Month: June 2017

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Examples of Link Building

Posted on by Mario

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Examples of Link Building

For people who work in SEO service world, it is important to make smart link building decisions. One of the ways is by knowing the difference between the good, the bad, and the ugly examples of link building. Only by identifying what is good and what is bad, you can prevent yourself from making such a mistake. In fact, by knowing the difference, we can create a strategy rather than just building links. Here are the three types of links that you need to know.

The Good Links
What is assumed as good links are organic link building which takes time and effort before it can get be more valuable. This kind of links is difficult to replicate. Hence, it will give you a more dominant position in your market. There are several types of links which are considered as good links, such as follow:

  • Editorial Links

One of the good examples of link is when somebody with good reputation in your field is inspired by you, your company, your products or your service. Thus, they take initiative to write an article about you and link to your website.

Many companies are struggling to get this review, but few can obtain these links. In fact, this type of links is pretty rare to get, but Google will value it extremely high.

  • Guest Blogging

Guest blogging may rank a little below the above examples; they are not be there just for a link but also provide value to their audience. However, you need to be more cautious as Google counts guest posting as a link building tactic. Especially, if you are going away beyond the expectations of value and be extremely conservative in terms of outbound links to your own website. Therefore, to achieve good rank, you need to write something with the intent of building you brand and reaching a larger audience.

  • Niche Directories

You may assume that directories will give you nothing, but highly focused niche directories still offer you a valuable source of links. Find many sources of directories focused on your niche, and their SEO value will vary dramatically, but it’s definitely worth looking into. A good directory should be such follow:
– Instead of accepting anyone who is willing to pay the fee, you need to have a vetting process
– Publish valuable content regularly which can be accessed and indexed by search engines
– Prune broken links regularly from members who no longer have an active website.

 

The Ugly Links
Ugly links are links that don’t produce any contribution to your rank. In the other words, they don’t have much impact on your ranking. All you have is just a waste of time, money, and energy. Therefore, you need to know several kinds of ugly links. Below are kind of ugly links that you should avoid:

  • Guest Posting at Scale

Experienced SEO engineers know that article directories is the hot new thing in SEO world. This program is able to submit your article to thousands of these websites at once. Besides, most of these programs are also able to “spin” or modify the content, causing a “unique” article for each submission.

  • Links From Non-Relevant Websites

Now, Google are smart enough at identifying the topic of a website. They only need to assign significant weight to links which are relevant. So, don’t waste your time to build link building if it isn’t relevant.\

  • Header, Footer, and Sidebar Links

There are certain areas that Google doesn’t give much weight. They include headers, footers, and sidebars. This makes sitewide links become a bad idea unless they are:
– Linking to a relevant sister publication that you own
– Identifying software that runs a website, as you see with most content management, blogging, and e-commerce systems
– Identifying who designed a website

The Bad Links
Bad links are links that will make your site’s rank bad.  If you have these kinds of links, you should disavow it as they absolutely cause penalty when you’re inevitably caught. Unfortunately, Google will remember your action as an attempt to unethically manipulate ranking. Below are examples of bad links that you need to avoid.

  • Paid Links

Buying links from website owner is a big No, as Google will catch buyer or seller of paid links. This is because it will be easier for Google to follow the breadcrumbs to identify the other buyers and sellers.

  • Comment or Forum Spam

Even though, it will be easier to spread links to forum and comment sections of blogs. But, in the other hand, it can destroy your brand by doing this for this is the same with spreading spammy links all over someone else’ website. Besides, you open the risk of a link-based penalty as many website owners are able to report you to Google.

  • General Directories

General directories are also one of the potential epitomes that Google will hate. This is because customers can pay them fee. This is because there are bigger risks that they will accept any website except those promoting porn, gambling, or violence. Therefore, it will provide you with lacks of any useful content as it isn’t relevant to your website.

Things that can be cached in WordPress Cache

Posted on by Mario

WordPress Cache What can be Cached and How We Do it

Caching is one of technologies which can contribute to site speed. Besides, caching will enable your stored data to be available for future requests. Some web developers might be familiar with it, some might not. But, if you haven’t been familiar with caching, you can learn more about it in this article. This article will explain what WordPress cache is and how it can be implemented on many different levels.

What is Caching?
In computing, the word “cache” is quite familiar. It refers to software or hardware component which is temporarily used to store values and retrieve them faster in the future. Values include MySQL queries, or compiled PHP bytecode as well as duplicate data, such as HTML and images.

