Codelobster IDE Review: Lightweight & Powerful PHP IDE You Will See

The most ambiguous situation for any developer is the selection of the development environment for his project. There are tools which offer full features for premium prices which are not affordable to an average developer. In this article, you will witness the simple and handy IDE with support to almost all trending web technologies. It interprets that it will foster the intellisense of web development technologies to make it easy for you to focus on the logic of the code instead of their semantics.

Any IDE (Integrated Development Environment) available on the internet with fancy UIs and no actual functional features should tackle with the IDE that I’m going to discuss in this article.

Codelobster IDE was developed to make web development in PHP easy and simpler all at one place. It supports and the syntaxes and semantics of several web development technologies like AngularJS, BackboneJS, Bootstrap, CakePHP, CodeIgnitor, Drupal, Ember, Joomla, jQuery, Laravel, Magneto, Meteor, NodeJS, Phalcon, Smarty Template Engine, Symfony, Twig, VueJS, WordPress and YiiFramework.

User Interface

Just like any other IDE, Codelobster PHP edition also got an aesthetic layout. It has an explorer window on the left with files in a tree structure, a workspace window where the developer can code in the center and a properties window on the right showing all the properties of the line of code selected. These three windows are dynamic and changes with usage. At the bottom it has a status bar that updates the number of lines of code updated in rows and columns format along with the language encoding.

Features of Codelobster IDE:

‘New’ options:

Creating new files in development environment may not be a great option but the support for all pages created in different technologies is an awesome addition to any IDE.



Codelobster is such IDE intellisense support with different libraries, packages and web technologies. A developer need not to get confused among different syntaxes but just to focus on the logic and functionality.

You can have a look at the technologies supported by the Codelobster IDE in the below screenshot.

Editing options:

Editing options gives a complete set of handy operations on the workspace from moving line to append, change case, indents and duplication of lines.

Search options:

Codelobster has all conventional search and replace option that an editor should have in case of batch replacements of code. This feature is not a new one though but good to have it in a IDE.

View options:

This is my favorite option of Codelobster. It not only gives the toggle switches to display or hide the panels, word-wrap, line numbers and active line but also the syntaxes. As we’ve already discussed that forgetting syntaxes is obvious for a developer with knowledge over different technologies.

Debug options:

The debug options have all the necessary choice of operation including the breakpoint adding and removing. You would generally find this in a heavy development environment. It’s kinda surprising to see it in a lite weight IDE.

Plugins support:

Codelobster IDE supports latest web development technologies and plugins necessary for the project. A developer need not to juggle between the environments for added

Tools availability:

Codelobster has set of built in tools that manages the SQL, validates the code, helps with snippets, formats code and my favorite option the converter.

It converts the HTML files to PHP and PHP files to HTML in one go. It also coverts special characters to entities and vice versa. Likewise, it also converts characters to 8-bit encoders and back. If it misses base64 conversions, I would have something to say against this feature.

Themes:

Codelobster has beautiful themes available both for daytime and nighttime working environments. What else could a light weight IDE could hold under its sleeve.

Why don’t you give it a try and tell me how it is working on this IDE comparatively with the other IDEs. If your computer freezes anytime, don’t blame it for Codelobster. Check out the following screenshot for more clarity.

Download Codelobster PHP Now & Start Coding

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Top 8 Ways to Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Online Store

It is easy to create an e-commerce website, but drawing traffic to it is the toughest task. As an online store owner, you always put efforts into attracting the customers. Finding the applicable method for getting users attention can be more challenging even if you have everything that your customers desired for. For getting growth and development in the online market, you need to be committed.

To get immediate attention, you need to spend on online ads. It is the convenient way to attract visitors. While doing an online advertisement for your business, you don’t need to pay on the basis of how often your ad is displaying in search engine results. Payment needs to be done only if the link of your business will be clicked. A number of ways are there to get visibility in the online store market. Here, you may take a look at some important methods to compete in the e-commerce market:

Use the Google AdWords tool

It is the quickest way of finding traffic. This is a PPC based method for holding consumer's attention to your e-commerce site. It simply says that you are responsible to pay money to Google if somebody clicks on your advertisement link.

Advantages of using Google AdWords:

• Show your ads in Gmail and search results of Google
• Display your ads on Android and iOS online app store
• Show videos of your business on YouTube

Search engine optimization

To appear in the top position, your online store needs to be optimized properly. There are many online merchants who use duplicate content. It is required for you to show the unique content for every product category and page. When you will not be able to prove that you are different from others, your position will go down. You should always try to provide a detailed product description to be on top.

Give importance to email marketing

You should not ignore email marketing as it can be the best method for drawing the attention of customers. It is essential for you to use coupons, discount, offers associated with your product so that you can increase your ROI. All promotional effort needs to be applied for finding potential customers.

