by Heba Salah | Jun 7, 2017 | Uncategorized
Having a website is essential and very important for your business. To have a good website that can benefit your business well, there are some factors that are required to help you add value to your website.
Security
In order to protect your visitors, you need to have your website secured. But what is the meaning of website security? You might have heard about HTTPS. HTTPS is a way to encrypt information that you send between a browser and a web server. This protects your website’s users from different attacks, where someone steals the information being sent to a website, like credit card information or logins. Another issue in security is SSL certificate. An SSL Certificate is a set of data files that you can add to your server to achieve an encrypted connection between a browser and your server. When installed, a green padlock will be displayed when users visit your site to indicate that the site is secure.
So, we can say that SSL certificate is a product that you purchase and install on your server resulting that your website becomes HTTPS.
Thus, If you’re selling anything online, you need to put some effort into securing your site with an SSL certificate. The SSL will encrypt communications between you and your clients (i.e. a credit card number, Social Security number). This will make them more comfortable to share their data with you. VeriSign, TrustE, Entrust and GeoTrust are good options to explore.
Social Media Integration
Nowadays, people are increasingly connected to the internet through any possible internet enabled devices. They spend majority of their time on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, etc. Because of this increasing usage of social media, it has become a critical part of marketing any business, as people now tend to associate more with the brands and businesses they see more on those social media platforms.
So to increase your presence online, you should promote your presence on them. Integrating these platforms into your website, will help you boost your SEO, improve your business image on the social web, expand your network, add to your credibility and improve your sales.
Thus, you have to integrate with social media. This integration should not be only by posting some content every while, but it should be a strategic process that involves the intelligent promotion of your social media channels.
Mobile Friendly Version
Now-a-days, mobile phones, tablets and other portable devices have become essential to our lives. According to Statista, in 2017 56.1% of the global mobile phone population accessed the internet from their mobile phones. These numbers are only going to grow as mobile devices become cheaper and more mainstream. In 2020, the number of smartphone users worldwide is expected to reach 2.87 billion, up from 2.1 billion in 2016.
For this reason, it is important to have your website optimized for mobiles and other portable devices. This will allow you to increase your reach and give better user experience since nearly everyone is on mobile now.
Having a mobile optimized website may also help to increase your sales since the studies have showed that mobile users buy more than people who primarily use desktop computers.
Live Chat
Live chat can add to your website. Having a live chat on your website allows your customers to have access with you and seek help. Wait times at live chat are usually less than call center. The general trend among users in marketing forums and on blogs is that live chat on a website can generally lead to improved sales numbers.
Live Chat can increase your potential sales, but to do so, it must be executed correctly. To do this, you must train your team well, take care of your shopping hours, not to be robotic in your responses and give your customers useful chat features.
You will be able to get all these benefits with a reduced cost than the traditional phone support method.
E-commerce customized
Buying and selling on the internet has become very well accepted and with the implementation of encryption for the transmission of sensitive data, the entire process is completely secure. So if you have a store, you can customize your website for e-commerce which will help your business grow.
by Heba Salah | May 21, 2017 | IT, Small Business, Web Design
Do you have a website for your business? Do you get all the possible benefits from this website?
Few years back, the forwards-thinking business owners realized that having websites for their businesses will be a profitable marketing opportunity. This encouraged them to build their websites and host them. When they finished doing that, all was done regarding the website issue.
Nowadays, things have become more difficult and more complicated. It is no more just about having a website for your business. The internet has become overpopulated and is continuously changing. So if you aren’t able to show and draw targeted traffic to your website, it will not fulfill the expected contribution to your business’s success and growth. This means that building a website is not the only job. What do you need to have?
What you really need after this is to manage your website or have someone manage your website for you. But what do we mean by website management?
Meaning of website management
Website management is all the multiple tasks involved in the administration and control of the hardware and software used in the Web. This is done by performing all the tasks necessary to keep a website up-to-date and in good working order so that it works and shows up correctly with the latest web browsers and mobile devices. It includes hosting, monitoring, verification that all contained links are active, maintenance, and so on.
So Website management entails a number of different services that are combined together to keep you website running without having to worry about it.
The duties and responsibilities of website management include:
1. Ensuring the website functionality and SEO availability continuously.
2. Performing regular software updates.
3. Ensuring the website’s security and keeping it up to date. This includes setting up good firewalls to block hacker as well as performing regular malware scans.
4. Monitoring, assessing and reporting the website performance.
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.
