Essential WordPress Plugins You Should Know

WordPress offers a ton of features and flexibility, there is still a lot of functionality missing from the core software. The best way to fill in the missing pieces, of course, is to get yourself the right plugins.

wordpress-plugins

Plugins offer all kinds of customization for site admins, however, with almost 40,000 options to choose from it the WordPress Plugin Directory, not to mention all the premium products available, it can be difficult sorting the good from the, well, not so good.

So here’s a collection of free and premium must-haves, the plugins that can help take your site from good to great.

Comment Spam Prevention

Akismet – best guard against comment spam for WordPress blog!

Database and File Backup Plugins

BackUpWordPress – BackUpWordPress will back up your entire site including your database and all your files on a schedule that suits you.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

All in One SEO Pack – Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. Install the all in one seo pack or the “WordPress SEO by Yoast” plugin (you don’t need to install both).

WordPress SEO by Yoast – Yoast’s all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog: SEO titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs & much more.

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. The SEO plugins listed above can also do the sitemap for you.

Blog Security Plugin

All In One WP Security & Firewall – The All In One WordPress Security and Firewall is the ultimate security plugin that will take your WordPress site’s security to a whole new level.

BulletProof Security – BulletProof security plugin offers website security protection against: XSS, RFI, CRLF, CSRF, Base64, Code Injection and SQL Injection.

Wordfence Security – The Wordfence WordPress security plugin provides free enterprise-class WordPress security.

Blog Statistics Related

Google Analytics Dashboard for WP – Displays Google Analytics reports in your WordPress Dashboard. Inserts the latest Google Analytics tracking code in your pages.

Google Analytics – Enables Google Analytics on all pages. This one seems to be simple and does the job. However, the developer doesn’t seem to be very responsive.

Google Analytics for WordPress – This plugin used to be really good but since the original developer sold this plugin, it has gone downhill (many users have reported to us that it doesn’t work well anymore). 

WP Statistics – A comprehensive plugin for your WordPress visitor statistics (doesn’t use Google Analytics).

Caching Plugin

W3 Total Cache – The fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. After you use the w3 total cache plugin you won’t go back to using WP Super Cache.

WP Super Cache – WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.

RSS Subscription Related

FeedBurner FeedSmith – This plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

Add to Any: Subscribe Button – Helps readers subscribe to your blog using any feed reader.

Category Specific RSS Menu – A simple WordPress plugin to add category specific RSS subscription menu into your posts, pages, sidebars. Very handy when your blog covers multiple topic from non related subjects. 

• Membership Plugin

Simple Membership Plugin – The simple membership plugin lets you protect your posts and pages so only your members (free or paid) can view the protected content.

WordPress eMember – WP eMember is a feature rich membership plugin that can turn your existing or new WordPress site into a powerful membership site.

Affiliate Related

WP Affiliate Platform – WordPress plugin for affiliate recruitment, management and tracking. This plugin lets you run your own affiliate campaign/program and allows you to reward (pay commission) your affiliates for referred sales.

Software License Management

Software License Manager – This plugin allows you to create a software license management solution for your web applications (WordPress plugins, Themes, PHP based membership script etc.)

Other Very Useful Plugins

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin –  This plugin gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.

Download Monitor – This plugin is very useful for managing and tracking your digital file downloads. You can track which file is being downloaded how many times and who is downloading them.

Executable PHP Widget – Like the Text widget, but it will take PHP code as well. Very handy for inserting custom ‘php’, ‘html’, ‘javascript’ in the sidebar.

Crayon Syntax Highlighter – A plugin to highlight any code in your posts or pages. very handy if you use example codes in your Blog.

Mailpoet Newsletters – Send newsletters, post notifications or autoresponders from WordPress easily, and beautifully.

WP-Polls – Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. Allows you to easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page.

EWWW Image Optimizer – The EWWW Image Optimizer is a WordPress plugin that will automatically and losslessly optimize your images as you upload them to your blog.

WP Video Lightbox – The WordPress Video Lightbox plugin allows you to embed videos on a page using lightbox overlay display. This plugin can be used to display images, flash, YouTube, Vimeo, iFrame etc in a nice lightbox overlay.

Contact Forms Related

Contact Form 7 – Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Contact Form – The Contact Form plugin allows you to implement a feedback form to a web-page or a post in no time.

Gravity Forms – Build and publish your WordPress forms in just minutes. No drudgery, just quick and easy form-building.