Guest blogs should be posted

For making potential customers, your e-commerce store needs to be engaging enough. An online store owner shouldn’t ignore the power of posting unique guest blogs, it proves that you are genuine. After guest blog will be published, interested people respond back to your shopping website. There is even facility to add at least two backlinks in your guest blog, it will direct your interested customers to your online shop.

Convince existing users to invite friends

The best strategy to increase your online store customers is persuading your existing users to invite their friends to complete the Sign Up process. For inviting new users, provide rewards like free shipping, gifts, and discounts on the future purchase.

Try to apply dynamic marketing method

It is a type of advertisement method which shows banner with the product picture which has been recently seen through customers. There is no need to have any specific design, you can pick any color with the desired format. After adding a logo, the search engine will assist you by enhancing your product popularity.

Social media is an influential platform

Everyone is using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin and a number of other social media platforms. Social media helps you to promote your business conveniently. If you want to gain popularity within a short period, try to show your products advertisement on these promotional sites. You can post text ads with picture and even use videos for getting more ROI.

Conclusion

The guidelines for finding a better traffic has been provided here. When you will apply all these methods, you can consider seeing yourself in the top position in different search engines. Customers will start believing in your products and get stick to your brand.

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Author Bio: Jacob Colleen works as a Digital Marketer at Webby Central. He loves to share his knowledge associated with different techniques that can be used for increasing the popularity of an online business. He also writes on other related topics to update users.

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12 Must-Have WordPress Plugins for Better Functioning of Your Site

Undoubtedly, WordPress offers a lot of features, still, there are several functionalities missing from its core software. And one of the best ways to leverage WordPress is to get the right plugins.

With WordPress plugins, site admin can change each element and customize it as per their preferences. There are more than 40,000 options available to choose from, excluding premium plugins. Among this stock, it can be difficult to choose the best for your website.

Below given some of the must-have free and premium WordPress plugins that can take your website to another level. Let’s have a quick glance.

1. Hummingbird

On an average, visitors don’t wait more than 8 seconds for a site to load and Google recommends to keep your site load time to the least, i.e. 2 seconds. To achieve this, Caching is the best and most effective way to increase your site speed.

Lightweight and fast, Hummingbird scans your site, caches, minifies, defers, combines,  and compresses, make optimization in-line with the Google PageSpeed. It turns your site into a speed machine.

2. W3 Total Cache

This plugin is designed to enhance server performance and page load speed by reducing download times. With reduced page load times, the overall performance of the site will be improved, helps you rank better in Google.

3. Defender

Defender helps you protect your site against hackers and evil bots with security scans, safety recommendations, vulnerability reports, customized hardening and blacklist monitoring.

As WordPress is one of the most popular and best options to create a website, this is a primary target for the hackers. Defender plugin can help make your security game stronger than ever.

This plugin searches website for vulnerabilities and if found something, let the owner know and patch those vulnerabilities in one click. It will help you even if your site is already hacked and also save the site from any upcoming disaster.

 4. Jetpack

It offers a complete suite of strong features for your site, including improved site performance, enhanced security, visitor engagement, and content tools.

Jetpack also offers an interactive, responsive, and lightweight mobile theme option, designed for tablets and smartphones.

5. Akismet

This plugin helps you filter out the comments from your blogs that you find spam. Akismet automatically checks all comments against its Akismet web service.

Users can also view the comments which have been cleared or flagged by Akismet with the history option.

6. Google Analytics +

It is necessary to track when and how users visit your website in order to check the areas where you can improve and attract more users. To get this, Google Analytics is a perfect tool and the Google Analytics + plugin brings all this information to the admin dashboard.

Moreover, with this plugin, you can boost your site’s performance by tracking certain tabs and working on them. These include tracking page views, visits, bounce rates, and average referrers and visit duration. You can also enable the advanced settings and track site’s demographic and analyze shopping behaviors.

7. Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin generates an XML sitemap for the site. It is crucial to have an XML sitemap for your site to help search engine index your blogs in a better way. Sitemaps enable web crawlers to see your site structure and retrieve results efficiently.

8. iThemes Security  

This plugin helps you fix common loopholes in your site from the potential attacks. Because of the vulnerabilities that unknowingly enter your site due to some installed plugins, can make your site an easy-to-target option for the hackers and other evil bots.

9. Contact Form 7

With contact form 7, you can create as well as manage multiple contact forms. No more coding needed to create these forms as the mail content and form can be customized easily with its settings.

10. Snapshot

Snapshot lets you backup your site for restoration later. You can also save the backups in more than one location. backing up your WordPress site can save your time and efforts, even if the site goes down or gets hacked.

11. Ultimate Branding

With this plugin, you can add, change, or remove WordPress branding on the site or anywhere on the multi-site network.

When you handle your site and business simultaneously, it is important to look professional with your products and content. That’s why you can have a white labeling machine from WordPress.

