Whether you’re brand new to link building or have been doing it for a while, we’re sure you’ll find something useful in this guide. The landscape of SEO and link building is always changing, and today, the importance of building high-quality links has never been higher. The need to understand and implement high-quality campaigns is essential if you’re going to compete and thrive online, and that isn’t going to change any time soon. This guide is designed to get you going quickly and in the right direction. There is a lot to take in, but we’ve broken everything up into easy-to-digest chapters and have included lots of examples along the way. We hope you enjoy The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building!

Definition of Link Building

Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. A hyperlink (usually just called a link) is a way for users to navigate between pages on the internet. Search engines use links to crawl the web; they will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website, and they will crawl the links between entire websites. There are many techniques for building links, and while they vary in difficulty, SEOs tend to agree that link building is one of the hardest parts of their jobs. Many SEOs spend the majority of their time trying to do it well. For that reason, if you can master the art of building high-quality links, it can truly put you ahead of both other SEOs and your competition.

Why is Link Building Important for SEO?

The Anatomy of a Hyperlink

In order to understand the importance of link building, it’s important to first understand the basics of how a link is created, how the search engines see links, and what they can interpret from them.

1. Start of link tag: Called an anchor tag (hence the “a”), this opens the link tag and tells search engines that a link to something else is about to follow.2. Link referral location: The “href” stands for “hyperlink referral,” and the text inside the quotation marks indicates the URL to which the link is pointing. This doesn’t always have to be a web page; it could be the address of an image or a file to download. Occasionally, you’ll see something other than a URL, beginning with a # sign. These are local links, which take you to a different section of the page you’re already on.3. Visible/anchor text of link: This is the little bit of text that users see on the page, and on which they need to click if they want to open the link. The text is usually formatted in some way to make it stand out from the text that surrounds it, often with blue color and/or underlining, signaling to users that it is a clickable link.4. Closure of link tag: This signals the end of the link tag to the search engines.

Digital Marketing Training in Kumbakonam

Digital Marketing Research Tools

Research is essential to the success of any marketing campaign.

Without proper planning and research, you are making your tasks when starting a campaign a lot harder. Always do your research and plan this will not only make your job easier but you will learn a lot more things in the process. Digital Marketing Training in Kumbakonam

Google Trends

Google Trends lets you see the latest trends, data, and visualizations from Google and find out what’s trending near you right now.

It can give you validation on an idea pretty fast and it is very easy to use.

Simply go to the website and type the keyword or the industry name you are interested in a hit “Enter”.

You can also add other terms so you can compare data.

They also show you an interest by region on a map and also related queries

You can also search by countries, time period, categories and type of search which includes Youtube search.

And as you may know, Youtube is the second-biggest search engine in the world.

So if you are going to start a business, research competitors, create a new campaign or just curious about certain words Google Trends is one awesome tool you can use!

Google Keyword Planner

So there are two opinions on the Google Keyword tool there are the people who love it and the people who hate it and think it’s data is misleading.

I will not be telling you what I think I will just tell you how you can use it in the best way possible.

What is the Google Keyword tool?

It’s a feature in Google Adwords which I will be talking about later in this article. It’s located in the “Tools” tab.

It is similar to Google Trends but it gives you actual numbers you can work with.

You can choose one or more keywords, choose the country and the language you want and see approximately how many times your word is searched.

You can see if the competition is “High”, “”Medium” or “Low” and what is the suggested bid for that keyword.

I do not recommend to use only the Google Keyword tool to research your keywords, but it is a great tool, to begin with, to get some kind of idea on volumes.

A cool thing about the keyword tool is that you can export the data and import it somewhere else.

Also, you can start a Google Adwords campaign directly while you research your keywords which I also don’t recommend.

What I recommend is that you check it out and find out if it fits your needs.

Ahrefs

Maybe one of the best SEO and SEM tools on the market.

Why?

Mainly because you can learn almost everything about your competitors with the Ahrefs Site Explorer.

What it gives you is the opportunity to learn where your competitors get traffic, where they rank for specific keywords in Google Search, how many backlinks and who exactly links to their website and much more.

For instance, you can set “Alerts” so each time a website ranks for a keyword or receives a mention somewhere on the web.

Also with their “Content Explorer”, they give you the opportunity to find the most shared content on the web.

Here you can see the most shared article about iPhone cases with a total of 91k shares.

You can, of course, filter that in many ways.

