by Heba Salah | Apr 30, 2017 | Small Business
To start with, what is a POS system? POS stands for Point of Sale. This is a system that can be used in any retail or hospitality business. It is a computerized system that is operated by a main computer and linked to several terminals. The system is also supported by different hardware features starting with bar code scanners, receipt printers, cash drawer, ending with card payment terminals. You can even link it wirelessly to handheld devices. The POS system can easily help you, as a business owner, to track sales, cash flow, inventory and many other functions.
Benefits of having a POS system:
So what are the benefits that will return on me when having a POS system? How will it differ
than the normal cash register that I already have?
Here are the advantages of the POS system over the cash register or cash box:
1. Reporting: The software provides you with detailed sales reports. You can analyze these reports in different ways. For example, you can analyze it by item sold, time periods, promotions, by store if you have more than one, or even by sales clerk. These different types of analyses can serve you and your business in different aspects.
2. Inventory system: Unlike the cash register, a point of sale system often includes an overall inventory management system. You can use a point of sale system to track your biggest sellers. It can also monitor your sales and alert you to reorder when a given item is at the reorder point. You can also see your real time inventory at any time. This is something that no cash register can do.
3. Faster: Point of sale devices provide faster service than old fashioned cash registers. This is true for every part of the process. From reading the bar code on the sold item to authorizing a credit card transaction and printing a customer receipt. All of these transactions are faster on a point of sale device.
4. Security: In your business, it is important to keep track of every cash receipt to prevent theft. Most of these systems provide an audit trail so you can trace any problems.
5. Human Error elimination: POS systems can eliminate human errors. Point of sale devices have built in checks to ensure that the information is entered. This in turn will save you money in the long term.
6. Supervision: Point of Sale system provides side access; so you can manage your business via internet from anywhere anytime. This way you can have full supervision on your sales and your staff even if you are away.
7. Simplifying accounting: Point of Sale system can simplify the accounting process. Unlike the old fashioned registers, you don’t have to sort through hundreds of receipts. You also don’t need to hire a number of accountants to maintain thousands of transactions. The financial personnel can simply use the built in reports in the system to follow up the accounts or they can even build their own reports to do so.
8. Promotions and discounts: You can also add your promotions and discounts on the POS system. If you have various promotions in different locations or on various items, you can easily track to what extent these promotions are using the system.
9. Better CRM: Point of Sale system helps you have better customer relationship management (CRM). You can easily find a record of a one or more customers. This will help the customers to easily return or exchange their purchase in no time. You can also add your customers to loyalty programs if you have one. If you have any promotions you can easily sent them to your customers using their data that you have.
Final advice
Finally, this is an advice that you can bear in mind while searching for a POS system. When looking for a system, look for one that can start small and grow with your needs. If you are on a tight budget, you can begin with a basic setup; for example, it can be only POS system with just a drawer and a receipt printer. Then as your business grows, you can add on to it according to your needs.
by Heba Salah | Apr 23, 2017 | Small Business, Web Design
To get a rank for a website on the search engines, two main processes are performed by these search engines. The first process is the ability of the search engine to get around the site (crawling). The other process is getting the page in the search engine’s index (indexing).
In order to optimize your web page on the search engines, you should consider some points while building your website. While trying to optimize your website, you could either use tactics approved by the search engine to increase your rank. These are known as White hat strategies. Or you could use unscrupulous tactics to raise your website’s ranking illegitimately or lower the ranking of your competitor’s website. These are known as Black hat strategies. Search engine providers can now detect these Black hat tactics. This may finally result in lowering your rank or even getting you banned or penalized by the search engines and affiliate sites.
One of the tactics used in optimizing your page on the search engines is link building tactic. This is the process of acquiring links from other websites to your own. Link building can be either used in a good way which is then considered as White hat; or it can be used in a devious way making it a Black hat.
Here are some dos and don’ts to consider while building links to your website. These will help you get a position on the search engine rank page (SERP) without violating the search engine’s rules.
Dos (White hat):
- One of the best things that you can do is adding link of your page to relevant sites. This can be done by creating and posting relevant content. The links can then be put within a piece of writing, such as an article, infographic, or press release. The best way for gaining links is by using targeted keywords within the content which should be relevant to site.
- Another thing that you can benefit from in building links is commenting and posting in forums and blogs. It is good to sign up and participate in blogs and forums related to your industry. You can take part in discussions, and post your comments; but you must make sure that your participation is relevant and adding value to the topic discussed. You can then add your site’s link / URL in your signature. This may attract people to visit your website and learn more about you.
- One more very good tactic is making use of broken and dead links. Broken links are links to pages that have moved or changed. Dead links are those giving you 404 error (“page not found notification”). As a savvy online marketer, you can look for such links on relevant sites and on your clients’ sites. Once you come across one of those links, contact the website owner and inform him about this broken link and offer them an alternative link within your site. You should also track any 404 pages on your own site and make sure to redirect them to a similar page.
Dont’s (Black hat):
- What you should avoid doing while creating your content is not having duplicate content on your site.
- You also shouldn’t use irrelevant sites or blogs. Don’t try to mislead people by irrelevant content, or try to mislead the searching engine by using the keywords repeatedly in an inconvenient way.
- When participating in forums and blogs, first of all, you should make sure that you are not participating in a low-quality blog. You should also make sure not to post irrelevant content on irrelevant sites. Don’t spam those forums and blogs with your links and don’t put your link only as signature in the comments.