You can also replace the WordPress logo, customize the admin panel, add your company name, customize login page, dashboard, admin bar, and footer, and every place where WordPress logo appears to get consistent branding for your site.

12. Optimize Database

WordPress keeps deleted posts, comments, pages, post revisions, unused tags, spam comments with its default settings. Until these sections are manually flushed from the site, they bloat, stick around, and slow down the site.

WordPress’ optimize database plugin helps you purge the database from the extra data tables that you don’t need such as expired transients. Once you have cleaned up the database, this plugin optimizes it for the smoother running site.

Hope this article has given you a clearer idea and helped you learn more about the must-have WordPress plugins you need for your site.

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Author Bio: Ritesh Patil is the co-founder of Mobisoft Infotech, leading healthcare mobile app development company in India, USA. He’s an avid blogger, loves innovation, and writes on diverse healthcare application areas. He works with skilled digital health app developers that has delivered innovative mobile applications. He believes in sharing knowledge and has leaned concentration on startups.

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How to Increase Click-Through Rate on Google AdWords?

Want to boost your AdWords click-through rate (CTR)? Everybody does, but the challenge lies in finding the right ways to increase CTR. The process of knowing how to increase click through rate on Google AdWords can be quite frustrating.

A lot of webmasters suggest focusing on ad copy optimization techniques, but that can take you only so far. Eventually, you will need to implement advanced ways to enhance your CTR.

If you want to find surefire ways to improve CTR of your AdWords ads, the following might help. Take a look.

Know your audience

How can you even begin writing an ad copy or boosting it if you don’t know your audience? So, you need to first get to know your audience and know what you are dealing with. The approach need to be different for audience of different demographics. Also, this is important because getting any kind of traffic is not going to help you. You need to only get the right kind of traffic as that is the only thing that will increase your CTR and fetch your business success.

Make use of keywords in Ad text

Ad contents featuring the most important keywords are likely to be clicked more because it makes the copy appear relevant to what the users are looking for. However, this does not mean that you use keywords everywhere in your ad copies. Overusing keywords will negatively affect the CTR and make your ads appear superfluous.

The right approach of making use of keywords would be to use it once in the description text and one in the headline. In case it is impossible to use the exact keyword in both the places, you can use synonyms.

Don’t use broad match keyword

Broad match keywords activate ads for different search terms and you may not be targeting all of them. Due to this, your ad copies’ relevance for the actual search terms of the users might suffer, resulting in negative impact of your CTR.

The smart approach would be to find a balance between the relevance and the targeted keyword. It is thought to be better if you make use of a combination of exact match and phrase or exact match and modified broad types of keywords. This will help you to be relevant, write more targeted ad copies and save from irrelevant clicks. Improved CTR is the immediate result that you will see.

Include keywords in display URL

Your click-through rate will improve dramatically if you can convince users, via your ads the relevancy of your landing pages. The use of the keyword in URL convinces the users that the landing page is exactly what they are looking for and therefore, they are most likely going to click on the ad.

Use countdown timers to create a sense of urgency

Do you know why Snapchat or Instagram stories such a rage? It is because they disappear within a few hours! This leads to creating a sense of urgency and people always refresh their feed to make sure that they did not miss any latest happenings. The same psychology is applied with the countdown timer. You simply have to add a snippet in your description or headline and put a start and end date. Such ad copies are proven to not just increase the CTR, but also conversions from traffic.

Increase visibility by using ad extensions

When you get a high CTR, Google enjoys it too because when a user clicks on your ad, the search giant gets paid. It’s basically a win-win situation. So, it is basically in the best interest of the search giant that your CTR is higher. So, the search engine offers you with some help in the form of ad extensions.

You can make use of ad extensions to enhance your CTR. There are a number of different types of ad extensions, but the most popular one being review extensions. These extensions became available quite recently and recommended by Google to help increase CTR.

When you get a review from a trustworthy, credible source, it will make your users trust your business. As per research, review extensions can boost your CTR for as much as 66%.

Employ device modifiers

Have you ever come across a situation when your ads got more exposure on mobile devices as compared to desktops? The reason for this is quite obvious. Mobile searches are increasingly outperforming desktop searches, and therefore, if you see such a phenomenon happening with your ads, it is quite normal. However, this is not a clear indicator that mobile devices will provide you with better CTR or better performance.

In order to increase CTR, what you can do is make use of device modifiers and adjust your bids on the basis of the performance. This will allow you to maintain control over how your AdWords ads trigger on various devices.

Begin with a question

Your ad has to stand out if you want to increase your CTR. For that, you need to impress the audience. You can do so by starting your ad with a question. Make sure to use a question that will immediately grab the attention of your target audience. This will help to improve your CTR.

