Of course, each of us dreams of a daily deep and lasting sleep. But for various reasons, not all can afford that. If you need help with your sleep, check out the App Store to find the right apps for yourself.
According to home dweller site, Sleep Cycle is a great app that will wake you up only at the right time, without interrupting non-REM (non-Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. There are 2 phases of sleep: light (REM sleep) and deep (non-REM sleep), during the first stage, we see dreams, spin, move our hands and feet, and even talk, and during the second one, we sleep like logs.
The worst thing is to wake up during deep sleep – you get up all beat up and exhausted for the upcoming working day. The Sleep Cycle is designed to wake you up only when you’re in your light sleep stage. In the app, you first need to choose a pleasant sound signal and do a test to determine where to leave your iPhone on the bed to achieve maximum effect. When the app notices you’re moving, it beeps thanks to an integrated accelerometer.
Set the alarm clock for the time you need. By default, you will be woken up within half an hour of your appointment. By the way, it is recommended to charge your smartphone because the app can “eat” the battery overnight. However, even if you close the app, the Sleep Cycle will run in the background. And in the morning, you can see all the statistics about your sleep phases and their duration, as well as start your working day in an uplifted and cheerful mood.
Sunriser is a very unusual and unique app that wakes you up with, obviously, the sunrise. Since the sun is the main power in our system, they say, to be healthy and active all day, you need to live by it. When the sun rises, everything comes to life, including the human body, so for those who can’t wake up without an alarm clock, a wonderful Sunriser app has been developed.
Its main screen will show a countdown until the sun rises in your area. But if necessary, you can set it as you want to avoid getting up with the lark. Despite its originality, the app is quite simple and easy to use and will be suitable for those who were looking for a great alternative to a built-in alarm clock.
Noisli is a wonderful app that allows you to choose different pleasant sounds that will help you focus on your work or relax before going to bed. The app includes a large collection of various “noises,” including natural sounds (water splashes, leaf rustling, or birds singing) and man-made (the sound of a running fan or train wheels). The app can also change its colors, so you can always choose the best one pleasant to your eyes. The collection of sounds is constantly growing, so you can find your own relaxing melody any time you want.
Many of us have a mixed work schedule that’s completely exhausting. Recharge will develop the proper regime within 6 weeks so that you can have a healthy sleep. The app will help you wake up every day at the same time and also offer daily exercises to keep you up through your day. At the end of it, you will be able to see a full report of your activity, as well as assess your mood on a 5-point scale.
Dreameo
Dreameo is another perfectly developed app that allows you to analyze your dreams. It’s no secret the latter is a reflection of our accumulated problems, as well as a harbinger of serious diseases or psychological issues. For some, they even help predict the future.
In Dreameo, you can record all the interesting sleep details you want to remember and read their interpretations. Track your dreams by the calendar and user-friendly search, and add them to your favorites. In addition, the app has a social network where other users can read and comment on your dreams. Turns out, you have your very own personal dream-book with many dream interpretations in your iPhone.
It’s obvious. You want your WordPress site to rank higher in Google search.
But how do you do it?
An effective SEO strategy can make this happen. But is it so easy?
SEO is a dynamic process. If you want to maintain a robust SEO for your WordPress site, you must cope up with its ever-changing requirements.
That’s where the challenge resides.
Only a well optimized WordPress site can generate higher traffic, leads, and sales. It’s possible when you understand SEO well enough to control it for your website.
Therefore, in this post, I am going to show you the most crucial aspects of WordPress SEO that impact your ranking. I will teach you to step by step on how to control these factors and achieve a higher ranking in search results.
Let’s keep reading.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
It is a process for developing your websites search engine rankings.
“SEO is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine.”
Reread the bold words.
It helps to increase your site’s visibility in the search results. Most preferably in Google, which dominates 88.47% of the search engine market share.
So as a WordPress site owner, you have to prioritize SEO consistently to achieve your business goals.
How is WordPress SEO Different From Other Platforms?
WordPress is a free and open-source CMS (content management system). It allows users to build and manage websites easily. However, there are other CMS as well, which are pretty popular for website development. Among all the CMS, WordPress is the leading one today. It dominates almost 60% of CMS market share and 34% of all websites on the Internet.
Source: Kinsta
Now the question is, how WordPress SEO is different from other web platforms?
Technically, they are not different. The core SEO process is more or less similar. But each web platform requires a diverse technical solution.
