Month: July 2017

3 Techniques on How to Optimize Your Website for Multiple Keywords

Posted on by Mario

How-to-Optimize-Your-Website-for-Multiple-Keywords

With so many updates, nowadays SEO puts more priority on context. This makes context is above keywords. But, this doesn’t mean that you will neglect keywords relevancy and authority. Therefore, as a SEO engineer who works for SEO service, you have to understand and combine what Google wants and what users want.

If you assume that Google will understand the context of your content while you build a strong brand and positive user experience, you will still have to consider about the hierarchy of your content, how to organize it, and how to build context that can rank for multiple keywords, so that it will meet your conversion goals. Below are several tips on how to optimize and focus on keywords.

  1. Know Your Current Content

After determining your conversion goals, you may need to set your analytics house, and conducted keyword research, then you’re ready to organize your keyword data into meaningful topics. Instead of stemming or use all of the literal variations of the terms and its plural or singular versions, you can find sets of terms on the same topic and group them together.

Usually we often fall into the most general topics of the niche or industry when running an e-commerce site. Most B2B sites follow a pattern as well with top-level business industry terms, product or service categories and the products or service themselves.

As keywords grouped into topics, so it is possible to take the important next step of mapping your keywords to existing pages of content or conducting a content audit. As the first step you can run a crawl of the existing site structure with screaming Frog, download the HTML page results into Excel, and then get to work putting topics and terms out to the side of specific pages.

When you know you have content gaps and need to create more, that’s when you can turn around and quickly search to see which websites own the top of the SERPs for those topics and draw inspiration (without copying them) for ways to fill the gaps with your own content and draw inspiration for ways to fill the gaps with your own content and make decisions based on priority.

  1. Optimize Site Architecture

Even though, you can start once you know where you stand with content, then having a plan for filling gaps but first you need to figure out how to organize the content. This means balancing user experience, with product/service offerings and topical keyword search volume. Moreover, build out your site hierarchy working top to bottom going from most general to most specific. Even though, mostly sites are already built this way. However, site navigation and structure is often dictated by an internal or organizational view when SEO isn’t involved.

Besides, you are able to cast a wider net in terms of rankings and visibility, by taking an approach that looks at essentially any page at any level on the site as an entrance point and landing page for one or more topical keywords. In fact, all of your efforts will destruct your message, when you try to rank for too many terms with a single page or section of the site.

  1. Do Your On-Page Optimization

It is surprising that there are so many SEO campaigns that neglected the basics of on-page optimization. In fact, these SEO basics still apply. However, you need to look at it deeper than just trying to merely produce content and organize it well top to bottom in the site. Besides, you need to ensure proper categorization, when you’re building context for the user and Google. Another power in the on-page variables is having all factors working together with architecture and on-page optimization.

4 Mantras for Designing Scalable APIs

Posted on by Mario

4 Mantras for Designing Scalable APIs - YWF

The idea of scalability is often offered with a great selling point. For instance, you may be familiar with these tags, “Make your API scalable by tying into our simple API” or “you too can make your service scalable by licensing our endpoint collating system”. These are common sales pitches, but they’re tying into a magic service to make scalability happen, as a web developer, you are likely not being scalable – there’s no silver bullet, and adopting a quick fix doesn’t address underlying architectural deficiencies. Generally, scalable can be defined into 4 big definitions:

  • Extensible: At most basic level, scalable software is extensible. Instead of limiting the functionality, it allows multiple avenues to tie into the underlying services and systems to enable extensions and other services. Amazon’s API Gateway is one of the examples.
  • Built into the Architecture: Scalability can’t be separated from the API itself. So, to make it simple, please build for scalability from the onset. In fact, you can use third party to increase your scalability, especially when they assist a built-to-scale approach.
  • Implies Demand Balancing: As its name, “scale”, you can manage one hundred requests as with one million. However, scalability demands efficient performance, regardless of technique or methodology, both at extremely high traffic and extremely low traffic.
  1. Design for a Repeating Launch Day

Launching a product can be really stressful, you may have prepared for everything, but you simply cannot know the requirements your system might see. For instance when launching a service, what kind of traffic can we expect? Let’s say we’re launching a new social platform that ties into an API to handle 200k calls an hour but the rate has surpassed to several millions of calls. This means that you need to address the foundation of your API as if you are always on the verge launching. Besides, you may need to use load balancer as it can determine between your success and failure. Moreover, having failover paths and secondary functions will produce you to a huge difference towards user experience.

