5 Team Building Mistakes to Avoid

Business Advice / /

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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5 Team Building Mistakes to AvoidRead More »

5 Team Building Mistakes to Avoid Read More »

eCommerce Plugins

What Are The Best eCommerce Plugins For WordPress?

Website Development / , /

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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What Are The Best eCommerce Plugins For WordPress?Read More »

What Are The Best eCommerce Plugins For WordPress? Read More »

SEO for New Websites

SEO for New Websites on a Small Budget

Website Marketing / /

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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SEO for New Websites on a Small Budget Read More »

Drug Rehab’s Search Engine Ranking

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

Website Marketing / /

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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5 Simple Things You Can Do To Boost Your Drug Rehab’s Search Engine RankingRead More »

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

Link Building

The Importance Of Link Building For Law Firm SEO

Legal Advice, Website Marketing / , /

Link building is a vital component of SEO for any online business or website. It’s no different for lawyers or law firms 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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The Importance Of Link Building For Law Firm SEO Read More »

Google Updates

Google Updates and What They Tell Us To Avoid

Website Marketing / , /

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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Google Updates and What They Tell Us To Avoid Read More »

Legal Help

Need Legal help with Starting or Running your Business?

Legal Advice / /

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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Need Legal help with Starting or Running your Business? Read More »

prevent-litigation

Tips to Prevent Litigation Against Your Small Business

Legal Advice / /

Lawyers will tell you that litigation once only happened to large businesses; these days, it is also increasingly happening in the small business environment. 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 from happening to you.

  • Watch your mouth. Being careful about what you say or write will help 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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Tips to Prevent Litigation Against Your Small Business Read More »

Email Marketing

How To Ensure Your Marketing Emails Get Read

Website Marketing / /

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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How To Ensure Your Marketing Emails Get Read Read More »

ECommerce Store

Choosing a Niche For Your ECommerce Store

Website Development / /

If you have decided to open an eCommerce store, is it going to be a general store or a niche store? If you are unsure what the difference is, it’s simply that a general store will sell to any market, and a niche store will focus on selling products which relate a specific subject.

An example of a general eCommerce business could be one that sells t-shirts, caps and other printed goods across all sorts of subjects such as pets, sports, types of employment and hobbies. A niche eCommerce store which also sells t-shirts etc will only sell them if they are within the niche the business targets, such as dog lovers, golfers, teachers or camping enthusiasts, for example.

The main benefit of starting an eCommerce business which targets a specific niche, rather than across general markets, is you can very easily identify those who have an interest in your niche. You will also find that people within a niche can be very passionate about it, and often buy everything they can which relates to it. This will not be the case if your products are more generally targeted.

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Choosing a Niche For Your ECommerce Store Read More »