#Trying to implement this whole thing in a website format is proving to be challenging but I'm excited to get it to work properly!

[ne0nwithazero]

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The ludomancer

So you heard of parahumans fans using their own lives to come up with triggers and create their own fan capes? well, that is more than well trodden ground so i figured lets take it an extra notch and figure out my own fan practitioner, my own fanctitioner! (disclaimer: many of of the personal details here were either exagerated or fabricated for dramatic effect)

backstory

i had open heart surgery when i was 6 months old, and if niccolette belanger is anything to go by, having big openings in your flesh at a very young age is free real state for persky spirits. Just imagine this giant entrance direct to my chest, leaving my heart ridden with holes and openly exposed.

Now this was in a very modern hospital in and incredibly sterile enviroment so is not like there were a lot of grisly phantasmagoric spirits crawling all over the place, you i was covered head to toe in technology, multiple wires and tubes and god knows what else all poking out of my chest, back in those days i was more machine than human. So with that in mind i like the idea that perhaps some fairly young spirits of electricity, technology, science and artificousness got inside me.

nothing too wild and powerful considering these things were all relatively recent by the standards of the practisce, but enough to have an influence. The general result is that i would be naturally inclined towards STEM fields, mad scientists, math and engeneering as a kid. I would constantly find myself getting involved into these enviroments (even when i didnt want to) such as going to a course in robotics, going to a high school soecialized in mechanics, studing computer science in college, etc.

my life would go on more or less like normal, the spirits slowly growing inside of me but always kept in check by my own essense and sense of self. Until...

Awareness

i changed careers and went to live at a college dorm in the middle of nowhere, five kilometers away from the nearest city, a small oasis of technology in the desert and the central hub for the Wi Fi of my state. As the years went by i became more and more isolated, my Conections grew weaker, my own sense of self got thinner and thinner (exacerbated by me finally questioning my gender identity). my prescence on the world was almost non existant, spending most of my time in my dorm in my computer not interacting with anyone, browsing ever incresingly more niche or obscure websites.

in this oasis of technology in the middle of nowhere, with my personal conections and sense of identity growing weaker, the spirits within me started to grow stronger and stronger, starting to screw with my very perception of reality, pushing things so that i would start to go down weird rabbit holes online, reading strange texts in impossibly formatted websites that would introduce strange ideas about the nature of reality, some times even downright attempting to posses me (i would try to rationalize these episodes where i would experience derealization as just panic attacts).

The spirits of technology would introduce me to forbidden ideas online, dangerous memetic cognitohazards, basiliks that would force me to perform obscure rituals to summon  demonic entities from lost planes of reality, not aligned with human values. They would try and convince me that reality was a simulation and coax me to pierce the veil and see the true subyacent reality, that subatomic particles were capable of experiencing suffering, that i could be tortured for eternity if enough people were kept from getting dust specks in their eyes. If things had gone like that for much longer i would have probably ended up summoning or becoming an Ex Machina and probably an entire wing of the college campus would have been condemned.

Luckly in my college there just hapened to be a young dabbler who got wind of my situation. They took notice of me and were kind enough to put me in touch with an online community of witch hunters who specialized in cases like mine (the dabbler didnt take care of it themselves because they didnt want to accidentally reveal to me more than strictly necessary about the magic world, the group of witch hunters had a lot more experience solving this problems without the karmic burden of awakening someone)

The witch hunters were a fairly niche group within the larger community of witch hunters. They specialized in bayesian techniques. Using the tools of rationality to dispell illutions, glamours, mind tricks and half truths. They established firm rules for thinking and percieving the world so that Others wouldnt be able to decieve or manipulate them. Calling bullshit on the impossible. Their organization, the Magical Interference Restriction Institute, coordinated the efforts to develop safe protocols for the practisce in the digital age.

They exorcised most of it, gave me a few basic mental tools and rituals to keep the spirits in check and recommended me to try and forget about the whole affair. But fat chance about that, by this point my eyes had been opened.

The awakening

When i finished college and moved to a different city i did everything in my power to enter in contact with the practitioner world again. Walking around the city, reading craiglist adds, looking into different organizations. Of course i wasnt acting blindly, i was guided by some of the things that i had picked up during my posessions, the things the spirits had revealed to me, the forbidden texts that i had read and some of the advice the witch hunters gave me.

Eventually i managed to follow conections and came across a small cabal of practitioners who put the front of a board game club to recruit people and have a place to reunite while looking legitimate and not arising suspicion from the mundanes. The way the club would work was that on the front it was a normal place to play things like Catan, Carcassone, king of tokyo, etc. But on the back room they would “play test” new “games” between the senior members of the club. when in reality they would workshop new rituals to perform.

They would focus on a fairly recent branch of magic caled Ludomancy. Focused on the idea that any boardgame is in the end a ritual. it would be this communal activity with rules and mechanics, supported by the illution and the beliefs of the players who would manipulate symbols and idols across intricate diagrams. 

they saw my experience with rules, logic and technology applied to magic and saw enough potential in me that they allowed me to join. Their awakening ritual is a bit different than most since they customized it based on their findings and experiences with rituals. Instead os sitting in a circle the circle is inscribed in a board. The piece that you use to move through the board has to be carved by you and has to be composed of elements that represent you and that are meaningful to you and it has to hold within a couple of drops of your blood.

