Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) as it is commonly known should be a part of every organization's marketing strategy. With close to 50% of online purchases starting off with an online search, you need to make sure that your business and products can be easily found online. This is more important for eCommerce businesses who must work even harder to get visibility on search engines such as Google. Even the best eCommerce platforms like Shopify, Bigcommerce or Magento have understood the importance of SEO and included many services and add-ons that can help companies effectively optimize their online stores on the basis on key SEO criteria.
Effective SEO is one factor that can cause your eCommerce site under or outperform competition. So, you need to make sure that the pages of your eCommerce site appear relevant to a search engine for the search terms (aka keywords) that your prospective customers could be using. Some enterprises may not always be aware that their eCommerce platform lacks the necessary features that can make their online store search-engine-friendly. In this article, we present some of the basic but most important SEO factors that your eCommerce store must have. Page Title: A page title is the text that shows up in the tab section at the top of the browser. Considered to be one of the most important SEO elements, the title should be effectively optimized. It is necessary that your eCommerce platform lets you modify the titles for any time of page. Some online store providers only let you edit the product page titles but not the ones for categories. Search Engine Friendly Navigation: Customers and search engines like it when they are able to easily move around your site. Make sure that the navigation structure meets the following SEO criteria:
301 Redirect: Select a platform that allows you set 301 redirects. Many eCommerce sites like to delete pages once products are discontinued or categories changed. With 301 redirect, you can redirect visitors and link juice from the selected page to a new page on your site. Blog: Google has time and again emphasized the importance of content. According to them, content marketing can be used as an effective strategy to build back links. In such a scenario, a blog becomes an indispensable tool. For your online store, look for a platform like Bigcommerce which supports a feature-rich blog and other things like social sharing and RSS feeds. Social Sharing Buttons: Are easily identifiable icons that allow site visitors to share your products, blogs or site information on the most popular social networks. Picking an eCommerce platform is no cake walk. While you may feel tempted to use the cheapest or easiest solution, you may regret your hasty decision later on. Robust platforms such as Bigcommerce offer a number of tools and extensions that can help businesses monitor the SEO aspects of their online store. For instance, the 'Plug In SEO – SEO Store Auditor' or 'SEO Doctor' can help track a store's issues with search engine performance and whether they should be fixed. Not all eCommerce platforms provide such extensive functionality, so make sure you spend enough time in searching for the best eCommerce platform for your business. Are there any other SEO elements that eCommerce storefronts must implement? Share your suggestions with us through the comments section below. The digital era has given eCommerce businesses a new platform to redefine its marketing efforts. Many businesses have already begun to develop and manage customer relationships on social networking sites. Nearly 81% of small and medium-sized businesses use social media today and 94% do so for marketing purpose, says LinkedIn in its recent study. So, whether it's B2B or B2C marketing, eCommerce sites should be aware of the global movement towards reckoning the digital age to promote products and communicate with customers. Social media is one part of the digital era that has greatly impacted organizations world over. With time, social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter have become a medium not just for communication but also for customers to share concerns, ask questions and express opinions. As social networking sites connect people to people and people to businesses, we can expect a large number of eCommerce platforms like OpenCart use social networking to not just promote products or connect with buyers, but also as a viable and profitable selling partner. In 2016, we can expect sites such as Facebook facilitate the acts of buying, selling and paying. These sites impact eCommerce businesses through social buying, social selling and social payments. Facebook currently stands at the top of the list, but this will soon change as other social networking channels like Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn are making more efforts to optimize for OpenCart eCommerce. Many of them are also using paid advertising options to drive more traffic to their website and increase product visibility. Enterprises may also choose to add social media plugins to their eCommerce stores. If you are an SMB on a widely used eCommerce platform like OpenCart, there are a number of extensions you can include to leverage social media for your eCommerce business. As a part of OpenCart custom development, you can consider adopting the social networking extensions below to increase your webstore's traffic:
