What is link building? Link building is where you place your website’s backlinks in other websites. These links help online user reach different webpages and sites including yours with a single click. Link building is the process of developing connections and placing these backlinks on various website in order to grow your webpage or e-commerce site. Link building in SEO is a very important strategy to give your website a great ranking. Here are major benefits to developing a good link building strategy.

Benefits from linking building for SEO

• Improving rankings: One should know that without backlinks, it is very difficult to rank on Google even when the website might have quality content. Your competitors who rank above you in search for your industry keywords will always have a higher percentage of backlinks. However, if you want to over rank them, you will need to create more backlinks than them, even though you’re in the same sector or industry. Algorithms are key and they will always favor sites that actively build value and authority. Create links that are trusted, diverse and relevant to build better results.
• Increase search engine visibility:  Visibility can make or break not only your link building strategy but also your digital marketing strategy as a whole. Link building increases search and can also help in credible lead generation. The more backlinks your website has, the better your online visibility will be. Which means that your content will show up more frequently on search results and be positioned among the top results if a lot reputable sources link back to it. So every time you are linked to from a new website, you are exposing yourself to thousands of new viewers and readers who will see your content through that link. This can have a big positive impact to your business and help to a quickly establish you as a trusted brand.
• Improves website traffic: one of the best ways to attract more traffic from search engines is through link building. The more your website ranks, the more the traffic it will get. Which helps you get relevant traffic which is a good indicator of your website performance. If you create a permanent link on authority site, then you will get a huge traffic for a long period of time. That is why link building is one of the best and most affordable method for generating relevant traffic.
• Links gives you credibility: links are important as they judge your website’s credibility. Google aims to provide users with the most relevant results to their search engine queries. If a user finds your backlinks in one of the most leading authority sites, they will regard your website and your brand to be of the same standings. The more quality links that point towards your site, the more credibility you’ll have.
• Enhancing relationships in your niche: Link building sometimes it involves reaching out to other blogs and websites that share your niche. Connecting with business owner in your niche can mean having a sound board for new ideas and also means that you should first understand who their targeted visitors are, what they’re interested in etc. link building might open up greater opportunities for businesses and other avenues for collaborations.

What is UX ?  User experience design (UX) refers to the way people interact with product, service or system. Also by improving the usability, accessibility and efficiently of user interaction with the website or apps. Here are some of the tactics to follow:

• Improve the page speed: Your website loading speed is very imperative. If it takes longer than 3 seconds to load, 55 percent of the people will leave your app or website. Page loading time also plays a vital role in helping the users decide whether they are going to further visit the site. If they are underserved in terms of user experience for the very first time, there are brighter chances that will ignore your site for future reference also. One of the website user experience best practices is to compress all your images before uploading them to the website. This will significantly improve your website loading speed.
• Make sure your site is responsive on all devices: One should know that enterprise operates in the mobile internet era, and you can’t ignore this fact. Survey’s show that the modern user expects a company’s mobile website to be as good as the desktop. If your website isn’t mobile optimized, users are five times more likely to abandon it. In addition to this, Google started penalizing sites that aren’t optimized for mobile devices, making the need for responsiveness even more crucial. This is probably the single-most valuable way in which you can improve your website usability. Google crawls both your desktop and mobile website and uses both of them to index your website. That means that in terms of SEO a mobile friendly website can help you perform better.
• Catch your 404 errors: None of your clients is going to like 404 errors of their search. Fixing this no found error is a step forward in promising your users a better user experience. When a user approaches a link or an image, they are expecting this link will take them to the next place they want to go. Encountering a 404 error page annoys users and make them rethink spending their time on your website and this will end up making them leaving your site immediately.
• Use attractive CTA: Your visitors already know which information is important and what to focus on your page. CTA’s have to be one of those element. CTA’S that are clearly marked with the action word enable your website users to more easily navigate your site, and get exactly what they want in the location they expect to find it. When you have an attractive CTA it will help in getting the higher conversion and additionally adding to a unique user experience.
• Increase user attention through white space: White spaces makes the content more eligible and also helps the user on other elements of the website. White space helps to smooth things out and gives an elegant look and feel to your webpage. However, it is used to deliver a clear and direct message. It is also associated sophistication as it is considered as a way to organize text and elements. The design background color does not always have to be white. It only needs to be the space between elements of the website. White space adds simplicity and elegance to your webpages.

CONCLUSION

UX is all about designing your website around the user’s point of view to provide delightful user experience. The key to good UX design is making it work for both your users and your platform. A well designed user experience is about leading a user to the data or resources they need, while cutting off everything that might stand in their path. To elevate user’s experience a bit more, keep in mind to consider the above-mentioned points.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best digital marketing techniques to boost your content over the web. Performing an SEO analysis of your website gives you deep insights into the areas that may need improvement. Therefore, it’s important to know the ins and outs of planning and implementing a successful SEO analysis starting with a deep-drive SEO audit.