You throw the dice and move across the board and depending on what places you fall in on of the cards will be drawn from the multiple decks. These cards will either give you challenges to overcome to prove yourself, make declarations and impositions on the kind of practitioner you will be once you awaken or just be criptic messages and riddles that wont be relevant or mean anything to you until many years down the line. You have to overcome the challenges, answer the questions posed by the cards and most of all, play the rules cleverly so that you can make your piece reach the center of the board and scream jumanji to complete the ritual. Now the rules of every awakening playthrough change and they can be incredibly intricate and complex, it can take a lot of cleverness of a lot of luck to finish this ritual but once you do you find yourself in a much firmer and powerful grounding than most begginers do.

the practice

i would probably focus on shamanism, collecting spirits here and there, slow and steady accumulation of a power base. i would like to get into constructs, acumulating spirits, helping them grow, give them a bit of my own power to help the process along, like sacrificing one drop of blood every week, or establishing small rituals of worship, and then mix and mashing them together to build more complex spirits, also i would probably offer small favors to the local practitioners in exchange of tibdits, trinkets and sources of power, always keeping it low profile and not too ambitious, something like helping with a ritual here and there, being a pair of extra hands, mostly giving help establishing magic circles and drawing diagrams, running small errands, sending messages. it would help let other people know that im not too much of a concern and hopefully they would let me be

if you need help or want to make an exchange with me you could come to my house and i would offer to play a game (usually one i made up) and in the process of playing the game i would perform the magic that you need or arrange the cosmological and quintessential pieces inside and outside of you according to your request.

My implement would be a set of D&D dices that i can use to make a bit of augury, affect probabilities, dictate outcomes and, in times of need, cheat at my games a bit. the rest of my equipment would be booklets and notebooks filled with my own designs, rulesets and texbooks, lots and of graph paper and one actual RPG supplement that i would use to bluff some of the more out of date Others by claiming that i have tomes filled with arcane spells and a full compendium of magicl creatures.

eventually i would try to diversify, focusing more on crafting and building, going more for the angle of the toy maker rather than game designer. I would build complex structures in papercraft, small mechanisms with cardboard, intricate contraptions with some clockwork and some springs.

i probably wouldnt get a familiar, i just dont see my self commiting to a life long companion. i would desperatly try to establish a demesne but that would also be rather complicated since i dont see my self owning property any time soon either.

[talkagency]

The Best SEO Tactics to Use in 2019

Digital marketing and search engine optimisation tactics change all the time. If you want to rank on top, then you’ll need to familiarise yourself with all the recent trends and popular SEO tactics.

Achieving high rankings is not as easy as it used to be, but it doesn’t have to be difficult either. Keep reading to find out how to drive organic traffic to your website in 2019.

Keywords Make the World Go Round

You probably know this already, but ranking without making proper use of keywords is nearly impossible. There are hundreds of free tools that can help you with that, but here are the ten best that we love and use all the time.

Finding the keywords is only the first step. To create engaging content that will rank high you need to know your audience and write for them. Keywords are great but they mean nothing if you don’t know what your target audience is searching for.

Think of questions that your target audience might ask. Then answer them in small chunks. By breaking up content into smaller, more manageable chunks, you increase your chances of taking the highly sought-after featured snippet spot.

    Better User Experience

Google is sworn to provide users with the best user experience possible as they strive to meet the user’s intent with every query. Google does this better than any other search engine in the world.

More time spent on a website and a reduced bounce rate are good indicators of user satisfaction. Google rewards sites that have low bounce rates with higher page ranking.

That all sounds great, but how do you actually improve user experience?

  Work on Your Writing

Everything you write needs to serve a specific purpose. Fill the page with promises, or just write about your favourite ice cream. Whatever you do, make sure that you always optimise for readability.

You want to engage people and captivate your audience with interesting blog post titles and exciting content. The better the content, the more time users will spend browsing through your pages.

Of course, it’s not just about the content itself. Formatting also plays a crucial role and you should aim to get it right. Generally, you want to keep paragraphs nice and short, while consciously alternating the length of sentences. Content that flows better reads better, simple as that.

The truth is that people don’t really read content, they scan through it. The average person spends just 37 seconds reading content online. Make it easier for readers to scan through your website by formatting properly: headings, sub-headings, bullet points, and images; anything that pleases the eye!

Don’t forget that you’re a marketer. Unless you’re running a charity, we suppose that your goal is to maximise sales. Your marketing strategy may be spot on, but the copy on your web page needs to be perfect too. That means no spelling errors, no grammar mistakes.

You want to engage people and captivate your audience with interesting blog post titles and exciting content. The better the content, the more time users will spend browsing through your website.

Work on Page Design & Speed

Good page design improves user experience. The most important things are big and pop out whereas the rest sit quietly in the background. Anything that’s not necessary or is cluttering the user’s screen needs to go.

Analysis of data from thousands of website shows that users are more likely to convert on a website when all the required information is clearly visible. Your products and services should be accessible at all times, preferably never more than two clicks away.

Your landing page should be designed to impress. Think beautiful navigation bars and captivating visuals. Focus on one single idea and stick to it throughout. Will the page promote your brand as a whole, or will it be used as a means of promoting a new product or service?

Needless to say, your page needs to run fast too. No one will wait 30 seconds for your super-slow website to load. You have 2 seconds, if that. An online tool, such as PageSpeed Insights can identify underlying speed issues and come up with suggestions to improve speed.

It’s usually just a matter of minifying unnecessary code and compressing large images. You should also enable browser caching to make sure regular users don’t have to wait more than a few seconds for your page to load.

Optimise for Voice Search

Did you know that 40% of adults use voice search at least once per day? Voice search is fast and convenient, and its success is a testament to our laziness. Jokes aside, voice search matters because it largely affects SEO.

The big giants designed voice search assistants that reply to our queries like a friend would. As a result, voice searches directed to them are often longer and much more conversational than regular searches.