Social Networking

Social Media and Share Icons – Social media plugin which adds social media icons to your website with tons of customization features.

Share This – This is a very useful plugin that allows your visitors to share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites.

Fat Free WordPress Social Share Buttons Plugin – This is a very simple and FAT FREE share button plugin that adds Google plus one, Facebook and Twitter share buttons to your blog posts.

For Google Adsense

Simple Google Adsense insertion – Easy to use WordPress plugin to insert Google Adsense to your posts, pages and sidebar.

Google Adsense Plugin – Google AdSense Plugin allows you to set parameters of the ads displaying, such as format (text ad, image, text with an image or link), size, color of the elements in the ad block, rounded corners and the ad block position on the website.

Google Adsense – The AdSense Plugin enables you to easily use Google’s products – including Webmaster Tools – with your WordPress site.

Photo Gallery Plugin

NextGen Gallery – The most popular WordPress photo gallery plugin.

Simple Photo Gallery – If you are looking for an effective, reliable, yet simple to use photo gallery plugin, then check this gallery plugin out.

E-commerce, Paypal Donation and Payment

WordPress Simple Paypal Shopping Cart – is a very easy to use plugin that allows you to sell products or services online in one click from your WordPress blog. Very useful when you want to sell eBooks or digital products from various posts and pages and need a WordPress Shopping Cart solution.

WP Easy Paypal Payment Accept – This is a very easy to use WordPress plugin to Accept donation or Paypal payment for a service or a product in one click. Handy when you are trying to put a customized payment widget on your site (you can add it to the sidebar or a page or a post of your blog).

WordPress eStore – This plugin provides a complete solution to sell products from your site. It is really good for selling digital products securely from your WordPress blog.

WordPress Donations Widget Plugin – The WordPress Donations Widget Plugin allows you to collect donation for a cause from your WordPress powered site.

PayPal for Digital Goods – This plugin allows you to use the PayPal for Digital Goods gateway to accept payment for digital goods. Provides inline checkout of digital goods.

Stripe Payments – A simple and lightweight plugin to accept payment on your site (for a product or service) via the Stripe payment gateway.

Read More

Affiliate Marketing Summit West 2017

During January 15-17, more than 6,000 digital marketers from over 70 countries will gather at the Paris Las Vegas hotel for the performance marketing industry's premier global event, Affiliate Summit West 2017.

These high-level decision makers will come looking for online publishers, traffic sources, retailers, networks, technology firms, digital agencies and other solution providers. And if you're an Affiliate Summit attendee, it could be you that they find.

There is no substitute for being here, demonstrating your solutions and building face-to-face relationships. The top companies and key decision makers in the space come to Affiliate Summit. Show them what you've got and what they're missing.

January 15, 2017 - January 17, 2017

Las Vegas

Paris Las Vegas Hotel

Affiliate Summit West 2017 (#ASW17) is taking place on January 15-17, 2017 at Paris Las Vegas Hotel.
The conference and tradeshow offers attendees:

• three tradeshow areas packed with affiliates, merchants, vendors, networks, technology providers, digital agencies, traffic sources;
• multiple tracks of relevant educational sessions delivered by industry experts;
• a variety of networking events;
• and online tools to help you connect with other attendees before, during and after the event.

Expected Attendance: 6,000+

• Early check-in: January 14, 12:00 PM
• Conference start: January 15, 10:00 AM
• Conference end: January 17, 4:00 PM

 Agenda

The Affiliate Summit West 2017 Agenda is now live and is packed with sessions that will help better understand the evolving landscape of affiliate marketing.
Don't forget that Affiliate Summit offers two pass types: VIP and Networking.
Review the benefits included with each pass type here to ensure that you have purchased the right pass for the sessions and events that you wish to access.

Register

Two pass types are available for Affiliate Summit West 2017 - VIP and Networking.

To help you choose the pass type that is right for you, refer to the Pass Comparison Chart below and then register here.

Registering 5 or more attendees?  Check out our Group Rates at the bottom of this section.

Call 417-2SUMMIT (278-6648) for instructions on booking at group rates below.

Group Rates	Discount
Group rate for 5-9 Passes	20% off
Group rate for 10 or more Passes	25% off

Read More

SEO tips and tricks to promote website

Developing SEO strategies that can drive an immense amount of traffic to your site within a month is not an easy task, especially if you want your site’s visitors to convert into profits. Generating highly targeted traffic or visitors that have the intent of availing the services or products that you are offering is the best way to really earn from your website.

