Simple Tips to Make Your WordPress Website Faster

The Internet has taken the world by storm. With high-speed internet service available almost everyone, the buck lies with website owners to make their websites faster to load. People love browsing the web but they also love the websites that load faster and do not make them wait for hours. In fact, a major contributing factor to page abandonment is a website's loading time. Faster the website loads, longer the visitor stays on your website. The loading speed also makes your website ranking improve in search engine rankings. A website's loading time also affects its conversion rates. Any delay in the loading time than expected and the consumer moves away to another website. Therefore, here are simple tips to make your WordPress website faster.

• The first step is to identify the speed bumps that are making your website slow. Run a speed by choosing a free online speed testing tool that offers website monitoring services. This kind of tool also offers easy to follow summaries where form you can identify the issues that are slowing down your website.
• Once the issues are identified, the next step is to fix the problem. The core of your website should be strong. The themes, hosting, the plugins all these make up the core of your WordPress website Keep these uncluttered and you will have faster loading website.
• It is a good idea to research before choosing a server to host your website. Choose a quality hosting service that might not be cheaper but will offer reliable hosting services.
• Always choose a clean theme that describes your website theme with a minimal framework. Remove excessive clutter.
• Caching plugins are designed to improve the website's user experience by increasing the server performance. It reduces downloading time, increases loading speed and provides the transparent content delivery combination.
• Do not install unnecessary plugins. Only use what you need to work with and get rid of unwanted ones.
• Try using an image optimizer that restores the quality of your image while reducing the file size.
• An optimized homepage will result in a faster-loading website. Since most of the visitors will be landing on the homepage, it needs to work faster. You can show excerpts of posts instead of the full posts. Remove unnecessary widgets and reduce the number of posts to show on the page.
• Make use of effective clean up tools for your website such as database optimization plugins. This will act as an automatic organizer for your website, thus optimizing the database.
• Control the post revision storing capacity by using a simple control plugin. This will give you more storage space and thus faster load time.
• Use a simple image plugin that helps with loading images above the fold and once the post is scrolled down, other images are loaded just before they are viewed.
• Increase your loading speed by giving your website the needed security and storage space using simple plugin that handles both website security issues and loading speed with ease.

As WordPress Gurus, we are in the market with the most number of WordPress Experts who help build these highly customizable and user-friendly sites. Talk to us for your WordPress design and get a free consultation!

Insights to YouTube SEO - The Second Largest Search Engine

YouTube is definitely the second largest search engine after Google that is used by millions of individuals around the world. To get yourself noticed on this prodigal platform, companies need to create a striking digital marketing strategy that gets all eyes on your videos. Though it is not as simple as uploading a video and it going viral, there are few simple steps to optimize your videos so that it reaches the right audience. In addition, your business needs to have a YouTube channel that uploads videos regularly. Here are few steps to create your YouTube channel and get a wise SEO strategy in place.

• Create a Gmail account for your business, if you do not have one until now.
• After you, sign in go to My Channel and name the channel on your brand
• Once done, select the right display picture that makes it alluring for multiple devices. You can also use artwork with size 2560x1440px.
• Once you have selected the display picture, you need to add a description to your channel so that it is appealing and attracts traffic.
• It is important to insert relevant channel tags. Do it in your Channel Keyword section, which will help in providing to YouTube and Google information about your channel. These tags will show up in the search results and bring in easy traffic.
• When uploading a video, remember to give it an appealing and compelling name. Since it is the most important piece of content on your brand page, it needs to be clearly visible to users. Optimized file names and tags attract sufficient preference from YouTube. A relevant in the beginning of the title is important.
• An apt description is necessary to describe your videos since Google and YouTube search engine bots cannot perceive videos without description. A suitable tag with 25-30 words of your video description should be included.
• Putting an appropriate SEO tag will optimise your video and make it favourable for Google.
• An attractive thumbnail will make your video stand out of the crowd on YouTube.
• Call -to-action buttons and annotations are a great way of encouraging visitors to subscribe/like/comment on your video, which sends strong signals to YouTube on how your video is being perceived. This also helps in boosting ranking.
• One can add subtitles and captions to their videos. This is a good way of increasing ranking YouTube as well as Google.
• Compiling your videos in a keyword-rich playlist is a good way of getting more views and thereby increasing the SEO power of your videos.
• Creating videos that will keep the viewers engaged in the latest YouTube search algorithm. The length of the video should not be a constraint, however, a minimum of 2minutes of video helps in holding the audience.
• On can upload their on keyword-rich transcript file rather than depend on one created by YouTube. This helps one to control as to what appears on the video screen.
• One should regularly upload and update content on YouTube. Fresher videos will make viewers come back for more and thus lead to more relevance.

