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Slip-ups that sabotaged your AdWords Campaign

Web Marketing

We often believe our competitors to be our biggest enemies. In truth though, it is our own lack of knowledge and ignorance that often drives us to the edge of failure. To gain more traffic, high exposure and heavy leads we often get blinded by greed and fail to comprehend things with a logical reasoning.

While many of the advertisers and businesses might already have learned this the hard way, to save others from the same fate, we have listed down some of the common AdWords mistakes that have sabotaged many campaigns already and might do even more damage if this blog is not taken seriously.

Following are the slip-ups that we should avoid:

1.     Using the wrong approach with keywords:

There are so many things that could go with keywords that we cannot even blame the person making the mistake. But in order to achieve your desired goals, one must learn to do everything right.

  • It is very important to group your keywords. Throwing all the different keywords into the same ad will never show the desired results.
  • There are three categories of incorporating keywords into Ads, broad match, phrase match and exact match. All three provides a different result. Many advertisers make the AdWords mistake of using one approach while expecting the result of the other.
  • Negative keywords are actually a blessing in disguise as they help you exclude all the keywords that might not be related to your product thus helping in refining the research and driving the right customers to the landing page.

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How to Discover Related Keywords Using Just the Google Homepage

Web Marketing

There’s a lot of tools out there for discovering keywords, keywords related to the keywords, building up a keyword network strategy, and so on. Here, you can do all of that for free using some Google search operator hacking.

We start with the tilde operator (~). (Ask a nearby Linux geek to find it on your keyboard if you’re stuck.) The tilde means “synonym” to Google; it will highlight the synonym words in bold when you use this. Next, we use the dash operator (-).
The dash means “opposite” to Google; in other words, leave out all pages that contain this exact word.

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7 Tips to Help You Stay On Top of Your SEO Game

Web Marketing

For a field that is constantly evolving, keeping up with all the new trends and updates in SEO marketing can be a little difficult. In this post, we bring you 7 things that no matter what year they are used in will guarantee you great results whether you are looking at your sites on-page optimisation or off-page optimisation.

1: Polish Your Keyword Selection Skills:

Keywords are not everything, effective keywords are everything. And unfortunately this is one area that most people struggle in. Looking at just the keywords that are being used by your target audience but are not leading your business to financial success will give you some pointers that would help with your page’s ranking, but that is all they are going to do. So to come up with truly effective keywords you need to selectively look at those search queries of your consumers that are bringing you financial gains.

2: Bring Out the Mobiles:

With more and more people using their smartphones to conduct their researches, going mobile with your business page is another one of the very effective SEO strategies. Make sure that your websites are mobile friendly that means they are quick to load and all the content that they contain can be viewed by smartphones.

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Are You Getting a New Web Design? 6 Things to Consider

Web Design
web-design

You have committed your time and money to creating a new website for your business. If you think all you need to do is to choose a web designer you would be wrong. If you want a website that’s highly successful there are plenty of things you need to do. Before you have your web designer builds your website, there is plenty to carefully plan, because if you plan poorly it’s going to cost you time and money, and you’ll be disappointed. Let’s look at 6 things you should consider.

  1. Establish the aim, target and theme of your website –  What will you do on your website? Sell products/services, provide information, etc. You also need to know who your target market is because that will also determine what your theme will look like. If you want a site that’s successful, you need to know your target market.
  1. Know what it will cost – You will want to know how long it will take to launch your website and what the web design is going to cost you. You’ll also want to know what it will cost monthly if the web designer takes care of the monthly maintenance.

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Skills You Need to Become a Successful Web Designer

Web Design

Web designing has evolved into a competitive market niche and it can be quite difficult to excel in this area. There are a lot of factors that contribute to the success of a website. The designer has to focus on multiple elements while delivering a project on time. If you aim to become an accomplished web designer, some of the most important skills you should acquire are:

Written Communication Is the Key

To be a successful web designer, this is one of the most important skills you need. The success of your website largely depends on the quality of content you use. The best web designer should not only know what banners to put on a web page, but also know the effective use of words to ensure readability of the content.

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How to Make Google AdWords Work for You

Web Marketing

With web marketing on the rise today and sometimes the only means of advertising for many, it is hard to stand out from the crowd and catch visitors’ attention, especially since everyone is strategizing with the same tactics and using the exact keywords.

Digital marketing experts will say that despite all the other free-of-cost options, AdWords is your best bet. Those who say it didn’t work for them must know that they might be doing something wrong. Let’s keep that discussion for some other time, and for now, focus on all the ways you can make Google AdWords work for you:

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4 Top Web Design Trends for 2013

Web Design

When it comes to affordable web design, it seems 2013 is going to see some changes in the trends. Let’s have a look at 4 top web design trends for this year.

  • Typography – Front & Centre

    Web designers are focused on the weight each component, like JavaScript or images, has on the site they are building. In the last couple of years there have been huge improvements to web type, which means that typography usages is likely to become the central design element. Layouts and typography based on content can be made responsive much easier.

  • Designs That Are More Responsive

    Responsive websites aren’t new, but what is new is the methodology behind the responsive web design. 2012 we saw a focus on responsive designs for new devices like the iPad mini. For 2013, the focus is more likely to be focused around the responsiveness of the website itself rather than the numerous devices on the market.

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Google and Privacy: Much Ado About Nothing

Web Design
google-privacy-policy

So it turns out that self-confessed Google junkies really don’t give a flip whether Google collects data on them or not. No, in fact, some of them say “yeah, bring it on!” This is the counter-reaction to the reaction to the new Google privacy policy. Another one is this guy, who points out that Google underestimated his age by half.

Look, people, it’s this simple:

  • You can opt out any time.
  • You can get five computers with three web browsers on each and delete cookies and search as 15 different strangers if you’re that paranoid.
  • Google is only collecting data and saving it to target marketing. That’s been the cornerstone of capitalism since the invention of money.
  • All this data will consist of is your interests, and guess at your gender and age. It doesn’t steal your credit card or anything.
  • Some of us (blog writers, for instance) have interests that aren’t going to make sense to a tracking algorithm anyway.

OK? Can everybody quit panicking?

How Could We Lose Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy In the Same Month?

Web Design
dennis-ritchie-and-john-mcc

Never heard of those two names? If so, we’re sorry for you. You would have to know that Steve Jobs died. Everybody (at least in the tech blog world) knows that he’s the founder and longtime CEO of Apple Inc. He made the front page of newspapers and the cover of magazines the world over when he passed away this last October.

But two more giants in computing passed away last October also, and they were barely noticed.

Dennis Ritchie founded the C programming language. He was also one of the founding fathers of Unix. He was one half of the partnership of Ken Thompson, with whom he basically invented the modern operating system and the modern programming platform as we know it today.

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An Analysis Of How Hackers Penetrated The US Pentagon

Website Hosting

We love a good caper story as much as the next mystery fan, and this perky after-crime report is a good look at cyber-security matters and how they fail. In How Hackers Stole 24,000 Files From The Pentagon, the breach is traced to some very obvious methods.

Briefly, they slapped together a bogus PDF document that got sent at about 7:30AM “because the best time to send those types of things is right before someone’s had their coffee.” See, right there, it’s the human factor, not tech. Victim opens document, document installs malware, target system has 24,000 documents on file because they subcontract for the US Department of Defense, and that’s that, it’s break time.

It also goes to show just how little progress we’ve actually made at information security. As long as we have the concept of a zero-day exploit, we’ll still have computer networks that aren’t any more secure than a cardboard box, no matter how many clever measures we take.