Blogging Hacks: December 2017

10 New Game-Changing Web Development Trends

By Ramesh Wetkoli
2 Comments

With the advancement of technology, new game-changing web development trends are emerging in the world of internet. Be it HTML5, responsive design, video content or the infographics for that matter. These new trends have grasped their root in no time. The trends we are going to discuss have been very much popular and are ever growing in the world of web development.

This post will take you through the new web development trends that will be popular in the coming time. Few of these technologies you must be acquainted with, few not. Some of these technologies are under observation to see the scope for the betterment of the future internet.

So what are these technologies?

1. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

You might have already experienced AMP pages on your mobile devices. When you make a search on Google, using your mobile device, few websites display this (⚡) symbol. These are nothing but the AMP websites and they load very fastly on mobile devices as compared to other websites.

Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open source initiative, a new web development technology, encouraged by Google, which ensures quick loading of the web pages on mobile devices. The AMP project was announced by Google on Oct. 7, 2015, and later it was supported by Twitter, Wordpress, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) website in Google search

The AMP web pages are built upon 3 components:

AMP HTML: Is the refined version of the HTML made for the reliable performance of the web pages. Basically, few restrictions are applied to the normal HTML code to display web page faster on mobile devices.
AMP JS: It is the Javascript library which ensures faster rendering of the HTML web pages.
AMP Cache: AMP cache is the service run by a proxy-based content delivery network for validated AMP documents published on the web. In simple words, these service providers keep a cache of the AMP pages to ensure fast loading of the web pages.

2. Progressive Web Apps (PWA)

The Progressive Web App technology combines the features of a website and mobile app together. PWA eliminates the cross-platform difficulties faced by users while accessing the information.

PWA takes the best features offered by a website and converts them for mobile experiences. So when the users browse the website they cannot really differentiate if it is an app or a website.

So when a user browses a particular website enabled with PWA feature, he is prompted whether he would like to "Add to Home Screen". Once the website is given permission and the user launches this site from the home screen, it starts to behave like a mobile app. It can even hide mobile browser controls to give it an app like experience.

The benefits of having PWA is that you can access the website in offline-mode, it offers app-like experience, offers improved performance, there is no need to install apps of your device and you don't have to submit your apps to the app store. Isn't it a game-changing technology?

3. Single-page website

One of the increasing new web development trends is a single-page website layout. Not to mention people admire these technologies if it is benefiting them and follow them in great numbers.

Single-page websites display entire content on their website using a single HTML page. So when a user clicks on a navigation link, a web page gets scrolled down or page focus jumps to the particular section of the web page where information is being presented.

Single-page websites use JavaScript, jQuery, Ajax, and CSS3 to bring this functionality to the single page design. There are pros and cons of using single-page layout for your blog, but still, it is being one of the popular trends in web development.

4. Website push notifications

Website push notifications work in the same way as those mobile notifications on your mobile devices.

Web push notifications can be sent from a website to a user's desktop or mobile app even if his/her web browser is not open. These notifications appear in the notification area of the user's device.

Though, the only users who are subscribed to this service from a particular website can receive these notifications. The benefit of website push notification is that the user doesn't have to keep open his browser or be present on the website to stay updated on important announcements by the website.

5. Flash to HTML5

Once upon a time flash was at its peak due to interactivity it offered, animation capability and high quality of graphics it provided. Though along with these benefits there were certain limitations and flaws in using flash based content for the website.

With the launch of HTML5, these limitations were eliminated. HTML5 offered the most robust features where users don't have to worry about the platform on which website content is being displayed. These websites can be easily tracked and analyzed for better user experience. The content can be easily enhanced without compromising on the security.

Because of these new features flash became outdated and HTML5 got whole new levels of popularity. In 2017, there are hardly sites that rely on flash based content. In the year 2018, these sites are almost wiped out and HTML5 is becoming the future of the web designing.

6. Multilingual websites

Multilingual websites are websites that offer content in different languages. The benefit of having a multilingual website is that it opens a new opportunity to get visitors from different language backgrounds.

Neil Patel in his blog says he got a 47% increase in his blog traffic by having a multilingual blog. If you really want to double the traffic to your blog then this is the thing to try.

There are plugins to help the translation process. Though it doesn't guarantee the 100% accuracy of the translated content. Also, how alluring it may sound, managing different versions of the content, structuring and putting it in a web template is a really difficult job.

Despite that, there is an increase in the multilingual websites in the current era. If the translation process is done carefully, then your website could draw great traffic and you can get benefit from it.