It can be concluded that a good quality video with interesting content is all you need to keep your audience engaged. Following these simple tips for your videos will get you more SEO relevant traffic to your brand.

If you need more advice on how YouTube SEO can help you with your Social Media strategy and campaigns then contact our Social Media Experts today.

Social Media Objectives – Customer Loyalty OR Brand Awareness?

Social media marketing is the most vital point in any business right now-whether it has an online store or a brick and mortar one. However, many businesses fail to measure the conversion availed from this medium. In recent market studies, many top social media goals along with myriad other data regarding time and resource investment of marketers, hiring process and source of the best ROI have come to light. While many businesses consider brand awareness as their top social media goal, many others are reaping the benefits of investing in other fields such as customer service.

4 Ways to Deliver Outstanding Social Customer Service

Over time, there’s been a huge surge in some of the big brands taking a step ahead to provide excellent social experience to their customers. Social customer service, according to study, is all about providing human touch to consumers for a better experience.

80 percent companies believe that they deliver excellent customer service. But that’s not how consumers think. Thus, there’s a huge opportunity for websites and brands to plan their social customer service best practices and strategies to stand out with extraordinary social experiences.

Noted below are 4 exemplary social customer services best practices to follow:

Reduce Response Time: Brands have gradually improved their total response time by 143% on the leading social network, Facebook, every year. Facebook targets brands with good social customer service and places information on their average response rate and time in the top left corner of the social media profiles. This enables fans to see the true commitment of fan base. 32% customers expect a response within 30 minutes, whereas 42% might wait for 60 minutes, as per research. Taking too long can tarnish brand image.

Having a System: Regardless of the size of your brand, having a social system to address grievances is very important for community management. Have a company-wide document to be handled by any staff member to manage disgruntled consumers on social networks. This creates a cohesive and effective experience for both the parties.

Go Beyond the Brand Pages: Setting up Google Alerts for keyword related to your brand can help you venture out of the brand page. You can receive daily mails on user response related to your brand. You can also invest in social media monitoring tools, which helps you track hash tags associated with the brand.

Be Social: While customer service is usually a corporate approach, being more sentimental with complaints can help. Social media creates an opportunity for brands to show who they are exactly dealing with. Most brands are choosing to be informal and using sign off messages with names or initials, thus offering faceless cooperation.

It is very important to be more realistic as well as understanding in your social behaviour. Social customer service is the key to strategic progress. Want to step up your customer service on social media? Discover how Olive Solutions can help you!

Use Twitter as your digital selling tool to drive more sales

The importance of social networking platforms in driving successful day-to-day business is well known to socially empowered sellers. Right from creating fan pages on Facebook to connect to your customers to using LinkedIn for getting to know prospective customers and businesses, you might have done it all. However, how much have you used Twitter to your business’s advantage? These 5 easy ways of using Twitter will expand your business reach and help you engage more customers than ever, thus clocking in more sales.