The good news is that there are many ways that you can do to hasten the process of having your site noticed by people who are in need of the information, services or products that you provide. Here are some of the ways that you can do to generate specifically targeted online visitors in under a month.

Target easy to rank long-tail keywords through blog posts

If your site has no blog section yet, then you better start including one. Blogs can benefit your business in so many ways, and consistently driving traffic to your site is one of them. Using long-tail keywords in your blog posts’ titles (eg. How to learn SEO), can extremely help your site’s performance in terms of traffic generation, seeing as this strategy can very much take your blog posts on top of SERPs without further improving them through off-page optimization or link building.

Blog posts can naturally rank on their own basing on its topical relevance as seen by search engines, and taking advantage of low competition keywords will make your pages rank on the top page of SERPs in no time, which means more organic traffic to your site.

Targeting 3 -5 keywords for each page on your site

Creating your pages or blog posts with the intent of ranking for more than 2 keywords is always a smart move, since it will allow your site to draw more relevant traffic along the process. Say, if your site has 15 blog posts or pages on its first month, and each page are targeting 3 different keywords. Doing the math will give you a result of 45 keywords giving you constant traffic within a month.

Doing this strategy is very simple, wherein you just have to use or combine your targeted keywords on your page or post’s title, URL and on the body copy (eg. Top 10 advanced on-page SEO strategies). With the given example of a post title you are able to target 7 keywords that you can use within the body of the content, including:

    Advanced on-page SEO strategies

    On-page SEO strategies

    On-page SEO

    Advanced SEO

    Advanced SEO strategies

    Advanced on-page SEO

    On-page optimization strategies

    On-page SEO techniques

Dofollow blog commenting

Commenting on blogs with the same theme as your site – particularly blogs that allow dofollow attributed links on their comment section – is one of the most effective ways to promoting your site as well as in improving your keywords’ search rankings. This technique has a lot of advantages and can certainly take your campaign a long way, given that this method allows you to acquire relevant backlinks and can possibly build relationships with other bloggers related to your niche.

Networking with other bloggers is extremely beneficial, especially with higher value link placements such as special mentions, in-content links (used as a resource), guest blogging opportunities and sponsored reviews. Anyway, leaving comments on blogs with the use of your keywords as anchor texts can help improve its search rankings in just weeks, particularly if the links that you’ve built are from topically relevant pages and are dofollow attributed.

Guest blog posting

Guest blogging has been known to be a link building method that’s really advantageous in terms of driving relevant traffic, acquiring high quality links, passing through Pagerank and in improving SERP rankings. It’s best to choose blogs that are relevant to your site, have high page ranks and receives a lot of traffic on their site (can be based through Alexa traffic rank).

In choosing the topic to write for guest postings, writing topics that are strictly about the keywords you are aiming at is the most effective way to get most out of this technique, since the link that you’ll be able to build through your author bio will have higher scores basing on its relevance as well as in targeting the audience that will be able to read it.

Forum participation

Forum posting is a good start for any campaign, especially if you choose to participate on high PR and high traffic forum sites. The best way to benefit from this method is to establish an expert or knowledgeable image through this channel, and not just focusing on building links through your signature.

Establishing yourself through forum sites and being genuinely active in participating with the community can bring you targeted visitors and interested clients within a month, so spending 30 minutes a day on 1 or 2 authority forums around your site’s industry is certainly worth it.

Article submission and converting your articles

This link building method has proven its worth over the past decade and is still known to be one of the most effective ways in generating consistent traffic as well as highly relevant links that can boost your search rankings.  The best thing about article marketing is that it’s capable of building solid links as it gets syndicated naturally, particularly if you have written a solid and informative article. Submitting an exceptionally written article to several highly trusted article directories (such as Ezinearticles, Articlesbase, Goarticles, Amazines, and many more) can enhance its chances of getting scraped or used by other sites that are seeking for quality content to be posted, which gives you more extra links and of course, more traffic.

But there’s more to this method than just the traditional article marketing, you can as well convert your articles to other formats for more exposure and external links pointing to your site. Converting your articles to PDF, podcasts, slide/powerpoint presentation and videos, and then submitting them to their respective directories can extremely amplify your site’s traffic in a short period of time, given that these formats have higher chances of ranking high on search engine result pages.