7. Augmented Reality (AR)

For those who are completely unaware of this technology, Augmented Reality superimposes a computer-generated image on the user's view of the real world.

The AR technology is not that widely spread across the web, but many of the users must have experienced the technology by now. Pokémon Go was one of the apps developed by using AR technology.

The AR for the web is mostly untouched area and there are unlimited possibilities to try with this technology for web content. For eg. a web search to find a restaurant, bank, school, hospitals, etc.

There are a couple of JavaScript libraries available which help to build the AR-based websites. This would be a really interesting place to see some cool AR stuff on the websites in the year 2018. Checkout WebAR for few AR based web projects.

8. Virtual Reality (VR)

Often Virtual Reality and Augmented reality are seen together. But these are totally two different concepts. In VR the virtual world is presented to viewers to make it feel like a real world. Whereas, in AR virtual objects are merged with the real world to make it feel like they exist in the real world.

Sounds confusing? Take the example of a Pokémon game. This game uses AR to showcase Pokémon characters in the real world. A zombie game played using VR box where a zombie walks towards you to eat your flesh is an example of VR.

Imagine a map service or a conference presented with VR technology could be a really amazing experience. Just like AR, there various JavaScript API being developed to support this technology. You can watch this space for more development in VR technology.

9. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI is the new inclusion in these new web designing and development technologies. Basically, AI is the science and engineering concept where machines are made intelligent to act and behave like humans.

AI-based chat applications (what is called as chatbots) on the web have become popular in recent time. There would be no doubt that in future chatbots will be the first point of contact for any customer interaction on the website.

There are plenty of AI-based applications already deployed on the web to make the task easier. Google Assistant, Amazon Echo, Facebook Messenger, and Google Hangouts Messenger are few AI-based applications you might be acquainted with.

In the future various marketing, related activities will be carried by using AI-based web services. According to Gartner, 20% of the business content will come from AI in the year 2018.

10. Cloud Servicing

In conventional computing services, all the data, software, hardware and applications are stored on the company or user-owned properties. In cloud-based computing, all the hardware and software is supplied by cloud servicing company to the user for its need.

By opting cloud-based service user has not to worry about the data storage, backup solutions, web-based email services, installing office suites, database processing, management of technical support services, etc.

Also, cloud-based services offer mobility, increased efficiency, cost-effectiveness, streamlined collaboration, and speed of connectivity. Market leaders like Amazon, Google, Facebook are competing with each other to provide better services in this segment.

Due to several benefits and promising services offered by cloud services, it will continue to grow in the coming years and definitely a future cool thing. See some of the cool things to expect from cloud services in 2018 here.

Conclusion

With the advancement of the time, new technologies will evolve and outdated technology will be a thing of the past. To strive for excellence and stay in the competition you will have to stay updated with the technologies in the demand. If you fail to do it, you will be lagged behind.

Let me know through your comments what you felt about this article. Please like and share this blog post on social media and give me a thumbs up for producing more such blog posts.

Thanks for your time!

Digital Marketing

Off-Page SEO Techniques for Better Ranking in 2018

By Ramesh Wetkoli
5 Comments

Welcome to a new article on SEO techniques. In previous articles What is SEO and Importance of SEO in Digital Marketing, we talked about building the knowledge base for SEO, the importance of it and how we can benefit from it by following right SEO strategies.

In the next article On-Page SEO Techniques for Better ranking, we talked about some of the important On-Page SEO strategies that will help you improve the ranking of your website.

So, our next step is to understand Off-Page SEO techniques and the importance of it.

So, what is Off-Page SEO?

Off-Page SEO refers to the techniques that you apply to other web pages and internet platforms to increase your site visibility in SERP.

Off-page SEO as the name implies is different from On-Page SEO, where On-Page SEO deals with implementing SEO strategies to your websites and web pages, whereas Off-SEO techniques involve creating website links and brand building techniques by using other site platforms.

Most of the people relate the off-page SEO strategies to the link building exercise but it is more than that. It deals with commenting, relationship building, influencing people, creating authorship and creating engagement on social media platforms.

Why Off-Page SEO is important for my site?

Before we set about, let's understand how Google or other search engines work. Search engines crawl through your web pages and rate your web pages, based on the on-page SEO factors applied to your web pages. The on-page SEO and off-page SEO together determines your web page ranking in the Google SERP.

Particularly, off-page SEO practices allow Google to understand how well your website content is liked by the visitors, shared on the social media and bookmarking services and linked to other sites.

In this matter, the website content and how neatly it is organized plays a vital role. Only quality content can help you get the quality backlinks, shares on the social media platforms and bookmarking on bookmarking sites.