• Any social networking platform interaction starts with a username. Create a compelling profile that is appropriate for your business and visible to your customer base on Twitter. A suitable username with an effective profile picture and header image will add to your professionalism and preserve your branding efforts. The customers-both returning and prospective are likely to engage in your page and convert into a credible relationship with your brand through Twitter.
• Take advantage of your cover photo on Twitter to promote any new product or service. A suitable header image along with an effective cover photo can speak volumes about your business. Any upcoming contest, price promotion or product introduction can be affected through these. Twitter allows pictures of resolution 400x400 pixels for profile pictures and 1500x500 pixels for header images. Anything that does not fit into these dimensions is automatically resized by Twitter and used.
• The correct use of economically permitted 140 characters can heighten the interest of your customer in your business. Use only related information that would convey your business’s USP, any new product launch, exciting offers or any other interesting statistic that would intrigue your customer base and compel them to visit your website.
• Twitter is the perfect medium to start countless conversation threads on unlimited topics. Identify your target customers by using Twitter’s search function and enter relevant keywords to find relevant videos, companies, tweets, news and accounts to engage.
• Staying on schedule and being responsive is a great way of directing customers to your business on the website and driving in more sales. Tagging colleagues with domain experiences can help in closing the deal and affecting the sale more quickly than expected.

It is exciting to know that at least 50% of technology companies use Twitter to acquire customers and at least 74% of people follow Twitter to get updates on products, businesses and services. Twitter is, thus an effective social platform to drive in more sales. Hence, hire our experienced social media marketing professionals to ensure the best exposure for your brand online.

A Startup’s Guide to Building a Social Media Marketing Strategy on a Limited Budget

It is anticipated that there will be 2.13 billion social media users across the world by the end of this year. It is undeniable that social media has become an integral part of our personal and professional lives.

When it comes to marketing, social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn enable social media marketers or businesses to connect, communicate and convert users into potential customers. 

One of the biggest reasons behind fast-growing popularity of social media strategy in the digital marketing niche is the ability of social media platforms to make businesses harness its immense potential for virality.

SEO Steps to Take After You Launch a New Website

You have successfully launched the website and next big thing is SEO. Here we have brought to you a 6-step guideline to make your site most SEO-friendly.

• Define Keywords: Do keyword analysis to find most trending and most relevant keywords for your website. Define target keywords for each page of your site. Never keep too many keywords for a single page.
• Fit Keywords: Make sure each webpage on your site has content that is optimized for its target SEO keywords. Ensure readability and engagement value of the content at the same time. Keyword optimized content is the most fundamental element to obtain higher ranking in search results.
• Embrace Primary keyword into Title Tag: Enter a search query in Google and you will find that the search result display title tags of different websites appeared in the result. Optimize title tags in all your web pages using primary keyword defined for the particular page.
• Insert Clear and Striking Meta Tag Description: That short information under your page title tag is Meta tag description. As you have very limited words for writing Meta tag content, choose each word wisely making it as attention-grabbing as possible.
• Begin with Google Analytics: Set up your site’s Google analytics account to trace each micro activity on your site in real-time. Did I say a basic account is free? Don’t forget to integrate Google search console to your analytics account to gain better insight on how your site is actually performing.
• Get Quality Backlinks: Look around for friends, peers and influencers to check who can do their bit to promote your website. Blogging and guest posting are also a great way to get quality backlinks.

Are you ready with your SEO game-plan? Hire a professional SEO service and build a full-proof SEO strategy for long term results.

Beyond the boring: The importance of web & graphics design

Is responsive web design to be blamed for the lost soul of web design? The repetitive use of responsive web designs, familiar navigation styles, fast layouts, heavy standardisation, fast prototyping and strict grid layouts in almost every website has made web designs boring.

The importance of web and graphics design is lost somewhere. To stand out from the crowd and create a wow factor for your website, let us have a look at some of the creative web and graphic designs that we can incorporate in our web design.