This is why you need to make sure you use natural-sounding language when producing content. It’s also a good idea to form queries into question phrases and target long-tail keywords.

Most voice searches are carried out on mobile devices. Effectively, this means that your website needs to be optimised for mobile.

Voice-based searches performed using a mobile phone are 3 times more likely to be location specific, which is exactly why so many SEO strategies today focus on local SEO.

Size Does Matter

Gone are the days when you could rank number one with a 400-word blog post. Studies show that size does matter as long-form content tends to rank higher on the SERPS.

We know what you’re thinking. You may not have the time to write 2,500-word articles, but the stats don’t lie. That is not to say that you absolutely cannot rank with shorter blog posts.

Yes, statistically longer-form content tends to rank higher on Google, but at the end of the day, rankings still reflect the satisfaction of user intent. It all depends.

For example, if you’re writing a quick start Google Analytics guide, you’d want a post that’s at least 1,500 words. An in-depth guide would have to be at least 2,500 words long.

More specific ‘how to’ queries may be easily answered within a few hundred words, which is probably exactly what the user’s looking for anyway.

Link building

Once upon a time, backlinks ruled the SEO world. Even today, they are still the number one ranking factor according to Google. It’s actually extremely hard to rank high without a proper link building strategy in place.

Keep in mind that not all links are good links. You should avoid linking to websites with low ratings as that can affect your own ratings too. If you really want to link to a questionable source (maybe you’re trying to prove a point), you can use a no-follow link with your anchor text.

The real challenge, however, is getting high-quality sources to link to your content. Focus on filling the gaps, offering new and original content. Think fresh and stay unique.

Technical SEO

You may get everything right and still struggle to rank high on the search results. If you’ve tried it all but your website still ranks low, then you can probably blame it on bad technical optimisation.

Technical SEO optimisation takes time and effort (which is why we always recommend that you leave it to professionals), but there are some things you can do right now to improve your ranking:

  Switch from the old HTTP web protocol to HTTPS. Google warns users when they attempt to enter a website that doesn’t make use of an encrypted connection.

Implement AMP for mobile. Accelerated Mobile Pages takes care of HTML tags, javascript and caches, allowing publishers to create responsive and mobile-optimised content.

Correct your semantic markups. Key information on your website should be clearly visible with proper HTML tags.

Fix 404 errors. Tools like Monitor Backlinks can help you detect and redirect dead links. There’s nothing more frustrating than landing on an error page, that much we can tell you!

  Are you ready to put these tactics to the test and take the SEO world by storm? Head over to our blog for more awesome SEO tips and tricks that will help you rank today!

  Article first published here: The Best SEO Tactics to Use in 2019

[theblackroseofsatan]

Phases of Mobile App Development

Even with all the evidence pointing in favor of building your application, don’t decide to move forward lightly. With over 1.5 million apps each in Apple’s App and Google Play Store, it’s important to run through the mobile app development process and how your application will fit in with both your marketing goals and your market niche. 

In today’s time, making a mobile application isn’t rocket science. However, making a successful mobile application is a process involving quite an extensive pre-planning. Building your mobile application could be as easy as opening up the IDE, throwing a few things together, doing a fast round of testing, and submitting it to an App Store, all done in half day’s work. Or you can make it an extremely involved process involving rigorous up-front design, QA testing on a whole lot of devices, usability testing, a full beta lifecycle, and then deployment some different ways. The path you choose will give shape to your vision. You could also choose to employ one of the top mobile app developers in Singapore, but that’s too easy.  With that said, here’s a look at the app development lifecycle and the objectives and challenges along the way.

1. The Research All apps start with an idea, even if yours is just to have a mobile app presence. Refine that idea into a solid basis for an application. Make sure your initial analysis includes actual demographics, motivations, behavior patterns and goals of your buyer persona. During each stage of the process, keep the end user in mind. Now, try to think of your customer’s lifecycle, once their characteristics are pinned down. After you reach them, they need to be acquired, converted, retained and their loyalty nurtured. By the end, you should understand how the customer will be using the digital product. Doing this at the very onset will set you on firm footing, and your clarity will give you and your investors, much-needed confidence.

This phase is essential because, during this phase, you lay down the necessary groundwork for what is to follow next. Do your bit of substantial research and brainstorming before moving on to the next phase. And another important part of this phase is analyzing the competition. A detailed study of your competitor’s app will help you figure out what features are absent in their app so that you could include it in your app, to make it stand out.

2. Wireframing The next step is to document and wireframe the app, to understand future functionalities. Although time is not on your side at this point, actually drawing detailed sketches of the envisioned product helps you uncover usability issues. Sketching does a lot more than merely tracing your steps. It can be a powerful communication and collaboration tool. When you’re done sketching, wireframing will help refine the ideas and arrange all components of the design in the right way. You can overcome any technical limitation found in the backend development process in this initial phase. Now, aim to develop a clear understanding of how your proposed features and ideas will fuse together into a functional app. You should also create a roadmap or a storyboard, to demonstrate the relationship between each screen and how the users will navigate through the app. Look for opportunities to incorporate your brand, focus on the user experience and keep in mind the differences in the way people use a mobile app versus a mobile website.

3. Technical Feasibility Assessment You might have a clear understanding of the visuals by now, but you also need to consider if the back-end systems will be able to support the app’s functionality. To know whether the idea of your application is feasible technically you need to get access to public data by sourcing public APIs. An app, depending on its format (smartphone, tablet, wearables, etc.) as well as the platform (iOS, Android, etc.), will have different requirements. By the end of this exercise, the team may have different ideas for the app or decided that some of the initial functionality isn’t feasible. At this point, brainstorm a little, ask questions and review the status.