The benefits of having off-page SEO are:

Increases Domain Authority (DA): It helps to increase the Domain Authority of your website. Domain Authority is the metric created by MOZ to rate your website on the scale of 1-100. Higher the DA score, higher will be your ranking in the search engine. So, if you have a better DA score than your competitor's website then you will get a better ranking in the Google SERP. For more details on Domain Authority, this article could be very helpful.

Increases Page Authority (PA): Page Authority is the metric created by Moz to rate an individual web page score. DA will tell you rating of the entire website whereas PA deals with rating a single web page of the website on the scale of 1-100 (100 being the best score). The off-page SEO practices can help you get the external links (links from other web pages to your web page) from high authority pages to outperform PA score of your web pages.

Increases ranking in Google: There are several factors that Google take into consideration for ranking your website. The PageRank(PR) is one the major factor that Google considers for displaying your website in top places. The off-page SEO techniques mentioned below will help you get better PR for your website and inside web pages and consequently better ranking in search engines.

Increases Brand Reputation: The off-page SEO techniques deals in developing and interacting with several marketers and webmasters and recognize how the world looks at your website. With the advancement of Google algorithms, several off-page SEO strategies which were followed in the past are no longer been used. Hence it leaves no option but to interact and create unique opportunities to build a brand reputation of your website through several methods.

Increases Traffic: Off-page SEO techniques increases your outreach to the end audience and hence increases the chances of getting more organic traffic, traffic from social media, bookmarking sites, web directories and referring sites. This enhances the chances of getting more visitors and creating several revenue channels through your website.

And, here are the Off-Page SEO techniques for better ranking:

1. Search engine submission

There is no guarantee that within a particular amount of time your site will be indexed by search engines. In the ideal situation, it takes around 2-3 months for a particular site to get indexed by search engines. It may take even longer or a shorter period if your website is not optimized or well optimized for search engines.

Whatever time it may take, but to fasten up the process you may manually submit your website for indexing to the several search engines. Google, Yahoo (though Yahoo search is powered by Bing it operates on different algorithms to display websites) and Bing accept manual URL submissions at the specified links.

Best SEO practices:

Below are the some important best practices to ensure your website gets indexed by Google (applies to Bing as well as Bing also follows the same methodology) as it is the most widely used search engine platform:

Manually submit the URLs of new or updated web pages to the search engines mentioned above.
Follow the instructions given by Google for webmasters in order to get your new or updated website indexed by search engine bots (also referred to as "Googlebots" or "spider") in lesser time.
Create a sitemap.xml file containing all URLs of your website to ensure your website is indexed and all your web pages are crawled. The sitemap.xml file helps Google and other search engines understand the structure of your website. Crawlers read this file and crawl through all URLs mentioned within this file.
Also, ensure you have written clear instructions on which pages you want to display in search engines and which one not by updating the robot.txt file.

2. Video marketing

In 2017, video marketing has really taken a boost on the internet and it will continue to grow in the coming years. Many website owners nowadays tend to do video marketing and add videos to their posts explaining the inside content.

As per the article by Kelly Reeves, 87% percent of marketers create video content. Peter Schroeder in his articles says that mobile video is expected to increase 11x between 2016 and 2020.

Hence if you have a blog or website which is firmly established then video marketing should be your next move to take your blog to the next level. However new bloggers should make their choice wisely as video marketing require skills and dedication to survive in the marketing.

Best SEO practices:

Create high-quality video content that solves user's queries or provides information to the users.
Create attractive snippets for the video that grabs visitor's attention.
Write a catchy and descriptive title that visitors can not go unnoticed.
Include important keywords in the title and place them at the beginning of the title.
Strive to keep the length of videos within 4-6 minutes, as such videos keep visitors engaged and reduces bounce rate.

3. Image sharing

Image sharing has become one of the popular methods in recent time to drive visitors to your site and is a highly effective way of off-page SEO marketing.

People favor using new methods of SEO as technology is getting advanced. You can create several infographics, banners, graphics for your content and share them to get website traffic.

Images convey the key message very effectually than the text content and hence can help us to get visitors as well as backlinks to your site. Also, it requires fewer efforts and expertise to develop images to share them on several platforms.

One of the popular platforms with more than 200 million users for sharing infographics is Pinterest. Many websites which do not have image-driven content also incline to publish and promote their brand on Instagram and Tumblr like platforms.

There are various free image service providers (Pixabay, Pexels, Unsplash, etc.) and free tools (Canva, piZap, etc.) to create images for the platforms mentioned above.