For example, you can’t add a WordPress SEO plugin to an HTML or Wix site. On the other hand, an HTML site is more open for customization.
You don’t need too much coding knowledge to control your WordPress SEO. There are plenty of WordPress SEO tools to make your task easier.
Though, plugins never intend to boost your web ranking automatically. SEO tools like Yoast bring you optimization assistance like suggesting and guiding how to make your site rank higher.
When you build your WordPress site, you will find a set of customization settings. You can maximize your web pages and blog post ranking with these settings.
What Is SEO Ranking and Ranking Factor?
Ranking in SEO refers to your content position in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
Suppose, someone search about “the most valuable soccer player” and Google shows this-
The first result is showing a featured snippet. If the search engine thinks a page would make an excellent featured snippet for a user’s search request, it elevates a content in the top.
How does Google measure this? Google states clearly that:
Now, see the next image.
Business Insider is on #1 place in the SERPs for the search request “the most valuable soccer player.”
So how did Business Insider and Investopedia occupied this position in the SERPs?
The simple answer is both sites followed Google’s Ranking Factors.
A ranking factor is the criteria that search engines apply to evaluate a web page or post. After this evaluation, search engines like Google or Bing determines a web content’s ranking in a search result.
Google uses these ranking factors to rank your website in various search results just as I have shown you in the example.
How Does Google Ranking Factors Work for a WordPress Site?
Now that we have learned what is Ranking Factor, here we are going to see how Google Ranking Factors work for a WP site.
People search for something using particular words. Those words are keywords. Following these keywords, Google tries to show you the most relevant search results considering their relevancy, quality, and values.
Google uses different ranking factors in its algorithm to find the most effective search results to the user.
According to its search quality guideline, Google determines these qualities to recognize a web page or content. Some of them are-
– The purpose of a webpage
– Understanding of the content’s quality and reliance
– The reputation of the website and content creator
There are plenty of other qualities Google measures, which I will discuss later in this post. However, these are a few of the most important attributes Google uses while generating search results and their placement.
How To Track SEO Ranking Factors?
Before you get on with top SEO ranking factors, it’s necessary to learn how to track them first.
There are plenty of easy ways you can do this-
You can manually search by keywords your customers are using
See where your website stands in the SERP for those keywords
List the top ranked pages for those keywords AKA competitors
Check those websites SEO profile i.e., backlinks, keywords, contents, etc
Check their content type, quality and also website design
Check their loading speed, URL construction, and navigation
Check their mobile device view as well
It demands hefty measures to do all these manually. So you will need to use the best SEO tools to execute these steps and get accurate results.
You can also get help from Google Analytic to know how your website is performing, understand your audience, learn which post and pages are most visited, etc.
The tools let you know where to optimize, how much you need to optimize your WordPress site.
I think, now you are ready to read about top SEO ranking factors.
Let’s get on with them.
1. An easy and accessible Website URL
The first ranking factor I want to mention is your website URL. It will be easier for Google bots to reach and crawl your site if you create an optimized and accessible website URL.
When you build your website, you need Google to visit your site to understand your content and page types. To help Google bots find your URL, you can do the following:
Create a robots.txt file to command Google bots where and where not to see for your website information. For example, a bot wants to visit www.example.com/gallery. Before it visits this page, it checks for http://www.example.com/robots.txt file.
Set up a sitemap. A sitemap is a list of all your web pages which helps Google to index them.
As a WordPress user, you can create a sitemap with any prominent WordPress SEO tool like Yoast.
2. Web Page Speed
Page speed is a crucial SEO ranking factors for many years. When you have a website that loads faster, it gives users a better experience. Google wants every website owner to deliver that.
Recently, Google announced their new mobile page speed algorithm. It will be effective from July 2019, where they stated the importance of page load speed. This new algorithm update bides you to increase your page speed for mobile search. Google suggests you use open source automated tools like PageSpeed Insights to measure and improve your site’s speed.
This is a free tool by Google which can give you a good overview of your sites loading speed status.
3. Mobile Responsive Design
The number of mobile users around the world will reach 5 billion marks in 2019. One of the main reasons for this massive growth is the accessibility to the internet by mobile phones. People are more cozy to use the web on their mobile phones than any other device now.
Hence, your WordPress Site must be mobile responsive to rank higher in the SERPs. Google recently introduced Mobile-first indexing for all websites.