SEO Tips

To optimize your whole site for search engines, you’ll need to follow these basic tips:

Make the website about one thing.

It can be about other stuff, too, but choose one primary topic that is most essential to your message.

This step is important, so you may want to do a little keyword research before choosing a topic.

Mention keywords where they matter most.

Include your “one thing” in the site title, domain name, description, tagline, keywords, blog categories, page titles, and page content.

If you’re on WordPress, you can change a lot of this in the General Settings or through a plugin like All in One SEO Pack.

Link to internal pages on your site.

A lot of content management systems automatically do this, but if yours doesn’t, you’ll want to be intentional about linking to your most important pages directly from your homepage and cross-linking them with each other.

Use a permalink structure that includes keywords.

Some sites have “ugly” permalink structures that use numbers to identify pages.

Don’t do this. It’s bad for SEO and just doesn’t look good.

Use a URL structure that includes text, and make sure you include keywords in your URLs.

So instead of having a page’s URL be this:

    http://yoursite.com/?p=12

It should look more like this:

    http://yoursite.com/coolpage/

Remove anything that slows down your website.

Page load times are important, so get rid of any non-essentials that bog down your website.

These may including music players, large images, flash graphics, and unnecessary plugins.

Use keywords in your images.

Include words that reflect your site topic in the image title, description, and alt attributes.

Also, re-title the file name if it doesn’t reflect your main keywords (e.g. writing-tips.jpg instead of d1234.jpg).

Link to other websites with relevant content.

You can do this by including a blogroll, link list, or resources page on your website.

Of course, do it sparingly, as each outbound link is a “vote” for another site. However, if you do it well and people click your links, this tells search engines you are a trusted authority on your particular topic.

Update your website frequently.

Sites with dynamic content often rank higher than those with static content. That’s why blogs and directories (like Wikipedia) do so well on search engines. They are constantly being updated with new content.

Make sure your website is indexed in search engines.

A lot of search engines will automatically find and index your content, but don’t count on it.

You want to be sure engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo are crawling your site, so that people are finding you online. (You can add them directly, if they’re not.)

Have other websites link to you.

This is really, really important, when it comes to SEO. The bummer is that it’s not something you can necessarily control. Other than creating excellent content, the only thing you can do is ask (which occasionally works).

Regardless of what you do, know that inbound links are essential to SEO.

Stop changing your domain name.

The age of your URL is a factor in your site’s search ranking, so be patient.

If you’re launching a new blog every six months, you’ll never see your site get the value it deserves.

Write like a human.

None of the above matters if you create content that sounds like a robot wrote it.

Write great stuff, follow the steps above, have patience, and you’ll see results.

Many of you have already started blogging, but many of these tips can be applied retroactively. And once if you done this, you can start writing regular content.

Read More

Professional Web Design Tips for a Faster Website

In today's time-crunched world, most people literally don't have a minute to spare. This hurried pace extends to the realm of website design -- your professional Web design must satisfy the demands of users with a wide range of options for viewing the Web.

Even if you create a website design that's worth a wait, visitors faced with slow download speed aren't likely to stick around. So how can you make sure that time is on your side? Pay close attention to seven professional Web design tips to create a website that won't slow your business down.

Limit use of flash

Flash is a classic example of style over substance and, while it definitely has its place in professional Web design, it must be used sparingly when you create a website. Even if your visitors have the right flash player (and many won't), it will increase your site's download time. Flash is also one of the Web site design elements that is not yet accessible to search engines, which means it can only hinder your search engine optimization efforts.

Compress your images

Images are a great example of how looks can be deceiving in professional Web design. You might not realize just how much space they occupy when you create a website design. By compressing your images before adding them to your professional Web design, you can reduce/shrink a GIF or .JPEG image by up to half its original size. You may also want to specify the height and weight of your images in your HTML, which can decrease loading time.

Clean up your code

While HTML text is much faster than graphic text, there are ways you can make it even faster. Watch out for extraneous HTML coding – like spaces, unnecessary tags and even white space -- that can increase the size of your files. Remember that less is more, and use defaults for tags or remove them wherever possible.

Use thumbnails

Thumbnails are an especially helpful website design technique for ecommerce websites. Provide customers with a small, fast-loading image of your product and let them decide whether they want to view the larger version of the image.