Bid higher to improve the position of your ad

You must remember that any technique aiming to enhance your ads’ differential view in the Google’s search results will work better when your competitors are not doing the same thing. In case they are doing the same, it will become a challenge and very difficult for you. So, if you already have everything in place, you might want to consider escalating your bids. This will instantly help to magnify your chances of getting more CTR since the position of your ad will improve. However, you must be prepared to incur more expenses as increasing the bids will cost you.

Analyze performance on search partners

The search partner websites trigger your ads by default unless you have opted out of it. In general, these websites gather a lot more impressions and fewer clicks, and hence, usually have a negative effect on your CTR.

But, that is not always the case. There are instances where search partners have performed better in some of the campaigns. So, it will be better if you were sure of it. Make sure to check this before you opt out of it. In order to check this, you can segment your impression, click, CTR and so on by network type. This will tell you the performance of your search partners.

A thorough analysis will give you a clear idea of what is lacking and what needs to be done in order to get more click-through rate on your AdWords ads.

Consider using negative keywords

You can consider making use of negative keywords proactively so that your actual keywords become much more relevant to your users. Your ads will trigger for the relevant search terms. As you must already know, where your relevance is better, your CTR is bound to be higher.

Put to use number or symbols in your ad headline

Believe it or not, including numbers or symbols in your ad headlines will give you a competitive edge over others. It will help to catch the attention of your targeted market much more quickly and easily, and therefore, help you to boost your click-through rate.

In a sea of text, number or symbols will pop out and that will be the first to grab attention. But, you need to make sure that the symbols or numbers you are using are relevant. After all, you cannot get a click if your ad goes unnoticed. So, give it a try and see how that works out for your ads. 

Implement a call to action

The presence of call to action or CTA is extremely vital in your website’s content, articles, blog posts and even AdWords ads. Research shows that the human mind actually waits for a CTA from your PPC ad. The Internet users expect to be directed towards taking an action after they have gone through an ad. Once a user has viewed your ad, they will want to know the next step.

Simply put, readers are curious and you can tap into that curiosity by using a compelling call to action. Some examples of CTA would be click here, read more, find out more, download the brochure, get yours today and so on. You have full freedom to think-out-of-the-box when it comes to CTA because this should be unique and hard-hitting.

Be very creative with your ad copy

Keeping all the technical aspects aside, creativity is what everything actually comes down to. You need to be creative to stand out from the rest and have the limelight on your ad. Your competitors might all have the same thing to say as you, but what matters is the presentation. You need to come up with distinct, fun and thought-worthy ways to say the same thing to your audience so that they take notice of you and ignore your competitors’ ads. You need to think beyond keyword and get into the psyche of your audience. Brainstorming sessions are particularly useful in this case as it will help you to come out with ingenious ideas.

So, if you were wondering how to increase click through rate on Google AdWords, the above-mentioned CTR optimization tactics should help you. It will help to increase your CTR and eventually, bring the cost of running AdWords ads down. In case you are still unsure, it might be better to discuss the opportunities of your AdWords ads with a professional.

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Author bio: Lokesh Aryan is the founder & CEO of Lokesh Aryan Digital. He is a Professional Blogger at lokesharyan.com, Influencer, and Author of On-Page SEO - Everything You Need to Know. He is currently working as Freelance SEO & Content Writer. He is Google Analytics Certified and SEMrush SEO Certified and having experience in high competitive niches for B2B and B2C clients. SEO is his core competency and he has a track record of getting clients the results they want. He likes writing, reading novels, playing cricket & volleyball. He also loves music, sings and plays guitar.

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10 Trending E-commerce Business Strategies to Improve Your Customer’s Experience

The shopping season has been shifted from November to be celebrated throughout the year, as far as the hot new trends are going, no matter how many days, weeks or months it extends to. It’s time for the retailers too, as they will be benefited from the trend as the promotion will now be spread through the year on various intervals. The adjustment can be made according to them as per their need. And soon there will be no gambling on the sales results on any single day.

Market overview of E-commerce from 2011- 2016

According to the US Department of Commerce statistics, 53%of Indian users have done online shopping the previous year, which counts for more than a billion users.

This article is going to highlight E-Commerce trends that should not be missed in 2018:

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

There is going to be generous time for the consumers in interacting with the AI. This automatic device is the first point of contact for shoppers to ask about their confusion, about the offers. Then E-Commerce is all set to be taken over by the AI. So, just get ready to chat or convey your needs on your next online shopping. The AI will always be there for the shoppers to advice them at any time. We can already see the benefit of the Artificial Intelligence as many food chains have been opened. Now people can order pizzas or burgers online just by sending the message.

No more cash and wallet

The consumers today are able to purchase and make transactions without their physical wallets. The consumers will be able to make payment even with the items such as watches, rings, etc. The retailers are smart enough and will soon be adding this new mechanism in their payment. The e-wallets are also making their presence in the market as opposed to the physical money that was a necessity once.

