Best of Austin

It comes as no surprise that humans have terribly short attention spans. In fact, a study by Microsoft put a number on it: 8 seconds – less than the attention span of a goldfish. The implications for online marketing are huge. In a noisy and highly competitive online space, you either grab a visitor’s attention the moment they land on your website or lose them – possibly forever. Bounce rate is an important metric for measuring how users engage with a website. It indicates the percentage of visitors who navigate away from your site after viewing only one page. Think of the times when, as a web user, you visited a website and immediately headed for the back button. While the decision to exit the page may have been made unconsciously, the reality is that certain ‘unappealing’ elements on the website influenced that decision. This is the basis of behavioral design. The rationale is that if certain elements of a web page can drive users away, then there must be other characteristics th...

Locals compete on Face/Off and Making It tonight from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2v3bM2W via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2vhYxe6

The Internet changes rapidly, which means marketers and business leaders must hurry to change with it. While most Internet searches were once done on laptops and desktops, people are now using their smartphones with similar devices to conduct searches for information, local businesses, products, and services. That shift was closely followed by another somewhat more distinctive shift called artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted voice search. In the past, a smartphone user would need to type a question or phrase into Google or another search engine to get a set of results to sift through. Now, AIs like Siri and Alexa – which reside in smart speakers and on smartphones, tablets, and laptops – have changed the way users are searching for the information, products, and services they need. You can conduct searches with nothing more than the sound of your voice. And that’s rapidly changing the SEO landscape. How voice-assisted search is changing searches Most people have smartphones thes...

Many people are comfortable opening up their world to others, some are not. This can even extend to the use of the Internet; some feel uneasy at the thought of somebody watching and analyzing every move to build a profile. And ultimately, when users believe this to be the case, they self-censor and think twice about what they search for and how to word it. In the past the usual question would have been, “what do I have to hide?”. Surprisingly for some (disappointingly for others), the answer is often quite straightforward and benign. For me, it’s simply because I prefer to keep myself to myself, which helps to eliminate a feeling of shyness and preserve the energy it would have otherwise consumed. Times are changing The major search engines have increasingly pushed the envelope on user privacy, often expanding their surveillance by stating it somewhere deep within the terms of service. Many, often non-technical, individuals may be completely unaware of the scope and scale of dat...

Fresh footage of Netflix series from Austin’s Powerhouse Animation from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2vdbndI via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2NSbwuu

Keeping up with the latest SEO practices can be overwhelming for someone who has just started out as a new website owner. Moreover, making sure that the existing SEO implementations are regularly taken care of as per the latest Google algorithm changes can be a nerve-wracking task for some. To make sure that you are not missing out on them, you have to perform an SEO audit of your website/blog at regular intervals of time. By keeping a checklist handy, you maintain a standard SEO audit task list that makes sure that none of the crucial points are missed out. In this blog post, we will be briefing you with a complete checklist that will help you perform the SEO audit of your website effectively and efficiently. The advantages of having an SEO audit checklist are: Helps you identify the site’s weakest points and work on them Helps you with your site’s off and on-page optimization Helps you increase your site’s loading speed after you implement conclusions drawn out of the checkli...

When looking back on summer 2018, it’s hard to ignore the optimism that’s been in the air. Sunny weather? Check. England football triumph? Almost! AI as the next big thing in digital marketing? Try and count the number of articles, blog posts and sound bites that you’ve encountered over the last month which cite AI in a hype-tastic way. Now we’re all for a bit of well-reasoned optimism, and there is no doubt that AI is an extremely powerful toolkit that will positively impact all kinds of socio-economic activity. But we’re not so sure about the true value of AI in the context of digital marketing, and specifically for international paid media. Back to basics Cutting through the hype, let’s start by looking at exactly how AI and machine learning work in the context of international paid media. For example, on a keyword level, how much and what kind of data are needed for AI to make a good decision? Well, Google’s machine learning product Smart Bidding states that it “enables y...

SEO is not easy to master. It keeps evolving, with new specifics and techniques added almost daily. However, it is imperative to lay the foundations of good SEO by accomplishing time-tested tasks that both beginner and advanced SEOs usually follow in their daily routines. In part one of this series, the author explained the most important SEO tasks related to SEO tools, keyword research, and on-site optimization. It is now time to tackle technical SEO, content, and off-page optimization. Technical SEO Technical SEO is vital to your site’s success. For example, one single error in your robots.txt file can prevent your site from being indexed. Though technical SEO covers a broad range of subjects concerning the elements needed for optimization, you should primarily prioritize the following areas: Crawl errors. If you keep receiving Crawl error reports, this means that Google cannot crawl your site’s URLs and, consequently, cannot rank it. Regularly check Crawl error notificati...