In fact, we can gain a significant performance advantage by making copies of data and placing them in the “caching” component. This is because your visitors can retrieve cached content much faster than un-cached. Besides, your performance improvement can enhance depends on how much data that you can cache.

Things that can be cached
There are several levels, depending on how far you want to go in optimizing your website using caching. Here they are:

  • HTML Output
    You can find many plugins that can help you cache the HTML page itself. For instance, you can use WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache that can perform cache and many more. These plugins cache the result of the HTML output saving time for future requests. In fact, you can serve uncached content for every plugin have a cache invalidation mechanism.
    You can also try to “minify” HTML to make it smaller. This will add up a couple of kilobytes per page and keep increasing over time.
  • PHP OpCache
    A technique which PHP takes the source PHP files and compiles them into an intermediary form called bytecode is named OpCaching. Bytecode is like a computer’s machine code, but it refers to machine code that is executed by a “virtual machine” rather than by a real one. Fortunately, it can be executed quicker than having the PHP interpreter parse a command at a time since it is machine code and resides in memory.
    At a certain level, caching stores these bytecode data into memory, this causes your application gets executed faster. Besides, in order to have PHP OpCache enabled, you need to have access to the PHP configuration file.
  • PHP Object Cache
    This cache is done on the language’s OOP level. It uses the concept of “objects” to describe logic, data, and ideas. Objects are constantly being created and destroyed as your application runs. This technique solves the problem by caching the objects themselves.
    You can find PHP object cache in Memcached and the assorted ones for Redis. However, in order to enable PHP Object caching, you need to have access PHP configuration.
  • MySQL Query Caching
    The idea might be the same with PHP object cache, unless it is applied at a database level. A set of data are returned by the database based on the query that was entered. In fact, someone can get data much faster if someone has called the same data first. This is because they would reside cached in memory. But, you need to have access to the database server.

5 UI Choices that Damage UX

Posted on by Mario

7 UI Choices That Damage UX-01

User experience is one of the most important factors from every product and UI has become one of the elements that can determine great UX. However, not all UI are great for UX as some UI will bring bad effects for your UX. Yet there are still so many websites that push certain design trends which actually cause negative UX. Some web designers may not understand that some UI may be bad, but some may do it on purpose. So, if you don’t know which kinds of UI that is good or bad for your UX, you better read several points below.

  1. Unwanted Modals
    The idea of a modal window is a smart concept. It allows developers add concept over the page without the need to open a new tab. But the real problem is the unwanted modals not the modal windows for they always drag down the user experience. In fact, you can find three different types of “unwanted” modal popups:
  • Exit intents which open when the user’s mouse leaves the page body, usually hovering the browser tab,
  • Timed modals that open after a set amount of seconds;
  • Scroll modals that open after the user scrolls a certain distance down the page.

From the above information, you need to re-think whether it’s worth it to apply an unwanted modal popup to your website. For it will annoy your users to get a higher conversion rate. But these unwanted messages also give modals a bad name, which is tough because they serve a real purpose in UI design. These can be used wisely, like with modal signup fields or information-based modals triggered from a user’s mouse click. Or you can make it annoying by just make it appear from out of nowhere.

  1. Guilt in Copywriting
    Guilt copywriting which appeared in modals had become a trend for years ago. This kind of copywriting annoys users but increase signups. You can find this type of copywriting in many sites. In fact, this writing can also appear in sidebar fields or in-content opt-in forms. This copywriting will make you feel guilt instantly as you close the window. For example, the subscribe button looks ordinary, but the cancel button might read “No thanks, design is not my hobby”. This strategy might work well from a marketer’s standpoint, but certainly holds little value from a UX standpoint.
  1. Slide-In Ads/Offers
    Sometimes in web you will find a small box slide into view from the side. This box is usually a feedback box for user testing, or it might be social sharing links or even a discount promotion. This is a good idea to get user’s feedback. But just don’t use it too much, at least 2 different slide-in boxes on either side of the page, not 3 or more.
  1. Nav Menus Without Padding
    Navigation menu in every site usually has padding around them. But, you’ll find that some padding isn’t clickable unless you click on the exact block area of the text itself. You need to take 30 seconds to move CSS padding from a link’s container element to the link itself. Even though, the navigation is still the same, but now users can click the link and the space around the link.
  1. Paginated Listicles
    Another UI design which can damage your UX is content with one-item-per-page listicles. This is because few persons will enjoy clicking the “next” button constantly to read through a clickbait post. Unfortunately, there are many websites that use this kind of UI. It is mostly about page views and ad revenue more than anything else. So, it needs not only the work of designer but also the work of webmasters to prevent any multi-paged articles.