Smartphone in hand

Removing Old Pages and Outdated Information From Google

Old pages have a habit of hanging around in Google. A service you stopped offering, a staff member who has left or last year’s prices can keep showing in search results. That can confuse customers and lead to awkward phone calls. The good news is that Google gives site owners and the public tools to fix it.

The right tool depends on two things. The first is who owns the website. The second is how long you need the page out of results, for good or just while you sort things out. This guide walks through each option in plain terms.

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Temporarily closed sign

Taking a Website Offline Temporarily Without Hurting Search

Sometimes a business needs to stop trading online for a while. The owners might be on holidays, a warehouse might be moving or stock might simply run out. The first instinct is often to switch the whole website off. That can do more harm than people expect.

Google has published guidance on pausing a website, and the main message is simple. Keep the site live wherever you can and limit what it does instead. Switching it off completely is only advised for a very short time. Here is how that works in practice for a small business site.

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Create a Web Design That Helps Convert Visitors to Subscribers

If a visitor sticks around your website and reads your content completely, it would be pretty safe to say they like what they see.

When visitors read what you have to offer they are left wondering, what’s next?

There’s different things that are offered such as other related posts or ads, but if someone has stayed around long enough to read the entire content, you need to recognize that this is the perfect time to ask for their email address.

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7 Reasons Designing Websites Is The Perfect Career For Digital Nomad Lifestyles

7 Reasons Designing Websites Is The Perfect Career For Digital Nomad Lifestyles

One of the lifestyle choices that has been created thanks to the internet is that of the “digital nomad”, and a career option that enables that very existence to be followed is to become one of the thousands of web designers who create websites. Note, that we are not saying that every web designer is a digital nomad, but many digital nomads are web designers.

What Is A Digital Nomad?

A digital nomad is someone whose life, and specifically, career is not location dependent. That means that they can work, pursue a career, and run a business, from anywhere in the world that has reliable internet.

It could be argued that recently almost everyone became a digital nomad of sorts given that many of us had to work remotely, not through choice, but the necessity to, often due to legislation to combat the Covid pandemic. What the pandemic also did was give many people a taste of being a digital nomad, and for some, it appealed to them greatly.

That has meant that many workers and their employers are now happy for them to work some of their time at home, and for some, working remotely is now their modus operandi. However, it is unlikely they could continue in their role, if, for example, they moved to another state or even country, and many see that as an essential facet of being a true digital nomad.

Why Becoming A Web Designer Is The Perfect Career Choice To Be A Digital Nomad

Web Design Can Be Learned From Scratch: You can become a digital nomad at any time in your life, and with web design not requiring years of college or university, it means you can learn it remotely and become proficient in a reasonable time.

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Website Design Ideas: Testing

Website Design Ideas: Testing

Most things that are complicated in business require testing. That may be as simple as the local supermarket testing different promotional offers during different weeks to see what cuts through. Or it may be as complex as a commercial electrician performing circuit board testing on a highly specialised pieces of equipment that controls the signals on a busy freeway.

In the digital world, testing is just as important. Enormous companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon all employ thousands of engineers and other staff to do constant testing on their websites, apps and services to squeeze out every bit of efficiency that can.

A/B Testing

But there is another, less commonly understood form of testing that these businesses undertake. It’s called A/B testing. And it is an incredibly powerful tool. Without testing, businesses are just guessing what website layout, offers and landing pages work best or will appeal the most. So the process of designing a website is less scientific and more driven by gut feel and experience.

There is a better way. And that way is A/B testing. A/B testing is very simple. It basically involves having two different versions of the same web page. That allows a small change to be made to one (the tested page) and one to be left as the original (the control page). That way, the effect of a particular change can be observed and measured as different users interact with the page.

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Social Media Marketing

Tips for Effective Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a type of digital marketing that relates to creating and sharing content across social media networks so you can easily reach your branding and marketing goals.

Online activities such as posting video updates, images, text and other content that is used to drive online engagement of the audience (free or paid) falls under the social media marketing umbrella.

Here are some essential things to remember that will introduce you to social media marketing and help train, develop and guide you through your business’ SMM journey.

Content Planning on Social Media – You must consider the goals of your business before working on your social media marketing campaign. Without a plan, your entire campaign has no strategy.

It might seem like you’re having fun when it starts, but at some point, you will be directionless and struggling.

Remember to undergo competitive keyword research to help you brainstorm ideas for content that will appeal to your target audience. Consider what strategies are being implemented by your competitors to create social media engagement.

