Google Search Console

How To Use Google Search Console To Improve Your SEO

Website Development / October 16, 2020

Whether you are an SEO beginner and need simple SEO tactics or are a seasoned pro, Google Search Console has to be regarded as one of the most effective and powerful SEO tools you have available, and better than that, it is free.

Of course, there are many SEO and marketing tools that can be paid for, and some of them are regarded as ‘must-have’ by a large proportion of SEO experts, but anyone who doesn’t use Google Search Console, is missing a trick.

To clarify any confusion, Google Search Console was previously called ‘Google Webmaster Tools‘ so you may have heard of, or even used it when it had its old name.

Its main role is to help monitor how your website appears in the search engine results on Google, and if there are any problems, to help you identify and sort them.

Those errors can come under many categories and require different actions which can include fixing broken backlinks, submitting sitemaps, or correcting technical errors that have arisen on your website.

As for SEO, Google Search Console offer huge opportunities for you to fix or optimise your website, and here are some of the ways that it enables you to do so.

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Office Needs CCTV

Five Reasons Your Office Needs CCTV

Business Advice / , / August 25, 2020

If you own or manage a business, you probably already know just how important it is to have a high-quality, reliable alarm security system. Things like 24/7 monitoring and CCTV surveillance are crucial parts of looking after your business and preventing theft and vandalism.

However, not all businesses have CCTV surveillance or a professional security team included as part of their security system. Generally, this leaves you open and vulnerable to intruders, especially if the rest of your system is neglected or poorly maintained. In the rest of this article, we’ve outlined our top five reasons why you should always install security cameras and/or CCTV to protect your office.

  1. CCTV Reduces the Risk of Theft and Intruders

The simple action of installing visible CCTV cameras can help prevent theft and vandalism of your business premises. Visible cameras are a natural deterrent for intruders and can make burglars look elsewhere for an easier target.

This is logical and our primary reason for installing CCTV around your business. Really, why would an intruder target secure premises when there are so many easier and more vulnerable options out there?

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Terminate an Employee’s Contract

When Can I Legally Terminate an Employee’s Contract?

Business Advice, Legal Advice / / June 10, 2020

In Australia, both employee and employer rights are clear and comprehensive. In general, Australian employment law is fair and provides adequate protection for all parties. However, it can also be extremely confusing, and figuring out what your rights are can be time consuming and frustrating to say the least.

Fortunately, though, the information is readily available. An experienced employment lawyer will be able to help you figure out your exact rights, and it’s often worth spending a little money to hire one if you find yourself stuck in a complicated situation.

Contract termination is one such complication area, so we’ve decided to provide a brief overview of the subject from the employers point of view. With this in mind, let’s have a quick look at when you can legally terminate an employee’s contract.

  1. If There’s a Termination Clause in the Contract

Many employment contracts contain some sort of termination clause that provides a way out for those who want to terminate their employment early. Sometimes, these come into place if a particular event or action happens, or they may be triggered at an employee or employer’s leisure.

For example, a particular employee’s contract could have a clause that allows early termination without penalty if particular performance targets aren’t met. Note that it’s extremely important to read all contracts before signing them to ensure you know about and are comfortable with any clauses or other termination details they contain.

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Using Email

7 Benefits Of Using Email in Your Marketing Plan

Website Development / October 16, 2020

If you are not using email marketing as part of your marketing and sale strategies, then we have one simple question to ask you, ‘Why not?’.

Hopefully, the reason is that you simply were not aware of the benefits of email marketing, rather than not believing it can work. We assure you email marketing does work, and in fact, it works wonderfully well for businesses, large and small, and at a global or a local level.

To reassure you if you have doubts, or to educate you if you have not seen what the benefits of email marketing are, here are seven of the most significant which can make the biggest difference to your digital marketing campaign.

Simple To Implement

Of all the online marketing tools or strategies that you might wish to start, email marketing is one of the easiest. At its very simplest all you need is two email addresses, yours, and the person you wish to email.

As a business you’ll obviously want to do it professionally,  so you will use an autoresponder service that allows you to set up your campaigns, run them and measure them, and it does so via one single log in.

