If you are building or scaling your business, your website is one of your most powerful assets. It’s your digital storefront, your branding hub, and often the first impression you make on potential customers. And in that landscape, alt text is one of those details that can either elevate your brand visibility or leave opportunities on the table.

In this article, we’ll unpack what alt text is, why it matters, and how businesses can leverage it to maximize both accessibility and SEO. By the end, you’ll see how a few words of thoughtful description can help you win more traffic, trust, and conversions.

What Exactly Is Alt Text?

Alt text — short for alternative text — is the written description added to images on a webpage. Its primary purpose is to provide context when the image cannot be displayed or when a visitor is using a screen reader. But beyond accessibility, alt text plays a huge role in how search engines understand your content.

Here’s something that might blow your mind: Google’s sophisticated AI still can’t perfectly understand images without textual context. Search engines are also blind in a way without alt-text. While they can crawl and index your written words, they, however, can’t “see” your images. Without alt text, that valuable image content remains invisible to them. By adding descriptive alt text, you essentially translate your images into searchable language that boosts your overall SEO.

So while it may seem like a small technical detail, alt text is really a strategic tool.

Why Should I Care About Alt Text?

Here is why you should care :

Accessibility Builds Trust and Loyalty

Inclusivity is no longer optional. Many potential customers rely on screen readers due to visual impairments. If your website is missing alt text, you’re excluding a portion of your audience. By simply writing clear descriptions for your images, you show empathy and respect. And that builds loyalty.

 Alt Text Fuels Your SEO

Search engines can’t interpret images the way humans can. By writing optimized alt text, you’re essentially whispering in Google’s ear: “Here’s what this picture is about.” This extra context can help your pages rank higher, especially when your alt text includes relevant keywords naturally.

For entrepreneurs, this is free organic traffic you can’t afford to miss. Every visitor who finds you through search is one step closer to becoming a customer.

 Improves User Experience Beyond the Screen

Technical failures happen more than you think. Sometimes images don’t load. Maybe the user has a slow internet connection. Perhaps your image hosting service is experiencing technical difficulties. Sometimes corporate firewalls block certain image types or external resources. In mobile environments with limited data plans, users might disable image loading entirely to conserve bandwidth.

When that happens, alt text ensures users still understand the context. Instead of being confused by a blank square, they still get the full story.

In other words, alt text acts as your safety net. It guarantees your content communicates effectively even when technology fails.

Legal Compliance and Avoiding Risk

According to the World Health Organization, approximately 2.2 billion people worldwide have some form of vision impairment. That’s roughly one in four people on this planet.

In many regions, there are accessibility laws in place. These laws require websites to be usable by people with disabilities. Failing to be compliant can put a business at legal risk.

In 2023 alone, there were over 4,000 website accessibility lawsuits filed in the United States. That’s more than ten lawsuits every single day. Companies like Target, Netflix, and Domino‘s have faced high-profile lawsuits specifically related to website accessibility issues. Domino’s case went all the way to the Supreme Court.

These lawsuits are completely preventable. Simply adding alt text is one of the easiest ways to safeguard your business and stay compliant with regulations.

Most startups and small businesses with limited funds do not have the luxury of paying hefty settlements, so as site owners, it is best to get this remedy as soon as possible.

How to Write Effective Alt Text

Now that you know why it matters, let’s talk about how to write alt text that actually works.

 Be Descriptive, Not Robotic

Instead of writing something vague like “image” or “photo,” describe what the picture shows. For example, instead of:

  “Dog”

  “Golden retriever puppy playing with a red ball in a park”

The second example not only paints a clearer picture for users but also gives search engines more context.

 Keep It Concise

Alt text is not the place for lengthy sentences.

Aim for one short, clear description — usually under 125 characters. Screen readers cut off longer text, so brevity ensures clarity.

 Use Keywords Naturally

If your target keyword fits naturally, use it. For example, if your keyword is “eco-friendly water bottle,” and your image shows that product, your alt text could read:

  “Eco-friendly stainless steel water bottle on a wooden desk”

Avoid keyword stuffing. Forcing phrases like “eco-friendly water bottle” into every image alt text looks spammy and hurts your SEO.

 Skip Redundancy

You don’t need to write “image of” or “picture of” in your alt text.

Screen readers already announce that it’s an image. Jump straight into the description.

 Prioritize Meaningful Images

Not every single image needs detailed alt text. Decorative elements (like background patterns or design flourishes) can have empty alt attributes (`alt=””`) so they don’t clutter the experience for screen readers. Focus your energy on product images, infographics, charts, and photos that add real value.