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WordPress Secrets

4 WordPress Secrets That You Have To Know

With the rise of the digital age and the internet entrepreneur, WordPress for web design has quickly become one of the most popular websites in the world. According to recent statistics, over 25% of the internet is now built on the WordPress platform, and this number is increasing almost daily.

If you aren’t a professional website developer, but you want to start your own blog or little niche site, the chances are that you are going to use WordPress. As a website building and maintenance platform, WordPress has a whole lot of features. It will take you some time to get to know them all, but you eventually will.

However, WordPress also has a number of secret features which most people never know about. Some of them are very hidden, while others are more obvious, but all are very useful to certain people. Our top four biggest WordPress secrets that you have to know include:

  1. Linking is extremely simple:

Linking to external websites is a bit time consuming, especially if you have a few to do, right? Wrong! Creating external hyperlinks in WordPress is easier than it has ever been. All that you have to do is highlight the phrase you want to link in the visual editor, and then paste the URL you want to link to it. That’s all you have to do, really! Try it and find out for yourself.

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Simple SEO Tactics

Three Simple SEO Tactics That Help You Gain More Customers

In the field of SEO there is a multitude of systems, techniques, strategies and tools which can all help boost your search engine ranking and in turn attract more customers to your site. Some of these tactics and tools require a significant amount of expertise and are often best left to the specialist knowledge of an SEO expert or agency like SEO Perth to implement them for you.

On the other hand, there are some very effective tactics which can be used to boost traffic and customers to your site, which can be easily implemented by most website owners. They do not require a high degree of technical skill and rely more on common sense, good practices and consistent action.

The first is to simply know who your customers are and more importantly what their needs are. A lot of this information can be gathered from past and present customers in terms of their purchase history and their preferences. A bit more research can identify the links, and therefore the websites that your customers clicked on to reach your site.

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Good SEO Ranking

Do I Need a Lot of Content to Achieve a Good SEO Ranking?

Most people seem to think that they need a lot of content to achieve a good search engine ranking. Sure, high quality content is always going to be a crucial SEO ranking factor, but is it really as important as people seem to think?

This is a question that seems to pop up quite often, so I decided to put together this short article to shed some light on the matter. Hopefully, after reading this you should have more of an idea about the way that the amount of content you have relates to your SEO score, and therefore helping boost its SEO ranking.

Without further ado, let’s jump straight into it!

Can I Rank Without Very Much Content

Well, the short answer is that yes, of course you can rank for certain keywords and phrases without pages and pages of written content. I mean, small business websites all over the world sit at the top of the search engine rankings for their relevant local keywords without having too much content.

But, in saying that, it’s important to realise that it’s always going to be easier to achieve a better search engine ranking if you have more content. After all, Google’s new ranking algorithms tend to focus on the user experience and how much value you bring to your readers – and if you have more content, you’re logically going to be offering more information and value.

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Website Design

Why Is It Important To Maintain A Consistent Design Throughout Your Website?

If you’re building or designing a new website – either with WordPress or another platform – then you need to think carefully about your global design features. This is where User Interface (UI) Design services become crucial. It’s very important to make sure that you get your UI design right, otherwise you simply won’t be capitalizing on your site’s full potential.

Unfortunately, a lot of people fall into the trap of changing their general design features between different pages or sections of their website. Doing this really isn’t a good idea, and in this article I’m going to explain why.

If you’re designing an attractive website, it’s important to maintain a consistent design throughout your website because:

Maintaining A Consistent Design Creates A Professional Appearance

One of the main keys to success in the modern digital world is maintaining a professional, trustworthy appearance. And, one of the easiest ways to do this is to make sure that you maintain a consistent design throughout your project.

Think carefully about how the design features that you use are portraying you and your business. Are they showing you as serious professionals who are going to succeed in the online world? Or, is your design inconsistent and flawed?

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Local SEO Tips

Top 5 Local SEO Tips

If you run a small, geographically constrained business, then local SEO is something that’s always going to be crucial to your success. Local SEO basically allows you to rank well for location-based keywords, which is great when you’re trying to source new clients and generate new leads.

Unfortunately, a lot of small business website owners don’t understand the importance of local SEO. With this in mind, I decided to put together a short list of my top five local SEO tips. These include:

  1. Create Location Pages

If you’re serious about ranking well for location based keywords, location pages are a great place to start. Basically, a location page outlines all of your services and the things that you offer in a specific suburb or area, and includes the location or locations that you want to rank for as major keywords.