4. Prototype Build a rapid prototype. Rapid is the key word here. You can’t truly comprehend the touch experience until and unless you touch the App and see how it works and flows. So, build a prototype that gets the app concept into a user’s hands as quickly as possible to see how it works for the most common use case. Use rough and not exhaustive wireframes for this phase. This will help you see if you are taking things in the right direction. Include the stakeholders in this process, allowing them to touch the prototype will give you their feedback and implement it into your work. And moreover, the prototype will give different stakeholders the first look at your app and will help you validate the information you’ve gathered.

5. Design Once you get this step out of the way, you can dive into coding. Your user experience (UX) designer architects the interaction between design elements, while the user interface (UI) designer builds the look and feel of your app. This is a multistep process with its many review stages. What you get is blueprints and visual direction, informing your engineers of the envisioned final product and about how interaction should move, feel and flow. Depending on your project scope and app budget, this design phase can be completed in a single afternoon or can take a team a whole lot of hours. And remember to create multiple variations of a screen by playing around with the layout of navigation, buttons and other visual elements. The more your product varies, the higher the chances of your UX being original. Application designing will prove to be a multi-step process, and your results should be clear visual directions providing an abstraction of the final product.

6. Develop The development phase generally starts quite early on. In fact, once an idea gains some maturation in the conceptual stage, a working prototype is developed which validates functionality, assumptions, and helps to give an understanding of the scope of work.

As the development progresses, the app goes through a set of stages. In the initial stage, the core functionality although present is not tested. See the app is very buggy, and non-core functionality doesn’t exist at this point. In the second stage, much of the functionality proposed is incorporated. The app has ideally gone through light testing and bug fixing, though some issues could still be present. In this phase, the app is released to a certain group of external users for more testing. After the bugs in the second stage are fixed, the app will move to the deployment phase where it’s ready for release.

If yours is a complex project where user requirements change regularly, make use of agile methodology. It helps with flexible planning, progressive development, early deployment and constant improvements. A large application can be broken down into smaller modules, and agile methodology can be applied to each of these small parts.

7. Testing In mobile app development, it’s a good idea to test early and often. Doing this will keep your final costs low. The farther in you go into the development cycle, the costlier it becomes to fix bugs. Refer to the original design and planning documents while building out the various test cases.

Application testing is vast, so make sure your team covers all the necessary facets of it. The application should be tested for usability, compatibility, security, interface checks, stress, and performance. In user acceptance testing you discover whether your mobile app works for your intended users or not. To test this give your app to a few people in your target audience and ask pertinent questions. Once your application passes the user acceptance test, you know your solution “works.” And further make your application available for a beta trial, either through the enrollment of previously identified groups or an open solicitation for participants. The feedback you receive from beta users will help you find out whether the app’s functions are operating well in a real-world situation.

8. Deployment Your app is ready to submit. Choose a day and key up a formal launch. For different application stores, the policies of launching an application are different. And keep in mind, this is not the end. App development doesn’t end at launch. As your application gets in the hands of users, feedback will pour in, and you will need to incorporate that feedback into future versions of the app. Every app will need updates and new features. Typically, as soon as the first version of the app is released, the development cycle begins anew. Make sure you have the resources to maintain your product. Apart from the money invested in building a digital product, keep in mind that its a long-term commitment. Godspeed.

[connecticut-seo-adwords]

Ways to Get Rid Of the Biggest Challenges As An Internal SEO

SEO has matured to a point at which most companies have at least one SEO, but our community hardly talks about the unique obstacles in-house SEOs face and how to overcome them. Those challenges involve politics, resource scarcity, technical limitations, and more. 

Just like SEO consulting, enterprise SEOs need more than just subject expertise. Knowing how to play the political game, budgeting and indirect management are just as important. In this article, you will get to know the solutions for the biggest problems of in-house SEOs. Besides my own, I reached out to my friends Micah (Zendesk), Jim (former GoDaddy), and Brendan (Eventbrite) to share their experience as well.

The Problem is Not Missing Knowledge, But Implementation

It is very frustrating to know what to do, but not being able to do it. It is like a doctor who has a remedy, but the patient cannot afford it. We often feel the same way as in-house SEOs. We know doing x will increase y, but it either can’t be implemented or interferes with someone else’s interests. Sometimes a recommendation can be implemented but takes too long to be worth the effort.

It’s like a doctor who has a remedy, but the patient cannot afford it.

Ask 100 in-house SEOs about their biggest problems and 99 of them will agree on the same ones. “Outdated mindset, not having internal resources, [and] technical limitations” are the core obstacles, according to Micah Fisher-Kirshner, Head of SEO at Zendesk.

Jim Christian, CEO of Blush Digital and former Head of SEO at GoDaddy, paints a similar picture: ”Proving the value of SEO [and] overcoming DEV bottlenecks”.

Or ask 442 enterprise SEOs and come to the same result, like the enterprise SEO survey done by Conductor.

Conductor enterprise SEO Survey

The last question to answer before we dive in is “Why would anyone join a company that puts up such limitations?” There are two reasons. One, you are new to the company and couldn’t see the mess before you joined. Sometimes obstacles are hard to see from the outside. Second, you are the victim of sudden changes within the company. That can be budget cuts, people cuts, internal reorganizations or a new content management system. However got you into the situation, let’s talk about what you can do.

Obstacle 1: Lack of Resources

Being short of engineers, content creators or money is the biggest reason for failure. I have encountered it as an in-house SEO and as a consultant. It is a big problem and often connected to obstacle #3 because in some cases the reason for missing resources is that SEO isn’t deemed important enough to justify the spend.