Use Cases for Alt Text

So, how do entrepreneurs apply this practically? Let’s look at a few scenarios.

E-commerce Businesses

If you sell products online, alt text is your silent salesperson. Well-written descriptions make your products discoverable in Google Images, which drives buying intent traffic straight to your store.

For example, instead of:

  “Shoes”

  “Women’s black leather ankle boots with side zipper”

That extra detail improves both search visibility and conversion. Despite its simplicity, alt text remains one of the most overlooked aspects of web development.

Content Creators and Coaches

If you publish blogs, webinars, or guides, alt text ensures your visuals (charts, screenshots, promotional graphics) contribute to SEO. It also makes your content more accessible to a broader audience, expanding your reach.

Startups and Small Businesses

When you’re building awareness on a budget, every ounce of organic visibility matters. Alt text is one of the cheapest SEO wins available. It helps your site compete with bigger players who may overlook this detail.

Personal Branding for Entrepreneurs

If you’re building a personal brand through photos, speaking events, or media features, alt text ensures your image-based content contributes to your discoverability. Imagine someone searching for “entrepreneur keynote speaker Singapore” — if your event photo has the right alt text, you could appear.

Common Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make with Alt Text

Despite its simplicity, many entrepreneurs miss the mark. Here are mistakes to avoid:

 Keyword stuffing: Writing alt text like “alt text alt text entrepreneur SEO alt text” doesn’t fool Google.

 Being too vague: “Business image” doesn’t add value.

 Forgetting brand consistency: Use alt text to reinforce your brand voice subtly.

 Ignoring charts and infographics: Data visuals need alt text too, or you lose SEO and accessibility benefits.

Final Thoughts: Don’t Overlook the Small Things

As entrepreneurs, it’s tempting to focus only on the big, flashy strategies — product launches, ad campaigns, scaling operations. But sometimes, it’s the quiet, overlooked details that make the difference between being found and being forgotten.

Alt text may look small on the surface, but its ripple effects touch accessibility, SEO, brand reputation, and even legal compliance. By investing just a few extra minutes to write thoughtful alt text, you’re investing in a better experience for your customers and a stronger foundation for your business.

Remember the 2.2 billion people with disabilities; though they may face visual challenges, they nonetheless represent real people with real purchasing power.

So next time you upload an image, don’t just leave that alt text box blank. Use it as a chance to improve your visibility and show your customers that you care.

It’s often the little things that make the biggest impact or sink a mighty ship. If you want professional help optimizing your digital presence, drop us a note as we specialize in strategies that ensure every detail of your online presence is working for you and not against you, including alt text.

The geographic distribution of website visitors today makes it important for a site to be able to deliver content reliably and without delay; otherwise, a visitor will leave for another one in a snap. CDNs help eliminate poor download experience by providing faster site downloads, so businesses must adopt them, especially those serving global audiences — even if you’re not speaking to the world, having one is still good.

CDN comes with lots of benefits that affect different areas of a website, directly or indirectly. These are some:

1 Quicker Website Loading Times

One thing you’ll notice almost immediately after setting up CDN service is how fast your web pages load now. What happens here is that CDNs cache (store temporarily) copies of websites on their servers worldwide. Every time someone visits your site, instead of pulling information from just one server, it pulls data from the closest server possible in order to reduce latency time, therefore speeding up page display – which leads to higher customer satisfaction rates and lower bounce rates, too.

When people get tired of waiting for a web page to download, they close it and move on. This may result in a loss of potential revenue for website owners. So you do not want to have such a problem and instead have as many happy visitors as you can.

2 Increased Reliability For Websites

With many CDN servers having copies of your website, you won’t have sleepless nights wondering whether your website is showing up! CDNs come equipped with strong failover capabilities and redundancy features, so if something goes wrong at one place, there’s always another copy somewhere else waiting to be shown.

By distributing content across multiple servers, CDNs reduce the chances of server failures or network congestion which could cause downtimes. This ensures that even if you get a spike in visitors or some hosts go offline unexpectedly, users can still access your site continuously without interruptions hence keeping business on track all day every day – if necessary.

3 Aids With Higher Rankings On Search Engines

Site speed is an important ranking factor for search engines like Google and Bing etc., because it affects user experience.

When it comes to user experience, search engine algorithms don’t take prisoners! So webmasters should do everything possible within reason (and perhaps beyond) to make their sites perform well in terms of loading times which will help them rank higher up on SERPs. In other words, people whose websites are not fast enough need to start worrying about this issue right now because, before they know it, their competitors might have already overtaken them thanks to better CDN optimization techniques.