If your WordPress site is mobile-optimized, It will index faster than the site which doesn’t have a mobile responsive design.
4. BackLinks
Backlinks are the most valued ranking factor to Google for any website. A backlink is getting a hyperlink from another website. It makes your site reachable and establishes connections throughout the Internet.
Backlinks tell search engines that either a site is well recognized or not. So it has a significant impact on any website’s ranking.
You can create different types of Backlinks for your website. But first, let me show you some essential terms related to backlinks which you need to understand-
Link Juice: the value or equity passed from one page or site to another by links
No-Follow Link: tells search engines not to follow the links on a given page
Do-Follow Link: Every link you add to your blog posts are do-follow links, and they pass link juice.
Linking Root Domains: It shows how many backlinks you get from a specific domain.
Low-Quality Links: The links come from spammy, harvested, or automated website.
Internal Links: These are the links from one page to another or one content to another in the same domain.
Anchor Text: It is the text you use for a hyperlink.
WordPress SEO revolves around three types of Backlinks.
Inbound Links
Outbound Links
Internal Links
So how do you create or earn backlinks?
Create informative and engaging content.
Guest post on high authority websites.
Collaborate with bloggers for mentions.
Suppose, you publish a WordPress tutorial, and high authority sites like SiteGround include this tutorial link to one of their relevant content. It will be more likely Google ranks your content higher. It happens because WPbeginner is a trustworthy and highly recognized website. After they give you a backlink, your authority also influenced by it.
You must link your website to high authoritative and niche sites. Random websites with low authority shouldn’t be your goal.
Link building with top websites in your niche makes your site’s authority trustable to Google as well as to the users. It also ensures the quality of your content and provokes users to share your content.
Is domain age important? Yes. It is a crucial ranking signal, indeed. An Ahrefs study shows, they put 2 million random keywords searches and gained data on the top 10 ranking pages. It is found, most of the top websites are at least 3 years old.
Nonetheless, your URL needs some years to create a reputation. If you follow the SEO guidelines I’m discussing here then your site optimization is on course already.
Next, you must think about your domain name. People will find you with it. Unless having a great name, your chances of being addressed become less effective. How to choose a perfect domain name?
GoDaddy shares some useful tips before you choose a domain name. Take a look-
Make it easy to type
Make it short
Use Keywords
Try not to forget your niche
Use no numbers and hyphens
Create a memorable domain name
Research before you take a name
Appropriate domain name extension.
Build your brand
Remember one thing. Google penalizes exact match domains if you have a spammy website with low-grade content. But, exact match domains attract people more.
So, here, what happens if your intentions are honest to build a better website? Google likes the exact match domain if your site is highly optimized, you have quality content, and you deliver real values to the users.
Now let’s talk about domain and page authority. It’s a combination of your content quality and other SEO factors like link building and social media shares. It’s one of the prime SEO signals for your WordPress site.
Your site needs to score on both domain and page authority from 0 to 100. If you score higher, your chances of being in the top search results increase.
The best way to check this ranking score is by using Moz.
Content is the way that helps the users to learn something they like. Producing quality content should be your priority. When you accomplish this goal, your website and services will gain trust.
Throughout this post, I mentioned too much about quality contents which are optimized. They are the key to turn a reader into a customer.
Highly optimized content influences your WordPress SEO. 90% of content marketers like to improve their audience’s informational needs.
Google search algorithm depends on keywords. When people are searching for something, they use keywords too. Before you want to create content, you need to research your niche and find out the most popular keywords. They help you to understand what informations your potential visitors are searching for.
While writing your content, put these keywords in there. It is essential. It will help Google to mark your content most useful to users. Nevertheless, you must create your content unique and valuable. Duplicate content will drain your search rankings severely.
7. Social Sharing Optimization
According to an E-consultancy report, 74% of companies and 82% of agencies claimed that they have either high or little social media integration to their SEO gameplan.
Only after two months of E-consultancy gathered info for their report, Googles Matt Cutt released a video where he said, social shares and likes indicate a profile’s authority, it doesn’t affect search rankings.
So, social sharing isn’t a direct SEO ranking factor. Why? Because anyone can link up their site or share content without any prior quality in social media.
But most of the high ranking pages and posts have a lot of social media sharing and public reactions. They do it by using the power of social media icons to increase engagement.
When you post content in social media, and it gets a lot of shares, likes, and comments, Google does consider it as useful and rank it top in niche search results. It helps you indirectly.
