With the Webby Awards Deadline Looming, We Tip Our Hats to Top Web Designs

responsive web design, Small Business Marketing, Web Design, , ,

Webby AwardsThe entry deadline for the next Webby Awards is Nov. 1, and next spring’s ceremony marks the 18th year in a row since the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences organized the event to recognize achievement in Web design and Internet excellence. The Webbies represent one of several major events celebrating top web designs, including the CSSDA, the Interactive Media Awards and the WebAwards, among others. Studying the winners of such awards is a great way for designers to learn secrets of the field.

Winning Criteria

What makes for good Web design in today’s mobile-oriented environment? Awwwards.com, which gives top Web designers recognition and prestige, identifies 10 trends in contemporary Web design. These include:

  • Putting content first
  • Simplifying design interaction and content
  • Centering on user experience
  • Providing app-style interfaces
  • Unifying desktop and mobile appearance.

Ultimately, any design is only as good as its functional delivery. If customers find designs too slow to load, their visual value will be lost. Choosing a fast hosting provider using resources at www.InternetProviders.com can help ensure site visitors appreciate your aesthetic efforts.

Winning Web Designs

This September, digital advertising agency LIQWID won the Web Marketing Association’s 2013 WebAward for Best Advertising Website. This marks the fourth major recognition LIQWID has received over the past year, making its site a design model to pay attention to.

LIQWID offers advertisers a solution to the challenge of responsive Web design. Where design once centered around desktop displays with fixed width in Internet Explorer and Firefox, today’s mobile orientation means design must display across screen sizes ranging from smartphones to HDTVs as well as a diverse collection of operating systems and browsers.

For ad designers, this poses the problem of how to make the same ad display equally well in different venues. LIQWID solves this problem by using fluid Web design principles to create ads that automatically collect information from the displaying device for instant resizing to any size, resolution or screen location. This enables the same ad to look just as good on a desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone.

Appealing Apps

Each year, Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference hosts the Apple Design Awards to recognize apps that further design, technology and innovation. One of this year’s winners was the Yahoo Weather app for iPhones and iPads, which provides a great case study for blending aesthetic appeal with functionality.

Apple strives to combine beauty with simplicity, and the tech giant praised the Yahoo Weather app for embodying this ideal. The app provides a high-quality background photo based on the geographical location of the place the user is querying about. This combines with elegant foreground typography, which supplies the relevant functional information, including place, time, current temperature and sky conditions and forecasting outlook. Compare the result with the generic ugliness of many weather sites, and you’ll see why Apple recognized this app for its visual achievement.

By Peter Marino, Owner and CDO of the SEO & Inbound Marketing company reelWebDesign.com.

Organic SEO : Why All-Natural Is Still Best

Content creation, content marketing, Organic SEO, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, , ,

My mom is a devoted supporter of anything organic. She checks the label on food items, makes sure that she buys only from organic family farmers and buys me yogurt while everyone else in school enjoys ice cream. Nevertheless, I was proud of the fact

and never complained that I was the “healthy kid” in class. I knew my mom was doing something right.

Organic SEO

Just like food, I prefer doing business the healthy way. There’s no way I will empty my pockets for so-called shady companies who use shortcuts.

Tricks of the Trade, Anyone?

In our modern world, we have a lot of gadgets and machineries that make life easy for us. We like to pay more for automatic vehicles when we can manage with a stick shift. We love ordering fast food, even though we can always prepare healthy 10 minute meals. You’d like to avoid these tactics when it comes to boosting your website rankings.

 Content Spinning – Google is always looking for uniquely written content. For talented copywriters, it’s not a problem. However, content spinning software is heaven sent for lazy writers. They can take any article from the Internet (including this article!) and use the software to create reusable content. Though considered as a black hat SEO technique, it was still acceptable by some blog owners in the past. However, Google found a way to detect those spun articles and yes, content is king again. Thank you for that!