What To Do When You Have No Engineering Resources for SEO

When you have no engineers to implement your recommendations, look outwards. What can you do outside of your website that has an impact on important (landing) pages? Most often the solution is content marketing. The goals are to a) raise brand awareness to increase organic traffic, b) create “natural” backlinks and c) make content assets that could be implemented on your site at some point in time in the future.

I don’t want to get too deep into explaining how to do content marketing. You find more than enough about the topic on the web and this of course. Focus your efforts on assets that can be shared on other sites and on social media:

Your job is more focused on content marketing than technical SEO in this case, but that is okay because what counts in the end is the impact you make and if you reach your (business) goals. You should create enough valuable assets in the process to fill your landing page, once you have more developer resources. You are making an impact in the present and save up for the future. If you are wondering where to place those content assets if you don’t have technical resources, focus on guest blogging and look at the paragraph “What to do when your CMS doesn’t leave any room for SEO”.

The best way to solve this issue is to get an exclusive developer just for SEO if that is an option.

A common belief amongst management is that the core DEV team(s) can handle any and all requests. The reality, in most cases, is that SEO projects get attached as subtasks to a bigger project and ‘goes along for the ride’. The solution to this problem was to incorporate a full-time DEV member on the SEO team. This developer could easily navigate the websites deployment cycle and get our projects out in days where the same requests would take weeks or months to deploy.

What to Do When Nobody Can Create Content for SEO

What about the opposite case, when you have technical resources but no one for content? You try to get outside resources to create content for you! Other than for development, you don’t need in-house expertise to create content, just subject expertise.

An outside resource can be a contractor, say from Upwork or another freelancer platform, but it can also be someone in the company but outside of your team. Find allies to create content with you, like product managers, PR or social media managers. You will have to convince them of the value of SEO, which I outline further down the article. SEO has the advantage of being a very holistic discipline with many touch points to others. Good content produced once can be used for other channels as well but avoid copy-pasting.

According to SEOclarity, the biggest challenge for in-house SEOs is developing the right content anyway. So you might as well embrace and focus more on it.

SEOClarity enterprise SEO survey

Another option is to find creative ways to leveraging user-generated content. How could your brand leverage your users/customers to create content? UGC can come in the shape of a community, guest articles on your blog, comments, or, if your company has a marketplace business model, be the main content itself.

What to Do When You Have No Budget for Tools

SEO Tools definitely make your life easier, but you can survive without them. Luckily, Google provides some very helpful tools for free, such as Search Console, Google Analytics, Keyword Planner and Google Trends. Bing’s Webmaster Tools provide additional information that the Search Console might not reveal. You can put together an ROI model completely for free, for example, just with the help of Search Console and Google’s Keyword Planner.

Free SEO tools are not enough to do your work well in the long-term, but they allow you to build out use cases to justify more budget. In the worst case, pay for a tool yourself, like SEMrush, so you can get to a point at which you have enough data to show the ROI by investing more into SEO. If there is one thing that justifies more budget, it is more profit.

What to Do When You Don’t Have Enough Time for SEO

You sometimes find yourself challenged with dealing with >1,000,000 pages or > 5 sites, which means you hardly have enough time to take care of everything. This is even tougher when you are the only SEO in your company.

The only way to overcome this obstacle is to evangelize SEO and spread knowledge to increase the positive impact of non-SEOs. The more your colleagues know about SEO, the better they can contribute. The goal is to have other people help you do the work. The question is “how to make your company smarter in terms of SEO”?

The first answer is by creating a platform where people can find knowledge. A powerful tool is a Wiki, like Confluence, that you can use to provide SEO knowledge within the company. In the same realms is internal blogging, which we do a lot at Atlassian. You can use a Wiki or good ol’ email, for example in the format of a monthly newsletter. It is important to create that content exclusively for the company and make it accessible for everyone at any time. If possible, make it mandatory for the onboarding process to consume that material.

The second answer is to proactively educate colleagues through workshops, presentations, and training. Cover all topics, from “What is SEO?” to “Technical SEO” and “SEO for writers”. Teach people hands-on how to do keyword research on their own, how to increase page speed and what great content is in workshops. Keep in mind that every company has employer churn, which means you should repeat SEO workshops in a certain cadence. To close the loop to the first answer, don’t forget to save all material from those trainings in one central place to which people have easy access.

Isolation is dangerous in SEO. Be proactive!

In many cases, SEO teams are either understaffed, or you are alone in your role, and our profession is not well-suited for isolation. Sharing experience and information are vital for SEO. Our community lives from reverse engineering and taking that knowledge out into the world.  

The solution to isolation is to be proactive about meeting other SEOs, when you are the only one at your company, for example at SEO meetups or conferences. Don’t hesitate to join Slack channels, like Online Geniuses, and Subreddits, like Big SEO, to seek exchange with the community.

Whatever your limitation is, the art is to focus on what you can do - not on what you can’t do.

It’s an important skill to know when I need to focus elsewhere because the time investment to convince others to do what I need will be too great.

Obstacle 2: Technical Limitations

Micah, head of SEO at Zendesk, agrees with me that there are three basic issues: “So, I have run into a whole variety of in-house issues in my decade-long career in SEO, if I had to narrow it down probably the main ones I’ve dealt with often fall into three categories:

An outdated mindset by others about SEO (which can be worse than having none at all).

Not having the internal resources for SEO work (probably the most common experience for any SEO).

Technical limitations that prevent the optimal SEO benefits.”