Besides your social media presence, you need to make your post option easy to share through different social media, encourage your readers to share your content, and participate in discussions.
8. On Page SEO Factors
I have discussed off page SEO most of the part in this post. For example, link building, social media marketing are the top off-page SEO. Besides this, on-page SEO is also a vital ranking factor.
To rank higher in any search engine, essentially you need to improve your on-page SEO signals.
To maintain a well balanced on-page SEO, you need to cater these things below-
Content Page:
A leading content page is what you need forever. Moz shares two specific criteria for a high-quality content page. They are-
i. Supply great content and create demand for more content.
ii. You must create linkable content. Unless people can’t be able to link it, your content never going to drive any traffic. Either it’s good or bad, it must be linkable.
Title Tag:
You should use keywords in your title tags. It helps Google to find out which title is most relevant to the users. It is the second most prominent on-page SEO factor.
URL:
I have already discussed the URL factors in this post. You must ensure the post category reflected in your URL. Here is an example of an optimized content URL: www.example.com/2014/06/content-for-everybody-nobody/
There are some other particular things you should care to enhance your technical SEO.
– You should use a header tag to show content order. WordPress editor lets you use h1, h2, h3 subheaders.
– Write a meta description for each of your content. It summarizes and highlighted your topic. Help Google to index your content relevantly.
– Utilize keyword phrases in image alt tags. It will show Google how relevant your images are.
9. Authentic Business Info
When you include your real business information to your WordPress site, it will enhance your local SEO rankings. People find it necessary to get your business information through a Google search. In 2018, 27% of customers did an online search daily to find a local business.
Google wants you to reveal your local business data. It is one of your responsibilities too. So, before you input your authentic information, you should be carefully managing these areas-
Your name, address, and phone number
Complete your Google My Business listings
Listing your business in facebook
Include the exact local search terms while listing your business in Google
10. User Experience
Since 2015, Google officially using artificial intelligence like RankBrain. It helps the search engine to asses how your business is performing, and what experience you deliver to your customers, etc.
Google takes notice of these user behavior listed below.
Your click-through rate
Your bounce rate
How much time your average user is spending on your website
These factors help google to rank your site. How does it happen? When you get a low bounce rate, low CTR and people don’t like to stay on your website—Google decides your site is irrelevant to their search.
If this happens for a large number of users, eventually your ranking will deteriorate.
What is another side of the coin? If your titles are likable, you share helpful content, your design is responsive, and people love to stay in your site, you are winning. This kind of user experience tells RankBrain that your website is a great one, and you rank higher.
Final Thought
So, these are the most vital ranking factors you should consider seriously. I believe now you can redefine your WordPress SEO more than ever.
Do you have any questions in mind? Let me know what do you think.
If you’re thinking of turning your focus more toward app website design, we have both good news and bad news for you.
The good news is, there’s a growing need for app websites, which could mean plenty of work for you. The bad news is, as more and more app websites are being built, visitors are beginning to suffer from “app website fatigue”. If your site looks like all the others, you’ll be lucky if you can keep a visitor interested for more than 5 seconds – not anywhere long enough to make a sale, much less convince that visitor to stick around.
The solution is pretty straightforward. Build a better website.
Easier said than done, right?
Follow the steps below, and you can start creating app websites that are not only attention-getting, but potential conversion powerhouses.
5 steps to Creating “Take Your Breath Away” App Websites
Step 1: Choose a “can hardly stop looking at it” color palette
Your choice may to some extent be a matter of taste. You’ll find it helpful to view a few examples, like those presented here. Whatever color palette you choose; it should follow these three simple rules:
– It should instantly attract a visitor’s attention
– It needs to be on-brand, and
– It also needs to visually support your website’s message
Over utilizes BOLD color touches in a way that instantly attracts attention.
Forest aligns its color palette with its brand with earth colors like greens and browns; a color scheme that makes the app visually memorable.
FlightCard uses a subtle, cold color palette to reinforce the message that boarding passes are so easy to use that you almost forget you’re even carrying one.
Looking for a color palette that will appeal to a larger audience? BeApp2 is a perfect example.
Step 2: Display crystal-clear product pics
If people can’t immediately see what the app looks like, the 5-second rule is going to kick in. They can usually tell at a glance if it will be easy to use or involves a not-so-flat learning curve. They can also see how it differs, if it does, from the other 400 or so apps on the market.
