Technical SEO vs Content Marketing: Which Matters More?

At WooRank, we like to define SEO as "the strategies, tactics and techniques used to rank highly in search engine results for the keywords used by your target audience in order to increase your reach and conversions." However, marketers and website owners have to decide which tactics and techniques to focus on. Especially those with smaller teams, or doing it all themselves.

Often, this decision comes down to choosing technical SEO vs. content.

But which one is more important? Where should you focus your time and effort?

What Is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is, basically, the way your website is setup to help search engines read and/or interpret your page content, and to provide humans with a great user experience.

Technical SEO includes, but isn’t limited to:

• Robots.txt: Text files that live in your website’s root directory, robots.txt is a set of instructions that tell crawlers what they can and can’t crawl. Disallow low value pages, duplicate pages and other content you don’t want indexed.
• Meta robots tag: Similar to robots.txt, the meta robots tag uses the content="” attribute to tell crawlers not to index a page (NoIndex), and/or follow any of the page’s links (NoFollow). Note that the NoFollow command applies to the whole page. Add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to an anchor tag to nofollow individual links.
• XML sitemap: Sitemaps contain the list of every page on a website, along with some important details about those pages. Search engines use them to find pages, as well as figure out how often is should crawl a site. Any page you want to appear in SERPs should be in your sitemap.
• Page speed: Page speed and load time are really important for user experience and SEO. Optimize your images, caching and redirects; and use G-Zip compression to improve load time.
• Structured data: Structured data, like RDF, microdata or JSON-LD, help computers interpret the context of the words used in your text. It’s how you harness the power of the semantic web for your benefit. Google relies on structured data to create its rich search results, and the better they can interpret what’s on a page, the more likely they are to serve it for a relevant query.
• Responsive design: Websites that use responsive design via the mobile viewport are more likely to be seen as mobile friendly by search engines. Responsive design scales a website to render according to the device screen, creating a better mobile user experience. This eliminates the need to create alternate versions of your website that serve based on user-agent, which is even more time and money for your development team.

What Makes Technical SEO So Important?

If you do some research, you’ll notice that other than site speed, most aspects of technical SEO aren’t ranking factors on their own. All things being equal, a site with a robots.txt file isn’t necessarily going to outrank a site without one.

So why should you spend all this time working on something that’s not going to give you a boost in SERPs?

Because technical SEO can have a huge indirect impact on your rankings, and your ability to even get indexed in the first place.

Think about it: without a robots.txt file or sitemap, Googlebot could waste all of its crawl budget trying to access a folder full of images or videos. Or, if you don’t use canonical URLs, people linking alternate versions of a page will dilute your website’s link juice. No structured data? Your Knowledge Panel isn’t going to look too robust, either.

So, without technical SEO, your website isn’t going to go very far with Google.

Poor Pijonares.

What Is Content Marketing?

First a definition:

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

- Content Marketing Institute

Second: a truism:

Content is king.

You’ve probably heard that before - it’s been around since Bill Gates published it in 1996.

What makes content king?

Content is the whole reason people go to your website from search results. They want to read, watch or listen to whatever is on the landing page (and, hopefully, take an action based on that). Inbound marketing like SEO relies on quality content to attract leads and customers.

The Value of Content Marketing

The value of content marketing is twofold: SEO and conversion rate optimization.

Content has several SEO benefits:

Continue reading %Technical SEO vs Content Marketing: Which Matters More?%

by Stephen Tasker via SitePoint

Getting Started with Sulu CMS on Vagrant The Right Way™

In this tutorial, we'll learn how to get started with Sulu CMS the right way - meaning, we'll deploy a Sulu "Hello World" instance using Homestead Improved and be mindful of performance issues and configuration values while we're at it. We'll also cover some common pitfalls, all in an attempt to get a good base set up for future Sulu tutorials. It is recommended you follow along with the instructions in this post and drop a comment with any problems you might run into.

Many thanks to Daniel Rotter and Patrik Karisch for helping me iron this process out!

Note that it's highly recommended to be familiar with Homestead Improved before starting out. If you're not at that level yet, you should buy our amazing book about PHP Environment Basics.

---

[Sidenote] Enter your project's name

This tutorial is dynamic in that it will replace all placeholders in the text below with the project name you define in the field under this paragraph. That way, the commands become very copy/paste friendly.

Project name:

Generated slug:

---

OS X Vagrant Folder Sharing Problems

When using the NFS folder-sharing mode on OS X hosts, the vagrant-bindfs plugin will be necessary. Install it alongside your Vagrant installation with vagrant install plugin vagrant-bindfs. This is a one-time thing that'll prevent many, many headaches down the line if OS X is your main OS.

The rest is all automatic and already configured in the Homestead Improved instance, you don't need to do anything else.

Vagrant up

The first thing we do is, of course, clone the HI repo.

git clone http://ift.tt/1Lhem4x 
cd 

Next, let's configure the shared folders:

bin/folderfix.sh

This made the current working directory shared with the /Code directory inside the VM. That way, the changes made in this folder will be reflected inside the virtual machine and vice versa.

