5 Ways to Build Better Online Reputation through SEO

 

How-SEO-can-help-shape-your-online-reputation

The main purpose of SEO service is to optimize any strategy to boost your website rank in the search results. One of the strategies that you can rely on is to show your “human” side of your business. This strategy will make your business seems more relatable and real. But, how can you show your human side through SEO? The answer is simply by collecting and displaying reviews. In fact, positive and negative reviews are used as a ranking factor. Negative reviews cause bad rank to your site while positive reviews will elevate your rank.

How Do I Take Advantage of Online Reviews and Improve my SEO?
Nowadays, customers wish to get better “transparency” from sellers. Transparency as a business means to open up to criticism and feedback. In detail, the action includes as:

  • Allowing employees to talk about your products and services publicly such as through an employee advocacy program.
  • Establishing 1-to-1 communication channel
  • Asking for feedback
  • Not hiding from criticism
  • Addressing criticism publicly

There will be some reviews that may destroy your reputation. Although, you can remove all the bad reviews but it is not a wise move. The best way is to turn the negative reviews to positive reviews through better customer service experience. Here are 7 tips that you can use to uplift your online reputation management:

  1. Monitor Your Reviews
    Apply social keywords when responding to social media messages directed at your brand. Set a Google Alert to notify you of any news posted about your brand. Therefore, by monitoring people’s reviews, you know what people really want and you can improve your product better.
  1. Friendly and Quick Respond
    Read your reviews daily. If you have more time, you can login to view and respond to social media messages multiple times a day. Make these daily routines as your habit, just like checking your email. In short, try to respond any reviews in less than 24 hours.
  1. Have Personality
    You can learn from many famous online businesses. Amazon is a good example. It always comes with a positive attitude and a willingness to help. Besides, it opens up a conversation in a witty style no matter what you have to say.
  1. Think of SEO as your Digital Business Card
    As it is stated above, good SEO strategies will help you boost your business. It works better than any business cards or flyers. In fact, business directory and profile sites help you accurately list your company online and monitor your reviews. Here are lists of business profile sites, that you can get started:
  • Amazon
  • Angie’s List
  • Better Business Bureau (BBB)
  • Bing Places
  • Citysearch
  • Consumer Reports
  • Demand Force (newer review site)
  • Dex Knows
  • com
  • com
  • Google+ Local/Google Places
  • Home Advisor
  • Insider Pages
  • Judy’s Book
  • MerchantCircle
  • Trip Advisor
  • Yahoo! Local
  • Yellow Pages
  • Yelp!

To gain and monitor your reviews, you can list your business on these sites.

  1. Pay Attention to Reviews on Social Media
    Remember that social media profiles are also part of digital reputation management. Therefore, sites like LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook are best for business as it has important information and people can post their reviews in these social media.

Bootstrap 4 Alpha 6 Major Components in Flexbox

Bootstrap-4-Alpha-6

Alpha 6 has just launched and it becomes the biggest ships to date.  Hence, in this article we will describe its grid system and major components in flexbox. If you are web developers who are currently working on WordPress, this article is for you. Discover what’s new with Bootstrap 4 Alpha 6, here!

Embracing Flexbox
As bootstrap is now flexbox by default, you can control your grid system and core components and provide unparalleled flexibility. However, it may be dropping IE9 support yet brings significant improvements to component layout, alignment, and sizing.

If you have no idea about Flexbox, here are some benefits that you can have when applying Bootstrap 4:

  • No more HTML white space or broken table-style rendering
  • Auto margins for easy spacing
  • Automatic equal-width grid columns (e.g., two columns are automatically 50% wide)
  • Equal height and equal; width cards
  • Utility classes for easily changing display, direction, alignment, and more.
  • Justified navigation and button groups
  • Vertical and horizontal centering without hardcoding values with translate or margin

In fact, almost every component now takes advantage of flexbox. This is because less reliance on clearfix, more control over Dom, and visual order, and fewer bugs. Even, Carousels, a more complex component has used Flexbox in some areas.

Responsive Utilities and the Great Infix
Among so many advantages that Alpha 6 offered, they also made two important changes to their naming scheme.

  • First, we’ve dropped the –xs infix from our lowest (extra small) breakpoint. However, xs isn’t a responsive breakpoint just like sm, md, lg, and xl. This is because it doesn’t start applying styles at a min-width and up. It can be applied to everything as there’s no bounding @media query.
  • Second, to better articulate their property value pairings, we’ve renamed several classes. Instead of pull, we use float. You can start with the property name, instead of creating new names for the various flexbox properties.