Commerce emerged with E-Commerce

All channels have started preparing the strategy for commerce to unite. Platforms like MCOM provides experienced regulation for the modern consumers. The customers now prefer retailers to give privilege to the purchaser as they are not dealing with the part but as a whole brand.

Direct brand contact

The buyers of today want the direct connection with the brands. They just don't like any medium. The retailers and the firm would like to build a relationship with the customers. From there, it becomes evident that E-Commerce is not only beneficial but is also crucial for the retail business. The knowledge regarding the trends will be helpful for the retailers to choose the best available service and plan. The retailers will be updated with the present rules and operation of the business area.

Dynamic Shopping Experience

Transformation is going to take place in the E-Commerce section. The dynamic shopping experience adaption takes place according to the user needs. The customers of today not only share the outlandish information on their multiform apparatus. They also want the retailers to convey the information to them in some unique experience of shopping. The retailers must confirm the needs of the customers. What they want, where they want and when they want is the task of the retailer to give them.

Adoption of sales funnel

This is an excellent tool to increase the sales in the market. Sales tube helps in controlling the journey of the customer according to their behavior. We have already come along a long way from the products to the database and are hoping for the transactions to shoot-up. The market is intense and we cannot turn or fall after this turning period.

Go get them, and make 2018 your year!

Same day deliveries

The customers can now get the products on the same day of their demand. The small line between the online and offline shopping will come to an end as same day delivery will emerge. People are even ready to pay some extra bucks for delivery on the same day. As the consumers want the delivery on the same day so, on-time delivery will continue to grow.

Virtual reality and augmented reality

Another trend of technology which will transform E-Commerce shopping experience will be virtual or augmented reality based on the product and concept of marketing. With the arrival of these inexpensive tools in the market, E-Commerce store will become virtual. In the near future, consumer’s will be able to view their product in a much advanced 360 degrees view. So, we should be ready to embrace the technology and be among its early adopters to amuse customers with a more realistic shopping experience.

IoT enabled E-Commerce

According to the Cisco report, the connected tool will reach up to 40 billion by 2020. The number of the connected tool is expected to lead to IoT enabled Ecommerce. It will just be a matter of time since the other brands will join the line. Imagine a home filled with IoT tools that also acts as a point of service (POS) or could connect to an E-Commerce channel. Exciting, isn't it?

Real-time customer support

Most of the readers have been through this painful experience. How long the retailers have to wait for the response from their customers. But thanks to E-commerce, the future looks like we will not have to face this problem. As the new players are entering the market each day, competition is becoming fierce. It is going to become tough for the E-Commerce section to stand out. They will be looking further for the consumer's support for achieving a competitive advantage. So to edge past their competitors, they will offer real-time customer support to facilitate its users with a better service.

Concluding thoughts:

From all the points mentioned above, we can conclude that E-Commerce is not only essential but also necessary for the retailers business. The knowledge of the trend will help them select better tools and strategies to move up the ladder. They will be capable of competing with the present modes and process of the business. This guide will help them to choose the correct partner for the online growth. The key to E-Commerce success lies in catching trends.

Finally, we can say that E-Commerce is one of the backbones of any business and to succeed in this high tech era, we need to kick-start our business with the E-Commerce and m-commerce.

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Author Bio: Ashish Parmar as a CEO of Prismetric, a top-rated Mobile App Development Company, adds to perspectives about mobile app development, Start-ups, Business Development and Leadership. An entrepreneur by heart, he loves to discuss the latest tech especially if it is mobile technology. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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Top 5 Internet Trends That Are Helping Businesses Acquire More Customers in 2018

From the popularity of digital wallets to the curiosity around blockchain, SMEs and big businesses alike, have leveraged social media trends especially at the break of 2018. Perhaps there has never been a time as urgent as now to adapt and keep up with the trends that are percolating the internet to remain relevant.

Digital Wallets

To understand the growing adoption of digital wallets as means of payment, AmericanExpress has carried out a survey about digital payments trends and online shopping habits. Some interesting outputs include:

• 20% consumers claimed they were not carrying any cash in their wallet
• 46% said they rarely or never rely on cash transactions to make purchases
• 70% of shoppers said they used digital payment methods such as mobile wallets, one0click checkout buttons and P2P payment apps
• 41% said sometimes or always rely on digital payment channels

To take a closer look at the role of digital wallets in the current Indian market, while its popularity has been on the rise since 2014, demonetization forced a rather reluctant portion of the consumers to adapt too. UPI based transactions noted a 89 times growth in the month before ( 1,03,060 transactions) and the month following ( 91,67,277 transactions) demonetization. A general growth in number of mobile users, internet access and app downloads in India add to the popularity.