  1. Purchasing Social Media Followers – Even if you have the money to buy the likes and plus ones, don’t ever fall for this technique. Chances are, those accounts are not owned by real people. The reason why you need social media as part of your marketing strategy is for customers and potential clients to be interested in your products and services. You can’t achieve that with fake accounts.
  1. Keyword Stuffing – Trust me, this does not taste as good as turkey stuffing. As the name suggests, an article is stuffed with too much keywords. If you’re looking for a cheap florist in Sydney, you don’t want to come across this:

“If you are looking for a cheap florist in Sydney to provide flowers for your next occasion, you’re in luck. As the only cheap florist in Sydney, check out the products and services we can offer you. You might also want to read on the multiple benefits you can get from a cheap florist in Sydney. Hurry and contact us, the cheap florist in Sydney you can rely on.”

That’s ugly as sin. No one in his right mind would want to read and share that.

The All Natural Goodness of Organic SEO

I view SEO rankings like a test in school. Those who don’t have the patience to study may do well in school for the moment, but will ultimately fail. That’s the same reason why you should choose an SEO agency who can help you with your goals, sans cheating. They should be able to offer SEO service that’s legitimate. With Penguins and Pandas on a witch hunt, you don’t want Google to penalize you for taking shortcuts.

In conclusion, if you’re a businessman who does not have time to write good, interesting and share-worthy content, find an SEO firm who can help you with that. You want your content to be read and shared by people, not thrown out. Real people (and not fakes ones) means money actually coming in, and not the other way around.

By Debra Wright

Debra Wright is a creative and innovative blogger and online marketing specialist. She uses her wordsmith skills to share her ideas, thoughts, and tips to other people about topics that fascinate her, such as Organic SEO. Follow Debra on twitter @debrawrites…

Driving Blog Traffic – A Beginner’s Guide

Blogging, content marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Web Traffic

drive blog traffic“There’s an art to increasing a blog’s traffic” Rand Fishkin, The Moz Blog

I have blogged in the past – travel blogs, interest articles and personal online journals – but I was never truly aware of the power of driven blog traffic.

I have realized, though, that it is all very well churning out high quality, human content on a daily basis, blogging about your passion – writing freely about that which makes you tick – if no one is around the read it.

Unfortunately, unless you know how to maximise traffic to your blog, you might as well be shouting from the top of Everest. No one is going to hear you!

If your blog posts are ever going to have an impact on the online community or generate any revenue, it’s vital that lots of people read it!

So, how do you do it?

The experts have proven that great writing and great content is at the heart of SEO.

SEO, done right, should never interfere with great writing – SEO 101, The Moz Blog

Great writing leads to lots of fans and followers who will then create a buzz through links, tweets and shares. None of this can be achieved without making your site accessible and choosing good keywords, and only all together can you achieve great SEO and a great blog site.

A Hard-Hitting Title

It all starts with a hard-hitting and SEO-rich title. It needs to be clear and instantly recognizable to get people to click on it.

The Right Keywords

Blog content that is well written, but also rich in keywords is very SEO friendly. Do your research as to what people are typing into Google and Bing search boxes and tailor your keyword placement accordingly.

The more you understand the habits and behaviors of searchers, the higher you will rank in search engines, and the more traffic your blog will receive. Google Adwords is a fantastic tool for finding out about people’s search habits.

Encourage Links

Search engines also look at who is talking about you and linking to your blog page. Blogs with other sites linking to it are considered more valuable to search engines than those who don’t. Carefully chosen “anchor text” carries the links in your content, allowing it to blend naturally into the text.

Advice from the experts is to not overdo it with links and keywords to keep your blog content organic.

Use Social Media

It’s time to spread the word! Social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn are the best tools you have at your disposal for publicising your blog and its content. Choose one or two that best suit the feel and content of your blog and then go for it. Create an engaged, loyal community and interact with them at every opportunity.

Analytics

You have done all the ‘driving’ you can, and your blog is ‘out there’, but how do you know if it is working? It is important that you run constant analytics on your blog, in order to gauge its reach, which posts attract more traffic and where you are ranking in search engines. Try Google Analytics for a start.