eCommerce and social networking sites together can nurture your fans and followers. Be sure to plan your marketing strategies using the above mentioned social networking extensions. With time and patience, it will pay off. Are you aware of any other ways social networking sites are helping eCommerce businesses? If yes, please leave your comments below. We are all familiar with just how much mobile usage in general has increased in the last few years. With Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing, mobile app developers and users have a lot more innovation and advances to look forward to in 2016:
Here are some app development trends we can expect to witness in the coming year: 1. Increasing popularity of Swift: Apple's programming language, Swift is fast becoming a developer favorite. It is not only being promoted as an application language but also as a systems language of the future. Swift is based on a compiler infrastructure that enables developers to write reliable code from the very beginning. 2. Enterprise Apps gaining traction: Mobile ownership is on the rise so are the number of apps being offered on various app stores. Likewise, enterprises too have begun to see value in using enterprise apps. Some benefits of these are improved employee productivity and other financial benefits. Businesses are more willing to build the best enterprise apps to stay competitive. 3. Mobile Security becomes a necessity: As per a Gartner report's prediction (http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2846017) more than 75% of mobile apps may have failed security tests in 2015. iOS 9 and Android Marshmallow both have upped their security measures, this means that sufficient attention must be paid to mobile security in 2016 and beyond. 4. Cloud based Apps on the rise: 2016 may well be dubbed as the year of the Cloud. The industry may get to see an amalgamation of mobile and cloud computing. Cloud provides a number of advantages, it can retain small sized apps, handle bandwidth and even connect applications across devices. A majority of web developers are typically familiar with CSS, HTML and JavaScript. For them, native mobile app development may be an uncharted territory. Native app development may be considered inherently complex because each platform uses a different programming language. To build an Android app you need Java and for iOS, you need to use Objective-C or Swift.
However, with recent developments in mobile technologies, it is now possible to use compilers such as PhoneGap to port and install apps across platforms. Apart from PhoneGap, there a number of frameworks that make this portability possible. They are highly effective in bridging the gap between web and mobile platforms. Let us take a look at some of the best mobile web app frameworks in the market today:
Which of the above frameworks do you prefer and why? Share your insights with us. Mobile development has never been any easier. There are a number of JavaScript frameworks that can help developers build mobile apps. These frameworks make a developer's life easy by providing number of functions and reducing the time it takes to develop apps. A large number of options also means more confusion for developer. Through this article, the aim is to reduce this confusion and present the salient aspects of the best JavaScript frameworks in the market.
Hopefully, the frameworks suggested in this article will be a solid starting point for those developers and businesses who need to decide which framework to use for app development. The final selection will ultimately depend on skill set of the development team, project needs and technical expectations from the final application. Mobile application development – be it for iOS or Android is not a hurdle-free process. Building for a native platform does come with its share of risks. As a result, organizations prefer to take help of third party organizations who can develop native apps for them. It is therefore no surprise that we get to witness a steady increase in the number of Android app development service providers. Outsourcing Android app development offers various benefits and has great scope. It is an option that many organizations opt for. In this article, we discuss the scope and benefits of outsourcing. It is a mobile world today and about 80% of internet users own a smartphone. iOS and Android are the two ruling platforms in the market today. The popularity of mobile and mobile applications has also spread to the business world. Organizations now prefer to invest in not only consumer-facing mobile apps but also business apps for internal employee use. Why should you opt for Android Application Development? As we all know, Android OS is an open platform, which makes it the ideal choice to develop everything from a functional enterprise app to a media-rich games application. One of the OS’s benefits is that it is based on a modified version of Linux kernel. It is license free, royalty free and can be distributed in different ways. Apart from this, opt to build out-of-the-box Android apps also gives you a wider range of audience. With shrinking timelines and resource constraints, many businesses decide to get outside help for their app development needs. Let us take a look at some of the benefits of outsourcing Android app development:
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