Apart from that, many CDNs include SSL/TLS encryption — another SEO ranking signal considered important by Google.

4 Support for Rich Media Content

Nowadays, websites often contain high-res images, videos, and interactive elements. These content can take up a lot of bandwidth and time to download. CDNs help to efficiently deliver these assets to users so they can be played back smoothly over different devices and network conditions. Whether it’s product images on an eCommerce site or video content heavy blog post – a CDN can massively improve user experience by reducing buffering times and generally speeding up content delivery.

5 Enhanced Security

Most CDNs come with built-in security features. They include security features such as web application firewalls (WAF), and bot mitigation. However, CDN excels in protecting against a DDoS attack which can crash a server. These functions help protect your web server against malicious attacks, thus making you feel confident about your safety online.

With the constantly evolving landscape of cyber threats, a web server without a CDN can be vulnerable. Companies are encouraged to invest in a CDN that has strong security measures in place if they want to keep their company’s digital assets safe from harm.

6 Scalability

Working on a pay as you used model, CDN can quickly scale up without any downtime. With its elastic computing, load balancing and traffic routing capabilities, a CDN is ready to take on any sudden spikes in traffic on a fly.

CDNs have the ability to scale resources automatically when demand rises, ensuring that even during peak periods, the site remains responsive.

7 Compliance and Regulatory Requirements

Finally, as data privacy laws continue tightening globally. The transfer of data outside a country’s jurisdiction can be an issue, like in the recent TikTok case with the US government. This is where a CDN can be useful if they have servers in the same jurisdiction where data is being collected. In the future, a country’s protection rules may require businesses storing customer information outside certain jurisdictions to comply with specific regulations, which can be facilitated by having some or all parts of their infrastructure reside within those boundaries provided by CDNs.

8 Reduce cost

As more people access your website, you will have no option but to add more servers, which could mean expensive investments into additional hardware. This could be costly as you would also need manpower to help manage things. Leveraging a CDN provider can defray infrastructure and operational costs. Working with CDNs can also help cut down on deployment time together.

In conclusion, integrating a CDN into your website’s infrastructure does not only speed things up or reduce server loads; it also allows businesses to provide frictionless digital encounters that foster customer trust, increase participation and ultimately drive bottom line.

Accompanying some of these new developments are new regulations like personal data protection and personal privacy. Companies need to be ready for all these changes.

Training can help organisations to be ready. Through training, employees can quickly fill knowledge gaps and be effective contributors to your organisation. An organisation that doesn’t invest in training will not be ready to face the challenges in the market. They might even find themselves going the way of the dinosaurs eventually.

Still not convinced about the benefits of training? Do read below to understand the key benefits.

#1 Develop Awareness

One of the primary and key benefits of training is awareness.

Training can bring about awareness in many ways. For example, training can help employees learn new skills and knowledge that can help them better understand their work and the world around them.

Training can also help employees develop a new level of self-awareness of things to do and things to avoid doing.

Finally, training helps employees develop organizational awareness by understanding the goals of their organization. This can lead to increased collaboration and communication between employees, as well as improved performance and efficiency in the workplace.

Thus, awareness is the first and most important thing training brings to the table. From there, all improvement begins.

#2 Increase effectiveness

Things are evolving rapidly – customers are getting sophisticated and competitors are getting more innovative and aggressive. To be able to compete in the market, being effective executors is essential.

For example, in business-to-business sales, being able to present well can get you to the next meeting with someone higher within the organisation. At the customer service end of things, a negative customer can be converted into an advocate.

The above are just two examples of how things can improve or even turn in your favor with employee training.

#3 Prevent things from breaking down

Things break down when people are ill-equipped to deal with situations. In every break down, there will be consequences and repercussions. There could be repercussions in customer or management dissatisfaction, reduce productivity or even unwanted media exposure.

Little incidents can quickly escalate if not properly handled. Customer dissatisfaction can quickly find its way to social media. Hence, training is essential to prevent things from breaking down. Training can also prevent mistakes from ever happening again.

#4 Raise standards

Training sets a company apart from being mediocre.

Deliberate, and constant training can radically improve employees’ understanding of company objectives and help to raise and set standards of performance. If an organisation do not invest in training their employees, they can’t expect their people to get to the next level. That’s why some companies stay small or have to continually waste time addressing the same issues and problems over and over again.

#5 Improve customer experience

When clients experience consistent top-notch service, they will keep coming back.