So that concludes our journey to discover the basics of driving targeted traffic to your blog. Learning how to drive traffic is an integral and vital part of the blogging process. Just as important, if not more, than crafting brilliant prose.

Our guest blogger, James Roberts, is an avid blogger and a professional copywriter. He loves travelling and takes his laptop with him wherever he goes. Why not follow him on Twitter?

Eight Tips For Driving Targeted Traffic with Quora

Business Tech, Content creation, content marketing, Quora marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, , , ,

If you’re after backlinks, you have nothing if not choices. One choice that many people seem to miss however is Quora.com. Often billed as Yahoo Answers on steroids, Quora is a Q&A site/social network that’s grown increasingly popular in recent years.

Quora backlinks might be no follow but that doesn’t stop them being highly reputable. And more importantly, the Q&A nature of the website often makes them an excellent source of highly targeted direct traffic.

If you’d like to increase your website or blogs exposure with Quora, here are eight simple tips for doing just that.

Create a Winning Profile

First off, if you’re new to Quora, you’re going to want to invest some time in your profile. Special care should be taken when choosing both your avatar and tagline. Both will be displayed every time you post something. You should also include a few personal details together with any niche relevant professional experience. The better your profile, the more people will visit your website to learn more about you.

Follow the Right Topics and Users

Quora allows you to select the kind of questions that you’re most interested in by choosing both topics and users to follow. Take the time to choose topics that are relevant to your niche and users who are actively discussing it. Once you’ve done this, you’ll be greeted with relevant questions every time you log in to Quora. This is one of the things that makes Quora so valuable, not only for traffic, but also for new content ideas.

Quality Matters

If you’ve built backlinks on Yahoo Answers, you’re likely to have noticed that the amount of traffic you get is largely dependent on the quality of your answers. On Quora, quality is even more important. The best answers get up voted to the top of the page, the worst answers get down voted to the bottom. If you want results on Quora, taking the time to craft answers that people actually value is therefore crucial.

Learn What Makes a Popular Answer

Get liked on Quora for authority

If you’re not sure what constitutes a good answer on Quora, the easiest way to educate yourself on the matter is to simply spend time browsing the site. You’re likely to find that the best answers are typically:

Written by somebody who’s well qualified to answer

Very detailed, with references where applicable.

Written in easy to understand, non-technical language.

Entertaining and enjoyable to read.

Answer the Right Questions

quality and quantity is important on Quora

Unlike Yahoo Answers, being the first to answer a question on Quora offers no real advantage. When choosing questions to answer, you should instead focus on both the number and type of followers. Are they people who are actually likely to visit your website? You should also look at the existing answers and ask yourself whether or not you’re capable of writing something better.

Ask Your Own Questions

Ask on Quora for authority

If you want to make the most of your time on Quora, don’t limit yourself to other peoples conversations, start your own. Here are a few tips for asking questions that get attention:

Don’t ask questions that have already been asked.

Ask questions that genuinely make people think.

Ask questions that are relevant to your website but don’t be obvious.

Include long tail keywords to get your questions ranked in Google.

Be Tactful

Be tactful on Quora

While there’s certainly nothing wrong with joining Quora solely for promotional purposes, if you want your content to stick, excessive self promotion needs to be avoided.

Don’t link to your blog unless it actually contains relevant information. Don’t talk yourself up, let your answers speak for themselves. Focus on providing a quality answer first, and building a backlink second.

Connect with People

Finally, while there’s no denying the value of Quora for driving traffic, don’t forget that it can also be a powerful tool for connecting with other people in your niche. Quora is, after all, a social network. And if you want to truly harness its power, it’s important to actually be social.

Take the time to engage with the community. Be helpful and don’t be afraid to discuss topics that are not directly associated with your niche. Engage with the Quora community and you’ll be rewarded with more than just traffic.

This post has been contributed by Jake Cornwall, an employee at Vayu Media, an internet marketing firm. He is very passionate about photography and he shares his ideas, as well as suggestions, through blogging.