Cloud Emailing
Improve deliverability of your emails, monitor action in real time with an affordable and scalable solution.
4 tips for local SEO
Local SEO has become the process of improving visibility and clickthrough rates of a web page in search results. Getting a website on the first page in Google or Bing can make the difference between an OK year and a GREAT year. If you are a local business, you know that the competition for certain keywords can be difficult to rank on the first page, especially the first position in Google Places.
There are a few things you can do to improve your chances of ranking higher in local search results. Here are four essential ingredients to developing a quality local SEO strategy.
I. Claim your search engine page
Local search pages in Google, Yahoo!, and Bing serve as ground zero for local search. If you don’t already have a website, this...
Email marketing strategy – 5 recommendations
According to Avinash Kaushik, email marketing, if done right, “can be one of the rock solid workhorse of any company’s marketing strategy.” While there are hundreds of various email marketing providers out there (some of the biggest ones are Constant Contact, Mailchimp, Amazon, etc.) that can do the job for you, it is fundamental to understand the basics of an email marketing campaign and the strategies to make it successful.
Mailjet, a real-time Cloud Emailing platform that provides full scalability and better email deliverability (whether it’s marketing, notification or transactional), gives the following recommendations:
1. Acknowledge the deliverability facts
20% of legitimate emails do not make it to the inbox! That’s...
Get a free quote form – what customers write
This post has been in the making since June 2008, when we first registered an account with Wufoo, a great online contact form builder, and started collecting “get a free quote” submissions on our company’s website. It is about time to reveal some of our findings to the world, and besides making the data interesting and entertaining, we hope it can be helpful to many web design and SEO firms out there as well as customers who are looking to hire a web development or Internet marketing agency and are about to fill out a quote request form explaining their business needs.
When we put together our quote form, the main idea behind it was to get customers to leave their email address, brief description of the project as well as budget prefe...
10 ways to spot a black hat SEO firm
With the success some SEO’s have seen delivering high quality services, there has been a rise in black hats and their various techniques. To the untrained eye, or someone that is not familiar with search engine optimisation, it may be hard to spot one of these incompetent SEO’s. You see so many “fly by night” SEO experts, that it is important to be cautious and look for signs to determine the validity of SEO offerings. In reality, there are numerous ways for detecting a black hat, and here are ten of the most common ones:
Watch for lofty promises
A lot of bad SEO companies will make promises that seem too good to be true, and oftentimes they are. One of the most common promises the companies make is that they will m...
Google abnormal returns (aka Google Easter eggs)
With over 1 billion worldwide searches a day, Google still tries to make our lives in front of the computer screen to be fun by introducing a set of “Easter eggs” that put smiles on our faces. Two amazing Easter eggs can be found by performing the following searches (in order to have the best user experience at this quirkiness, we recommend to use Google Chrome, Firefox or Safari browser):
Search for “Do a barrel roll” and you will end up seeing a Google search results page flipping 360 degrees. What an amazing surprise, and it is technically accomplished using CSS3.
Type the keyword “Askew” in your search bar and you will see a distorted SERP (search engine results page) on your screen.
In addition to the “Easter eggs”,...
Django / Python web development
ArtDriver has been an active advocate for WordPress CMS, and it would not strike our readers if we told them that over 50% of our web development projects for the past two years have been WordPress based websites. However, this post is not about WordPress anymore; rather it will describe our joy of discovering Django, an open source web application framework (as well as a CMS) written in Python programming language. We recently launched a Django based website for the Write Track Admissions consultants, and have been delighted to learn this new technology that can be effectively utilised for the creation of complex, database-driven websites.
We’ve enjoyed working with the Write Track Admissions, a U.S. based company that provides advic...
Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder, dies at 56
We pay our tribute to Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder, who passed away on October 5, 2011 in Palo Alto, California surrounded by his wife and immediate family. We miss you Steve and know that you will remain in our lives forever through your genius inventions that will continue transforming our lives in the years to come…
Home page of www.apple.com to commemorate Steve Job
Steve Job’s Biographer, Walter Isaacson, on “60 minutes” (Part 1)
Steve Job’s Biographer, Walter Isaacson, on “60 minutes” (Part 2)
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Linking out as a SEO strategy
When it comes to effective link building as part of a SEO strategy, many are reluctant to link out from their own site. When linking out is done, it is all too often focused on the homepage of a website rather than a deep link to a more specific page.
The main reason for this is that many believe that linking to other sites is not a good thing, and that Ranking Power or results will be damaged. The reality of the situation is that linking out can actually do more good than harm, and as such, this should be a part of any SEO strategy.
If you were to ask any SEO in the industry how to implement an effective overall SEO strategy, they would tell you that you should optimise for the user rather than the Search Engines.
In terms of onsite SEO, ...