Top-notch service can be achieved through training, and deploying sound procedures. Without proactively addressing issues through training, you’ll lose clients that might otherwise be saved. With training, standardized client interaction and sound follow-up procedures, you are constantly building better client relationships that will lead to repeat business and referrals.

#6 Be a competitive advantage

Training can be a competitive advantage.

With improved standards brought about by training, customers can expect better service over a competitor who does not invest in training.

With staff having attended training, they can make a difference and are in a better place to put a smile on a customer’s face. Customers are more likely to come back to you over a business that does not know how to take care of them.

#7 Increase revenue

Quality training is guaranteed to make you money.

For example, training your frontline team (i.e. sales, customer support) can help them handle any situation that may occur in a client engagement. Arm them with the necessary mindset to deal with customers’ complaints and objections effectively. They can turn a bad situation into a good one. This could result in more sales and referrals.

#8 Save expenses

Training can also help you save money.

Educating employees on certain must-dos can avert downtime, mishaps, avoid penalties and fines etc.. Training can get employees to toe the line and be compliant and more self-aware.

In today’s privacy-conscious world, do not skip any training in compliance because failing to comply with privacy regulations like PDPA can result in severe penalties.

#9 Retain talent

Training also saves you money through reduced employee turnover. The cost of hiring and training a new employee is high. Also, there is the uncertainty of whether the person can quickly learn the ropes and fit into your company’s culture.

So employee retention is a key consideration in maintaining continuous performance and growth for an organisation. When employees know exactly what to do and are empowered to do so, they feel more confident in executing their tasks to meet performance standards. Employees also feel less stress for now they are equipped with better knowledge of what to do, instead of figuring things out themselves.

With organized and regular training programs, employees will feel your company is willing to invest in them to help them grow. Most people would appreciate a progressive company, rather than one who is not.

Conclusion

Training needs to be part of a company’s culture. It should be looked upon as an investment rather than a cost. Trying to save money on training will cost you more in the future through reduced productivity, loss of customers, penalties from regulators etc.

The quicker an employee is trained, the quicker you will reap the dividends (i.e. increased performance, protection against regulators and cyberattacks, etc.) of your investment.

If you need any training in the areas of sales, cybercriminals and personal data protection, do not hesitate to reach out to us.

Email marketing is particularly attractive to marketers in the early days of the Internet. It costs next to nothing to use them. Marketers need not deploy any new application but leverage off existing assets the company already owns – the email system.

The idea of using emails as a marketing channel caught on and soon many marketers were blasting away to promote their company’s offerings. This behavior resulted in SPAM. It became irritating as messages were irrelevant. Also with repeated messages, it fast become annoying and was overwhelming inboxes. Eventually, this uncontrol, excessive behavior led to the birth of SPAM laws to control these spammers and their unwanted messages.

While spam laws have been around for a long time. It never resulted in many emails landing in junk or spam folders. Something else is at foot.

The rise of phishing

Now there is a newer threat in our inboxes – phishing emails. Phishing emails are more insidious and more malicious than spam emails. While spam emails were merely irritating, they didn’t cause much trouble beyond that. However, with phishing emails, it is a whole new ballgame.

Source : FBI Internet Cybercrime Report 2021

Phishing emails can cause companies and their associates (i.e. customers, stakeholders, etc.) some damaging problems. Problems like locking digital assets, stealing confidential data, taking over IT assets to launch further attacks on other organizations, etc. These are problems companies can live without.

To counter this issue, companies have set up mechanisms to deal with this new threat.

The rise of privacy regulations

One of the major drivers for companies to start taking action to protect the organization’s inboxes is regulations, specifically those relating to personal data. With regulations like GDPR, companies are liable to pay huge fines if there is a data breach of personal data.

As cybercriminals can easily enter an organization’s network via emails, incoming emails have to be protected against these perpetrators.

To meet regulatory expectations, companies have put in policies, processes and measures to protect themselves against these new regulations.

The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

In the past, organizations relied on users’ inputs on whether an email was a spam email. It was a manual process, without much automation and checks.

These days not only do we have automation but built-in intelligence in spam filtering applications to detect spammy emails. With AI, the check goes deeper into the content. Hence, increasingly you might find your email not landing in the inbox if your content is not properly crafted. For example, if you are sending promotional emails to any Gmail accounts, they will not land in your inbox, but in other folders (please refer below).

The rise of service providers’ blacklists

Blacklists have existed with us for a long time now. They existed mostly in the domain of cybersecurity specialists to list out rouge IPs and domains. However, increasingly, the use of blacklists is expanding beyond the traditional use of keeping perpetrators out of the network.

