SCSC Web Dude Blog

You use email marketing to engage customers and boost sales, but how do you know your campaigns are effective? Is email helping you achieve your goals? Are you reaching your readers? Are your emails getting opened? The only way to know for sure is to measure your key performance indicators (KPIs). What are KPIs? Don’t be intimidated! You mastered your ABCs. You mind your Ps and Qs. And you’re about to learn the basics of email marketing KPIs: specific marketing metrics you can monitor in order to measure progress toward your email marketing goals. Finding and following the right KPIs can show you how your email marketing campaigns are doing, so you can adjust accordingly and get to where you want to go. Which marketing metrics matter to you? Though every metric can be measured, not every metric matters to you. And that’s good news because it would take an awfully long time to track the hundreds of metrics out there. A better approach is to focus on metrics that are relev...

When it comes to your email sign-ups, success is based on three vital elements: design, copy, and the information gathered. We’ll start with the foundation of your sign-up form: the design. There are so many things to consider when it comes to your sign-up design, and it’s vital not to slack on any of them. Placement The placement of your email sign-up form is vital to its success. While you may not think this would fall under design, we believe it does. After all of the hard work you put into creating your sign-up form, it would be a shame for it not to be seen. In order for your sign-up form to bring in more subscribers, you have to make your form present in the right place at the right time. When you’re finding a location for your sign-up form, you need to take your audience into consideration. Would they be more likely to sign up if it was at the top of your website, or if it was available on your Facebook page? There are a number of places where you can place your sig...

BrightEdge In this third and final segment of our guide to basic SEO concepts, we’ll touch on the more advanced SEO definitions and concepts of website “crawlability,” including basic search engine directives, common client and server errors, best practices and web developer resources. You can access  Part 1  of our series, covering  on-page SEO  concepts, and  Part 2 , explaining essential linking terms and related search engine directives. Crawlability In simple terms, “crawlability” refers to the ease with which search engine robots (or “bots” like Googlebot) can “crawl” a website in doing their work of indexing pages to build the search engine results pages (SERPs). There are several tools and best practices webmasters and developers can employ to optimize a website for search engine bots – in other words, maximize its crawlability – as well as minimize the usual crawling errors. The ultimate goal behind site crawlability is to expedit...

BrightEdge Welcome to Part 2 of our 3-part SEO basics series, designed to help you “speak SEO” with your team by becoming better acquainted with the basic SEO concepts most often discussed.  Part 1  of our series covered basic on-page SEO terms and definitions. In this segment, we’ll define essential SEO linking concepts and search engine directives. Search Engine Directives: Definitions Meta robots  refers to the automated search engine “robots” — usually referred to as “bots,” such as “Googlebot” and “Bingbot” — that “crawl” the Web, discovering and indexing individual Web pages in the search engine results pages (SERPs). By using relatively simple HTML (“hyper text markup language”) code, SEOs can “tell” search engine bots what specific Web pages and page-level information to  exclude  from search results, as well as how to handle the links contained within a Web page’s content, via directives (often referred to as “tags”). The working defini...

BrightEdge To help you better understand and communicate more effectively with your SEO team, we’ve composed a 3-part series of basic SEO concepts and their related definitions. While there are many SEO terms, we’re focusing on those that are the most basic and most discussed. In this first segment of our SEO instructional, we’ll go over the fundamentals of on-page SEO concepts and definitions. An Overview of Page Content for SEO On-page text  refers to the actual written  content  of a web page, and should be substantive in offering visitors valuable information. As search engine crawlers crave written content, a best practices checklist for evaluating your website’s pages should include: Word count:  While there is no universal “ideal” word count for all web pages, a generally accepted practice is to have at least 500 and preferably 2250 words per page, but this will vary by topic and the purpose of the page. Your most important content and SEO ...

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...