Campaigns Can Be Set Up In Advance

The autoresponder service which we just mentioned is one that allows you to create a series of emails and have them delivered at a time and date which is predetermined by you.

What that means is that in a single afternoon you could create all the emails you wish to send, but instead of you having to physically press ‘Send’ for each and every one to go out to your subscribers, the autoresponder does it for you automatically.

That means you could be earning requests for information or sales from the emails you send out, literally whilst you are asleep.

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5 Team Building Mistakes to Avoid

Business Advice / / February 17, 2020

If you’re serious about building a successful business or company, you need to make sure that you build a cohesive, functional team of employees. Unfortunately, this isn’t always as easy as it sounds, which means that you might need to implement some team building strategies.

However, according to Team Works Development, team building can go seriously wrong if you’re not careful. In our experience, there are a few common mistakes that a lot of team leaders make, and they should be avoided at all costs. The five most common include:

  1. Assuming Everyone Is Equal

Although we shouldn’t have to say this, your employees are not equal. Everyone is different, with unique skills, emotions and learning abilities. If you assume that everyone is equal, you won’t be taking advantage of their unique traits.

Additionally, this assumption can be dangerous because it can lead to some members of your team under performing and not performing to the best of their ability. Ultimately, assuming every member of your team is equal is a sure fire way to not achieve the results you want.

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Web Design Tools

Best Web Design Tools Of 2019

Website Development / / June 1, 2020

The number of active websites on the internet is ever increasing, and there’s a rapidly growing demand for specialists in web design and web development in the modern world. It’s therefore important to current designers to be able to work as efficiently as possible to handle the workload that comes their way.

Luckily, there are a lot of website design tools out there that are designed to help make a designers life easier. I’ve crawled the web and consulted some of best web designers in the world, found on Slinky Directory, to find the best web design tools and I bring them to you in this article. Whether you’re creating a brand new website, or redesigning a website, the best website design tools of 2019 include:

Adobe Dreamweaver

Although it isn’t cheap, you should definitely consider adding Adobe Dreamweaver to you website design toolbox. It’s one of the most powerful design tools out there, and it essentially brings everything together into one place to allow those without a lot of coding experience to put their own website together.

Since you don’t have to have a lot of coding knowledge to use Dreamweaver, it has become a favourite among amateur website designers throughout the world. And, on top of everything else, it also makes it particularly easy to produce responsive designs, which are absolutely essential in the modern world.

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eCommerce Plugins

What Are The Best eCommerce Plugins For WordPress?

Website Development / , / September 30, 2020

WordPress is, without a doubt, one of the most versatile website builders and content management systems available. It’s great for everything from personal websites to massive eCommerce stores, largely because of its customizability and the huge range of plugins it offers.

If you’re thinking about creating an online store, experienced digital agencies such as slinky.digital will tell you that you should consider using WordPress. If you do decide to use WordPress, then you should look closely at some of the eCommerce plugins available to entrepreneurs around the world.

I’ve done some research and come up with a list of the best eCommerce plugins for WordPress. They include:

WooCommerce

If you ask anyone who knows anything about WordPress eCommerce, they will tell you that WooCommerce is the best plugin on the market – and it’s completely free to get started!

WooCommerce powers almost 10% of all eCommerce website, and an unproportional number of the most popular sites. It offers a huge range of free features, with premium extensions to expand your store’s functionality.

Since WooCommerce is owned by the same company as WordPress, it integrates perfectly with WordPress website designs. It is very well managed, offers beautiful themes, and lets you add as many products as you want.

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SEO for New Websites

SEO for New Websites on a Small Budget

Website Marketing / / February 27, 2020

For business owners who have large or even unlimited budgets, it could be that they overlook SEO and go straight to paid advertising to drive traffic to their website. Alternatively, they might employ the services of a large SEO agency and get them to undertake every ranking tactic in the book. However, not every business starts out with an endless supply of money, so what to do?