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Another great feature and my favorite is the Keywords Explorer 2.0

It has an enormous database of keywords and you can research keywords in 170 countries.

It shows you accurate search volume data, how many searches are with clicks and how many searches remain without clicks.

Another awesome thing about the keyword tool is that it shows you the keyword difficulty in other words. How hard is to rank for that specific words.

It has a ranking history graph, a very detailed SERP analysis of all the data you need in order to make a plan and a marketing strategy.

Last but not least, thousands of keyword ideas with all the metrics you need to know in order to make your decision easier.

Since I make my decisions based on data I can say that I really like how Ahrefs works.

Here are some updates they made recently.

They increased the crawling speed of our AhrefsBot and the size of their databases (links and keywords).

To demonstrate it in numbers, they launched this regularly updated page https://ahrefs.com/big-data These numbers make Ahrefs so good at competitive analysis (including backlink analysis) and in keyword research.

Also, they launched a brand new Site Audit tool. They are still polishing it but it already gets some enthusiastic reviews. Unlike other tools, it does not just show you website errors and SEO issues and relevant recommendations. It lets you create your own issues and configurations for the site audit. I think it’s really great in the constantly changing environment of today’s SEO.

They also launched their Rank-tracker feature which helps you keep up with the performance of specific keywords with very nice charts and graphs.

Analytics & Report tools

For one to be successful in the long-term one must learn how to analyze.

Successful campaigns or mistakes can be tracked and optimized.

Here are some of the best Analytics tools.

Google analytics

There are many data-sources on how many websites use Google Analytics.

In a post from 2015 Marketing land says that Google analytics is used by 30–50 Million websites.

Other data-sources like W3Techs say that Google Analytics is used by 54.9% of all the websites, that is a traffic analysis tool market share of 83.5%.

Either way no matter how many websites use it is one of the most popular analytics tools in the world and if you are Digital Marketer, Growth hacker, Marketing Manager and even a CEO you must learn how to use it.

With Google Analytics you can track everything about your users even what resolution screen they are using.

You can create all kinds of reports and thus learn more about the people using your service.

Where they come from, which channel provides the most leads, sales, downloads etc.

You can even perform A/B testing with the new Google Optimize platform. It’s very easy and it’s integrated with Google Analytics so you can see your results right away and take the best decision based on data.

Something very important is to keep a test for at least 7–14 days and not stop it after 2–3 days. This way Google Analytics will help you in the best way and more accurately.

It is extremely powerful if you know how to use it and if you invest more time to understand it you can only win.

Here is a link to the Google Analytics Academy

Facebook analytics

Facebook has recently gone into the direction of becoming a whole in one Marketing platform.

The Facebook Analytics for Apps recently came out of beta and it is one of the most powerfull analytics for apps tools there is if not the most powerful one.

Why am I saying that?

Well on the platform you can everything you need to know about a user.

It is by far one of the most accurate demographic segmentation ever.

And that’s not all. If you don’t know the Facebook Applications has a lot of permissions that you grant when you install it.

But the true power of it comes when you set it up just like they want you to.

With events.

You see with Facebook analytics for apps you can track specific actions that users have taken in your app and create a segment to target them.

Yes.

You can show ads to people based on specific events.

For instance, you can show personalized ads to people that haven’t completed the level of your game or give a discount to people that were one step away from subscribing to your service.

Also, you can create Lookalike audiences to those segments but and I will talk about why this is amazing when we get to the Facebook Ads tool.

Last but not least there are “Push Campaigns”.

Push Campaigns feature is part of the Facebook Analytics for Apps SDK and it gives you the opportunity to send Push Notifications to your users totally for FREE!

There are two types of Push Notifications

• In-app Notifications — Pop-up screens that show up while the user is in your application
• Push Notifications — Notifications when the user is not using your application

The best part is that you can use Push Campaigns with the Events and instead of paying for ads you can get to your users for free.

Another cool thing from 2017 is that Facebook analytics is not only about apps anymore.

You can use it for your Facebook Pixel.

That way you get an in-depth information about the Facebook profiles of the people that visit your website, about the people that become leads and customers. This was a big step because you can really learn who are you customers and also learn how to target them more precisely.

Like the Apps analytics here you can also create audiences based on specific actions and use them for targeting in the Ads Manager or Power Editor.

It’s designed to be very visual and has “Automated Insights” which are insights that are picked up by Facebook Analytics AI and are shown to you on top of the Overview page. This feature is still in beta but works pretty well so far.

You can also now see where users came from too.

