2016 was a monumental year for digital marketing, with the rise of live streaming video, native advertising, and the increased use of personalization. Rather than focusing too heavily on mastering these trends, now is the time to look to what’s ahead. Whether you’re a marketer for a company, work at an agency, or an entrepreneur, sharpen your skills and discover the newest tools and resources by checking out these digital marketing events in 2017: Inbound Where: Boston, MA When: September 25-28, 2017 With over 300 sessions at last year’s conference, there’s something for everyone at Inbound. Inbound marketing is quickly becoming the norm among businesses and agencies looking to generate leads without cold calling or placing expensive ads. Learn about cost effective marketing methods from industry experts – and if none of the sessions are of interest to you, you can hear some inspiring words from celebrities! Past keynotes have included Alec Baldwin, Martha Stewart, Anna Kendrick, and marketing guru Seth Godin. Napa Summit Where: Napa Valley, CA When: March 30-31, 2017 Napa Summit brings together digital marketing professionals and agencies in a more intimate setting to learn top trends from some of the industry leaders. Don’t let the intimate setting fool you though! This exclusive event brings speakers from Disney, LinkedIn, Home Depot, and WebMD. This event has major networking opportunities–just make sure to take notes in case the wine gets passed around more than a few times. DIGIMARCON CANADA 2017 Where: Toronto, Ontario When: May 18-19, 2017 One for the Canadian folks! This event is a great way for marketers to explore dozens of different sessions covering digital strategy, UX, paid search, sustainable growth, and more. DIGIMARCON CANADA promises to send attendees home with a notebook full of action items to drive their digital marketing strategy. As part of series, this conference is also held in various locations throughout the U.S. Digital Design & Web Innovation Summit Where: San Francisco, CA When: September 6-7, 2017 This is a must-attend event for two groups in particular: Digital marketing agencies looking to branch out into web design and development services for their clients AND those looking to improve their own business’ web experience. Connect with individuals from some of the attending companies such as Amazon, Google, Target, BuzzFeed and hear from speakers from American Express, Comcast, Audi, ESPN, and Playstation. PluginsCon Where: Salt Lake City, UT When: September 8-9 2017 If your site is hosted on WordPress or your business develops sites for clients using WP, make sure this conference is on your 2017 agenda. Learn about new plugins to help take your site to the next level, discover the resources that are available to scale your site, and network with other WordPress enthusiasts! PressNomics Where: Phoenix, AZ When: April 6-8, 2017 PressNomics is another event for the companies that love WordPress. It brings entrepreneurs and small businesses that drive the WordPress economy together to collaborate, learn from each other and spend one day playing golf and doing fun cultural stuff! Check out more upcoming WordPress events here. Developer Week Where: February 11-17, 2017 When: San Francisco, CA A solid marketing strategy is useless without an optimized, secure, and speedy website. This event is a great opportunity to round up your design and marketing team to attend this week-long conference packed full of workshops, bootcamps, panel talks, and keynotes covering all new dev technologies. This event is 100% vendor neutral which is why attendees come back year after year for unbiased sessions. Conversion Conference Where: Las Vegas, NV When: April 19-20, 2017 Past attendees have been quoted saying “if you have anything to do with online optimization, this is a must-attend event” about Conversion Conference. As one of the most highly regarded and anticipated CRO events, attendees look forward to learning about the newest and most effective ways to convert leads on your site. Join fellow CRO enthusiasts from Hallmark, Spotify, Salesforce, Expedia, Netflix, and PayPal. The speakers and presenters list is still being finalized but so far, the lineup is chock full of experts from the biggest names in digital marketing. Conversion World Where: Online When: March 9-10, 2017 Can’t spare a few days to travel to an event but need to stay ahead of the digital marketing curve? Conversion World is conveniently hosted virtually. Before you ask: Yes you can wear your pyjamas but no, this isn’t an event that you can tune into while multitasking. There are plenty of opportunities to connect and interact with web and marketing professionals so you’ll need to stay focused. Save some money on travel, food, and accommodations and learn how to improve your business or client’s businesses through the newest conversion rate optimization tactics. Oh and if you weren’t sold already, it’s free. Social Media Marketing World Where: San Diego, CA When: March 22-24, 2017 This event brings 4,000+ individuals together to learn about new ways to create communities on social media. What’s unique about this event is the speaker lineup and corresponding attendees. You’ll hear from business marketers but also social media influencers and celebrities like Zach King, Tim Schmoyer, and Shaun McBride. The speaker lineup tells us that attendees can expect more than business promotion tactics. Bonus: there are also a number of sessions on blogging, podcasting, and analytics. Comment below and let us know which events are on your agenda for 2017!