We have covered resource issues and will end the article with politics, but the second biggest problem I see for in-house SEO is technical limitations. They are especially frustrating because there is no short-term fix for the core problem. A survey conducted by SEOclarity indicates that the most efficient SEO tactic depends on company size but technical optimization seems to be the most effective one across the board. That makes technical limitations especially painful. There are workarounds, and in the following, we will cover them all.

the most effective SEO strategies according to SEOclarity

What To Do When Your CMS is Not SEO-Friendly

Content management systems can be so technically limited that you cannot make any changes. The reason can be that it is customized or even completely self-written and doesn’t have SEO functionality. Some CMS’s also just flat out have no SEO capabilities. This issue can be connected to not having engineering resources (see above) or too much technical debt (see below).

The solution here is an environment you can control, anything from a blog to a microsites and landing pages. In the worst case scenario, the blog can be on a subdomain and/or Medium, even though I recommend to post on your own blog first and then use the import function for Medium. It can be on WordPress or another platform, as long as you have full control over it. The upside of a solution like WordPress is that you can control the content on that platform and cover the technical side with plugins, plus you can make any changes yourself at any time.

What To Do When You Have Too Much Technical Debt for SEO

A couple of years ago, I consulted a big travel company in Germany that had so much technical debt that it needed 12 engineers just to keep the site alive. It was so loaded with technical debt that we could hardly implement any SEO recommendations.

Technical debt occurs when development is rushed, and sights have to be lowered. It leads to short-term compromises, which can blow up in the long-term. It is basically the cost of doing things fast instead of right.

Technical debt - also a topic for SEOs

As a consequence, high technical debt slows down your engineering team, until it is paralyzed. The solution is to get all stakeholders to agree to decrease technical debt first and then move on with other goals. It is a very similar situation to be in when you have no engineering resources, with the difference that you, as SEO, have to fight for decreasing the debt. If you have your own developer(s), they cannot help you. Instead, they should focus on decreasing technical debt as well. In the meantime focus on things you can do outside the site, as described above.

Obstacle 3: Politics a.k.a. Interfering Interests

Politics is a hot topic for enterprise SEOs

Politics are very powerful, in and outside of SEO. They can go so far that a company spends tens of thousands of dollars to bring in an agency just to back up an argument. Inside a company, politics should get you resources (and sometimes promoted). It is often not about manipulation a la House of Cards but more about making a point for SEO. 

Oftentimes the hardest part of my job is communicating the value of SEO to the higher-ups. The numbers alone sometimes aren't enough. Even when we've had remarkable quarters, it amazes me how easy it's forgotten the next quarter.

One reason for stakeholder skepticism is the sheer nature of SEO, which doesn’t provide an immediate harvest of the crop. “SEO, unlike every other channel, doesn't have an immediate payout. Throughout my career projects and ideas were overturned or rejected because there wasn't a way to attribute value.” (Jim Christian)

What To Do When Executives Think SEO is Not Important

The solution to this problem lies in stories, pictures, and charts that show and prove the impact of SEO ($$$). As SEOs, we are also salesmen and our product is our ideas (recommendations). We are all salesmen in a way, as Peter Thiel notes in his great book “Zero to One”: “Sales is hidden: The best salespeople don’t reveal themselves as salespeople. Investment bankers sell businesses; people who sell ads are called „account executives“; people who sell customers work in „business development“; people who sell themselves are ‘politicians’”. The term sales often has a negative association, but it doesn’t have to be that. See it as a pitch.

How To Create An ROI Model to Prove the Monetary Value of SEO

Money makes the world go ‘round. It is the strongest argument in every business. If you can show stakeholders the monetary value, you are hard to argue with. For years, it has been a common tactic to use the CPC of a keyword and its search volume to determine its potential monetary worth.

To overcome this challenge my team and I developed a Keyword Database where our universe of keywords was combined with new customer acquisition, ROI estimates, and time estimates. We constantly refined the calculations to be within 2-5% of reality. This made it extremely easy to build a case for the projects that we wanted to create. It was one of the most valuable lessons I learned in my professional career.

A custom click-curve based on your Search Console data

The general formula to calculate the monetary value of keywords is “CPC x Search volume x CTR”. It is the cost you save when ranking organically, instead of paying for the keyword. We can get quite fancy when doing that with a custom click-curve (see above). It is very impressive to executives, and you learn a lot of helpful things along the way. I was inspired how to make your own, custom click curve with Google Search Console data by Alex Galea. Let me show you how:

In the app, select your site and enter “page” and “query” into the “Group By:” field. You can leave the rest on default. The date range is automatically set to 90 days.

Hit “request data”. From here you can either export the data to Excel or keep it in Google Sheets.

Add another column right next to “Position” and call it “Position (rounded)”. In the field, use the ROUND function and select the cell next to it on the left. It will round the position to the next integer, which will later give us a clear CTR / position.  

Select all (ctrl + a) and create a pivot table (data > pivot table).

For the rows, you select “Position (rounded)”, for the values “CTR”. Make sure to select “average” under “summarize by” for the CTR.

What you now have is already very close to the final click curve.

If you like to you can go ahead and copy paste (values only) the first ten positions, or however many you want your click-curve to have, to another cell.

Create a line chart out of the table you just pasted over and show the data labels - et voila! You have a usable click-curve to show around.

Now we want to finish the model by applying that click-curve to find out the monetary worth of a keyword. For that, you want to compile a list of keywords you want to rank for and get their search volume from Google Keyword Planner or another tool of your choice.

I like to use SEMrush’s Keyword Difficulty tool to quickly get the search volume for a list of keywords. It doesn’t give you the CPC, but you can still get that from Google’s Keyword Planner.