Combine them together and you’ll get updated class, such as .col-6, .d-none, .float-right, .d-md-flex, .justify-content-end, and .text-lg-left. With these classes, you can have immense power and customization to folks building with Boothstrap.

More Grid Improvements
You will also have more grid improvements. By adding responsive auto sizing columns, more container padding options, and add any number of .col-* classes, the result will automatically be equal in width.

To remove gutters from grid rows and their columns, you can use the .no-gutters modifier.

Updated Navbar
If you find that the Alpha 5 navbar still needs more improvement, you’ll see that the Alpha 6 is done perfectly. The navbar has been rewritten and it provides better built-in responsive behaviors and improved layout customization.

Here are some of the lists of the updates:

  • The responsive navbar toggle, .navbar-toggler, has also been updated. The icon is once again a child element, .navbar-toggler-icon, for improved customization. It also includes easy modifiers for absolutely aligning it to the top right or top left.
  • Navbar navs no longer require the .nav base class. While it provided a starting point, these shared styles often got in the way of navbar behaviors. Now it’s just .navbar-nav and utilities for alignment.
  • Navbars are built with flexbox! Instead of floats, you’ll need flexbox and margin utilities.
  • The .navbar-toggleable classes are now applied to the .navbar instead of the .collapse within. This allows us to provide better responsive behavior with just one class change.

Guidelines to Avoiding Google’s Penalty Caused by Intrusive Interstitials

Intrusive interstitials guidelines to avoiding google's penalty

This year, Google has made one recent change known as the intrusive interstitial update. This update aims to penalize intrusive popup ads which affect the mobile user experience. No wonder that some websites have experienced lowered mobile rankings. If you are working in SEO service field, this thing may become one of your concerns. But, don’t worry as you can avoid Google’s penalty caused by intrusive interstitials. Figure out the solutions in the passages below.

Decrypting the Intrusive Interstitial Update
First of all, it’s a mobile popup penalty.  Secondly, it’s an intrusive popup penalty. In light of this, Google wants to make sure that ads and popups do not interfere with the user experience. By devaluing pages with popups and overlays on the screen, Google can help users access the content they’ve requested in the first place.

What is the Impact of this Latest Update?
Pages with intrusive interstitials will no longer consider as being mobile-friendly. This is because obstructing content on mobile with ads or other popups is against Google’s guidelines. Ads or popups on screen causes the content inaccessible for a few seconds. In fact, Ads displayed over content are no longer acceptable on mobile. This includes popups that appear when you load the page from Google or when you scroll down.

What Constitutes an Intrusive Interstitial?
Intrusive interstitials will lead to a frustrating experience for desktop and mobile users alike. In fact, it tends to block most or all of a page. This will hinder visitors from experiencing your site as they block the content that visitors seek unexpectedly. In light of this, intrusive interstitials has become the biggest enemy as on desktop they are annoying at best and can ruin the entire experience on mobile.

What is still Permitted and not?
Even though, you have to deal with pop ups ads, but this doesn’t mean that all pop ups are forbidden. In fact, some popups are still permitted, such as:

  • Intrusive popups are still ok on desktop
  • Interstitials triggered by exit intent are still allowed
  • Page to page interstitials will not be penalized

Types of intrusive interstitials that will be forbidden are:

  • a popup or modal window that blocks most or all of the content on a page (this is basically a full-screen interstitial above the header);
  • a standalone interstitial that’s not responsive and that blocks the content;
  • a layout in which the content above the fold has the look and feel of an interstitial and requires dismissal or scrolling in order for the user to reach the main content beneath the fold.

Workarounds
Popups is frustrating indeed, but companies use them as at some points they are effective. So, if interstitials still become the best options to convert users for your websites. You can consider keeping them on the website by a no-index tag in your code. However, this will cut off organic traffic from Google to that page.

Therefore, designers, developers and marketers must create another ways to generate revenue. A sound strategy would be to leverage content marketing to educate audiences and guide them through the buying process. In the other words, you should move away from interruption marketing towards permission marketing.

So, the solutions that you can do related to this situation are; audit your popups, cookie notifications, overlays and big banners. This is to make sure that they comply with Google’s new guidelines. Furthermore, make sure that don’t take up space more than 15% from the screen to avoid penalty.