- Don’t deal with link brokers who sell links on various websites to online marketers to improve their ranking on Google. Buying such links from link brokers is a direct violation to Google’s guidelines which may lead you to getting penalized by Google.
Finally, we advise you to follow the White hat tactics on your website. The results of those tactics may be slow, but they are long lasting. Just remember: “Slow and steady wins the race.”
by Heba Salah | Apr 16, 2017 | Web Design
Link building is one of the important techniques of SEO. This is because it is one of the major factors for how Google ranks Web pages. Link building is the process of acquiring links from other websites to your own. There are several ways to do it. While some of these methods are good and can increase your rank; others are bad and of low quality and may lead to the opposite. They may even lead to penalizing your website by Google.
Anchor text
One of the strongest methods that the search engines consider when ranking pages is the actual text used by the linking page to talk about content in your page. This is known as “Anchor text”. Although this method is an important and strong way to link to your page, which optimizes your rank at Google search, you should not over use these links. This means that you should not repeat the linking words many times without actual need in the context. It is really great that people write about you and link to your website, but this should be done and the links should be created in a natural way. If you add so many commercial keywords to the anchor text, this is not at all natural and may put you in trouble.
Page quality
Another factor that is taken into account is the quality of the page sending the link. Links sent from high quality and trusted pages count more in boosting rankings by search engines. Thus when using anchor text, we should determine which anchor text to use and decide which page to point at.
Social media
Social Sharing is also another method for link building. In the past few years, social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have exploded with the amount of content shared on it for business. Links shared on the social media are also detected by the search engine, although they are treated differently than the other types of links.
The main benefit of the social links is that they are one of the factors that Google takes in consideration in their algorithm. This results in higher ranking for your website. Having good social sites also encourages people to interact with you, which hopefully encourages more people to link to your website. When choosing the social network to engage with, you should put in consideration your industry and your target market. For example, you shouldn’t put big effort in a popular site that your customers won’t visit much.
Web directories and blogs
Listing in web directories and blogs is another important means of linking. Adding your website to a web directory or linking to your website in a blog will surely increase your rank on search engines. Still this linking must be also used with caution. Your website shouldn’t be just listed in any directory, Some directories don’t provide any real value and Google has excluded them from its search results. You should thus choose the directory carefully to provide useful information to your customers. This directory should be also relevant to your industry.
As for blogs, you should take care not to make a blog with only one post and one link to your site. If you want to have a blog, then you need to keep it alive by writing posts on regular basis. You should also be focusing on your industry and your clients’ needs in your blog. If you are participating in a discussion on a blog, you can share a link as long as it is relevant to your business and the blog. Don’t put your link only as signature in those comments.
All these methods may take some time till they show their results in SEO. But they are high quality methods which will not make your website blacklisted or marked as spam by Google search engines.
by Heba Salah | Apr 9, 2017 | Web Design
Nowadays, the internet has become an integral part of everyday life. More than 3 billion people are using the internet today and they’re increasing everyday. If you have a business and you don’t have a website, you may be losing great opportunities for your business. A website can be a great means for helping your business grow.
Here are a few reasons why having a website is important for your business.
1- Your website will make you always available
Your website runs 24/7 without any supervision, thus it is continuously working on promoting your business without having to pay for employees all 24 hours. It also makes your business accessible so that your customers can interact with you at the time and in the way that is best suited for them. If your customers are in any part of the world, even if on the other side, they can reach your website at a suitable time for them. They will never visit you and find you closed. You are always accessible.
2- Having a website enhances your credibility
Today, most people use the internet to know more about the products and services they want. They also search for the companies’ websites before they start dealing with them. Having a professional website with helpful information about your company and the products or services you provide will have a powerful impact on the potential customer’s confidence in you. Through your website you will also have an opportunity to explain why you deserve their trust. Without having a website, your potential customers will probably go to your competitors who have one. A well designed, informative and updated website will add credibility to your business and strengthen your brand.
3- The website is a good way to increase your sales
You can increase your company’s sales by selling your products through an online store. This will make your store available throughout the day giving you the possibility to sell more. You can make good use of this by giving full details of all the products or services you are providing and how they are better. This will make it easier for your customers to come to a decision. Having a website will also make it easy for your customer to refer their friends and business contacts to your site: as website addresses are easier to remember than phone numbers. Also giving people several methods for contacting you makes it easier for them to reach you.
4- You can target a wider market through your website
Your website can reach local, national, or even international potential customers at no extra cost. So you can now expose your products and services to totally new markets. You are no longer limited only to the passing by or nearby customers to sell your products and services. Since information is always available, people from all over the world can visit your site at any time and get to know more about your products and services. Thus, if you are a small business, you can now expand your potential customers and you are no longer stuck to your geographic area. All you have to do is provide the full information through your website to attract more customers. A website gives you a global footprint exposing you to the international market.
5- A website makes it possible to apply marketing strategies with low cost
Having a website allows you to market your business online. There are many marketing strategies that you can follow, and they may be of lower cost than the normal marketing strategies. For example, designing, printing and delivering the marketing materials are some of the largest expenses that your business will incur. Now you can spread easily through your website. You can even change any information, or offers or advertisements on your website without having to pay for changing the marketing materials. You can consider your website to be an unlimited number of full-page ads that you can change any time!
So as you can see, this is why it is important for every business, whatever its size, to have a website. Without a website it will be difficult to remain competitive in today’s market. If you are a small business owner, you have the opportunity today to present yourself to the market as professionally and effectively as bigger companies. Just because you are small will no longer mean that you cannot compete with them!