Service providers, namely Internet service providers, email hosting providers, email marketing service providers, application service providers have a blacklist. The purpose of these blacklists is to weed out rouge users of their services. Why? Simple, they themselves need to be compliant to regulatory laws

To provide an affordable service, service providers use a shared-services model where its customers use an application mounted on a server. All it takes is one inconsiderate user to ruin the reputation of the IP of the server. All users on the server with the same IP will be affected. Hence, service providers are keen to identify these abusers and will not hesitate to have them removed if they fail to heed any warnings.

Let’s have a conversation if you would like to avoid your emails heading to the spam/junk folder or blacklist.

Once the malicious email (with your domain) lands in your recipient’s inbox, and if they are opened, all sorts of malware may be unleashed on their computer and network. This will cause a lot of problems for them as well as for you.

So what can you do about it?

Enter Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (aka DMARC). DMARC is an email authentication mechanism. It consists of two parts – a verification component and a policy component.

However, DMARC does not work alone. It requires two set of information from the authorised email server – the Sender Policy Framework (aka SPF) and Domain Key Identified Mail (aka DKIM). These three records residing at the Domain Name Server (aka DNS) will help email-receiving servers to determine the authenticity of the mail and how to handle the email thereafter (i.e. allowed the email to pass through, put into a spam or junk folder, or simply rejected it).

The technical implementation of DMARC, SPF and DKIM has several business benefits which brand and business owners should take note of.

#1 Prevents Email Spoofing

It is easy to send off emails with fake domains. This is due to the lack of an authentication mechanism in current mail servers. Cybercriminals are aware of this loophole and are taking advantage of it.

Cyber criminals also knows that a familiar email is more likely to be opened than one from a stranger. Customers and business associates who have come to trust you and your brand are more likely to trust the email and its the content, thinking the email is legitimate.

DMARC, together with SPF and DKIM, blocks out cyber criminals’ email spoofing attempts through a system of verification and authentication. They ensure that only authenticated emails land in the inboxes.

#2 Business Protection

If a fraudulent email is successful in its mission, and causes damage to another organisation, the victim company may seek legal redress from your company for “allowing” the incident to happen. Your company’s progress and productivity may be impacted as you get embroiled in a civil suit. If the matter is picked up by the press and make known. This could put a dent in your business as customers and associates might stay away for fear of being the next victim. Their may be financial and reputation impact, eventually affecting revenue.

#3 Avoiding the Spam/ Junk Folder

Before deploying DMARC for your domain, receiving email servers have no way of authentication your emails. Hence, your emails may find a home in your recipient’s spam or junk folder.

With DMARC deployed, the chances of emails landing in the inbox are higher. This is crucial for transactional or important emails, where you do not wish them landing in a spam/junk folder. This may cause some inconveniences and even confusion for the receiving party, resulting in a poor experience with your brand.

#4 Improved Marketing RoI

If you are running a marketing campaign, you want your emails to reach as many inboxes of your target audience as possible. It doesn’t help your marketing effort with your marketing emails landing in your recipient’s spam box. This severely impacts on your marketing metrics, projecting a lower return on investment (aka RoI).

With DMARC together with email marketing best practices, emails performance can be properly tracked, reflecting the true RoI of your marketing campaigns.

#5 Avoid being Blacklisted

With SPAM laws in place, Internet Service Providers (aka ISPs) and Email Service providers (aka ESPs) are setting up blacklists to list down domains and IP addresses that are misbehaving (i.e. spamming).

Mass mailing also consumes precious bandwidth. This cost ISPs as they have to purchase more bandwidth to accommodate more traffic. On the part of ESPs, they themselves do not wish to be penalized by ISPs and placed on a blacklist. Hence, they have their own blacklist to weed out non-compliant customers.

Once on any blacklist, it may take weeks if not months to be removed from it. Also if you are not diligent enough to quickly remove yourself on a blacklist, you may quickly be listed on other blacklists. This will adversely affect your sender score and domain reputation.

#7 Better Sender Score

In the world of finance, there is a scoring system called the credit score. The purpose of the credit score is to determine the credit worthiness of a borrower.

Similarly, in the world of emails, there is a similar system called the sender score. Through this system, ESPs are able to determine whether your domain has a good or poor email track record. A number between 0 and 100 is assigned to domains. The higher the score a domain has, the better would be the preferential treatment by major mailbox providers. You want to have a sender score of more than 70.

