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6 Ways to Optimise a Website

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Are you unsure how to successfully optimize your website? You will be happy to discover we have all the top tips you need to transform your site for the better. Find out where to focus your efforts by reading the six ways to optimize your website.

1. Replace Flash with jQuery

It is time to say goodbye to flash once and for all. On top of a slow load time, flash can also not be viewed on various mobile devices, so it can tarnish the user experience. We therefore strongly recommend removing it from your website and replacing it with jQuery, as it offers the benefits of flash that can be viewed on every mobile device with a faster load time.

2. Upgrade Your Website Hosting

Does your website often struggle with a downtime or slow load time? The fault might lie with your web hosting service. We therefore recommending upgrading your hosting by turning to a more reliable host. For instance, Certa Hosting make it is easy to switch your web hosting for free, and they can customize a hosting plan to ensure it compatible with a WordPress, Magento or Drupal site.

3. Utilize Your Title Tags

Transform your website as soon as today with title tag optimization, which can improve your site’s organic ranking in the search engine result pages. That’s because title tags will indicate to Google what a page is about, so it can improve your results in the search engines, which can drive considerable traffic to a website.

4. Optimize Your Content

In addition to optimizing your title tags, you should also optimize your new and existing content. For instance, include anchor text to link one web page to another, and use header tags and subheadings throughout the content. It’s also advisable to write custom meta descriptions for every web page, which will appear in the search engine results pages and could improve your rank.

5. Incorporate Your Contact Information

Customers can become easily frustrated if they need to turn into a detective to find your company’s contact details – and they will not want to fill in a form to find it. Ensure they can easily connect with your business by visibly display your business address, telephone and email addresses onto your website. Adding your contact information can also aid a local search marketing campaign, too.

6. Update Your Website’s Design

Did you know you have between 3 to five seconds to impress a visitor? If they don’t like what they see, they will quickly click away from your site and visitor an industry rival. If you have an unappealing web design with poor content and a slow load time, you can guarantee you will experience a high bounce rate – and many visitors might never return to your site again. Don’t disappoint visitors and create a clean, aesthetically-pleasing and easy-to-use website that reflects your brand.

Do you have any top tips for website optimization? Please write a comment below.

Gain Their Respect: Be The Best Boss For Your Employees

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Being the head of a company and running a business comes with plenty of challenges; you’ll have to navigate your role as the boss day by day and ensure that you deal with things as quickly and efficiently as possible. The greatest assets you have as the leader of your company, are your employees; they are all essential cogs in your machine and need to be happy and motivated to do their job properly. As their boss; your staff will look to you for guidance, advice, and the opportunity to progress and develop alongside the business, so you need to be ensuring that you’re doing all you can to fulfill their needs.

If your team respect you; they’ll listen to you, keep a significant level of communication open with you, and you should be able to run a successful company with their help and dedication. The following are some things to consider to help you be the best boss your employees could ask for, so your business goes from strength to strength with a fully functioning team at the wheel.

StrategyDriven Talent Management Article
Photo courtesy of Pexels

Communication And Feedback

Every employee appreciates the opportunity to share their thoughts, ideas, and worries with senior members of the team. Therefore, you need to ensure that you’re giving your staff ample and regular chances to speak and communicate. Set up brief morning meetings each day, with a longer meeting on a weekly basis. A staff meeting will encourage everyone to share their thoughts and bounce new ideas off one another. It’s also a chance to check on the mood of your company and make sure that everyone is on the same page regarding what needs to done or changed.

Make sure you’re there for one-to-one catch-ups with your employees; you’ll get a thorough understanding of how they’re feeling and you can pass on any feedback or criticism in a professional manner and private setting. You may come across challenging members of staff; you can check out the 10 ways of dealing with insubordination in the workplace and tackle any issues as soon as they arise. The rest of your employees will appreciate the action you’ve taken, and any problematic team members will gain respect for you and should improve.