What is an SEO analysis?

An SEO analysis is also known as an SEO audit. SEO analysis is where you examine your website and gain a better understanding on how well your site has been optimized and what to do to improve it.

 Why is an SEO analysis important?

An SEO analysis can help you figure out where you can improve your site content and technical features to give users a better experience and to show search engines context and relationship between your content and the search query visitors are using.

Analyzing a website’s SEO basically involves evaluating on-page and off-page factors. One should try doing this to discover ideas to rank new content and web pages through site auditing and backlink analysis. It’s important to continuously improve website traffic, achieving your business objectives, growth goals and strategic decision for improvement.

One should perform SEO analysis through framework of satisfying search bots and algorithmic updates. Constant algorithmic changes from Google can affect your site’s ranking, site auditing helps you to stay up to date.

How to do an SEO analysis of a website

On page SEO: Refers to the process of optimizing one webpage to rank higher on search engine results pages in order to gain traffic includes activities like structural issues, the HTML source code, the page architecture and meta-tags.

Off page SEO: Refers to potential action or techniques that are taken outside of your own website. This includes internal link building, guest hosting social media marketing etc.

Technical SEO: Improving the technical aspects of a website in order to increase ranking of its pages in the search engines. It also includes mobile optimization.

Here are some of the things to check when doing an SEO analysis

• Analyze titles and headings: Titles should be attention-grabbing and encourage users to click on them. One should ensure that you are using the proper SEO keywords for your page. High search volume keywords usually have high competition, so it’s difficult to rank for them. So try to find a long-tail keyword that is a little less competitive and will improve your chances of showing up on the first page of SERP.
• Audit your images: Images are important in your website because they are attractive and easier to consume for the visitors. It is important to optimize your images with proper text to describe the appearance and function of that image. Search engine crawlers can’t crawl images, so you must have an appropriate title, the title should best describe what the images contains. One should also compress the images to reduce their size which can help improve load speed.
• Analyzing your website content: Content is a vital part of SEO because you need to consider when checking the SEO of your website. One should ensure the content is unique, high quality and with no errors and also make sure to optimize keywords positioning and on-page errors.
• Check for broken links: Broken links can cause a terrible experience for users visiting your website. Broken links can be fixed by confirming appropriate spelling or performing a 301 redirect to a different but still valid URL’S removing broken links can help make your website more user friendly.
• Evaluate incoming links: inbound links also known as incoming or backlinks are hyperlinked links to your site from another site. You should also check inbound links to your website and even those of your competitor’s website. This can give you an idea of how much work needs to be done to improve your rankings. It’s important to analyze a site’s incoming links /backlink profile to make sure it’s not receiving too many low-quality links like spam or negative SEO attacks.
• Check your page speed: Analyzing the loading speed of your website is an important factor that one should take into account. Your page speed can influence your website’s SEO and user experience. One should monitor it at regular basis to ensure that it is running well and efficiently. You can test you page speed from page speed insights tool by Google.    

CONCLUSION

SEO analysis is a must for every website and it should be done at regular intervals. One should know whether their efforts are working if you see an increase in organic and overall traffic. If you re-run your website audit you should receive fewer issues and a higher ‘health’ score.

With a membership plugin, one is able to block some or all of your content allowing users to access when they pay an upfront or recurring fee.

Choosing the right platform to build your membership sites on makes a huge difference when it comes to growing your business.

HOW TO CHOOSE THE BEST MEMBERSHIP PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS?

With so many membership plugins it can be difficult to choose the best one for your site. Here are some of the things you need to look at when choosing a plugin:

• Features: when it comes to membership plugins you can purchase any types of features you want for your site. And if you are looking subscriptions and sell paid content depending on the feature that works best for site. You want to ensure the plugin you want to use makes it possible for you to gate the content and privileges as needed. And having an idea of what type of membership site you want to create will help you decide whether or not the membership tool you’re considering has the features needed.
• Ease to use: Always make sure you choose a plugin that is ease to use, apply and customize the various features of a membership plugin. It should also be simple to integrate payment option like PayPal, stripe etc.
• Compatibility: One should choose a membership plugin which is compatible with WordPress theme. If not, it will end up breaking your site and making things harder for yourself.