Pennies emphatically displays what their app looks likes on a smartphone. At a glance, you can tell how intuitive it is to use and even figure out how the color codes function.
You can create a similar app website with BeWallet as your starting point. This pre-built website was designed from scratch for financial apps; a potential gold mine since there are SO many financial apps out there in dire need of a decent website – and you can do much better than “decent”.
Or, you could choose a more general pre-built website like BeSoftware if you want to display crystal-clear pics from inside the app.
JibJab takes things one step further by employing a simple yet persuasive tactic to show what its app does. It shows the before and after.
Step 3: Show visitors how the app works
If people can’t tell how an app works, they’re less likely to become interested. Helping them image themselves as actual users is a powerful marketing tactic
PeekCalendar has placed a video on its hero section. It demonstrates how people can use their app to better organize their lifestyle.
BeApp3 allows you to give visitors the full app experience by adding product images and a video that shows exactly how the app looks and works.
BePay has placed a Watch Video CTA button right above the fold, so visitors can immediately go to their product demo video.
CutestPaw is a pet-lover’s dream app. Everything is cleverly rolled up into a single hero image that shows how the app works AND what it looks like on a smartphone. Anyone who likes little kittens might be tempted to purchase the app.
Step 4: (Over)use “white” space
White space is sometimes a design element you just can’t use too much of. A page that’s 95+% white space can often do the best job of highlighting a message. White space is so important that it’s an app website’s #1 visual element.
Tha Fly Nation offers a clean, airy design that directs the eye toward focusing on the site’s key elements.
You can create a similar experience with BeProduct4 or BeHosting2— two pre-built websites where white space is effectively used to enhance the visitor’s experience and emphasize the critical elements on the page.
SpellTower is perhaps THE most extreme when it comes to white space. It’s part of their brand and it drives the message home like no other. Now, you can understand why 95% whitespace can be so effective.
Step 5: Make your CTAs grab them by the eyeballs
The next worst thing to forgetting to include a CTA button is to have one that doesn’t stand out—really stand out. A CTA button has to be so big, bright, and bold that a visitor simply can’t resist clicking it.
Big, bright, and bold hints at greater things to come.
Wire‘s CTA button clearly stands out above the fold: it’s big and bold enough to draw your attention to it the instant you’ve finished reading the headline. It’s centered on the page, like a “gate” you can’t move around, but need to click if to move forward.
BeERP uses precisely the same bright-green button for its main CTA. A secondary, somewhat nondescript optional button is on the right.
You can also direct attention to your CTA by having it match other elements on the page. BeKids is a great example of this. You can see how the blue of the CTA button matches several of the hero section’s visual elements.
Summary
As you can see, these steps are not complicated at all. They give you a surefire means of building an app website that’s eye-catching. It will stand out from the competition and is built for conversion.
Use the most stunning visuals you can get your hands on, don’t skimp on the use of white space. You need to know what your audience wants, and you’ll be off and running.
As simple as these steps are, building a quality website takes time. That’s true for app websites as well. You might be juggling multiple projects and facing one emergency deadline after another. Then, you might try the following approach.
You’ll find a large and impressive gallery of 400+ pre-built websites on Be Theme. You can select from it and customize it to your liking. You’ve seen several in the foregoing examples.
They are functional and visually impressive. They feature interactive elements, stunning effects, and intuitive navigation. Personalize one to fit your app and you’re good to go!
Every Layout is a new work-in-progress website and book by Heydon Pickering and Andy Bell that explains how to make common layout patterns with CSS. They describe a lot of the issues when it comes to the design of these layouts, such as responsive problems and making sure we all write maintainable code, and then they’ve provided a handy generator at the end of each article to create our own little frameworks for dealing with these things.
They also have a complementary blog and one of the posts called “Algorithmic Design” caught my eye:
We make many of our biggest mistakes as visual designers for the web by insisting on hard coding designs. We break browsers’ layout algorithms by applying fixed positions and dimensions to our content.
Instead, we should be deferential to the underlying algorithms that power CSS, and we should think in terms of algorithms as we extrapolate layouts based on these foundations. We need to be leveraging selector logic, harnessing flow and wrapping behavior, and using calculations to adapt layout to context.
The tools for flexible, robust, and efficient web layout are there. We are just too busy churning out CSS to use them.
I’m looking forward to seeing where this project goes and how many more layouts these two end up documenting.