Reward And Respect

There’s no better incentive to meet and exceed expectations than reward. Figure out what drives your team; get to know them i order to offer a reward that they’ll work hard to achieve. You can also let your team know how much you appreciate them with regular social events, like drinks and a meal, outside of the office environment. Relationships are often strengthened outside of the work setting, and you’ll understand what makes your staff tick a bit better. Take a look at 101 ways to reward employees without giving them cash and get some inspiration to gain their respect.

Try to remember what you wanted from a boss or a leader in the past; be a better version of what you expected, and you’ll have a loyal workforce behind you, ensuring your business progresses and grows.

How To Attract The Right Employees

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StrategyDriven Talent Management Article
Finding the right employees is no easy task, but it’s very important. Not having the right people in place can make or break your company. That’s why businesses everywhere are always trying to come up with the precise formula for drawing in the most ideal candidates for the job.

While it’s not going to solve all of your problems, there are important steps a company should take to ensure they’re bringing in worthwhile people to interview. It’s a waste of everyone’s time when the potential hire isn’t a good fit right off the bat. See how to attract the right employees.

Technology

One way to attract candidates is to have updated technology. Having current computers, systems and an IT department is important. All of these aspects help draw in the right people, so they apply for positions at your company. It’s difficult to get any work done without modern technology, and smart candidates will recognize this and run the other way. You need it to do your job too. For example, xcdhr is an easily configured online self-service system for HR visionaries in ambitious, growing firms. This system makes your HR vision a reality by helping you attract and retain talent.

Culture & Strategy

Potential employees want to know that who they’re going to work for has a strategy and all of the latest gadgets and upgrades. Culture includes having a fancy office to display and a great management team to brag about. It encompasses how the teams celebrate successes and what the company does for fun and offers for volunteer opportunities. Candidates want to know that who they’re working for is going to respect their work-life balance desire. Culture is about the people who work there and how they carry themselves. If your culture is very attractive, then let that be known, so the right people come knocking.

Benefits & Incentives

A big magnet for potential hires are the benefits and incentives packages and competitive salary offerings. People want to know they’re going to get paid well and be recognized for their hard work. Emphasize the perks that are available, such as free coffee, a game room and Friday afternoons off. You have to be willing to give if you want to bring in the right people for the job. There are lots of companies out there, and yours needs to be able to compete if you want the best people working for you.

Career Path

It’s likely a potential hire is going to ask you about a career path in the interview. It’s a good idea to have an answer, instead of saying that you’re unsure. People want to visualize their future and know that they could be with your company for years to come. They want to be assured that their salary and bonuses will rise the longer they work for you. Have performance measures in place so you can track how well each employee is doing.

Conclusion

Finding rock star employees is a challenge. Your job becomes easier when you make your company a desirable option for potential candidates who are a good fit. This is how to attract the right employees.

Top 5 Ways to Improve Your Business

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship ArticleWhether you’re a small business owner looking for advice on how to boost your business, or a professional working for a large business wondering how to make an impact, understanding the different ways businesses can improve is important. There are a number of tips and tricks to do with marketing, sales and the more technical side to businesses that can aid growth, but in many cases, improving businesses can be much simpler than that. Here, we’re taking a closer look at the top five ways to improve your business.

Invest In Your Business

The best way to improve your business is simply to invest in it. You don’t need to have a huge budget in order to do this, and there are many low-cost ways that you can make a better working environment and a better business as a whole. For example, consider looking into sales or automating your marketing for an effective solution. If you do want to invest a little bit of cash, but don’t quite have it to hand, then consider taking out a loan from a bank or something similar to Wizzcash short term loans. This will give you a little helping hand to help you boost your business when you need it.

Set Goals

A simple way to improve your business is to know what you want to achieve, and work out how to achieve those set goals. This way, you know that your business is consistently striving towards something, meaning you will continue to improve your processes and work environment as you go.