Paste your keywords with search volume and CPC into the spreadsheet. I like to give optimistic, realistic and conservative scenarios to manage expectations. That means optimistically you would rank on position #1, realistically on #5 and conservatively on #8. Those are just the rankings I like to pick for my scenarios. You can pick whatever you like, as long as you disclose it to your audience.

Multiply the search volume of a keyword with the CPC and CTR for the respective rankings. So for the first keyword’s optimistic scenario, I multiplied the search volume with the CPC and then CTR for #1.

This list with 3 different scenarios should convince most stakeholders of the value of SEO.

I recommend you to repeat this process 2-4x a year. Your rankings and keyword strategy change and so does your click-curve and ROI model.

How to Evangelize SEO to Executives

“Nothing hampers me more than having to go through layers of red tape to get a page up or modify a live page”. (Micah)

There are two things outside an ROI calculation you can do to convince executives of the need for SEO. First, evangelize SEO through workshops and trainings exclusively for executives. You have to speak a different language when explaining SEO to managers vs. makers. Focus more on the macro perspective, competitors and business impact. Show people how much goes into being successful in SEO.

Second, show results often. Propagate every SEO win, no matter how small.

By getting into a regular rhythm of sharing Google Data Studio reports with the company, I found that people were much more likely to remember our numbers simply because I made them so easy to access and interpret. By sharing it on a bi-weekly cadence, we were able to communicate the value of SEO and actually make it stick. When it came time to request more resources, it was a much easier sell.

As I mentioned in the paragraph “what to do when you don’t have enough time for SEO”, newsletters and dashboard are a good way to show results and get people excited. However, don’t overdo it with the dashboard, especially for executives. If it is overloaded, it will feel like an airplane cockpit, and nobody will look at it.

What To Do When Other Departments Compete with Your Interests

Departments have differentinterests that sometimes conflict with SEO. Just think of SEM going for the same keywords as SEO. I already mentioned the positive aspects of SEO being so holistic, but there are also negative sides. Design, UX, developers, SEM, Social Media and PR are just some of the teams you might collide with. Sometimes you compete for resources, sometimes for clicks.

The best solution is to come together and agree on shared goals, e.g., Objective Key Results (OKRs). In my experience, SEM and SEO either hate or love each other. One proven way to align the two teams is to get executives to agree on optimizing for conversion efficiency. That means bringing in the most conversions for the smallest budget possible. SEM would target keywords the company is not yet ranking organically for and turn the spend down for keywords that are covered by SEO.

Tl;dr: Show the Money and Make People Smarter

In-house SEO faces unique challenges that can be overcome by mastering three skills: proving monetary value, making people smarter and focusing on what can be done.

Sometimes it takes a little creativity, sometimes it takes a little luck, but it definitely takes one thing: perseverance. In my whole career, I have never seen a case in which the mentioned hurdles were overcome easy. It takes a bit of grit, but know that a) you’re not the only one with that problem, b) it is not a death sentence and it c) if you keep at it you’ll eventually crack the nut.

Source

https://www.semrush.com/blog/how-to-overcome-the-biggest-obstacles-as-in-house-seo/

[qsstechnosoft]

10 Famous Apps Built With React Native

In the world of mobile app developments, we’re always looking for swift development cycles, faster time to deployment, and greater app performance. With two operating systems dominating the landscape, enterprises creating mobile apps often face a compromise: apps that give a better user experience, or apps that are faster to develop and run on more platforms and devices?

The concept of creating apps using only one paradigm for all platforms sounds a bit unbelievable. However, React Native, despite its immaturity, allows to accelerate the process of building apps across different platforms, thanks to the likelihood of reusing most of the code between them.

What is React Native? React Native is a native version of the popular web library of the same name and its main purpose is to bring the power of React to native mobile apps development.

React Native components are pure, side-effect-free functions that return what the views look like at any point in time. For this reason it is easier to write state-dependent views, as you don’t have to care about updating the view when the state changes since the framework does this for you.

The UI is rendered using actual native views, so the final user experience is not as bad as other solutions that simply render a web component inside a WebView.

What reason are the largest companies using React Native for?

#1 Facebook & React Native React Native commenced as Facebook’s hackathon project developed in response to the company’s needs. Facebook wanted to bring all the advantages of web development — such as quick iterations and having a single team develop the whole product — to mobile. That is how React Native was brought to life and leveraged in mobile app development for both iOS and Android apps.

Why did they choose React Native? Originally, Facebook only developed React Native to support iOS. However, with it’s recent support of the Android operating system, the library can now provide mobile UIs for both platforms. Facebook used React Native to develop its own Ads Manager app, creating both an iOS and an Android version. Both versions were created by the same team of developers.

Facebook also made React Native open-source, with the idea that compatibility with other platforms like Windows or tvOS could be operated on by the development community, so stay tuned.

Results Performance improvements: Events Dashboard startup is now twice as fast. Most of the advances made were done at the framework level, which determines your React Native app will automatically benefit when transferring to the latest version of React Native app.

#2 Facebook Ads & React Native The social networking platform isn’t the only React Native application that was produced under Facebook’s roof. Facebook Ads was the first React Native app for Android and, the first completely React Native based, cross-platform app built in the company. The framework seemed absolutely suitable for the lot of complex business logic required to accurately handle differences in ad formats, time zones, currencies, date formats, currency conventions, and so on, particularly that a big chunk of it was already drafted in JavaScript.

Why did they choose React Native? From a design viewpoint, the interface is clean with intuitive UX and simple navigation. The animations and transitions are perfect; they do not feel unnatural or buggy at any point. The overall experience is brilliant, and if your marketing team isn’t using the app, Facebook strongly recommend them to start.

