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Tips for Successfully Localising Your Business Website

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Localise your business website

The internet has brought many benefits to the world, and among them, is the ability to shop and do business online from just about anywhere on the planet. If you have an online business, being able to tap into new markets across the world could make the difference between a good business and a great one.

Before the internet, running a business meant either operating an actual physical storefront or supplying stores with a particular range of products. While land-based storefronts are still a thing, setting up a website has become the new virtual shop, with the added benefit of reaching millions in an instant.

However, to reap the benefits that internet technologies have made possible, you need to find a way to tap into as many diverse markets as possible. This means overcoming common barriers such as multiple languages, cultural preferences, religious observances and more. So how do you go about doing this? Simple. You localise your existing website to suit whichever market you have targeted in your drive for expansion.

If you’re considering the move towards localisation of your website, but are not quite sure how to get started, the following tips should help push you in the right direction.

Analysis of Your Target Market

The first step towards the localisation of your business website is to thoroughly analyse your target market. In doing so, you’ll not only save yourself a tremendous amount of time, but you will also be able to avoid costly errors along the way. It may also be beneficial to consider smaller markets rather than the usual larger economies, as these may represent greater untapped markets. In this case, you’ll need to look for those subtle nuances which can’t be covered by blanket approaches.

When analysing potential markets for website localisation, ask yourself the following questions:

  • Who is your typical target customer?
  • Which specific markets do you intend to target?
  • What is the main language spoken by that target market?
  • What are the main consumer habits typically displayed within that target region?

Avoid Free Online Translation Tools

While it may be very tempting, especially to your operation bottom line, to make use of free online translation tools, it is best to avoid these at all costs. Why? Free online translation tools may not be able to offer you accurate translation services, which could result in users being unable to fully understand your services or products. At worst, you may even end up offending users with poor or inaccurate translations. Investing in a professional translation of your content will result in tremendous cost savings in the long run, as you would have managed to get it right the first time around. This includes all the subtle language nuances, colloquialisms and other peculiarities of the target market.

What are CMS Plug-ins?

CMS stands for Content Management System, and it provides a simple way to create web pages and manage your online content. WordPress is one of the most well-known and popular CMS platforms on the net and you’ll be able to find a host of useful plug-ins that go along with it. This includes some great CMS language plug-ins, which assist you in managing your various language sub-domains or web pages. These CMS plug-ins will help you to add the content pages that have already been professionally translated, to the right pages within each of your blogs or localised web domains.

Making Further Tweaks

Once you’ve gotten your content translations worked out and mastered, the next step is to take your site to the next level with localisation. While the translation is essential for your target market understanding what you’re all about, localisation looks at tweaking a range of website features to make them really feel at home. This means making your images, website colours, and overall design, culturally relevant to your target audience.

By following these simple tips, you can easily create localised versions of your main website, and have them be just as appealing and intriguing as your English site. This will result in more traffic as word spreads within your target market, that your site offers the best service, presented in the most authentic and appealing way.

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5 Compelling Reasons to Start a Blog for Your Business

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With the arrival of the World Wide Web, businesses of all shapes and sizes were suddenly able to create markets and trade in a whole new way. The power of the internet radically expanded opportunities, particularly for small to medium-sized enterprises (SME’s), as almost anyone with an idea or a product could now launch their very own business online.

However, the slight downside to this new world of opportunities is that, since practically anyone can launch their online business website, the level of competition has also increased exponentially. To remain ahead of the game, businesses need to find something that gives them an edge over their rivals. This is particularly true of SMEs competing within smaller or more specific niches online.

One of the most effective ways in which your business can gain an advantage over your rivals is through the creation of a business blog. A few years ago, online blogs were mainly the domain of internet personalities, travellers, food and hotel critics and so on. However, as more internet visitors began to actively engage with bloggers (through following their blogs), their influence over their audience became very apparent.

Businesses began to notice the potential that blogging could have in attracting more traffic to their sites, and then converting visits into sales. Creating a business blog can be extremely effective in helping to build brand awareness and, at the same time, provide added value through the creation of user guides, advice blogs, and future brand developments.

As more and more online businesses adopt the blogging platform (studies show that over 80% of businesses now rely heavily on blogs), here are five compelling reasons why your business should start blogging:

1. Business Blogging Can Develop Strong Relationships with Your Customers

Creating an interesting and informative daily or weekly blog around your business is a great way to develop strong relationships with your customer base. Unlike your product pages, your blog will allow you to connect with your customers more informally or conversationally.