Internet and email service providers rely on various metrics to determine a domain’s reputation – sender score is one of them. It has a high weightage. You do not want your domain to have a poor sender score.

#7 Identify Email Senders

These days many applications are being used across the organisation. You have sales using a CRM, marketing using email marketing systems and various analytics solutions, customer support using ticketing support systems to help customers with their issues etc. For the purpose of better tracking and reporting, some of these applications are able to send off emails through their application.

During a DMARC deployment, before a DMARC policy is enforced, DMARC can surface all IPs that are sending off emails with your domain. From there, you can white list certain IPs and blacklist any unauthorized IPs at work. Without DMARC, you are allowing nefarious elements to continue their malicious work.

From the above, the benefits of deploying a DMARC policy are overwhelming. If you need help with your DMARC deployment, do not hesitate to reach out to us.

However, times have changed. Today,  there are several laws in place that require activities that involve the gathering, use, storage, and disposal of personal data to comply with privacy regulations. These laws are not to be taken likely, and it affects everyone.

Even before privacy law kicks in, a domain may be blocked and blacklisted by Internet service providers if the domain has a history of spamming. What this means is that your email might even not even reach your audiences if these service providers have their way. No one likes spammers.

Besides regulatory requirements and being on a blacklist, mass emailing via traditional email clients is an inherently unproductive activity when it comes to marketing.

For starters, a marketer has no insights into the effectiveness of the activity. They do not have a view of whether the client has opened or even viewed their emails. There is no insight into whether this channel of marketing is an effective one. Without this simple insight, a marketer is just shooting in the dark. This lack of information leads to a lot of marketing challenges.

Without the ability to understand their audience behavior, a marketer is unable to do any segmentation. Without proper segmentation, customers might receive emails that are not relevant to them. This makes for a poor customer experience when they receive emails with marketing messages that do not resonate with them. You might even be reported as a spammer and get your emails channeled into a spam folder.

One of the critical technical limitations of traditional email services is that it does not allow emails to be scheduled.

Studies have shown that at certain times of the day, more time is spent reading emails than at other times. If there is a need to send emails over the weekend or after office hours, you might need to hire someone willing to do the job or deploy a system to resolve this issue.

The scheduling feature in email marketing tools comes in handy too for many other occasions like reminders if you are providing regular services, birthday greetings, anniversary notes, etc. Automating such repetitive tasks saves a lot of time. From the client’s perspective, they would be happy to receive such celebratory greetings. If not, at least you would look upon favorably over your competitors who are not doing so. Hence, an investment in an email marketing system pays dividends even after a sale is made.

Behavioral studies have shown that a buyer would likely make a purchase only after repeated exposure. Automating a series of emails with different messages sent off on different days would be most helpful in this nurturing effort. This increases the likelihood of a sale for your brand.

Knowing that it costs up to five times or more to sell to a prospect than to an existing customer, businesses are constantly seeking ways to cross-sell or upsell to their customers. Being able to tag a subscriber in the email marketing system would allow businesses to have a better idea of how to increase spending with your brand. Businesses can now put in front of their customer complementary solutions that they might need.

By crafting the automation once, the same automation could be re-used for all customers buying the same product. This saves a lot of time.

Thus an email marketing is not only necessary in today’s privacy-conscious world but brings a host of benefits pre and post-sales.

There are many email marketing applications in the market, and they are all not created the same. They have their respective strengths and weaknesses.

Through understanding you and your business, we would be able to advise an appropriate system that works for you.

Speak to us today for a non-obligation discussion!

However, many small business websites do not appreciate its importance. In most cases, once a site is done up and published, it is usually assumed that the bulk of the work on the website is done.

One of the things that next need to be worked on is to identify keywords that your target audience would most likely key into a search engine. This is important as it will allow lead search engines to pick up and display your site on a search engine result page (SERP).

Many times website owner publishes content from their perspectives. This is a huge mistake. Writing content that will not be picked up by a search engine is a complete waste of time and effort. It will just be another best-kept secret on the web.

Keyword research is vital. It starts with your target audience in mind. Imagine you are the audience; what are the words he/she would likely type in a search on the web. Take these keywords and gear your content to meeting these keywords. If you can do this, half the battle is already won. Note while choosing a keyword is critical; it, however, doesn’t guarantee you will be rank high on a SERP. There are other considerations like competition, bounce rate, domain authority etc, that finally determine your site’s position on the SERP. We wished too it was that simple.

While keywords are important when crafting your content, it should, however, not be the primary focus. The focus instead should be on producing content that is relevant to the reader than for search engines. Search engines today are smart enough to pick them up.