Experts believe that although digital wallets offer to speed up the checkout process, avoid wastage on processing fees and are fairly easy to implement, its magic hasn’t reached it potential reach due to security issues. With the introduction of Blockchain that will bring security issues to a minimum, Digital wallets usage is bound to make a giant leapfrog in the coming year. To stay ahead of the curve in an industry, it is now almost essential to be an early adopter of digital wallets.

UGC

It doesn't come as a surprise that businesses are increasingly using social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or even Snapchat to reach out to a wider set of audience. With an additional 121 million users joining social media channels within a single quarter in 2017, it’s a smart choice too. However, since 2018 there has been a major change in trends of social media channels churning out algorithms that prioritize posts from family, friends or acquaintances over content from brand pages, which has been resulting in a steep dive in the organic reach and referral traffic for businesses.

The silver lining to this gray cloud comes in the form of user generated content that is garnering increasing popularity among marketers of small businesses to reputed brands alike. Popular such campaigns include BMW’s #BMWRepost, Starbucks’ #RedCupContest, and Adobe’s #AdobePerspective. A recent survey with a sample size of 4500 people, yielded some interesting results to support this shift.

• Engagement on UGC promoting a brand was 7 times higher than that of brand generated content.
• A positive customer generated post resulted in 56% of the respondents being more likely to purchase this product/service.
• An image posted by consumers is considered 7 times more trustworthy by customers compared to brand ads. 

Social Media Advertising

Businesses have also learnt to combat the falling organic reach and referral traffic using Social Media Advertising, with a million new businesses choosing to advertise on Instagram in just the last 6 months. Currently, there are 6 million brands using Facebook as an advertising channel and 2 million employing Instagram. Social media ads allow businesses to target specific sections of the audience based on interests, demographic, behavioral patterns, locations and more, contributing to its escalating marketability and resulting in spending on social media ads growing by 20% annually. A survey by Animoto suggests that greater than 50% of the surveyed marketers intended to increase their spending on advertising, bolstering advertising agency Zenith Optimedia’s prediction that ‘social media ad spending will overtake newspaper ad spending by 2020.’

Additionally, seeing that video continues to be the most preferred form of media in 2018, and the number of channels supporting the media format in the form of ‘stories’ continue to strengthen their reach, a large percentage of advertisers plan to concentrate their marketing investments on Video ads on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram.

Social Media Messaging

Facebook studied the behavior of 12,500 people across 14 markets and recognised consumers’ growing preference towards messaging businesses to ask questions regarding the product, make purchases, appointments and provide feedback. The survey also found that

• 61% would respond more positively to a personalised message from a business.
• 50% are more likely to purchase from a business that they can communicate through message.
• 56% prefer engaging with customer service on messages in comparison to calls.

This shift is not entirely unexpected considering how costumers’ favored means of communicating with a business has been constantly changing from phone, email, social media and has currently settled on social messaging. In a time when messaging is found to be helping brands communicate with their consumers or audience more than ever, it is increasingly important to be ready to receive messages, address the customer personally and take advantage of newer marketing means such as Facebook’s Click-to-messenger ads to be a successful business. The preferce for messaging has also resulted in a sub trend of the rising tide of chat bots. Combined with the estimated savings of $8 billion every year by 2020, and consumers’ increased exposure to and appeal towards chatbots, large number of channels like Wechat, Slack, Viber, iMessage and Facebook have bots.

Blockchain & IOT

The Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain are two topics which are causing a great deal of hype and excitement, not just in the technology circle but in the wider business world, too. A blockchain without getting into the intricacies is essentially ‘a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked and secured using cryptography.’ IOT is the networked interconnection of devices in daily use, equipped with ubiquitous intelligence. It is based on processing of large quantities from multiple devices of data in order to provide useful information/service. While they can stir up enough change individually, together, they hold the power to bring about adverse lifestyle changes in consumers through out the world.

In-spite of all the advantages IOT offers and the limelight it received through 2017, it’s biggest critiques and fans alike had no choice but to acknowledge the challenges it brought about in the security of consumer data before blockchain. However, in 2018, IOT is predicted to be a lot more secure and hence, have a more widespread acceptance. For businesses looking to innovate, products that cater and compliment IOT will be essential. For every business though, it is important to be equipped to collect large amounts of consumer data from multiple devices accessible and to know how to use it.

Consumers’ dwindling size of attention span and loyalty combined with the flourishing innovation results in a market place that is consistently going through metamorphosis. While adapting to social media messaging or pushing user generated content can provide a nudge in the right direction, it is essential for businesses to dissect current and upcoming internet trends to understand how your business can best benefit from it.

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About Author: Afshan is an inquisitive writer and an active listener who loves to bake in her free time. When she is not doing all that, she is sleeping.

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Everything You Need to Know Before Starting to Work with JavaScript & SEO

For most professionals out there, SEO optimization practices always meant working with plain text versions of content. However, as the technology continues to evolve, this is no longer the case, because SEO requires understanding technical knowledge to work with dynamically generated content, like through JavaScript.