SEO Sydney Pro advise that if you are starting a new business, with a new website, and are operating with a small budget, there are plenty of actions you can take in relation to the site’s SEO and subsequent ranking. The key is that you take a logical and planned approach to this so that each tactic you employ, compliments and supports the others.

The first part of the plan should focus on setting up all the technical elements, which using automobile terminology, could be referred to as the workings under the bonnet. You should sign up for, and set up, accounts for Google’s Search Console and Bing’s Webmaster Tools, which you’ll be pleased to know costs nothing. These tools will provide you with lots of essential data to help your SEO activities.

The next step is to create an optimized XML sitemap and submit it to Bing and Google. Before submitting this, you must ensure that your website’s ‘robot.txt’ is set to allow the search engines’ spiders to crawl your website rather than disallowing them. Another element you should have in place is that your website should have an SSL certificate so that it has ‘https’ rather than ‘http’ protocol.

If you have already started building your website and adding content, then there are two additional technical aspects of your website that you should start to implement. One is the linking structure and whilst there may not be many links and URLs in a new website, even at this stage you should be optimising internal links with regards to SEO.

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Drug Rehab’s Search Engine Ranking

5 Simple Things You Can Do To Boost Your Drug Rehab’s Search Engine Ranking

Website Marketing / / August 30, 2020

According to SEO marketing company Oxygen Marketing appearing high in the organic search results for relevant keywords should be a priority for every drug rehab facility. The keywords and search terms that you focus on will depend on what sort of services you offer and how big your firm is, but there’s one thing you need to remember:

SEO is about the technical details.

Search engine optimisation is focused on boosting your website’s organic search rankings. You can create the best content in the world and have the best drug rehabilitation website on the internet, but you still won’t rank highly if you ignore the simple technical details.

With that in mind, I’ve put together a quick list of the top 5 things that drug rehabs often forget about when trying to improve their search engine rankings. They include:

  1. Make Sure Your Page Load Times Are Low

People don’t hang around to wait for websites that load slowly. Slow page load speeds are also seen in a negative light by Google and other search engines. It is therefore essential to make sure that you minimise your page load times as much as possible. Choose a fast hosting provider, make sure that you’re following content best practices, and only use plugins when they’re really necessary.

  1. Get Backlinks

The importance of backlinks can’t be underestimated. They are essential for building your website authority and therefore for SEO. Focus on building high quality backlinks through forum posting, online business directory listings, and guest posting.

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Link Building

The Importance Of Link Building For Law Firm SEO

Legal Advice, Website Marketing / , / October 21, 2019

Link building is a vital component of SEO for any online business or website. It’s no different for lawyers or law firms such as Davies Co Lawyers who are looking to improve their SEO ranking. In fact, a SEO strategy without link building is very unlikely to succeed, simply because backlinks are such a big ranking factor used by search engine algorithms.

But What Is Link Building?

If you haven’t heard of link building before, don’t worry – it’s pretty simple. In fact, it’s almost as easy as creating decent content for your own website. It refers to placing the link to your website on other high authority sites across the internet. This can be done in a number of ways, but the most popular is through guest posting.

The most backlinks that your website has from other sites, the more credible it will appear in Google’s eyes. Well, this isn’t actually completely true, because it’s a bit more complicated than this. Backlinks from other high quality sites are worth more than backlinks from poor quality sites, while backlinks from very poor quality sites could even result in penalties. It is better to have one link from a number of sites than a number of links from one sites, because every new site that links to you will increase your credibility.

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Google Updates

Google Updates and What They Tell Us To Avoid

Website Marketing / , / October 21, 2019

Google dominates the internet search engine industry, so if you want your website to be ranked as high as possible, you should pay close attention to what Google says it is looking for. Over the years Google has sought to make its results the very best they can be and in doing so, have introduced several updates in terms of what they see as a positive and negative SEO practices.

Some of these updates had a devastating effect on thousands of websites who saw their ranking plummet overnight. The majority of these were websites whose SEO optimisation techniques had become undesirable to Google. By moving these sites down or out of their results completely Google expected that the people using their search engine where seeing higher quality results.

Here are the main updates Google have introduced in recent years and what they mean in terms of SEO practices.