For example, if you own a small plumbing business in Location X, you might create a location page outlining all of your services in Location X. Your keywords would be things like “Plumbing Location X” and “Location X plumbing services”.

  1. Make Sure Your Address Is Listed On Your Website

If you have a physical address, you need to make sure that it’s listed on your website, and that it’s correct. Similarly, include a phone number and a list of your offices if you have more than one.

This will help Google work out exactly where you’re based, and should help you rank better in your local search rankings.

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WordPress Website

The Importance Of Images On Your WordPress Website

Images – or more broadly, graphics – are an extremely important component of any WordPress website according to the team at SEO Perth Experts. They are engaging, they can encourage people to explore your content, and they can help you claw your way up the search engine rankings.

As the old saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words”. If we extend the definition of picture to include things like infographics, GIFs, and other visually engaging content, we have a modern definition which applies to website creation.

However, images are good for more than just telling a visual story. Some of the most important functions of images on your WordPress website include:

Images can help you jump up the search engine rankings – when used properly:

Although a lot of beginners don’t realise this, images are actually a huge factor when it comes to search engine rankings and search engine optimisation. Search engine crawler bots will pay particular attention to your images, and you can win big ranking bonuses if they are labelled correctly with things like meta tags and captions.

If you aren’t sure how to do this a quick Google search will help you out. Although it can be confusing to start with, it is definitely worth learning how to label your images properly if you want to rank highly in search engine results.

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Logo Design

Designing Logos

The Do’s and Don’ts of Designing Logos

Logo Design is more than just coming up with a pretty looking design. There are a lot of factors which have to be considered and used in order to design a logo that does everything from making sense to conveying the brand’s image in a manner that sets the brand apart. Whether you’re a designer, a business owner or simply just someone who is curious about logo designing, this post is here to gear you with all the do’s and don’ts of logo design.

Don’ts

We’ll start off with what you should not do when you’re designing a logo so that we end off on a more positive note.

  • Don’t add too many details in your logo. Simplicity is a key element for any successful logo design. The more sophisticated the design is, the more likely it is to be confusing for your intended audience.
  • Don’t change your logo every passing year. A brand that changes its logo quite often is a weak one. It’s good to have one logo that will remain for a long time so that consumers can associate the logo to your brand.

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Web Template

How to Choose the Best Web Template

A web template is typically used to separate the content of a web site ie: the navigation system, logo and contact information etc.

Templates make creating new pages easy and have become today the web designers dream. In creating a website, you could opt to creating your own web template or utilize a ready made one. Such a choice should be made only after careful consideration and if you do not have prior experience in the field it is always the best choice to opt for a professionally prepared ready made one.

Using web template is mainly beneficial to companies that are in its infant or start up stage. Mainly because once the company has its web site done, it can focus on the other key aspects a growing business needs to handle. Templates further allow the whole website to maintain a consistent look and feel with the ability to maintain the appropriate visual cues which the customers tend to look for and appreciate. The template as whole makes the whole website more stable, making the customers more comfortable with probing around within the site as they know they would not get lost. A main benefit companies are to achieve through a template is the ease at which it can make the required changes that would inevitably come along within the web site, making the site more relevant and the company more dynamic in the eyes of the customer.

Having now considered the importance and the benefits of utilizing a web template for any organizational site, let us now look into how one could go about select the most ideal template for the organization. There large amounts of online stores that are able to provide you with a web template. Many of them may appear quite attractive and selecting one from the many thousands available may put you in a tough spot indeed. Do not aim to buy a wrong template and redesign it as it will not be too much of a success and beats the whole purpose of buying one in the first place.

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Web Design Meme

Top Trends in Web Design Meme

Oh, is it the end of 2012 already? Here we go, then. The Top 5 Website UX Trends of 2012, which promises to be the least surprising list you’ll see all year. Because we’ve been seeing these five aspects for a few years now. Single-page sites are back after a long disco-like hiatus, and typography never went away. If anything, maybe we’re seeing the end of web design evolution.

This is actually a good thing; we don’t have to change everything every year just because we can, and it would be nice to make a website that doesn’t have the shelf life of a banana for a change.

Social Media Marketing

6 Deadly Social Media Marketing Sins that You Absolutely Must Avoid

There is no doubt that social media marketing is paying rich dividends to businesses that are using it as a part of their larger marketing plan. It’s also given smaller businesses an opportunity to compete against the big players in the niche. Social media marketing brings with it a slew of benefits, but only if done right.