• Incorporating a wired layout is the best way to challenge the status quo. Some e-magazines are using grid play to create a totally outside the typical web design experience. Avoid the unnecessary scroll jacking and breaking massively at viewports and what you have is an interesting web layout. Keeping the break points and scrolling functionality normal, more organic grid feel can be created.
• Going organic with crazy busy layouts is another way of creating interesting web designs. Making powerful and memorable experiences for users is what we should be concentrating on. A fantastic way to communicate a brand’s unique personality is to include custom illustration work. Entertaining animations also make or a smooth experience without jumping the page to predefined points. This way, your web design becomes a story-telling feature.
• A basic experience that every user has to receive is the same layout and colour combination on the same website-landing page. With advanced technologies, this can be tossed out of the window and something unique can be introduced. For example, an overlapping box layout and a colour scheme change for every new visit. This feature can be extended to other subpages too.
• Another way to keep away the boring web design and create something unique is to decide on an interesting or entertaining theme. This encourages you to explore beyond traditional UI and provides for a nice framework. These can be interesting for small companies and those in entertainment business. For example, retro theme can include a combination of retro colour scheme, lighting effects and texts. The layout is responsive but not bring. It does not feel boxy or typical and manages to flow nicely to any viewport size. 

These are just some of the examples of unique, out of the box web and graphic applications that can take your website from boring to wow. Call Olive Solutions today for Web Design Consultation and a get a FREE Quote!

Google Display Banners -The Most Effective Sizes

Spending any amount of the marketing budget on display advertising needs you to know the banner sizes that work the best in capturing your target audience’s  attention. The most effective banner sizes are helpful in generating impressions and clicks, leading ultimately to sales. Knowledge of ad inventory is necessary in order to design the right banner. Most publishers choose banner sizes they want to display on their websites. Picking a wrong banner size will effectively limit the reach of your ad campaign. Based on ad impressions on Google’s display networks from highest to lowest, here is a comprehensive list of banner formats that have proven to be most effective and successful.

Modern SEO Seamlessly Collaborates Sum of Independent Parts

A few years ago, having a website for your business was simply more than enough to drive in huge customers. However, today things have changed. Managing a website requires loads of strategies and experiences.

So is modern SEO something more than few independent parts? And the answer is YES. All site ranking activities are not directly related to core SEO techniques. However, they somehow do a lot to enhance online presence.

Perhaps, some of these techniques can be carried out independently and they can still do a lot to enhance your site's perceivability. 

The Importance Of Being Yourself On Social Media

Using Social Media for Business? Be You

Today customers interact with businesses and brands over social media channels. And thus, having a right social media image or profile is vital to any business out there, whether they are a SMB or a large enterprise. However, very few companies succeed in harnessing the maximum potential of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for their business objectives.

If you are a business who wants to truly stand out in the social media landscape, there is a golden rule – Be Yourself! Whether you are sharing a post on Facebook, making a tweet or triggering a discussion in LinkedIn, being authentic and consistent will pay off. 

3 Vital Tips to Plan your Link Building Strategy in 2016

Any conversation among webmasters or SEO experts always begins with aspects concerning link building strategies.  So what needs to be your plan for link building in the year 2016? Well, as expected, Google will come hard and things will not be easy; however, this definitely does not mean that you give link building a skip.

Remember that link building will always remain an intrinsic part of your SEO strategies; however, advocating care and following certain tips will go a long way in ensuring that Google does not penalize you. With 2016 already under way, changing your perspective with regards to link building is necessary. Keep in mind that link building means authority building and hence, you need to give it more importance than just thinking about numbers.

Guide to Design and Development Trends for Adaptive Marketers

While responsive websites is the entire trend in today’s digital ecommerce world, it is not always a good idea to suggest a business to redesign its website. Google does suggest a number of  benefits for a responsive website, but it is you who is going to decide whether you just want a responsive website or a great website that helps its visitors have an awesome user experience. 

Here are some for the guidelines best followed for adaptive marketers for design and development trends.

Beginner guidelines for ‘Safety First’ colours for the Web

Using too many colours for your web design can most probably not land you into a wonderful looking colourful page, but rather a situation called ‘Blech’ where too many colours inevitably end up looking just wrong. Working with colours can be a wonderful experience but when you are to create colours for the web, you need to follow a practical framework where the website looks not only well coloured but also make sense. Here are some safety guidelines for beginners for website colour schemes that can help them wade through the tough water (read: colours) through ease.