Insights are not as detailed as in Google Analytics but they can give you a great overview. For example, you can see what are the top sources that drove traffic. Main ones are Referral, Direct, Social Networks (Facebook, Instagram etc.), Self-referral (sub-domains that you own), Search Engines etc.

Retention graph is becoming more and more accurate.

All in all Facebook Analytics both for apps and for the pixels is becoming more and more accurate and useful.

Digital Marketing Training in Kumbakonam

Web Design Training in Kumbakonam

Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; interface design; authoring, including standardised code and proprietary software; user experience design; and search engine optimization.

Often many individuals will work in teams covering different aspects of the design process, although some designers will cover them all. The term web design is normally used to describe the design process relating to the front-end (client side) design of a website including writing markup. Web Design Training in Kumbakonam Web design partially overlaps web engineering in the broader scope of web development.

Elements of Effective Website Design

1. Less is more

When it comes to effective website design, the simpler the better!

Users came to your site with a purpose in mind. That purpose is almost never to admire beautiful graphic design skills. Fancy layouts can be visually appealing, but you never want your graphics to distract users from finding what they came to your website for in the first place.

Some of the most effective website design layouts are the simplest. Strategic use of white space can really bring out the wow factor of your website! White space, also known as negative space, are the areas on your website that are intentionally left empty. No, it does not necessarily have to be white.

2. A Picture is worth a thousand words

Notice here how the arrow in the logo points directly towards the pricing option in the menu bar. Furthermore, the positioning of the man on the right side is pointed towards the lead box. These are two great examples of how visual cues on websites can guide users to primary conversion points.

When possible, replace text on your website with infographics. They are a great resource to effectively convey information while still grabbing users’ attention. The average user skims a website rather than reading it in full detail. This is why infographics may be able to convey information more effectively than standard paragraphs.

3. Conventions are Cool!

People are used to certain generic website layouts. Being unique is usually a good thing, but it might be a better idea to take advantage of what users are already comfortable and familiar with! There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to effective website design.

People are trained to look for certain buzzwords like “check out,” “add to cart,” “contact us,” and “submit”. It may be enticing to think outside of the box and use different wording, but that can actually deter some people from converting since they were in search of a more typical word. The last thing you want to do is confuse your website visitors. Avoiding fancy jargon and sticking to what people are used to leaves less room for guesswork and makes your website easier for visitors to navigate.

This website makes great use of common conventions for an extremely easy to follow web page. The logo is in the upper left-hand corner, where users are accustomed to seeing it, there is a menu bar along the top, a shopping cart icon can be clicked to view the cart, and there are clearly labeled buttons to find FAQs and to shop their products.

4. Consistency is Key

It was Lincoln Chafee who famously said, “Trust is built with consistency.” One of the easiest ways to build trust with your website visitors is to maintain consistent design elements across your website.

Some examples of effective website design by way of consistency are maintaining the same navigation or menu bar across the top of each page of your site, keeping the same color scheme and fonts across each page, and maintaining a consistent image style. If you have vector art on your homepage and lifestyle stock photos on the rest, it can come off as disjointed or confusing to visitors.

Effective website design requires one consistent motif across the entire site. Pages can have slightly different layouts to keep your website visually interesting, but they need to match. You definitely don’t want users clicking onto a new page only to wonder if they’ve clicked onto a new website entirely!

Similarly, if your ads are eye-catching and feature a sleek, minimalistic design then people click onto a colorful, busy-looking website, they may be turned off enough to click off of your site without making a purchase. Keeping consistent themes in all your branding, including your website, is a great way to maximize conversions.

5. Let it Flow

Effective website design is about more than just looking good; the information on your website must flow in a logical and easily followed pattern. People read web pages in what is called an “E Format”. This follows the flow of most western language reading patterns. People scan sites starting at the upper left corner, then move across the page to the right, then down on the left side, and back across the page to the right one or two more times. With this format in mind, you should put the most important information on the top left corner of your site and the least important on the bottom right since that is the most frequently ignored area.

Furthermore, grid-based layouts tend to be the easiest to follow. They keep the information on your site organized in a logical pattern that doesn’t look cluttered. Even with a grid-based layout, people are turned off by large blocks of text. Instead, utilize headers, subheaders, and bullet points when possible. Keep the natural flow of the eye in mind and make sure it is easy for users to navigate your website.