 THE BENEFITS OF USING A WORDPRESS PLUG IN MEMBERSHIP

• Collecting membership payments: One has the ability to monetize your website and collect payment from members or renew their membership without leaving your website.
• Control access to your content:  The best thing about membership plugins is  that one has the ability to control the access of their content. Allows you to release a specific amount of content periodically in order to retain subscribers.
• Community building: Effective way to build customer loyalty is by creating a community building. Which allows you to connect on a deep level with your target audience, increase your customer lifetime value and an opportunity to forge strong customer’s relationships.
• Generate revenue: requires site visitors to pay for access to your membership site.

              MOST COMMON TYPES OFMEMBERSHIP

• Online courses/ ecourses: This course might include: interactive projects, video, Quizzes and documents like PDF
• Fixed-term membership:  This is where customers pay for a short membership and they might have access to locked content for certain amount of time.
• Product membership: This is where digital and physical are sent to members on a recurring basis like clubs are popular examples of this type of membership
• A service –based membership: Requires members to pay for a certain amount of services that you provide, which includes coaching, consulting etc.
• An online community: with live charts, forums and articles to read and other resources that are not available to the public or unregistered users.

WORDPRESS MEMBERSHIP PLUGINS TO TRY IN 2022

• Member press

Member press is one of the easiest to use WordPress membership plugins. Member press provides a full membership suite with unlimited member support, digital products, drip content and coupons.

Features

• Customizable checkout
• Compatibility with WordPress theme
• Email notifications to keep you up-to date with member information
• Content dripping and contact access expiration
• Powerful LMS features for selling courses online
• Support for PayPal, stripe and authorize net
• Offer customizable coupons
• Integrate with easy affiliate plugin to create your own affiliate program
• Content restriction rules to protect posts, pages, images, video etc.

Cons

• Limited payment options: Member press only supports the 3 most payment getaways. This would be a deal breaker for site owner who live in countries not supported by these payment getaways.
• Limited integrations: While the plugins have enough support for popular services to run a membership site effectively, it still lacks extensible, you can pay someone to integrate a third-party service you would like to use.
• There are no free versions.

Price: member press starts at $179per year

• PAID MEMBERSHIP PRO

Paid membership pro is a free WordPress membership plugin that comes with great set of features and its extendable add-ons. The plugin is among the easiest to customize and even comes with its own WordPress theme. It has built- in integration of six payment getaways and extensive options for restricting content. You can get the basic version for free.

Features

• Create and control membership levels
• Compatible with PayPal, PayPal pro ,2checkout and stripe
• Unlimited membership levels
• Pay per post/view
• Customizable with email templates
• Flexible subscription pricing structures including recurring and one-time payment.
• Offer discount codes

Cons

• The paid options are out of reach of small websites
• Add-ons cannot be purchased individually
• Some of the documentation and solutions require code knowledge

Pricing starts from $247 per year.

• s2MEMBER

s2member is a popular free membership plugin. It has a variety of features for a free plugin even though some of them are limited.

FEATURES

• Free basic plugins
• Content dripping
• Integration works with mail chimp, bbpress and buddy press
• Easy- to- accept recurring payment.
• Stripe, click bank and authorize net integration are available in pro

Cons

• Free versions limitations: free versions only support PayPal, limits to only 4 membership level, does not have drip content feature
• Not very user friendly: a little more difficult to use than other membership plugins

Pricing starts from $89

• RESTRICT CONTENT PRO

Restrict content pro lets you create unlimited subscription levels. One can choose between free, trial and premium subscriptions, which gives you a good deal of flexibility. Also gives you all the features you need to create a full-featured membership site.

FEATURES

• Content dripping
• The Woo Commerce integration ensures that you can sell your membership and even include other products for sale on your website.
• Payment getaways: stripes, PayPal and Braintree comes as a free Add-ons. Also supports payment getaways include 2checkout, PayPal website payment pro, PayPal express and stripe checkout.
• 13 free Add-ons are included with each payment plan.
• Unlimited subscription levels
• Easy to understand user interface
• Membership emails
• Unlimited subscription packages

CONS

• There is no built-in affiliate system
• Unable to drip content with core plugin

Pricing  Starts at $99 for the first year

What is Google my business or Google business profile?

Google my business is an easy to use tool that help small businesses to manage their online presence across Google like Google search and maps. Its a platform that allows business owners to control how they appear on Google and make their company stand out. Here are some of the benefits of using Google my business.

COLLECTING REVIEWS

One must never underestimate the power of customers reviews, especially when it comes to search rankings. According to Moz research, internet reviews are considered to account for 10% of how search engine rank results. If you want your business to appear in search results, you must use Google my business to make it easy for your consumers to submit good reviews about your company. When your business shows off its shiny yellow 5 star rating along with all its other important details. When your competitors has significantly fewer reviews or low ratings, that customer is more likely to turn to you than them.