The last important thing is to integrate analytics into your system. By knowing trends developing in real time will help you develop in an agile way and address deficiencies as they arise organically, while predicting further failures down the road.

  1. Anticipate Success

No one will truly know how successful you’re actually going to be. This is because it’s not a simple consideration of traffic, either – traffic might be high even if you’re the second or third most popular choice. Therefore, a provider will plan for the most extreme case possible as he doesn’t know how much traffic they can expect. Another way to frame this would be to anticipate success.

  1. Non-Extensible is a Unitasker

If your application is not extensible, traffic management and scalable mindset is nothing. While extensibility is indeed its own concept, with its own considerations and implications, whether or not a service is extensible can have a direct impact on whether or not it’s scalable. In the end, there is no way that a provider can know literally every possible future use and application of their service while it’s a great practice to develop with scalablity from the onset.

  1. Efficiency is King

You will face so many complexities within your problem, so it is important to know how to simplify your API architecture and thus simplify the resultant solution applied to the problem. In fact, you can drastically reduce the actual resources needed by an application by increasing efficiency.

7 Common On-Site Search Mistakes and How to Fix Them

Posted on by Mario

Common-On-Site-Search-Mistakes-and-How-to-Fix-Them_ywf

Search function is necessary in any website; therefore, you need to be more careful as search function could be damaging your conversion rates. However, when it is well optimized, you can enhance the search function, the usability and enjoyment of your site. As a web developer, you surely want more users enjoy your site, right? Learn how to optimize on-site search and avoid the common mistake that may occur.

It isn’t Visible
First, make sure that your search form isn’t invisible. Creating a search form that is hard to find will frustrate your users. So, ideally your search bar should be located near to the top and left side, the closer, the better. While the search box might not be the first thing that users will see, but you need to be smart to know where you can place it. The right location should be within normal reading patterns.

It isn’t Easy
Anything that places an obstacle between your user and completing their search detracts from its accessibility. So, make sure that any text would disappear once the user starts typing. On the other hand, it is important to increase the accessibility of your search bar include cosmetic changes like color use and text readability. Then, make sure they are sharp and contrasting.

Auto-Suggestions Aren’t Provided
With auto-suggestions, you can speed up the search process significantly for the user, especially if you offer multiple models or versions of a core product. In fact, the less time users must spend typing in their query, the longer they can spend engaging with the content they’re trying to find.

The 404 Isn’t Helpful
You can maximize the usage of 404 pages. It can be useful and beneficial for your users. For instance, you can place links to main directories, offer suggestions for reworking the search query, or direct them to your contact page. The point is to offer solution or answer to your users.

Results Aren’t Straightforward
It is important to create familiar and dressed down search result pages. Hide the bells and whistles of your engine under an advanced search link and, if possible, have the search menu expand without leaving the page. Make sure that the search results landing page is easy to read on first pass, providing legible, plain fonts, and clean composition so that results can be assessed individually.

Filters and Sorting Methods are separated
Since users don’t want to perform any additional work, ensure that sorting options, such as date, popularity, and etc. can be accessed from the same page. Place the options on the top left corner at the start of the search results to increase visibility.

No Search Variation
Always provide your users with variation search results. For example, when a user types “black dress”, you can offer them with alternative search query options and results (such as “black” and “dress”) in separate sections.

By this way, Google can provide closest equivalent, even if you don’t have the product or information they’re looking for. Providing something close, even if not exactly what they searched is more beneficial than an empty results page.