6. Don’t Forget About User Experience (UX)!

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works,” -Steve Jobs

The success or failure of your website hinges most heavily on usability and functionality. A beautiful website means nothing if it doesn’t have an effective user experience. When designing your website, you should always keep the user in mind and cater to their needs. Think of your website like a house. No matter how beautiful it is on the outside, you don’t want to live somewhere with shoddy construction or a confusing layout.

Attention spans are short. If users can find the information they are looking for more easily on a competitor’s site, they’ll drop yours faster than a ton of bricks.

When it comes to the visual hierarchy of your website, your website should be organized so that visitors naturally gravitate towards the most important elements first. This can be done through the use of placements, sizes, and colors. For example, if you have a lead form on your website, you want every box on the form to appear above the fold and the “submit” button should be large, bright, and easy to find at the end of the form.

The best way to ensure your UX is where it needs to be is to have people test out your site. Sometimes, as a site developer, you can become blind to minor issues users may encounter when visiting your site. Enlist the help of some friends to make sure your website is easy to navigate. You should also routinely check your site to make sure all links work and everything shows up properly.

7. Keep Load Time in Mind

The days of dial-up are dead for a reason! According to eMarketer, experts used to say users would abandon a website if it took longer than eight seconds to load. That statistic has now been cut by more than half. If your website takes longer than three seconds to load, you could be losing valuable customers.

So how do you speed up a slow site? One way to improve load time is to optimize image sizes on your site. Large files take longer to load, so reducing the size and scale of some images can shorten a webpage’s load time. Making landing page redirects cacheable is another tactic that may improve your website’s load time. Already tried all these tips? It may be time to upgrade your servers.

Keep in mind that it shouldn’t take more than a few seconds for your website to load, no matter what type of device it is being accessed from. Test your site to ensure it loads quickly, not just on a desktop, but on phones and tablets, too.

8. Accessibility For All

On the subject of mobile website viewing, did you know that more than half of all websites accessed are now opened on mobile devices?

In this day and age, your website HAS to be mobile friendly! You can create mobile versions of your website, or you can simply utilize a responsive website layout that adjusts to different screen sizes automatically.

Effective website design includes making sure your site is easily visible on all different operating systems, browsers, and devices. Flexible, responsive designs are necessary to maximize your conversions.

9. Optimization Station

As with most things in today’s digital age, the key to success in web design is constant optimization. You should consistently be testing your website to make sure it is as user-friendly as possible and effectively designed to maximize conversions.

Many third-party sites also offer heat maps you can install to see which parts of your website visitors interact with the most. This will give you a good idea if people are focusing too much on unimportant details of the site and getting distracted from main conversion points.

Also, keep in mind that optimization is not a one and done activity. The world of web design changes constantly. You must consistently be updating your website with new information to keep it up-to-date. Have you ever clicked onto a website only to be jarred by a layout that is clearly from a decade ago? Continuously updating and optimizing your website can prevent it from succumbing to the same fate.  

10. Goooooaaaaalllls!

The underlying purpose of your website should be evident at all times. Be clear, upfront, and honest about what your website is all about. Don’t try to hide it or make users dig for it. For example, if you want more leads, you can have a lead form pop up right when someone first clicks onto your site.

If you’re trying to get more direct sales, make sure conversion points like “add to cart” buttons are particularly eye-catching and easy to find. All buttons on your site should be sized proportionately to their use.

So there you have it! Now you should be equipped with all the information you need to create user-friendly, conversion-driven, effective website design.

Occupations

There are two primary jobs involved in creating a website: the web designer and web developer, who often work closely together on a website. The web designers are responsible for the visual aspect, which includes the layout, coloring and typography of a web page. Web designers will also have a working knowledge of markup languages such as HTML and CSS, although the extent of their knowledge will differ from one web designer to another. Particularly in smaller organizations, one person will need the necessary skills for designing and programming the full web page, while larger organizations may have a web designer responsible for the visual aspect alone.

Further jobs which may become involved in the creation of a website include:

• Graphic designers to create visuals for the site such as logos, layouts and buttons
• Internet marketing specialists to help maintain web presence through strategic solutions on targeting viewers to the site, by using marketing and promotional techniques on the internet
• SEO writers to research and recommend the correct words to be incorporated into a particular website and make the website more accessible and found on numerous search engines
• Internet copywriter to create the written content of the page to appeal to the targeted viewers of the site
• User experience (UX) designer incorporates aspects of user-focused design considerations which include information architecture, user-centered design, user testing, interaction design, and occasionally visual design.

Web Design Training in Kumbakonam