You’ve built a beautiful, custom site for your client leveraging WordPress’ unique capabilities. The client is ecstatic about their new site and the feedback they’re receiving from customers is positive. But what happens when your client looks to you to help boost their organic search rank? It’s important to be equipped with the top WordPress SEO skills and knowledge to build sustainable relationships with your clients. Out-of-the-box WordPress SEO functionality is definitely a debatable topic, so use these fundamental tips to help your clients rank higher in search engine results pages: Optimize title tags Title tags are extremely important SEO elements to consider when developing your client’s WordPress site. These help search engines understand what each document is about and index them based on relevant keywords and phrases. As a rule of thumb, ensure each title tag is unique, includes appropriate keywords and a call-to-action, and is between 50 and 70 characters long. Still aren’t convinced that this tactic can help your client’s sites rank higher? According to SEO giant, Moz, title tags are the single most important element towards boosting rankings. Write SEO-friendly meta descriptions Similar to title tags, meta descriptions tell search engines and searchers what each page is about. While these can be longer (approximately 150 characters is what we recommend), a common misconception is that meta descriptions need to be complete sentences. They don’t! Meta descriptions should make sense to a reader but feel free to include a date or author if that’s what is important to the page’s content. The longer character limit also allows you to incorporate actionable verbs to help encourage readers to click through. Consider including words and terms like “book now”, “request” or “explore”. Leverage alt image tag best practices Images play a big role in the aesthetics of your client’s websites and can also help drastically improve search engine rankings. The alt attribute (or alt text/tag) tells search engines what the images are about. Saving images before uploading to WordPress with keyword-rich, descriptive file names will help your client’s get more traffic to their site. Like title tags and meta descriptions, be sure to include a call-to-action within your image alt tag such as “learn more about product X”. Why are alt tags so important? It improves the site’s accessibility (how will visually impaired visitors know what your images are about?) and also increases the likelihood of appearing in Google image search results. Optimize for speed The difference between a site that loads in one second and one that loads in three seconds is monumental in terms of SEO and the user experience. A WordPress site that loads slowly will annoy visitors and is one of the key signals Google uses in its algorithm to rank pages. The search engine has an allocated “crawl budget” and if your client’s site takes longer to load, Google can’t crawl as many pages within their budget which can negatively affect their rank opportunity. Here are a few key ways to keep your sites running at top speed: Compress images. Save as a JPEG or PNG and ensure the dpi is 72. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This stores copies of your images and site files in locations all around the world so they can be downloaded to your visitor’s computer faster, speeding up the overall load time of your page. Simplify the code. If you’re developing massive sites for your clients, HTML, CSS and source code files can become monstrous and slow down your site immensely. Simplify files by removing unnecessary spaces and characters. Not sure how fast your client’s WordPress site is loading? Use Google’s handy PageSpeed tools to run a quick test. WordPress SEO hack: Choose a reliable host If your client’s site receives a lot of traffic, or anticipates bursts of high traffic periods, it’s important to choose a reliable host. The host you choose can also improve site speed, too! Many WordPress developers opt for a shared host, which may save a few pennies but how will your agency feel if your client’s site crashes? Ensure you choose a host that provides server management as well as: Security Speed tuning Caching Scalability Ongoing updates of plugins Learn more about managed WordPress hosting for your agency. Simplify permalinks Most site’s default page URLs look something like this: http://somesite.com/blog/?p=38 But if you look at this page’s URL, you’ll see one that’s much more descriptive. Tweaking your site’s permalinks will tell readers what the page is about but also appear in search engine rankings to tell individuals what the page is about. We recommend using a simple permalink such as: /%postname%/ Yes, Pagely does not follow this advice.. fail. Keep in mind that if you’re changing the permalinks to existing pages, you’ll need to redirect any old URLs. Relevant internal links Include internal links to other site pages or blogs (on the same domain) where appropriate. This is a crucial SEO tactic as not all pages will be indexed by Google. This un-indexable pages include ones that are only visible after completing a form, pages built using Javascript, or links within i-frames. Basically, any page that requires a search engine to do any additional work, probably won’t get crawled (lazy much?). Including links to these types of pages within content will help boost your client’s site ranking and also keeps visitors engaged by suggesting other pages to browse. Use header tags [correctly] There are six levels of header tags: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H5. H1 tags typically denote the title of the page whereas H2-6 tags signify sub-headings. Each tag should be related to one another and speak to the same overall theme of the entire page. The H1 tag has long been a recommended SEO best practice to tell search engines what a particular page is about. Some may argue that header tags have recently become less important to rankings. In fact, Moz’s 2013 search engine ranking factors survey denoted H1 tags with a lower score than most factors. However, Google’s recent hummingbird algorithm focuses less on the specific keywords users are searching and more on their intent, header tags that reflect this approach can be extremely beneficial for rankings. For example, try formatting H1 tags as a question that aligns with the page’s content. Answer the question within the page copy. There you have it–a roundup of the most fundamental WordPress SEO best practices to implement while developing your client’s sites. SEO signals and elements change on the daily and take time to stay on top of, look for WordPress Plugins like WordPress SEO by Yoast as great tool to get started making improvements on your own WordPress site.