The problem with a socially driven marketing strategy is that there are all chances of it going wrong. If it does go wrong there are some mistakes that can righted, but there are others from which there is no turning back. Such mistakes are like the deadly sins of social media marketing.

Let’s take a look a these sins that will take your chances of marketing success way down, so much so that recovery will be next to impossible.

1. Having no strategy in place

When you are using social media as a part of your marketing efforts, you need a clearly drawn out strategy in place. You need to know why you are doing what you are doing. Does your use of social media fit in with your overall marketing plan, and what do you hope to achieve from social media marketing? These are the two questions that you need to answer before you put in place a strategy that you feel will pay rich dividends.

If you don’t have a strategy in place, you won’t be able to take the right decisions, which will mean that you actually end up wasting time on social media, rather than making any constructive use of it.

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Cisco Linux

It’s About Time Cisco Showed Linux Some Heart

Cisco, the name spoken with the most reverential tones in the IT and telecommunications market, has a new push for their hardware’s interoperability with Linux software. The move ties in Yahoo!, who will be working with Digium to deploy Asterisk throughout Yahoo’s global communications net, using Cisco SIP end points on the desktop.

Actually, Cisco has shown plenty of love to Linux in the past, just not in supporting Free and Open Source Software on telecommunications systems. Remember, back in 2005, Cisco internally rolled out Linux desktops to their workforce.

The reason given being, not cost, but because Linux is easier to support! Take that, MSCEs!

And then back in April of 2008, Cisco opened up its ISR routers’ API, with an application extension platform based on Linux. So you might actually compare Cisco more to IBM. They’ve been planning this move for a long time, and they do it like they do anything, in slow, steady steps.

TechCrunch

Disregard TechCrunch; Use Google First. Always.

Controversial as always, TechCrunch gets our attention this month by questioning the ‘Google-it’ mentality. And we’d like to not only refute things like this, but go all the way back to Socrates and lay out our direct, irrefutable line of logical statements which leads us to this path.

Proposition One: Nobody owes you an answer.
When you have a question, you are imposing on another person to do you a favor. There is no law, nor moral obligation, for anyone else to answer your question. That’s at all, whether Google exists or not, whether you can find the answer on Google or not. Both Google and people are going out of their way to help you for free.

Proposition two: The only motivation people have to answer your question is to do something kind.
That’s it. Invisible-hand-of-the-marketplace or not, every time a human answers another human’s question for free, they are practicing altruism. It might have the secondary assumption that you’ll ‘pay it forward’ and help other people, or the feeling of obligation that the answerer is paying it forward, or because helping the questioner helps the answerer indirectly, and so on. But all answers start with a desire to help.

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ACTA

Is It Time To Be Afraid of ACTA Yet?

It only looks to involve the US and UK/EU at this point, but the broad plans of ACTA, the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, look like they could eventually become a de-facto standard for the whole wide world of e-commerce.

TechDirt is digging up shovels full of information on ACTA. The agreement is set up to protect against the boom in global media piracy, but the problem is that it’s almost impossible to solve this problem without trampling on multiple human rights at the same time.

That’s why the organizations Consumers International, EDRi, the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ASIC (a French trade association for web 2.0 companies), and the Free Knowledge Institute have all banded together to protest the agreement and voice their concerns, or at least put on the breaks until cooler heads can have a look at this.

On Australian turf, the Australian Digital Alliance, Australian Library and Information Association, Choice (a non-profit consumer advocate), and the Internet Industry Association have formed a coalition stating much the same thing. In a package, reducing counterfeiting is important where it endangers consumer health or safety or constitutes commercial scale infringement is a good thing; but we shouldn’t have to roll heads to do it.

windows 7

Is An Upgrade Too Much To Ask Of Some People?

Sometimes you have to wonder if we should re-think this whole software design thing. A reminder of just how over-their-heads some people are occurred recently with the story that Microsoft won’t be providing IE 9 for Windows XP. That’s right, if you’re not using Windows 7 by now, you are simply off the radar for browser upgrades.

The trouble, as all web developers know, is getting users to upgrade those browsers. Why is this always such a struggle? Older browsers are buggy, insecure, troublesome, and the hardest of all to develop for. We’ve gone for years like this, with a few hardy users getting the newest edition of everything, most of the crowd shuffling along within a year, and then there’s the die-hard long tail, bringing up the rear. They use IE7, IE6, even IE5.5, and you’ll get that old browser away from them when you pry it from their cold dead fingers. They make web designers pull out their hair.

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