Now when it comes to off-page SEO techniques for the images it can't be the same as on-page SEO techniques and so our alt text or filename is not going to help. Let's look into some of the best practices to follow for off-page image optimization.

Best SEO practices:

Always use high-quality images for Pinterest pins. No buddy will like to see noisy, blur or small images in your pin.
Go for taller or vertical pins as these images will more likely get noticed by users than those small images.
Write a thoughtful and strong description for pinned images. This will help to display your images in search results when someone makes a search for it.
Research on keywords to be used for your pin by performing a search on Pinterest for similar image and write headlines accordingly.
Pin consistently to pull the attention of the rest of the users.
Add home-page or web page link in your image pin.
For Instagram images, add watermark or logo in your image. It will help you promote your brand.
Add your keywords to the image by using hashtags. There is no way to add a web page link. Even if you add it in comments, it wouldn't work as Instagram doesn't allow it.

4. Link building strategies or backlinks creation

Link building is nothing but the creation of links on other sites that points a link to your site. These external links are called backlinks of your site and the process of creating backlinks is called link building.

Link building is one of the most important technique in off-page SEO strategies. But, getting backlinks from the low-quality site wouldn't take you anywhere. In fact, Google says in their article that in order to get a higher rank for the website, a webmaster should try to get links from the high-quality websites.

Hence, one quality link from a good quality site could be a lot better than 100 low-quality sites. When Google crawls your web pages, they keep a log of content being shared on the web page by indexing them. They analyze your keywords as well as the number of links from the external sites and authority of these external sites.

Best SEO practices for a link building:

While you promote your site on various platforms don't just share links of your site. Along with it indulge in engaging interaction with others, try and learn what they are doing for their site. Build a friendly relationship with other bloggers which will help you in your blogging experience.
Use important keywords for the anchor text of the incoming links.
Build the brand by sharing your site on the right platforms where visitors from your niche gathers and letting others know about your website.
Try to get backlinks from the trusted and high-authority websites from your niche.
.edu and .gov websites have high authority and hence try to get backlinks from these sites.

5. Social media marketing

I have written a post on How to Get Traffic to Your New Blog, which covers social media strategy in great detail. Here we are going to have a look at it from the SEO perspective.

It has been often stated by Google authorities that Google doesn't consider your social media links as a direct ranking factor, but it helps determine the popularity of your blog by looking at the number of shares, likes, tweets, and retweets and if authoritative users are involved in these actions. So eventually looking at it, it seems that these actions influence your ranking in the SERP at the end.

Best SEO practices:

Grow your reach by increasing followers on every social media platforms you use. Gather your niche audience under one platform by using social media platforms.
Engage in communication with other users on these platforms and share articles from your site with them. Encourage them to further share it on social media platforms and sites. More the shares, more it will reach the audience and increases the chances of having more backlinks. Quality content plays a very important role here.
Take polls and participate in a conversation with other users to increase engagement with other users.
Twitter and Google Plus shares can appear in SERP and can drive traffic to your blog through an indirect path.

6. Social bookmarking

Back in the time, people used to save the links of the important sites by bookmarking them in the web browser to read them later. But the risk here is whenever a computer crashes all these important bookmarks are gone.

After a time, social bookmarking sites came into existent where users can bookmark several site-URLs and save them under their profile. These bookmarks can be shared with other users and hence increases the chances of getting more exposure to your site.

Best SEO practices:

Write catchy titles to grab the attention of the users and write a short but relevant description of your blog post.

Know the correct timings when users are active on these sites. Your post should grab the attention of the users in the first 24 hours of your adding the bookmark link. Hence, know the best timing for bookmarking and make proper scheduling accordingly to make the best out of it.

Engage and create a good rapport with the other users. So when you share your link on bookmarking site these users will support you by voting and may influence other users to vote for you.

Conclusion:

To conclude, we had a brief look at what off-page SEO means. It means building quality links, authority and creating engagement with the audience outside the boundary of your website. We also had look at how off-page SEO helps to increase DA, PA, ranking in Google, branding of your site and traffic to your site.

We look at some of the effective off-page SEO techniques for better ranking. So just getting backlinks is not enough. These backlinks have to be from qualitative and high authoritative web pages. 1-2 high-quality backlinks are as good as 100 low-quality backlinks. Along with backlinks user engagement and value addition is also equally important.

Lastly, good quality content is the base of your SEO efforts. Quality content gets more user engagement, it gets more shares on social media as well as it gets more backlinks from other users. Hence, always focus on writing good qualitative posts.

Thank you for your time. Please support me by sharing this article on your social media profile.

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