We chat with Austin-based tequila maker Terray Glasman from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2OfMNkT via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2v0xqE7

CPU usage problems are widespread in WordPress websites. It becomes more prevalent when you use shared resources or a hosting plan that doesn’t have that many resources. However, the CPU usage can also happen in a good hosting plan. When it happens, it slows down your website considerably as there are no resources to serve content to your site. CPU usage problems can lead you to not only poor user experience but can quickly impact your website ranking. In this article, we will learn how to minimize CPU usage in WordPress. All the tricks that we will share are simple and easy to follow. However, if you can always use a developer that can do it for you. So, without any delay, let’s get started. 1.    Get rid of the unnecessary plugins Plugins offer excellent value when it comes to adding features to the website. Any website would require a set of plugins to work correctly. However, it is clear that we as users install plugins that we don’t need. Sometimes, we install p...

Robert Rodriguez’s new Austin-shot science fiction epic from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2LHIGMQ via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2LgCwaq

What’s better than a margarita? Buy one get one free margaritas. from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2LszYW5 via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2uYQAdv

You know: Literally … as in, not figuratively ? from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2mz2G9w via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2NEDfyK

As part of an ongoing user experience crusade that has also included the introduction of AMP, Google has now rolled out its speed update to all users. Improving the speed of your website is something that you should invest in regardless of SEO – Google’s own data shows that a 3 seconds load time increases bounce rates by 32% (when compared to a one second load time) and a 5 seconds load time can increase your bounce rates by 90%; and don’t forget, every bounce represents a potential customer lost. 1Source: Google/SOASTA Research, 2017. Bounce rate can also affect organic search rankings in itself If Google sees that most of the visitors to a page are going straight back to the search results then it doesn’t consider that page to be giving a good user experience. Google sees a bounce as negative to their own user experience and drew a clear line in 2010 in the sand for site owners introducing site speed as a direct ranking factor . Being 2010, this was a desktop-only search updat...

Your online website is the digital portrayal of your business. Viewers go through it with an intention of peeking into the functioning of your business and even the reputation of it. One of the most decisive factors behind your brand gaining business through its website is the credibility it holds. The potential customers will only bank upon your business website after they trust it and the people behind it. In case you are an ecommerce website or a website that deals with customers’ sensitive information, you will have to put in extra efforts to gain customers’ trust. As per the Stanford Web Credibility Research , websites become more credible by being useful and easy to access. A website’s usefulness is marked by its features, functionalities, and UI. However, the website’s ease of use is determined by the implemented web design. Hence, a lot of factors together contribute to enhancing your site’s trust score. If you are clueless and would like to make your website more credible, ...

On October 19, Search Engine Watch will host The Transformation of Search Summit in New York City, in partnership with ClickZ and Catalyst. Dedicated to the key trends affecting consumer behavior and search marketing today, this 1-day event will provide a host of insights and practical tips for business leaders, senior marketers and search specialists. Speakers include: The importance of search as a medium for connecting with consumers cannot be understated, and the facts certainly substantiate this: Over $90 billion was spent on search advertising in the US in 2017 93% of online journeys begin with a search engine 96% of Google’s annual revenues come from search ads. And yet, pinning down exactly what search is can be a difficult endeavor. In essence, search arises at moments of need or desire; when people want to know, do, or go, they reach out to a search engine. These moments are increasingly fragmented across devices at home, at work, and on the go. While the...

In any role, it can be all too easy to fall into a comfort zone; you figure out a method that works, perfect your execution and watch as the fruits of your labor flood in. And repeat. Of course, this can be a perfectly acceptable approach, but resting on your laurels can potentially cost you in the long term. While you’re using your tried and tested way of working over and over, your competitors are not only catching up, but trying out new ways of working that could leave you behind. Digital and content marketing is an industry that prides itself on innovation. It is, of course, the data-driven offspring of traditional marketing, but results from Zazzle Media’s recent State of Content Marketing Survey revealed that even our industry is guilty of dragging its heels when it comes to jumping on emerging trends and technologies. For example, just 2% of marketers surveyed said that voice search would be a key focus for them this year. While this is somewhat caveated by the fact that 1...

The multi-disciplinary arts fest seeks community support to expand from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2uHkYJq via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2NoozDQ

When it comes to SEO , there are many challenges that a website has to go through. The problems, however, depend entirely on what type of site you are running. For an ecommerce website, it is easy to get things wrong when it comes to SEO. In this article, we will discuss those challenges and also share some workaround (solution) related to the challenges. If you own an ecommerce website and are struggling with SEO , this article is for you. 1. Writing a strong product description   There are a number of challenges with providing a strong product description for all the products on your website. Generally, an ecommerce website consists of thousands of products, and they are automated to a certain extent. This leads to poor SEO quality when it comes to content and providing value to the reader. Search engines, for example, will find little to negligible unique content to crawl. With so many pages to crawl and rank, no new content will result in no SEO exposure. According to rep...