The holidays are right around the corner, and both consumers and shop owners are taking advantage of the internet during this period of time. Online shopping has grown dramatically in the U.S. over the years. As a matter of fact, in 2014, Cyber Monday, which is basically the online version of Black Friday, surpassed $2 billion in sales. Each year, the number is expected to increase. The reason for this is likely due to many trying to avoid the chaos of holiday shopping in person. Packed shopping malls, long-lines, and cramped parking lots? No thanks.

Now, although online shopping is making the lives of both buyers and sellers easier, cyber hackers are doing a good job of making it complicated.

October was National Cyber Security Awareness Month. In this day and age, with people flocking to the internet instead of retail shops, online security needs to be at the forefront of every company’s strategy.

The Internet is a great place to connect, find information, and conduct business. But there are many ways for unscrupulous people to take advantage of others online. Fortunately, staying safe online is a skill that can be learned. The following tips will help protect your privacy and your personal and financial information.

Passwords

Passwords should be at least eight characters long, and should contain letters, numbers, upper- and lowercase letters, and a symbol ($&! are some examples). It’s best not to use the same password for every account, because if one site is hacked, hackers may try the same password on a number of accounts. It’s easy to forget passwords, so write them down in one place somewhere away from your computer that you can easily find and remember.

Social Media

Facebook is a wonderful tool for connecting with friends and family, but it can be a challenge to use social media without compromising your privacy. Take advantage of privacy settings. Facebook provides the ability for users to limit who can see your posts, pictures, and other information. Setting your account to “private” in the settings menu and limiting your posts to “friends only” ensures that strangers can’t see what you post online.

Even when your social media is set to private, your posts are your public face. Friends on social media can take screenshots or copy anything you write online and share it. A good rule of thumb is not to post anything you would not say in public.

Email

Junk email is a nuisance. If you are getting a lot of email from a company you’ve done business with, you can usually find a link at the bottom of the email to unsubscribe from their mailing list or limit the number of emails they send. Unsolicited email should be added to the “spam list” provided by your email provider. Never click a link in an unsolicited email. These links may lead to scams or software that could infect your computer.

Scams

Scams are common on the Internet, but you can avoid becoming a victim by using common sense and being aware of the techniques used by scammers. People will sometimes post on social media about personal emergencies and ask for money. Before giving any money, reach out to the person directly to confirm that their account has not been hacked. Another common scam involves emails saying that you or a family member owe money. These are almost always scams. Do not respond to an email asking for money. You may sometimes see an email or pop up warning that your computer has been infected with viruses or malware. Scammers will either attempt to sell you useless software or ask you to download a program that will infect your computer with actual malware. If you are concerned that your computer has a virus, contact a professional, but never download anything you see on a popup window.

Social media is a wonderful tool for advertising and promoting.  It’s nearly a necessity these days. Several of the social media sites now have their own version of “stories”. We’re going to discuss those today.

According to a 2015 report, 92% of consumers use emojis. Younger consumers increasingly prefer using emojis instead of written text to express their thoughts and feelings. As a result, emoji use has skyrocketed in online marketing. Google, Bing, and Yahoo all allow emoji searches on their search engines. Savvy marketers are using emojis in SEO to take advantage of this growing trend.

How to Incorporate Emojis into Your SEO Strategy

Local SEO and City Search: Entering an emoji into a search will simply return a list of images similar to the emoji. For example, if you search using the pizza emoji, Google returns images of pizza. But if you amend your search to include “near me” or a city, Google returns pizza restaurants. Some of the results include businesses that don’t use the pizza emoji anywhere on their website.

It would appear that Google translates emojis into basic text when users search with emojis, but there is some evidence that emoji searches provide a nuance that can be more useful. For example, searching with the bikini emoji in a given city returns businesses that sell bikinis, while searching with the text “bikini” returns some of the same businesses, but also businesses where the employees wear bikinis.

Branded Search: As of right now, a search containing an emoji and a common search phrase like “for sale” will only return results that contain that emoji within their website. If you were to search using the dog emoji and “for sale”, the results would be a mixture of social media postings, classified ads, and general results that contain the dog emoji.

Do People Use Emojis to Search?

Emoji searches are allowed, and search engines have begun to interpret emojis used in queries, but it is still unclear how many people are actually using emojis in their regular Internet searches. Traffic from emoji search results can currently be seen in Google Search Console, making it fairly easy to monitor current emoji usage in your business’s search traffic. Until there is more data, marketers can prepare by testing emoji use in online content to see its effect on page ranking and investigating what emoji searches businesses and clients may currently be ranking for.

First of all, let’s define a landing page. The simplest way to describe a landing page is that it’s a webpage that you visit or in other words ‘land’ on. You can land on this page by clicking a link or on an advertisement. A landing page can be an effective tool in marketing and advertising for your business.

What is the purpose of a landing page?

There are several purposes for building an effective landing page for your business or website that include marketing and advertising for your business. The main reason most people create more landing pages is to increase their conversion rate. In marketing, conversion is to get a percentage of people to do a desired action. When we are talking about landing pages, the desired action may be to:

Blogging has been a great resource for businesses, writers, and other professionals. A blog has many uses, such as selling products, sharing experiences, giving advice, teaching, and just for fun. In order to have a successful blog, there are several things you should do to keep your blog going. Here are a 15 great tips for your blog:

There are many techniques to help your website grow increasing foot traffic. Many people rely on search engines to direct traffic to them. One key method that most website owners will use is search engine optimization or SEO.

What is SEO?

In short, search engine optimization (SEO) is a method that helps your audience find you easier in the search engine results or the search engine result pages (SERP). There are methods for both On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO.  On-Page SEO consists more of keywords, longtail keywords, tags, meta tags, and other tools that you do directly to, or on, your website. These occur actually on your web pages.  Off-Page SEO is a promotion method that occurs off of your website. This method uses links and social media to broaden your audience and increase your search engine results.

READ MORE

Social media is a great tool for your WordPress business account. By adding social media to your WordPress site, you are opening up the avenues of your business and potentially adding traffic to your other sites. There are several ways to link your social media sites to your WordPress site, which include:

• Adding Links
• Using a WordPress Plugin such as a Social Media Widget
• Adding your social media to the “About You” section on WordPress
• Adding a “Share This” button

Online shopping and marketing are becoming increasingly more popular by the day. WooCommerce can take your WordPress Business website and create top eCommerce platform. Buying and Selling has never been easier.