Switch to CSS

Many Web designers now use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) instead of the more traditional table layout. CSS is a styling language that has a dual purpose in professional Web design: it can save you time when you create a website and save your visitors time by drastically reducing page size and download time.

Reduce server requests

Any element of your design that loads from a different server – whether it be a graphic, an audio clip, or an ad – will elicit an HTTP request each time the page loads. Create a website with limited external content to reduce loading time.

Pay attention to page size

Even if you use all of the tips above, your page size may still be big enough to cause a slow response when all the pieces of your website are put together. Remember that less is often more in professional Web design, and use only the content that is absolutely necessary. Ideal page size is around 30KB.

When you create a website design for your business, go the extra mile to ensure your website has the speed your visitors need -- or risk getting passed by.

Read More

Important SEO Tips For Your Website

Search Engine Optimization, SEO is a process that looks after improving any website ranking on the SERPs in order to get traffic naturally or organically. Google search engine has become smart and intelligent these days. It has started penalizing sites for using unfair means to increase their website ranking in the search engine.

SEO, on the other hand, uses simple process and helps such kind of people develop and expand their business genuinely in a proper way. We are here with the 5 best SEO tips that would surely improve your website ranking in the search engine.

Writing quality Content

Content forms the base of your website ranking. Whenever any searcher looks for any kind of information, he or she will type keywords in the search column and the search engine will display the results matching those keywords. Your content should not only be good but presented in a way that easily attracts the audience. SEO guide you in this direction.

Make it simple, easily understandable, knowledgeable enough to do some value addition to the reader. He or she should feel delighted once your content reading is finished. Fresh and 100% plagiarism free content is always welcomed. Once you are able to get the trust of clients via your content, half of your marketing job is already done.

Social Media

Social Media is an amazing platform to promote your business, website, its products, and services to the people in masses. This Social media platform should never be ignored. Once you have created an interesting content, share it on social networking sites like Facebook Twitter, LinkedIn and engage more people so that it automatically gets recognized by the Google search engine. This is the main reasons why most people advise beginners to use this platform and share as many posts as they can.

Right Keywords infusion at a right place

The first step of this tip is to choose the right sets of keywords that can drive the organic traffic to your website. You can use keyword research tool to get an idea of how people search on the Internet.

Analyze which sets of keywords are in demand and then use the same in context to your content. Then make sure, you don’t stuff your content unnecessarily with the keywords. Keyword density should be 2-3% only.

Regularly check the website Performance:

Use tools like Google Analytics to track your website performance on a regular basis. Create a list of customers who are interacting with your website and answer the queries that pop up in their minds. Reviews and feedbacks from readers are very important to improve and make your site better than ever.

Have User-Friendly Navigation

While this won’t only make your visitors happy, it will make Google happy as well. You might have the best content in the world, but if your visitors can’t locate it on your site – it won’t matter. Make sure your navigation stays consistent and concise across all pages of your site. Try to narrow down your navigation to no more than 7 options. Dropdown menus are fine to better organize content and offer visitors additional browsing options, just ensure it makes sense to your target demographic.

Utilize Social Media

Google wants to see more than just a company website. They want to see social media profiles, reviews, and an active community or following for your brand. The more content you have supporting your brand online – the better your rankings will be with Google.

Create Quality Content

First and foremost, write quality and informative content for your website visitors. Try not to focus on page length. If your page has 200 or 700 words on it, that’s totally fine. Generally, we recommend to our clients that you have at least 200 words on a page, and that you make sure your content is focused around just one topic (which would be your keyword or keyphrase). It’s fine to have a page that is 205 words and then another that may be more detailed and exceed 1,000 – as long as your content is informative, easy-to-read, focused and well-structured – the length of a page isn’t a big factor.

Read More

Free Google SEO Tools Everyone Should Use

Whether you are a beginner or any professional of any online business, you must have come across a need for Google SEO tools to keep running your website smoothly in order to get a higher ranking. If yes, we are here with the list of Top 10 tools that are free to use and definitely brings the desired results:

Google Search Console

If you only make use of one tool from this list, Google Search Console (formally known as Webmaster Tools) is the plum choice. Just as the logo demonstrates it’s intent with a spanner, using Search Console is akin to giving your site a regular service; use it to keep everything running smoothly, and spot bigger issues quickly.

Find out if your site has a manual penalty, identify crawling issues and broken links, see how many pages are indexed, download links, test your robots.txt file or structured data, and plenty more, all for free. It’s a peek into how Google regards elements of your site.