Optimization of pages built with JavaScript represents a great example of the need for technical knowledge for professionals. To be able to provide helpful advice to developers and ensure that they follow the best SEO practices, professionals need to understand the essentials of JavaScript search engine optimization.

Are you also an SEO professional looking to enhance your knowledge of JavaScript SEO? It’s certainly a good knowledge to have because you need to know the relationship between Google and the content rendered by JavaScript to be able to improve the latter’s performance.

In this article, we are going to give you everything you need to know before starting to work JavaScript and SEO so you have a perfect understanding of how a website using JavaScript can be properly crawled and indexed, and ranked high on Google.

Let’s begin.

What is JavaScript? How does it Work?

JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages that can create websites that engage visitors in a great way. The list of websites using JavaScript includes such well-known platforms such as Google. Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and Amazon. The ability of this language to provide a great user experience using animations, smooth content transitions and page transitions, zoom effects, and other effects made it very popular among web developers.

In fact, here’s a graph for you showing the usage of JavaScript, courtesy of BuiltWith Trends.

JavaScript utilizes frameworks to create beautiful, interactive web pages by managing the performance of page elements. These frameworks run inside an Internet browser; this means that you load a page using your browser, it uses its built-in interpreter that finds a JavaScript code on the page and runs it.

Can Google Crawl JavaScript?

According to Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, the search engine has gotten pretty good at understanding pages built with JavaScript. Even though the developers at Google would have us think that we shouldn’t worry about JavaScript and website crawling because they’ll take care of everything, this is not entirely true.

Well, newsflash: Google does not handle JavaScript perfectly no matter what its developers say on it blog. In fact, they even kinda admitted that on the aforementioned page of the Webmaster Central Blog. Specifically, they wrote that (the following is an excerpt from the Blog):

“Sometimes the JavaScript may be too complex or arcane for us to execute, in which case we can’t render the page fully and accurately.

Some JavaScript removes content from the page rather than adding, which prevents us from indexing the content.”

As you can see, saying that Google can crawl JavaScript-rendered content is not exactly true. Clearly, there are some limitations and caveats when it comes to crawling and they don’t disappear even after users follow Google’s advice to “follow the principles of progressive enhancement.”

What is the Difference between Client-Side Rendering and Server-Side Rendering?

Before starting to work with SEO for JavaScript, you need to know two critical concepts: server-side (back-end) and client-side (front-end) rendering.

The first respective process happens before a web page is loaded into a browser. This is a traditional approach in which a browser receives an HTML that completely describes the requested page. Typically, Google and other search engines do not have any problems with server-side rendering. The copy of content is there, so all a search engine or browser have to is to download CSS (Cascading Style Sheet, a programming language that describes how HTML elements are displayed on the screen) and “paint” the page’s content on the screen.

On the other hand, client-side rendering uses a different approach, and Google has some problems with adapting to it. In this case, a browser or a search engine receives a blank HTML page without any content. Next, JavaScript downloads the copy of the content from the server, refreshes your screen, and alters the DOM (Document Object Model).

Simply explained, DOM is the process that browsers use after receiving the HTML copy of content to render the page. You can actually see DOM when you click on “Inspect Element” in Firefox.

How JavaScript affects SEO?

Using JavaScript allows to achieve higher versatility, faster server load, more loading time speed, and easier implementation. That’s great news for SEO! With website speed being one of the most important ranking factors, you can certainly use these advantages to get ahead of the competition.

Unfortunately, JavaScript also brings some problems. For example, many struggle to SEO-optimize the content that uses JavaScript.

Naturally, a question arises: should an SEO professional know how JavaScript affects Google ranking. The answer, is yes, of course.

The reason why should know how to make your JavaScript more SEO-friendly is that Google does not take care of everything on its end, so most of the problems your JavaScript-built website will have may be a result of a lack of optimization, not Google’s inability to handle JavaScript properly.

Also, here’s what Google had to say to explain that:

What should you be concerned about as a SEO professional?

The main job for SEO professionals is to take care of three important things related to JavaScript on their websites:

• Crawlability. The ability of search bots to crawl your website.
• Obtainability. The ability of search bots to obtain information regarding your website and parse through its content.
• Critical Rendering Path. According to Google, this term refers to “prioritizing the display of content that relates to the current user action.”

Crawlability

This term refers to optimizing the website for Google’s crawler bots that read and categorize our website, thus deciding where it should be displayed in search results.

To make sure that crawler bots do their job, you should clean up and optimize the site code and structure, because they are critical for the success of crawling.

Let’s now see what can prevent Google from crawling your website: 

The HTTP Header Saying That a Page Does Not Exist

The initiation of crawling begins only if a crawler took a look at HTTP header that confirmed the existence of a certain web page by a status code. If the header says that a page does not exist, so the crawler won’t be able to crawl the website, therefore, Google will not crawl your website.