Digital Marketing facts and its statistics

Digital revolution is in place. Instead of spending an hour or two on the internet, we are connected 24/7. Whilst the medium may vary - laptops, desktops, smartphones but we are on the internet either checking our mails, on social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter or Wattsapping and Googling. All these platforms cumulative form the digital sphere. Here comes the importance of digital marketing. It has made a paradigm shift in marketing. It is a form of inbound marketing where the goal is to find your concerned business. Businesses put content out for others to search and find them through an online search, a paid search, by reading your content such as an article or blog or by finding your business on a social network. 

Design Principal to Boost Conversion Rate

Before beginning to create your new business website, it is essential to keep everything well planned and down on paper. A structured web design plan would ensure that your website is well-designed, relevant, structured and competent enough to provide compelling online presence. Some of the key principals to keep in mind while redesigning a website to increase conversion rate are as follows:

Which Social Media Platforms Drive the Most Sales?

In today’s age of social networking, if your business is not on social media, you are missing something big. Online applications are a great way to promote, share and discuss information regarding your business. Social Media Marketing encompasses various forms such as blogs, forums, micro blogs and involvement in social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

How to Choose the Best E-Commerce Platform

A successful online business needs a suitable ecommerce web host. If your business needs to conduct online transactions, it is essential for the web host to have great storage capacity for product files, the flexibility to be customised, and the sufficient bandwidth to handle increased traffic, and the online transaction functionality. Not all this makes finding the perfect ecommerce solution an easy task. 

Some points can be kept in mind while choosing the best ecommerce solution for your business.

The foremost requirement is to know the need in a web host. For example, the products the business will be selling, the size of the product images to be displayed in the site etc, will be decisive in selecting a suitable hosting package for the business. Also sufficient disk space for storage and bandwidth requirement needs to be taken care of. An estimation of visitors per month on the website could be of great help in deciding the best e-commerce platform for one’s website. Contacting an experienced web developer can be helpful in selecting the preferred programming language and the right operating system to host one’s website.

Google Analytics Features Every Site MUST Have Enabled

Event Tracking:

Have you ever wonder - how many people are clicking on specific image/link/button? When visitor plays a video? When visitor start filling a form and ends it? You can track all these kind of stuff with event tracking functionality.

Image courtesy: https://www.webmechanix.com

Real-Time Reporting:

You can easily monitor at a time user’s activities via Real Time Reporting. It shows the number of people on your site right now, their geographic locations, the keywords and sites that referred them, which pages they're viewing, conversions as they happen.

Enhanced Ecommerce:

With a help of advance, ecommerce tracking you can get an idea of what visitors buy and why! You can easily get transaction and purchase details from your GA account. Product Performance shows that which products are bought, in what quantity, and sales revenue. Sales Performance gives the information about the revenue by the day, and the percentage each day contributes to the total. Transactions show you data associated with individual transactions, including revenue, tax, shipping, and product quantity.

Goals and Funnels:
Most of the websites have a contact us page. Did you ever notice how many visitors have filled your contact page? You can track this kind of things via Goal setting in GA account. Use Goals to measure how well your site meets your business objectives. Set up a goal for each activity you want to track as a conversion.

If you want to track the path of users towards the completion of goal then create a funnel in goal setup. Funnel report shows how users are navigating sections of your website and if they reach a Goal as you expect them to. A great use of the Goal Flow report is to see if there’s a step in your funnel that stops traffic from converting.

Multi-Channel Funnel:
Generally, users visit a site multiple times before converting. A potential customer may discover your brand via a display ad, return to your site later to research, and finally convert after searching for a specific product or offering. The Multi-Channel Funnels reports allow you to analyze your customers' conversion paths -- the sequences of interactions that led to conversions, which helps you make effective advertising 

If you have Google Analytics’ Premium account then you can get benefits of:

• Tag Management
• Universal Analytics
• Measurement Protocol
• Mobile App Analytics
• Remarketing