WordPress Developer Rian Rietveld Picks Heroes of Accessibility Awards

Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference held last week in San Diego, California is an event for people who work around removing obstacles for disabled people. Every year certain people are awarded for their contributions and this year’s achievement category award went to Rian Rietveld for her contributions to the WordPress core. She won the Heroes of Accessibility Awards, categorized under the individual achievement category.

Other members include Karl Groves and Sally Shepard, Tenon.io and iOS developers respectively. Video of the ceremony is available on the official site and the Rietveld award announcement is time stamped at 6:50. In addition to the core contributions, Rietveld offers consultancy and auditing for WP theme and plugin developers. Rietveld shared that the award was a great encouragement to continue work on WP accessibility combined with the team.

For more news, stay tuned to Medialinkers blog.

Adobe Post: A New Tool to Create Graphics for Visual Marketing

Adobe has recently introduced Adobe Post for interesting visuals to post on social media in a few seconds. If you are relying on visual marketing to divert traffic to your site, consider using Adobe Post.  You can install it free of charge on your SmartPhone. The tool has received a lot of great reviews with thought leaders and works great for business of any size. A few features reviewed by the Medialinkers web design experts are as follow:

Google Releases Analytics 360 Suite for Enterprise Marketers

Google has launched Google Analytics 360, a new marketing product for the ease of enterprise marketers. Analytics 360 is a combination of Google Analytics Premium and Attribution 360, formerly called Adometry in addition to its other three new products, Data Studio 360, Optimize 360 and Audience Center 360.

The Analytics 360 suite is designed to offer a comprehensive marketing solution to marketers, helping them to work efficiently in a multi-screen environment, as explained by Babak Pahlavan, senior director of product management at Google.

Analytics 360, as a combination of 6 different tools will let marketers interact and engage with the right users at the right time helping advertisers to understand user journey in a better way. As a rebrand version of Google Analytics Premium, Analytics 360 is extremely easy to use and offers marketers actionable information instead of plain data.

Optimize 360 helps marketers to run A/B tests on sites for finding the right combination of design elements and text snippets for a site, while Google Data Studio 360 assists in the data analysis and visualization, through the use of Google Docs sharing functionality.  The other parts of Analytics 360 suite such as Attribution, Analytics and TagManager offer additional features and are scheduled for a release over the next 2 months.

For now, the four new products in the suite such as Data Studio, Audience Center, Tag Manager and Optimize offer beta functionality, and can be used through invitation only by the existing members of Premium Google Analytics and Adometry  for the next couple of months.

For more details, stay tuned to Medialinkers blog.

How Can You Use Attractive Images for Blog Posts?

A picture is worth a thousand words as it not only grabs user attention but published with a proper caption also makes it crucial from SEO point of view. Any blog post added with a nice photo or illustration will get a lot of attention on social media.  Here is why, posting attractive images in blog posts is important for you.

1.       Choosing Images According to Blog Post

When choosing an illustration or a picture, you need to make sure that the image fits the blog topic. A picture must make users to read a blog post and explain the points they have written in the blog. The picture and text needs to be about the same topics and must reinforce each other.

2.       Tips on Finding Blog Images

Pictures and photos have copyrights, making them inaccessible to be used on every blog post. These should not be used without the consent of the creator. However, you don’t need to worry, as there are many databases consisting of pictures which you can use freely or buy accordingly.

3.       Using Pictures

Create Your Own Images

When looking for original pictures matching the theme of your post, consider making your own pictures. Take pictures which ensure an original picture, those that are never found on another blog. This will also allow you to show a picture which really fits the post content. When blogging your daily life events, take your own photos to define the details.  The same also goes for food blogs. From a technical or company blog such as Medialinkersweb design Atlanta blog, it becomes difficult to find pictures suitable to the theme of a blog.

Using Images from Platforms

In case the blog content is not in line with the pictures you can take, you can consider downloading the pictures from image platforms. There are sites such as shutterstock, Yayimages, unspalsh and librestock etc which offer both free and paid images for users. However, try and select exciting images that are not used by everyone on the web.

4.       Using an illustrator

You can also work with a professional illustrator to create illustration based images for you. Many sites are doing that. Not only this will give you on-topic illustrations but will also provide you with original and unique ideas customized perfectly to your blog post topic. People will recognize a post by understanding the illustrations. Lots of illustrators work freelance, which means that you can hire them for your blog post without much problem.

Conclusion

Illustrations and pictures when used correctly make a blog post more appealing in the user eyes. The social media exposure also increases, with the help of attractive images. Work to create and pick original images to make them stand out from others.

You can also contact the Kennesaw web design agency to design images for your blog posts.

3 Steps to Ensuring a Foolproof SEO strategy

Search Engine Optimization, strategy is important to place you on the Google’s first page results. With a proper SEO plan in place, you can get the keywords on front page, however, without it; it would become difficult for you.

3 most common and crippling mistakes to avoid are as follow:

1.       Right Keywords

Determining the right keywords for you and your organization is difficult, when working in a populated category. Common keyword related mistakes include single-word keywords instead of long-tail keywords. When using single-word keywords or highly popular keywords, you can get lost in results which appear after a general search.  When you can’t compete with a company on a large budget, it is important for your SEO strategy to find the right keyword path.