Panda

Released in 2011, and still part of Google’s primary algorithm, the main objective of Panda was to tackle the number of websites with low-quality and spammy type content. Specifically, it penalised:

  • Content stuffed with keywords
  • Plagiarism and copyright infringements
  • Duplicate content, especially within a website
  • Low word count pages, or ‘thin content’

To avoid any of these penalties you should always ensure that any content on your website is good quality, is original, has at least 300 words, and reads naturally.

Penguin

Whilst Panda dealt with spammy content, a year later Google decided it wanted to address the issue of dubious backlinking practices. They sought out websites whose backlinking profiles were unnatural, and which seemed to be trying to manipulate Google linking algorithm. Penguin’s main targets were:

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Apply For GST

Do I Need To Apply For GST For My Business?

Business Advice / / September 30, 2020

When it comes to tax in Australia, it can be hard to get your head around all of your obligations, especially if you are starting your first small business or something similar. Goods and services tax (GST) experts Accountants Australia advise that GST is an area of confusion among a lot of first time business owners, and is something that gets brought up at their offices regularly.

Additionally, contacting a commercial lawyer can help you with your business taxes. GST in Australia is very confusing. Some small businesses have to have it. Some small businesses don’t. So how do you know if you need to register for GST? Basically, it all comes down to how much money you expect your business to turn over each financial year.

Firstly, what is GST?

GST, or goods and services tax, is basically a small fee that the government puts on top of all purchases and sales in the country. It currently sits at 10% of the price of the item, which means that when you sell something, you will actually have to collect 110% of the amount that you actually want to sell it for – if your business is registered for GST. The 10% tax rate then needs to be paid on to the Australian Tax Office (ATO).

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Legal Help

Need Legal help with Starting or Running your Business?

Legal Advice / / July 14, 2020

Reliable Business Lawyers look out for your Best Interests

Every business entrepreneur is aware that starting and running a business is no mean task but they may not be familiar with the type of problems that may crop up. Hiring reputed commercial lawyers like Lawyers Perth right from the beginning helps prevent problems and reduces the likelihood of stress, confusion and heavy legal expense at a later stage. Most business owners may consider hiring a lawyer as an expense (especially when they need every dollar to invest in the business). However, the truth is that having a lawyer looking out for you can help you concentrate on other tasks without having to worry about legal implications of decisions. Business lawyers are trained in Australian commercial law and will explain to you the pros and cons of different options and business decisions. They will help you weigh the advantages against potential pitfalls and as a result, you are able to make informed commitments. As online business advice experts will tell you, a business that is unfettered by legal problems and headaches is more likely to thrive, grow and prosper.

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prevent-litigation

Tips to Prevent Litigation Against Your Small Business

Legal Advice / / October 21, 2019

Lawyers will tell you that litigation once only happened to large businesses; these days it is increasingly happening in the small businesses environment as well. It can be disastrous for any business, but even more so for the smaller one that doesn’t always have the resources to pay for it and recover. If you own a small business, here are some tips to prevent litigation happening to you.

  • Watch your mouth. Being careful what you say or write will help to keep you out of hot water. These days some people are on the defensive all the time, which means a thoughtless joke or comment can be taken the wrong way and the next thing you know you are up for slander, libel or harassment of some kind.

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Email Marketing

How To Ensure Your Marketing Emails Get Read

Website Marketing / / October 21, 2019

If you are not tracking open rates for any of your email marketing campaigns then you should be. If you did check your tracking numbers you may be shocked at how few of the emails that you send actually get opened.

There can be many reasons for this, and it can be very frustrating, spending time making sure your email is as good as it can be, only to see more than half your subscribers don’t even open it. However, there are some actions which you can take to improve open rates and one of the most effective is to improve the subject lines of the emails you send.

One of the most obvious reasons subject lines can impact on open rates is that many people simply scan the subject lines when checking their email, and if they like it they open the email, and if they don’t it gets trashed. This might sound brutal but it is the reality.

Making your subjects more appealing means they must first spark interest in the person looking at them and this interest can fall into one of three specific categories.

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