Results The first thing you will notice is that the app is lightning faster, regardless of the operations you want to perform; from checking the status of a current campaign to building a new one, all it needs is a second or two at most to navigate to the next level or access the data with ease.

#3 Walmart & React Native Walmart has already proved its innovative attitude introducing Node.js into their stack. A few years later they also revised their mobile app into React Native.

Walmart managed to improve performance of the app on both iOS and Android by using less resources and within shorter time span. 96% of the codebase was shared between platforms while skills and experience of developers were leveraged across the organization.

Why did they choose React Native?

Walmart aims really high, striving to become the world’s largest online retailer. With such big goals the company needs to take bold moves that involve higher risk in order to gain a competitive advantage. That is why they always seek the ways to improve customer experience by trying new technologies.

Results React Native allows for great performance, nearly identical to native apps, and extremely smooth animations.

#4 Bloomberg & React Native Bloomberg’s new consumer mobile application for iOS and Android gives clients a streamlined, interactive experience with simple-to-access personalized content, videos and live feeds featured across Bloomberg’s Media. To develop the application, the company employed a unique mobile app development framework. An engineering team at Bloomberg’s NewYork City headquarters produced the app using React Native app development technology, the primary tool that actually delivers on the promise of cross-platform native app development.

Why did they choose React Native? The consumer mobile app was huge endeavor because we had to transition the entire organization to React Native“ says Gabriel Lew, a senior application engineer at Bloomberg office who led the development team’s effort. (source)

Another advantage of React Native is that it automates code refreshes, accelerating the release of new product features. Instead of recompiling, your app reloads instantly.

#5 Instagram & React Native

Instagram accepted the challenge to integrate React Native into their existing native app beginning from the simplest view you can imagine: the Push Notification view which was basically implemented as the WebView. It did not require building navigation infrastructure, as UI was quite simple.

Why did they choose React Native? The dev team at Instagram faced a few problems on the way, but they substantially improved developer velocity. 85% to 99% of code was shared between Android and iOS apps, depending on products, thus the team was able to deliver the app much faster than they would have with a native solution.

#6 SoundCloud Pulse & React Native SoundCloud Pulse is an application for creators that helps them manage their accounts and keep their community humming. When the company started designing the second set of native apps, they faced a few obstacles. iOS developers were impossible to find and they didn’t want to have a huge gap between the iOS and Android releases. Therefore, an independent research team started to run user-testing sessions with React Native based prototypes.(learn more: IT Team Augmentation)

Why did they choose React Native? Their experience with the framework was generally positive. Developers found it easier to work on a React Native-based application than on a native application. Moreover, they were capable of building the application by themselves without frequent input from specialised mobile developers.

#7 Townske & React Native Townske aims to be your travel inspiration city guide on your next trip. The app connects you with locals to get a list of their favorite places and creates a curated list of places to explore and experience as locals do. It’s not mandatory for users to have an account, which is great, as it allows you to quickly find the next location you want to visit.

Imagine that you have low Wi-Fi connectivity, or that your battery is running low — in these cases, it’s a neat feature to have. ( See more: Famous apps using electron)

Why did they choose React Native? React Native is focused solely on building a mobile UI. Compared with JavaScript frameworks like AngularJS or MeteorJS, React Native is UI-focused, making it more like a JavaScript library than a framework. The resulting UI is highly responsive and feels fluid thanks to asynchronous JavaScript interactions with the native environment. This means the app will have faster and smooth load times than a typical hybrid app, and a smoother feel.

#8 Gyroscope & React Native Gyroscope enables you to see the complete story of your life; it’s the health app on steroids. Not only can you track steps, your workout, or your heart rate, but with the dozens of integrations you can also track activities like productivity on the computer, or use sleep tracker and automatic Ai to make sure you get enough sleep.

Results All the data is exhibited in two attractive, well-designed views: Simple and Cards mode. All tracked data is aggregated in daily/weekly/monthly statements, and you can also easily deep-dive into it and pick on which things you want to focus next.

#9 Wix & React Native Started in 2006, Wix is an online company that provides web hosting and website design services. Users can design and build their sites in HTML5/CSS, as well as mobile websites, using drag and drop utilities. Two popular features of Wix are that developers can create their own web applications to market to other users, and that users do not need to know any coding to create a website. There are several navigation options available for handling navigation in react native apps like React-native-router-flux, react-navigation,airbnb-native-navigation and wix-react-native-navigation out of which I prefer to use react-native-navigation because of its extremely configurable navigation and screen options along with properly maintained and updated codebase. ( See more: Famous apps built with Node.js)

Why did they choose? Whereas native app development is usually linked with inefficiency, less developer productivity, and slower time rate to deployment, React Native is all about delivering the speed and agility of web app development to the hybrid space — with native results. See the project on Github.

#10 Delivery.com & React Native Delivery.com empowers the neighborhood economy by enabling customers to order online from their preferred local restaurants, grocery stores, wine and spirits shops, and laundry and dry cleaning providers. Every day more than one million delivery.com customers explore their areas and order from more than 10,000 regional businesses while at home, at work, or on the go. With headquarters in New York and an expanding presence throughout the U.S., delivery.com offers e-commerce an integral part of local everyday life, helping customers shop, businesses grow, and neighborhoods thrive.

Why did they choose? React Native allows you link the plugin with a native module, so you can connect the map up with the device’s functions like rotate, zoom, and the compass, while utilizing less memory and loading faster. If your app supports previous operating systems (and older devices), this can help you keep the app running smoothly.