To ensure that bots can find all the pages on your website, you should submit XML sitemaps to Webmaster Tools. Google has all the instructions to build and submit a sitemap to them. Also, you can use free tools like XML SiteMap Generator.

In addition to the structure and hierarchy of your website, it may also contain maps for images and videos. The optimization of these maps is important to help Google crawl non-text content.

“Also, to clean your site’s architecture, you should use internal linking,” advises Mark Bledsoe, a web developer at A-Writer. “It is basically a signal for Google to understanding the architecture and importance of the pages.”

 Image Source: Neil Patel

Its purpose is threefold:

• Help Google with website navigation
• Define the website’s structure and hierarchy
• Distribute page authority and ranking.

Here’s what you should do ensure that internal linking enhances the overall search-optimized value of the website.

• Create a lot of content. Internal linking is impossible without internal pages, so create as much quality content as you can.
• Avoid links to top pages. Do not link to homepage and contact us page. This is too ‘salesy.’
• Use informative links to match the context of the content. The users will use links only if they make sense to them.
• Don’t link for the sake of linking. For example, if you have a page about social media marketing plans and a page with a car review, linking them will not make any sense because the content on the first respective page is totally irrelevant to the content on the second page.

Robots.Txt File Can Block the Crawler

If this happens, no search engine will ever find your website or a certain page.

Google defines robots.txt as “a file at the root of your website that indicates those parts of your website you don’t want accessed by search engine crawlers.”

An example of a simple robots.txt file for a website built with WordPress:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/

(This example tells Google to leave /wp-admin/ directory alone).

In other words, this file has directives for Google on whether to crawl specific parts of your website. To ensure that it supplies Google with the information you need, follow these tips:

• Robots.txt must reside in the root of your website (for example, if your website is www.example.com, you should place it at www.example.com/robots.txt).
• The file is valid only for the full domain it resides on, including https
• Be super attentive when making changes. Remember: this file can prevent your website from being found by Google.
• Avoid using the crawl-delay directive for Google as much as you can.
• Test your robots.txt file with a free tool from Google.

Robots Meta Tag Can Block Google, too

Since this tag tells search engines what to follow and what not to follow, it can block them from indexing the page. While this still allows them to crawl that page, it makes it impossible to index it.

The following are robots meta tag values and how Google interprets it, according to Webmaster Central Blog:

• NOINDEX – this tag blocks Google from indexing the page
• NOFOLLOW – this tag prevents Google from following any links on the page
• NOSNIPPET – this tag prevents a description of the website from appearing in search engine’s results
• NOARCHIVE – this tag blocks a cached copy of the webpage from being available to search engines.
• NONE – equivalent to “NONINDEX, NOFOLLOW.”

To ensure no limits and an inadvertent blockage of content, some web developers use the following meta tag:

Obtainability

Google and other search engines use headless browsing (action of fetching webpages without the user interface) to render the ROM to obtain as much information about the content and the user’s experience. In other words, they process JavaScript and utilize the DOM instead of HTML.

To ensure that Google finds and ranks the website, it is important to get a good understanding of how it crawls and interacts with the website’s content. Here are some facts you need to know:

• If JavaScript loading time exceeds five seconds, Google may not be seeing your website at all
• If JavaScript has some errors, Google may miss some pages
• Crawling bots do not see actions that your site requires from users.

How to Ensure that Google Gets Your Content

There are a lot of speculations about how Google interacts with different libraries and frameworks of JavaScript. The studies like this one described on Elephate blog found that the search engine had different patterns of interaction with different JavaScript frameworks and libraries.

Since no one can guarantee that Google loves your JavaScript-built website, testing various aspects of its performance and content is a good idea. So, test the pages on your website to ensure that Google can index them.

Critical Rendering Path

The last thing on our list of things that SEO professionals should be concerned about has to do with the user experience. A search engine’s critical rendering path is tailored to enhancing user experience because it aims to deliver it by loading pages faster.

Here are some examples of how it affects a website’s performance, courtesy of Google.

However, you may interfere with this path if your JavaScript files are blocking your website’s or a specific page’s ability to load. Therefore, testing for these files is very important.

Wrapping Up

For you as an SEO professional, the most important thing about JavaScript and SEO is that you have to pay close attention to the factors described in this article. They can help you resolve nearly all issues and questions you can have when trying to optimize your JavaScript content for Google or any other search engine.

Oh, and one more thing for you: optimization and implementation of JavaScript come with different risks, so expect to run into something that doesn’t work properly at some point. You just need to take your time and test everything, and Google will do the rest.

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About Author: Audrey is a passionate blogger and marketer at college-paper.org. Her areas of interests are very wide, but mostly she writes about content marketing and business relations. Her aim is to engage people to self-growth and staying motivated.

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