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1. SEO Has Become Much More Integrated and Diverse SEO used to be standalone: no one had any idea what SEOs were doing and how they got pages ranked. Many SEOs would ignore very important digital marketing aspects, including user experience, brand building, etc. The only purpose was to get a page ranked. These days it’s finally different: SEO is just one element of success. It’s next to impossible to achieve high rankings without building authority and brand awareness, or without ensuring users are going to have a good experience using the site. Google has taken all of that in the account: they monitor how users interact with a website, how satisfied they are, and how quickly they find answers when landing on a page from search results. Google has made  trust and authority  important ranking signals. As a result, there are fewer and fewer companies that focus on a single component of SEO (like link building) or even just SEO. Most companies are offering full-package inter...

WebAIM’s Principles of Accessible Design  has laid out a thorough guide for technical standards in terms of defining the best accessibility practices. We’ve taken what we feel to be the twelve fundamental elements and listed them in this section. While this is by no means an exhaustive list, it is a solid foundation that will vastly improve your website accessibility—even if you only stick to these twelve points. Almost all of them are incredibly simple to implement, and won’t impact your site’s overall look or feel in any major way. However, the difference these technical standards will make for your users who have disabilities will be huge, and in the right way. Alternative Text Also known as alt tags, alternative text gives users an understanding of what visual content (images in particular) are showing when they fail to load. Not only is this good for SEO, as they give website crawlers context, but they are hugely beneficial to accessibility for users who are blind or other...

In an ideal world, the journey people take to become loyal customers would be a straight shot down a highway: See your product. Buy your product. Use your product. Repeat. In reality, this journey is often more like a sightseeing tour with stops, exploration, and discussion along the way—all moments when you need to convince people to pick your brand and stick with it instead of switching to a competitor. Staying on top of all of these moments might seem overwhelming, but mapping your customer’s journey can help. It can give you and your team a greater understanding of how your customers are currently interacting and engaging with your brand, and also help illustrate how your products and services fit into their lives, schedules, goals, and aspirations. Let’s take a look at five steps your team can take to start journey mapping. 1. Find the sweet spot where your customers’ goals and your own align Before you start journey mapping, nail down your business goals. Any m...

Unlike content marketing (which is centuries old),  SEO  is a very new discipline. It has been around for just a couple decades, and it quickly became the primary digital focus for many marketers. Yet, SEO cannot exist without content, and I am happy to report that the search industry has reached maturity when it goes back to basics: recognizing that content is  the  most important and fundamental part of the marketing puzzle. Now, with SEO maturing so quickly, there are still many misconceptions and misunderstandings around it. Those misconceptions may impact the content marketing process in a not-so-positive way. Let’s clear things up a bit: 1. SEO Has Become Much More Integrated and Diverse SEO used to be standalone: no one had any idea what SEOs were doing and how they got pages ranked. Many SEOs would ignore very important digital marketing aspects, including user experience, brand building, etc. The only purpose was to get a page ranked. These days i...

Original article URL: https://www.emailonacid.com/blog/article/email-development/email-development-best-practices-2/ Email development can be a daunting task. Many new email developers, or web developers who are new to email, find that the complex and multi-layered email client ecosystem causes endless headaches; a fix for one client breaks their email in three others, or a simple float functions in only half of the email clients available. The best practices that we outline below cover both email design and email development. Keeping these best practices in mind can save you hours of hair pulling down the road. Even with these best practices, don’t forget to test your email. Finicky email clients are just one of the many reasons why you should  test your email  code every time. With  Email on Acid , you can see what your design will look like in more than 70 clients and devices. Email Design Use Single Column Design Keep the email design simple to make lif...