For finding the right keywords, don’t get too broad or too specific. When optimizing a keyword, potential customers will give a hard time finding the lost seekers of a different service. However, don’t pick the keywords which no one searches on. Choose that describe your organization well and are broad enough to be typed in the search bar.

2.       Not Using Digital Marketing Tools

The digital marketing tools will help you see what works and what doesn’t. Everything from the analytic tracking to goal trackers come under the data visualization tools, important to make your SEO efforts succeed. When only measuring the SEO strategy success through increase in business, you will not get the results you have anticipated. Optimization of web content takes time with continuous efforts and improvements.

The tools give you the ability to understand and track the SEO side you haven’t seen before to measure results beyond a standard business increase. The tools offer information about the number of visitors on a site including the potential keywords to work better for a business.

Getting help from online marketing program and tools are important for creating a strong SEO strategy. These technological changes help in increasing the comprehension of site’s effect on the hardware it interacts with. Make sure a site is updated and you adjust and adapts to it.

3.       Targeting your Customers

Targeting the wrong audience will not increase your business even if your SEO strategy puts you on top on the results page. Similarly, if you're not appearing in the results for the correct audience, those searching for your business won't be able to find you. When you don’t understand or base your strategy on finding customers, then it’s going to fail for you.  

As a thumb rule, check your bounce rate. If the number if high then you are ranking for wrong keywords and need adjustment. Plan out your targeted customers as an old customer won’t search the web the way a teenager would, so your keywords must target the most relevant audience.

You can also reach out to the experts of Medialinkers SEO agency to plan and run the SEO campaign for your needs.

Google Takes Action Against Only 65% User Generated Spam Reports

Google only considers 65% of the entire user generated spam reports. About 35,000 user generated spam reports were submitted to Google. The figures were shared by Juan Felipe Ricon, member Google Manual Actions.

He also added that Google has different ways for detecting spam but still considers “User generated spam reports” as a priority to fight spam. However, the 65% ratio is only due to Google reliance on other spam fighting methods as not all users are good at user generated spam reporting.

For more news and recent updates, stay tuned to Medialinkers blog.

12 Hacks to Increase Your WordPress Site Speed

WordPress, the most popular CMS available today is used for building all types of websites such as eCommerce, social network, business sites etc. However, the only downside of using WordPress is its speed, since most of the WordPress sites are slow compared to other sites. As site speed is an important ranking factor for websites in the search engines, it is critical to sort this issue. Here are 12 tips to assist you in improving a WordPress site speed for the best user experience.

1.    Go for a Good Hosting Service

The web hosting service you choose affects the loading speed of your site.   A good web hosting company is still important if your website isn’t running on WordPress. A number of web hosting companies provide competitive web hosting packages, so research around to find the right one for your business.

2.    Use a CDN

CDN stands for a content delivery network, a system of distributed servers that offers web resources and web pages to users based on their geographic location. CDN copies the CSS, JavaScript and media files of your website to render them quickly to the users.

3.    Install a Cache Plugin

Cache is a temporary storage space to store content such as web pages, images, and files etc. It helps to load web contents quickly for the users, reducing site speed time by a great amount.  There are various WordPress Plugins available to implement caching of a WordPress site. W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache are the most popular WordPress cache Plugins.

4.    Compress CSS and JavaScript Files

You can minify your website CSS and JavaScript files to compress their original size to a minimum possible size to render them quickly on the browser. You can either use YUI Compress, a manual compressing system or a WP Minify for an automatic compression of your CSS and JS files.

5.    Compress Large Images

Large images also contribute to the slow speed of a site. Use WP SmushIt plugin to reduce the size of large images without comprising on quality.

6.    Compress Entire Website

Website Compression turns all site content into a Zip file. When a client requests a web page, his/her browser acts like a WINRAR application to fetch and show the page contents to the user. This may sound like hard work, but it is simple to implement and works really well.

W3 Total Cache is a good option to use for site compression. Go to Admin Page -> Performance -> Browser Cache -> Enable HTTP (gzip) Compression.

7.    Optimize Website Database

WordPress database saves everything automatically such as trackbacks, pingbacks, trashed items, comments marked as spam and even the unapproved comments. This causes a WordPress database to fragmentize like a system hard drive.  A couple of good plugins to optimize your database are WP-Optimize and WP-DB Manager.

8.    Install Good Plug-ins only

Plugins also add a lot of junk to your site files.  Only keep the ones critical to your site performance to reduce site load time.

9.    Disable Pingbacks and Trackbacks

Pingbacks and Trackbacks are simple notifications sent to a site, every time it gets mentioned by someone on the internet.

Go to Admin Page ->Settings -> Discussion and uncheck the first two checkboxes to turn this feature off. It will not harm your site performance

10.    Always Select a Good Theme

Not all WordPress themes are coded equally. Some are fast and some are sloppy.  Observe the load speed time of theme’s demo to get an idea about its impact on your site load time.

11.    Optimize Site Home Page Structure

Keep your homepage optimized to show a minimum number of widgets and post excerpts. This would not only enhance your site speed but would also make for a great user experience.

12.    Enable “Keep-Alive” Feature

HTTP Keep-Alive uses Transmission Control Protocol to send multiple HTTP requests, instead of opening a new connection for every request. Your web host might already have this implemented, but if not, you can copy this line in your .htaccess to enable the Keep-Alive feature.

To get a mobile friendly website contact Medialinkers Atlanta web design company