Monitor Trends

Events around the world, no matter how big or small, could have an impact on your business. Staying up to date with your industry and even the current economic, social and political environments around you can help you to improve the way your business runs. Monitoring trends doesn’t have to be difficult either – just open your eyes and ears to your local community and this will be done for you.

Boost Employee Motivation

While getting the sales in and ensuring that all work is complete might be at the top of your list as a business owner in order to ensure that you are getting a profit, the best way to do this is through employee motivation. This is one of the most overlooked aspects of businesses, but generally, those who look after their employees will see their staff turnovers decline and see your business begin to boom. There are a number of ways that you can do this, such as regular staff events, rewarding hard-working employees, recognising achievements and encouraging personal and professional development.

Know Your Limits

One thing that many business owners tend to forget is their limits. As they are fuelled with the idea of success, they can quickly wear themselves out and hit bigger hurdles than they may have imagined along the way. Know your personal limits as a business owner, employ the right staff around you to help hold up their end of the business that they may be experts in, and manage your resources in a much better way, and your business will begin to fly.

4 Essential Things To Include On Your Business’s Website

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<StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article
Photo courtesy of Pexels

Your website is an integral part of your business. It’s your online shop floor, and it has to be brilliant in order to really grab the interest of potential customers and businesses partners, and it also has to be easy to use so people can find what they need easily. There are a number of other features that your website should have to boost your business’s chance of success, so read on to find them out!

Easy To Use Navigation Bar

This is integral to any website and determines whether or not it’s going to be easy to use. Every website has one in some form or another and it needs to be the best it can be in order to really enhance your website and make it stand out. Your navigation bar will contain links to other parts of your website, such as specific products or an “about us” page. If your navigation bar doesn’t contain anything useful, or you don’t have one at all, you’re going to find that less people visit and use your website because they can’t do anything useful on it! If you don’t already know what you’re doing then it can be difficult to create your own navigation bar, so it’s good to check out these navigation bar templates to either use or base your own design off.

Backlinked Images

Images are important to your website, but backlinked ones are even more important. Images are important to your website because they give your audience something visual to engage with, if your website visitors see a photo of something that they like then they’re obviously going to be more interested in using your business! Backlinked images have a different purpose. The internet is a place where everyone can use everything of each others, and this includes your images. People can, and will, use your images without your permission for their own benefit. There isn’t much you can actually do about this, but it’s where backlinked images come in. If you use a WordPress image SEO plugin, whenever someone copies an image from your site onto theirs, the image automatically links back to your website when anyone clicks it. This can actually be incredibly beneficial for you as it essentially gets you free advertisement if someone steals your image, definitely something you should be doing to get more traffic to your site!

“Contact Us” Section

This specifically is very important, hence why it has it’s own section. Put quite simply, your customers and other businesses have to be able to get into contact with you if you want your business to go anywhere! Perhaps it’s a general inquiry, or maybe it’s a different business looking to set up a trade deal, regardless of what it is they have to be able to get in contact with you easily. So you need to make sure you’ve got two things in this section. The first one is that you have to include all of your company’s basic details, just in case anyone wants to pay you a visit or give you a call. The second thing should be this, an interactive part of your site where you allow someone to send you a message whilst leaving behind an email and a contact number. This allows you to answer any questions that people might have, bettering your business!

Videos

The reason why you need at least one of these is the same reason why you need images; it’s an engaging format for you to tell your customers what is going on! Often a video demonstrating  or explaining a product’s function is much better than an image or even a piece of text trying to explain it. Videos are much more informative than images and so you should learn how to embed videos on your website in order to make it much more attractive and informative to get people interested in your company.

As long as you do all of the things that are listed here, your website is going to be off to a great start. You’ll have images that make sense and that advertise your company even if they are stolen and used elsewhere, your visitors will know how to get into contact with you if they need to, they’ll be able to move around your website easily and there are going to be plenty of videos that tell your visitors what you do! Having a website means that you have to get visitors to it, and the best way to do it is SEO maximising, so read this to learn about it!