Oh, and while you’re at it, check out Bing Webmaster Tools; as Sam points out, there’s lots to be gained from this free tool as well!

Google Analytics

Ok, we all know about the frustration of (not provided) keyword data, taking away some of our most helpful analysis. But, there’s still a HUGE advantage is having analytics data for your site in order to analyse content, user experience, the success of campaigns and more. In fact, if you’re not using analytics in your digital marketing, you’re behind the competition, no matter what.

Google Analytics remains a popular, and constantly evolving tool, though there is increasing competition from alternatives such as Clicky, Open Web Analytics, WebTrends, Omniture and more. Want some extra help? Check out the Solutions Gallery for great ways to slice your data, and the URL builder to add custom tracking to your links.

Google Adwords Keyword Planner

Another tool that’s been through significant, and often much-lamented, change in the last year, the Adwords Keyword Planner remains the de-facto source for many when it comes to ascertaining keyword volumes (though don’t rely on it for exact numbers), even if other tools are used for generating seed lists.

It feels that the new Planner is much more PPC focussed than the Keyword Tool it superseded, and the suggested keywords are often so broad as to be useless initially. However, there are ways to still use the Keyword Planner to get excellent data.

Google Trends

Google Trends is still a great tool for comparing traffic for different search terms, including historic, geographic and related terms (in Google’s mind) data. Understanding if a term is a rising or falling element of your topic’s vocabulary is highly valuable for creating enticing content, and available for free.

Google Consumer Surveys

We all know that understanding our audience is key to making a great website that serves their needs. Whilst surveys can cost a lot of money, Google’s Consumer Surveys have a free option for measuring site satisfaction – you can’t deviate from the four default questions without paying, but you can still get valuable data on how users perceive your site and their experience of it. This can be especially helpful when testing a new site design or content category.

PageSpeed Insights

Google announced that site speed had become a signal in their search ranking algorithms. Subsequent studies have also shown that site speed does have an effect on your site’s visibility.

Fortunately, there is a way to create a list of suggestions for your client or development team without having to be an expert coder (though that never hurts). Google’s PageSpeed Tools includes a PageSpeed Insights broswer extension for Chrome and Firefox (as an extension to Firebug), and an in-browser version that offers even further detail. Either option will give you some actionable data to get your site literally up to speed.

Content Experiments

What was known as Google’s Website Optimizer has evolved into Google Analytics Content Experiments. As the name suggests, it now lives within Google Analytics rather than as a stand-alone product, but still offers an excellent, and free, way to test, measure and optimise your site.

Content Experiments ties in with the goals you have created in Google Analytics, and lets you show several different variations of a page to users. This means you can test layouts, headlines, content, colours and more to find the optimum layout. As conversion rate optimisation becomes a more common part of the digital marketing landscape, this is a great way to dip your toes in the water before making an investment in an agency or ine of the range of potent user testing tools, all while getting actionable results.

Google Places for Business

Want another free method for extra search visibility that’s been shown to generate traffic? Get yourself a local listings result by using Google’s Local facilities, Places for Business and Google+ Local. Multiple tools? Well, yes, somewhat confusingly, there’s two different ways to claim a local presence.

Essentially, your Google Places listing gives you control over the information that is shown in Google’s Maps, which local results make use of. Google+ Business pages look similar, but allow you to engage with other local businesses, post news and so on.

Google Alerts

Ah, good old Google Alerts. Whilst it’s reliability has been called into question in recent times, there’s no doubt this still holds an important place in many online marketer and content creator’s hearts.

Using Google Alerts you can keep an eye on a topic of your choice with regular updates from Google themselves on the latest index updates. Common uses include finding non-linking citations of your brand, or to keep an eye on the latest news on a topic or company of interest.

Tag Manager

One of the most common frustrations in digital marketing can be the delay caused by waiting in a queue for development time. Google’s Tag Manager neatly gets round this, letting you update many of the most common site tags without having to ask for dev support.

This is a more advanced tool, but the benefits can be outsize. Once the code is installed on the site, a decent array of common marketing tags can be edited without a further code update. There’s support for URL, referrer and event based tags, custom macros and more, plus a debug console. There’s also planned further integration with third party tools to even more flexibility, and it’s possible to use tags from third-party tools such as Optimizely now.

Read More