Unknown to some inexperience content writer or anyone doing SEO for the first time, putting too many keywords or “keyword stuffing” is frowned upon and quickly picked up by search engines. Having the right amount of keywords is essential from being penalized by search engines.

Lastly, keywords also need to be continuously reviewed to make sure it maintains its position or climbs up the SERP.

.

As it spreads across the world, governments are implementing measures to “flatten the curve”. As such, companies are instructed to allow employees to work from home.

During this time, face to face meetings is also kept to a minimum to starve the virus of new hosts. Remote meetings via webinars are now the preferred mode of any communications.

While we do our part to “flatten the curve”, we must not forget about the cybercriminals. They are still around despite the broader threat of Covid19.  

Companies can essentially do a few things to improve their position. They could modernize things, enhance the way of working, better protect themselves, and get ready for an uptick in business when the virus passes.

#1 Improve connectivity security

With employees working remotely, companies would want to improve their cyber defenses. Companies should consider deploying a firewall and VPN solution if they have not already done so. A VPN will prevent any “man in the middle” attacks.

#2 Improve endpoint security

Companies should also consider deploying an anti-malware solution on all remote machines in the event a cyber attacker is successful in deploying a malware payload. With an anti-malware solution in place, the malware can be detected and isolated.

Any anti-malware should also include an Endpoint Detection and Reporting component (EDR). With the added EDR functionality, companies can identify the origin of the attack the path it took, and the systems affected. This information will facilitate the investigative work of forensics experts. It will also reduce the financial cost of involving these experts, as their expertise is not cheap.

#3 Minimizing information loss

Finally, if companies are afraid of sensitive information being leaked, we can help in preventing that from happening.

If there is a data breach and sensitive personal data is leaked to the public, there will be an investigation by regulators. Pending the outcome of the findings, there would be a fine by the regulators. The size of the penalty will depend on the effort made by the company to improve its process in handling personal data, and what measures and controls they have put in place to minimize a data breach.

#4 Employee cyber awareness training

Beyond implementing solutions, companies could also explore running training programs to empower their employees.

One could be in the are of cyber defense and get ready to dash out of the gates when the economy picks up.

We provide cybersecurity employee awareness to empower employees against a cyber attack. We will convert them from being unwitting victims to alert defenders against any cyber onslaught.

#5 Sales training

For the sales team, we can also provide sales training to help them deliver better outcomes through better sales presentations and customer engagement.

Customers are getting savvier, and they expect to deal with a salesperson to be equally apted. Customers may be seeking a solution to solve a problem, but they eventually buy into the confidence of the service provider through the salesperson representing them.

#6 Lead generating website

A crisis is always an excellent time to slow down, review and improve on things (i.e., enhance internal processes, attend training, etc.) you usually never had the time to do.

With the impact of Covid19 weighing down on businesses, this would be a good time to modernize and sharpen the sword.

One of the things we can help with is your website. Your website has a bigger job to do rather than just looking pretty. We can not only help empower it to generate more leads but bring in more relevant leads.

Do drop us a note to see how we can make it happen for you.

If done well, SEM could establish you as an authority in your niche, and eventually, bring more business for you.

For starters, in this post, we will limit our content creation to writing for a blog. It is more involved than most might think.

In the physical offline world, you just need to create a story fit for human consumption. However, a post in the online world, have also to satisfy search engine ranking criteria, and fend off competition.

On the web, there are many blogs with similar content. Besides paying for ads, how can you rise above the crowd? While ranking higher in a Search Engine Result Page (SERP) is essential. However, we shouldn’t be too fixated on ranking top of the list. The holy grail is the click through to your website, this is what we should be actually focussing on.

Let’s go back to basics and understand how a customer’s purchase journey. From there, we can get some clue as to how we can get them to visit our website.

When a user searches on a particular topic, many results will appear on the SERP.

Assuming you are one of the links that appear on the page, how would you get the user to click on the link that leads back to your page? That is the first hurdle you need to overcome. If the link is not clicked, it doesn’t really matter how good the article, it is not going to be read by that web surfer.

Fortunately, there is more than one way to increase the likelihood of that click happening. In this post, we will confine ourselves to optimizing the content for that precious click.

The first step is to brainstorm on some keywords and key phrases that your visitor would likely most likely input in the search engine bar.

With the keyword list, you have generated, you next check the volume and competitiveness of each keyword or phrase.

Once you have narrowed down to a few keywords, you go back to the search engine and enter your keywords.

