Alright, let's talk about website design tips to help you increase your online presence.

You don't need much stories on how to create and manage your website. Get it better with these tips.

1. Focus on essential elements: When creating your website note that simplicity rules. Reduce navigation confusion to make it easily accessible.

2. Focus on essential elements: let what's 20% on your page give 80% value and content. Don't make your website look too clumsy.

3. Get rid of unnecessary elements : such as links in footer, blog post meta details, and so many social media sharing widgets

4. Reduce the number of pages: Put important pages on the website and discard the unnecessary ones. You can trim or fuse multiple pages into one .

5. Get more content above the fold: What shows up on the screen without scrolling down are more recognized. Have the main content and call-to-action element above the fold.

6. Limit your colours : it's advisable to use fewer colours to simplify your website. Try sticking with no more than two or three colours .
With these simple tips, you are up the game to having a beautiful website.

Research has it that 46% of brands don’t have a defined digital marketing strategy while 16% of those who have one don’t integrate it into their marketing activity. It’s noteworthy to say if you don’t have a plan in place you can’t expect to grow and innovate in digital marketing. So how do you avoid the pitfalls of failing to nail down a digital marketing strategy? Start by crafting a plan that packs a powerful punch.

Here are the 5 most important steps you can take to ensure your digital marketing efforts create a real impact online.
Step 1: Set your Objectives
• Define your business’ overall mission/objective. Make your digital marketing mission fit into your grand plan. What’s the overriding objective you want your digital marketing efforts to achieve (for example do you want to position your company as the go-to online provider for computer parts)? This is your mission. To achieve this goal, set and measure your KPIs. Get specific with your KPIs by identifying the figures you will be held accountable for achieving. And keep them (your KPIs) realistic by analyzing your previous digital marketing efforts. This will ensure you aim for a positive increase on your current results while helping you to avoid setting your expectations too high.

Step 2: Learn From Your Mistakes
Don’t go into the planning period in the dark. Analyze your digital marketing strategy’s past success and failures so as to help you focus on setting the best KPIs for your business. Decide on whether you are going to analyze the previous year, quarter or month and get to work. To analyze, determine the time period you would like to analyze and set your calendar to match this timeframe. Don’t forget to analyze your competitors’ strategy.

Step 3: Speak Their Language
Don’t let the planning take away from the people you’re trying to reach. Don’t get carried away with KPI setting, budget fretting, and channel selection, only for you to forget about your audience. Start with the basics and note down all the demographic information you know about your target consumer – like age, gender, and location. Identify the problems you can help your target persona solve, and find means to meet them.

Step 4: Stick to Your Budget
Three things are important for identifying your means:
• Your budget
• Your digital channels and
• Your team (or people).
It’s important to take stock of all of your resources before deciding on what else you might need for the next period. Define your overall digital marketing budget, decide if you’ll use paid promotion or not, allocate a specific portion of the budget to your digital channels and run along with it. If you’re using paid promotion and it isn’t bringing you the results you desire, revisit and invest the allocated budget figure into the channels bringing you the best results.

Also, identify whether you need to hire more people and whether you have the means to do so. Decide if all of your digital marketing activity will take place in-house or if you’ll outsource to a third party agency. Get your team to review their digital marketing activity and brainstorm a few ideas for future strategy.

Don’t forget to review your current digital marketing channels and decide which channels to keep and whether you’d like to invest in any new ones (depending on where your customers are and the time you have available). Clearly, articulate what each digital channel is trying to achieve to optimize whatever channels you’re using.

Step 5: Make the Plan but be flexible
Your plan won’t be perfect from the outset, that’s not a problem. Not every assumption you make is going to be correct and you can’t predict exactly how your customers will behave. It’s, therefore, essential to continuously measure and monitor your strategy’s performance and to change elements where needed.

Highlight the key campaigns you’ll create and promote, allocate a timeframe for each and document the digital channels needed to ensure the success of each campaign. Don’t forget to create a monitoring plan to check the success of each strategy at continuous intervals so as to change things when there’s a need to.

Search Advertising Tips

1. Follow the rules of Bing, Yahoo!, and Google search ads before running your campaign as all have slightly different formats.

2. Optimise the URL displayed in your search ads so that it’s relevant to the product or service you are promoting.

3. Insert target keywords in your headlines and copy that either match or closely match the keywords you bid on in order to boost the chance that your ad appears for those terms.

4. Write strong calls to action for your search ads that directly state what you want consumers to do.

5. Consider using a tracking number when using a click-to-call extension in order to identify and measure which ads performs best.

6. Do not spend precious text ad character count on your business name. It should already be in your optimised URL.

7. Do capitalise the first letter of major words in your ad.

8. Use correct punctuation in text ads. It just makes good sense.

9. Using trademarks in text ad copy is a no-no unless, of course, you own them. You can, however, bid on terms relevant to your business.

10. Do not use unknown abbreviations, it could pique the interest of a few searchers,



Website Tips
1. Ensure that your website is always updated. A clean, modern design is key in digital marketing, plus it ensures that you meet today’s best practices and Web standards.

2. Make your website mobile-friendly. The 2014 Local Search Study results indicate that nearly 80% of local mobile searches end in a purchase. This is a big audience you shouldn’t ignore.

3. Accurately complete your site’s metadata (title tags, descriptions, alt text, etc.). Not doing so can negatively impact your visibility on SERPs.

4. A business blog is a winning addition to your website. It can help boost your site’s SEO, set you apart from the competition, and demonstrate your knowledge and expertise.

5. In order to get found by local consumers, you need to optimise your site with local information like your address and geo-targeted keywords.



Search Engine Optimisation
1. Having a business blog is useless if you don’t regularly create and promote original and shareable content to help prove relevance and therefore rank in search engines.

2. Enable share buttons on your blog so that readers can easily post your content to their social media pages and drive visitors back to your website.

3. Optimise your Google+ Local page to help your business name, phone number, location, and even opening hours show up in Google Maps and Google’s local search results.

4. Much like Google+ Local, Yelp is a platform to complete and post information about your business. More importantly, it helps feed Apple Maps with local business results.

5. Include geo-specific keywords, such as your city, neighbourhood, and zip codes, to your website, blog, and even social media copy to appear in search results for these terms.

6. Do not only promote blog posts once. Repurpose them as engaging images, quotes, or questions in order to generate additional views, shares, and subject relativity.

7. Getting backlinks from influencers and other industry-related websites that have already established credibility are great for building your own authority and driving more visits back to your site.

8. Enable Google Authorship to help build your personal brand. By establishing yourself as a subject matter expert, you can share your own content, generate more shares, and drive more website visits.

9. Since positive reviews rank in search engine results, generate positive reviews with high rankings to help persuade consumers to choose your business.

10. Once you receive positive reviews, promote them on your website and social media sites so that consumers who search for your business on social sites or local directories see the great things others say about your business.

11. Images can help sell your business, and they also rank in search engines. Don’t name your images “photo.jpg,” and instead name them more descriptively, add alt text, or captions on your website to help images show up in search results
12. Think, review, and review again before you make a social media post or comment. The ability to easily take screenshots makes it difficult to take back a social media mistake.

13. Since your employees also represent your brand, both in person and online, implement a social media policy that at the least permits them from sharing internal information.

14. Before you jump on a trending hashtag, make sure you know the origin of it. Not doing so can potentially cause social media regrets.

15. Like it or not, you “share” your brand on social media. And since consumers can start good and bad conversations about you, make sure to set up alerts that notify you of new mentions, comments, or messages.