Like with any Symfony app, Sulu requires a custom virtualhost configuration for Nginx. We've made things easier by turning it into a "project type" in Homestead Improved, so all you need to do is the following modification on Homestead.yaml:

• add the nfs folder sharing type (on OS X and Windows 10)
• add the sulu project type and change its document root subfolder to web

The relevant sections should end up looking like this:

...

folders:
    - map: /Users/swader/vagrant_boxes/homestead/
      to: /home/vagrant/Code
      type: nfs

sites:
    - map: .app
      to: /home/vagrant/Code//web
      type: sulu

Finally, let's fire up the VM.

vagrant up; vagrant ssh

Protip: Useful aliases to set up for future use:

alias vh='vagrant halt; cd ..'
alias vush='vagrant up; vagrant ssh'

Setting up Sulu

Creating the Project

Let's install Sulu's standard edition (the minimal edition is actually "standard" now, whereas the old "standard" is deprecated - they're working on renaming this).

cd Code
composer create-project sulu/sulu-minimal 

Note that the docs currently suggest adding a -n flag at the end of that Composer command which means "No interactive questions". I like it when an installer asks me about things I'm supposed to configure anyway, so I omitted it.

Continue reading %Getting Started with Sulu CMS on Vagrant The Right Way™%

by Bruno Skvorc via SitePoint

How to Boost Happiness and Engagement with Personalized UIs

Personalization, or more specifically, personalized UIs, is one of those hot design trends. It's certainly not a new design concept, but it fits in with the way users navigate content in 2017, like the last piece of a jigsaw.

But why?

UI Design is a balancing act. Designers want to use effective and established design techniques, but they also need to help their brands stand out from the competition by creating something fresh, which can be difficult when designers are relying on tried-and-true techniques.

While there is no cookie-cutter for exceptional design, modern user interface designers simply must find ways to leverage design techniques that are not only known to be highly effective, but impress the user as well.

And the solution to this is not a visual trend that'll be out of fashion before next week, the solution is to design personalized UIs and user experiences that are specifically tailored to an individual user.

So What Exactly is Personalization Then?

When I say personalization I'm talking tailored/curated content, remembering the user's name, and using a conversational tone of voice (to name a few examples).

Personalization helps to deliver relevant content to the user ⏤ it helps "cut the crap" so to speak. When users begin to see content that isn't appealing to them, or doesn't apply to them, they start to lose interest.

And that user is then lost.

Let's take a look at how empathy helps us design user interfaces that "speak" to the user in an engaging, more humanlike way, or design experiences that utilise backend code to deliver relevant content behind the scenes.

How Empathy Breeds Better UX

You might be quite surprised to know that Atticus Finch’s advice to Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird matters in UX/UI design as much as it matters in everyday life:

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." ~ Atticus Finch.

Being empathetic is about more than simply imagining what would make the user experience better, it requires you to spend time thinking about what it would be like to be the user, to actually use the interface you're designing.

Empathy requires knowing your audience; your demographic. Envision yourself clicking their mouse and tapping their keyboard buttons ⏤ when you do this, you'll experience their problems, and then you can begin to come up with intuitive solutions to the issues they're/you're facing.

Just like we use empathy to improve usability and accessibility, we can use empathy to create personalized UIs that boost user-happiness and user-engagement.

Let's take a look at how.

Remember the User's Name

First year of high-school.

"Hi Stephen!" 👋

She remembered my name.

I don't think I was that interested in her at first. We had only met once, on the first day of high-school, but she remembered my name. Relationships are built on loyalty, trust and mutual interests, but it was this little nugget of effort that initiated the friendship.

Why? Because we made a personal connection.

Computers are not humans, we all know that, but if you have the user's data at hand, why not use it to your full advantage? Remembering little things about the user makes them feel special, and ultimately results in boosted happiness and an increased level of engagement.

Speak to the User in a Conversational Tone

"Mr. Brown, what would you like to do today?"

People will respond to this for 3 reasons.

Continue reading %How to Boost Happiness and Engagement with Personalized UIs%

by Stephen Moyers via SitePoint

Feather

Simple One Pager hosting a set of clean open source icons by Cole Bemis called 'Feather'.

by Rob Hope via One Page Love

Duotone

'Duotone' is a One Page HTML template with a beautiful, bold design suited for bands or musicians. The colorful, long-scrolling template features a slick HTML5 music player footer, so users can listen to your tunes while browsing the site. Other features include parallax backgrounds, Soundcloud integration, band member slider, Eventbrite ticketing integration, testimonial slider (could be used for reviews), Embedded Tweets, big image pop-up gallery, contact form and a newsletter sign up box. The colorful design was inspired by Spotify's Duotone style when they rebranded in 2015. Overall a vibrant HTML template with lovely typography - good work!

by Rob Hope via One Page Love

How to Install Yii on Windows or a Mac

Dean Ifrach

Fun One Pager with quirky snippets of copy for marketer Dean Ifrach.

by Rob Hope via One Page Love