FREE AND EASY TO USE

Google my business makes it simple for startups for small businesses and companies to market their product and services online by enhancing exposure and raising the likelihood of appearing in search results. It can help potential customers to quickly find and contact you. Its a free tool that you can make use of to improve your online presence, connect with your customers and increase your business revenue.

ALLOWS YOU TO APPEAR MAPS AND GOOGLE LOCAL PACK LISTING

Google my Business helps ensure that people find your business when looking your products and services that you offer in their local area. The local pack is a search engine result page (SERP) that lists the location that are relevant to your search. Also provides a slew of other helpful data for any potential consumer who may want to know, like business phone numbers etc. In case customers have extra questions or even public star rating, Its useful for both the company and the consumers.

PROVIDES INSIGHTS THAT GIVES YOU HELPFUL INFORMATION

One can use Google my business dashboard to gain key insights on your audience and local search performance. Google my business has tools that gives information on key areas to help create plans and make decisions. This tool gives you access to information and insights that might help you figure out where you audience is coming from.

GOOGLE MY BUSINESS ENABLES VISIBILITY

The local pack takes up a lot of space on Google page one result page, and its the first thing each Google users see after typing their query. It allows users to see all of the information they require at a glance. Well optimized listing impacts business visibility in Google in the local packs and maps, with relevancy, trust, search proximity and popularity determining where you are found. When you profile is incomplete, inaccurate, lacking relevance and poorly reviewed, Google won’t give you visibility to the searchers you want to reach.

HOW TO CREATE A GOOGLE MY BUSINESS ACCOUNT

STEP 1 : Go to google.com/business and click ‘manage now”

STEP 2: Check whether you business already has a Google listing. if their is, claim it ,click add you business to Google

STEP 3: Enter you details which include business name, business category, address and name of operation

STEP 4: Verify your business, you can request Google to send you a postcard with verification code. Google will send you a postcard within 14 days . NB When waiting for google to send the postcard one should not edit their business name, address or category.

STEP 5 : Publish your Google my business profile and add additional details e.g. operation hours, business description, photos etc.

Building a landing page is one of the very first step when designing you website. A landing pages will help convert your visitors into leads. The more landing pages you have in your site , the more leads you get. Here are some of the mistakes to avoid in your landing page.

CONFUSING CTA’S

If the motive of a page is to encourage the user to do a specific activity, then it may seem obvious to say they should make that very clear. Most brands common mistakes is to allow their calls to Action to be unfocused. They want to say too much, too soon, and the end result is a confused customer who doesn’t convert. Another thing is using generic CTA’S which do not impress site visitors, but it often lack context about why the person should click. This is one of the easiest landing page mistake to avoid by making sure your CTA is clear and straight to the point.

STOCK PHOTOS

Stock photos can make or break your especially when it comes to your landing pages. When you use stock photos it makes a very unprofessional appearance, If users recognize the same image is being used on a different website. Stock photos can be great for other pages or blog post, but for the landing page that introduces your business to the world, it is wiser to use lifestyle images- where possible, visitors want to see actual people doing what you want them to do with your product or service.

UNFOCUSED DESIGN

Make sure your visitors can immediately locate your form or CTA, If its unclear they’ll be less likely to follow through when it comes to your landing page design, there is a delicate balance to be stuck between not underwhelming or overwhelming the visitor. In the meantime you don’t want to pull all this work into creating the best click-worthy ads that end up leading to dull landing pages.

SLOW PAGE SPEED

Most internet users are mostly impatient, unwilling to wait for a badly design landing page to finish downloading so one need to know that you page should be as fast as possible-every seconds will cost you. A slow site can be a negative ranking factor on Google , making it harder for customers to find you online. If you not sure whether your landing page is optimized, use tools like Google’s page speed insights, It helps you identify the elements that are taking longer to load.

NOT OPTIMIZED FOR MOBILE PHONES

So many landing pages are still not optimized for mobile phones despite great percentage of users now use browsers on their phones and this is crucial way of losing conversion. Before launching your landing page, conduct tests to make sure the page and each of its element renders well on mobile phones. Remember that Google penalizes websites that aren’t mobile friendly.

FAKE TESTIMONIALS

Fake testimonials harm more than good. Most of the time its pretty easy to spot fake testimonials as they are generic and don’t include any specific info as to how your product helped the customer.

DISTRACTING NAVIGATION

Landing page should never have a navigation bar. Too many links in header of your landing page can distract your visitor from the main action that you would like them to take. Navigation bar give your visitors the opportunity to click away from the page and the offer itself. If visitors leave without filling out your form, you won’t collect their contact info and turn them into leads.

CONCLUSION

You can have the best offers, but people won’t convert if they don’t stay on your landing page long enough. Fixing these mistakes will set you on the right path towards building effective landing pages that are certain to fulfill their mission.