On the search engine results page (SERP), Ignore the results from paid Ads, you need to look at the top listed sites, and understand why they are ranked higher?

After reviewing your competitive results, you would be able to craft a more persuasive, captivating headline that would pique the visitor’s interest to want to click it.

Once you get that precious click, you want to look at providing useful, relevant content. The content not only has to be human friendly but also search engine friendly. The latter is what we termed as on-page SEO.

In the next paragraph, we will look in detail where being friendly entails from the content perspective.

Human friendly

By being human friendly, your article has to be easy to read. As a baseline, your blog post needs to be appropriately structured. There must be a good flow and proper use of English.

Spelling errors should be kept at a minimum or ideally non-existent. These errors could negatively impact the credibility of the author.

Using synonyms will prevent your post from sounding repetitive.

Using similes will make your words be more vivid and come alive.

Using metaphors will make complex concepts easier to grasp.

Just like in a mini-series, deploying appropriate hooks in your content will keep your audience reading on.

Whenever possible, having mixed content formats (i.e., using images, videos, infographics) will make your post more interesting for your audience.

Before you launch that post, there are several things you need to check, they would be grammar, spelling errors, and plagiarism.

Remember, at the end of the day, if your blog is not human friendly, your visitor would quickly abandon your site and head for another website, potentially a competitive one.

Search engine friendly

If your website is not search engine friendly, your ranking on search engines will slowly drop. This, in turn, will cause your organic traffic to be reduced to a trickle.

There are over 200+ ranking factors in Google’s algorithm. Some are more important than others.

Using the right keyword and strategically placing them in your post is one ranking factor.

However, you must not overdo it with keywords as overstuffing your post with them can get you penalized and even blacklisted by the search engines. You definitely don’t want that to happen to your site.

Using related keywords will allow search engines to better understand the context of the post, and display the page accordingly.

Take, for example, someone is interested in the animated movie – “Cars”, he will type the word “cars” in the search bar. If the website doesn’t have any related keywords to put the move “cars” in the context of the animation movie, the search engine would most likely return a page on automobiles (i.e., car models, car brands, car dealership, etc.). This is not what the user would want. Hence as a website/blog owner, you need to inject related keywords to help the search engine what your site is all about.

The length of the posts also plays a part in influencing search result pages. Your various posts need to have the appropriate length. A post of 300 words would be an excellent baseline to start.

While the list above is not exhaustive. You can now better appreciate the various steps that go into creating a human and search engine friendly post.

Remember, all your readers have choices and their arrival on your page is cerntainly not entirely by chance.

You have worked hard (i.e., doing your research to create compelling headlines) to get your visitor onto your page. You reward your reader with quality content, and hopefully, in return, they can reward you by becoming a fan of your webpage.

All of this can only happened through well-conceived planning and preparation.

With can help you with your content creation, shall we have a conversation soon? Contact us today!

Google has been focusing on speed as a ranking factor for the last eight years.

In Jan 2018, Google formally announced that it would be updating its speed update algorithm sometime in mid-2018. This update will be a significant one. This early announcement gives website owners some heads up to start taking actions to improve their site downloading speed.

Why Is Google doing this?

The reason that Google is making this speed update is that speed matters to a user, especially as more and more users are surfing on mobile devices, which typically has a slower connection compared to desktops.

The user’s patience for a slow downloading site is waning. If a website takes too long to download, they merely move on to another website. Users expect to move through a brand’s site and pages at lightning speed. A web page that loads quickly will increase user satisfaction.

A key ranking factor

One of Google search’s key ranking factors is a site’s download speed.

So what does this mean to you, a website owner?

If your site is not downloading fast enough, visitors will abandon your site and move on to another. In time, your ranking on Google search engine page results will drop.

If your competitor’s webpages are downloading faster than yours, your site will rank lower than theirs. Hence you can see, speed matters.

What contributes to a website download speed?

Many factors determine the performance of a website.  They generally fall into two parts – front-end and back-end.

Front-end would refer to the webpages and all its associated resources, as rendered by a browser. The components on the front-end  that has an impact on the loading time would include the

• HTML codes

• CSS files

• JavaScript

• media  sizes (images, video, etc.) and

• the use of caching

• the use of redirects

The back-end would refer to the webserver delivering the page to your browser. Below are some of the

• location of the webserver,

• connection speed,

• PHP version,

• the number of HTTP requests etc.

Optimizing both front-end and back-end is critical in achieving optimal website performance and ranking higher on search engine result pages.

Let’s have a conversation if you would like to do a web page speed audit or improve your website speed.