You can interact with your customers by allowing them to ask questions relating to your brand or specific products, which you can then answer directly. A good business blog that is engaging and filled with useful content, is also a great way to attract new customers who may be browsing your site, but not committing to a purchase, membership or other feature on your site.

2. Boost Your SEO

Search engines are designed to target the most relevant, content-rich pages when collating search results. Blogging is one of the easiest, most effective and inexpensive ways for your business to achieve excellent SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). This is especially true if you are diligent and create great blog posts consistently. Daily blogging feeds top search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and others, looking to index your content. Creating consistent blog posts is also a great way to add the most relevant keywords to your business, making it easier for potential customers to find you quicker.

3. Sharing is Caring

Successful bloggers will tell you, one of the biggest benefits of regular blog posts, is the opportunity that it creates to share links. By sharing links to your blog, you open up the potential for vast amounts of traffic to your site (viral marketing) and huge market growth. Creating a shareable link to your blog, which can be shared on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook or even just email, is easy to do and is an invaluable tool in your marketing.

4. Become a Leader in Your Field

No matter how small your enterprise is, creating a regular blog can elevate you to the top of your niche, by building trust within your community as an authority in your particular industry. Your blog is a great way to showcase your product knowledge and industry expertise by creating highly-informative blogs that your customers will value.

5. Getting Personal

While we’ve discussed how blogging can increase brand awareness, it also offers you the opportunity to show your customers a more personal side of your brand. By connecting directly to your customers, you’ll be able to give them better insight into your operational standards and business message. You may find that your customers are more willing to stick with your brand once you’ve engaged with them on a personal level, letting them be a part of your vision for your business.

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Why Link Building is Important for Your Business

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The process of link building is a vital component of a successful and complete SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) marketing plan. If you are not aware of the link building technique, or what it can do for your business, you could be losing out on business that your competitors are picking up. Successful online businesses know, link building strategies play a key role in their success, helping their businesses grow through high-quality SEO marketing campaigns.

If you are looking to achieve the same results for your business online, getting to understand what link building is and how it works, is your first step on the road to greater successes and bigger shares of the market place that you are competing for.

Link Building 101 – Understanding What Link Building Is

While it may sound complex and somewhat confusing, link building is actually very straightforward. Once you understand what link building is, you’ll be able to easily implement effective link building strategies within your SEO marketing campaigns.

Essentially, link building is a strategy whereby different web pages as well as different websites, are linked together in order to drive traffic from one to the other. By grabbing hyperlinks from various websites and adding them to your own page, you create a network of links that help search engines crawl pages by relevance when ranking in their search engine.

Anatomy of Links and How to Create Them

At the core of the link building technique, is the link itself. Therefore, understanding the anatomy of a link may help you to understand how they are created in the first place. Every link is composed of four different parts and each plays a key role in how the link performs:

  1. The Anchor: This is the beginning part of the link and its job is to open the link tag and signal the search engine that it contains a link to another destination. The anchor is identified by the letter “a”.
  2. Link Referral Location: This part of the link anatomy is used to indicate the URL that the link anchor is pointing to. The Link Referral Location can consist of a number of different items, including an image, a web page or even a downloadable file. The Link Referral Location is marked with the letters “href”. However, this can also be preceded by a hashtag (#), which is used to indicate a link to a different segment within the same page.
  3. Visible Link Text: This part of the link is the part which the user sees on the webpage. It is the part that the user will click on in order to go to the page that it is linked to. The Visible Link Text always stands out from the rest of the text on the webpage, alerting the reader that they can click through to another page, and is usually underlined and written in blue.
  4. Link Closure: This is the part of the link that tells the search engine that the link is complete.

Why Link Building is Important for Your Business

We’ve already highlighted the benefits of link building as it relates to SEO rankings and marketing strategies. However, the following should also go some way in helping you to understand the importance of link building in modern business.

Link Building is Great for Building Your Brand

Using link building can be a great way to build up your brand with those searching for the products or services in which you deal. By linking to relevant, high-value content, you can show visitors that you are an authority or expert in your particular field. This also creates trust for your brand, and users are more likely to go with the services or products that you offer.

Link Building for Building Relationships

The very nature of link building necessitates communication between different business websites since you are requesting that another site includes a link to your site. You can then reciprocate by including links to their sites. This is a great way to build long term relationships within an industry or within a certain niche that includes various aspects, products or services.