What Digital Marketing Techniques to Use as a Property Lawyer

Digital marketing is one of the most valuable forms of marketing in today’s digital age, so property lawyers must use digital marketing strategies to stand out in a competitive market. To help you we have put together some digital marketing tips and tricks. These are some techniques that property lawyers can use to enhance their online presence and to attract more potential clients.

Understanding Your Audience

Before getting into digital strategies, it’s important to understand who your target audience is. Property lawyers are hired for all sorts of property reasons, they typically cater to home buyers, real estate investors, and individuals seeking legal advice on property matters. However all clients are different and require different things, so be sure to meet with every client before taking on a case to make sure it is suitable for you.

  1. Website
  • First Step: Having a website designed for your property law business is the first step in creating a digital presence. If you don’t already have one you should definitely research into finding a good and reliable website designer to help your vision, come to life, or if you don’t have a vison yet, they can help you get started on one.
  • Images: Make sure to send photos of yourself, your employees and your office to your web designer to give your website a personal, real life feel.
  • Testimonials: Encourage satisfied clients to write reviews on their experience and send them through to be used on your website as it is comforting to prospective clients to see previous success stories.
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7 Additional Services Your Web Hosting Service Provider Should Offer

7 Additional Services Your Web Hosting Service Provider Should Offer

Given the advances, not just in technology, but in what modern-day internet users expect when they visit a website, the services that a web hosting company offer should be more than just hosting. Simply offering website owners a place to host their website does not cut it and a hosting company that thinks that way is not going to be around for very long.

Web hosting companies worth using should be able to offer clients several additional options and add-ons that enhance how the websites that it hosts perform, and which provide enhanced services for the owners of those websites. Below we have outlined 7 services that we believe every web hosting company should offer or provide to its clients.

Website Builder

Many businesses arrange for web hosting before they even have a website but plan to create one. This is where web hosting companies that provide website builders have an advantage. Most website builders will have free templates which makes the task of creating a website easier.

Web Design

Sticking with the subject of creating websites, some of the better web hosting companies take it a stage further by offering web design services. This goes beyond the business shaving to build their website themselves and instead the hosting company’s web designers do it for them. A big advantage of this will be that the web design will be optimised for the hosting service and thus increase its performance and reliability.

Domain Name

Whilst the cost of purchasing a domain is not exactly going to break the bank, we feel it is always positive if a hosting company offers a free domain name to new customers. This way setting up nameservers, for example, is simplified and the domain goes live sooner.

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Why Knowing The Basics Of Copyright Law Is Advantageous

There are numerous businesses whose owners or CEOs may seek advice, guidance, and on occasion, representation, from their commercial lawyers at Culshaw Miller Lawyers, concerning copyright law. Not every business type will require advice on copyright law due to the types of products that they make, but all businesses must be aware of how to comply with copyright law or risk falling foul of those copyright laws and having criminal or civil action taken against them.

It is not just businesses that need to comply, as individuals can break copyright law too. In both cases, that breach is likely to be one of several ways in which copyright law can be broken. These include copying, scanning, or printing protected material, publicly communicating protected works, or being renumerated for works for which you do not hold the copyright.

On the flip side, if a business is more likely to be a victim of copyright infringement rather than a perpetrator of them, it needs to know what copyright law protects, and how it protects them.

In Australia, there is no requirement for anyone or any entity, such as a business, to register their copyright for any “works” they have produced. Note that “works” is the catch-all term for anything capable of being copyrighted.

Instead of registering a copyright, the mere fact that you have created a work means your copyright protection starts from the instant of its creation. You do not even need to add the copyright symbol to your material for copyright protection to apply, however, it is best practice to add it anyway to deter those who may wish to steal your works.

Works can include anything written, drawn, recorded, or created by “the expression of an idea”. It is also worth pointing out the importance of the words “expression of” because copyright does not extend to the idea itself, only the work produced from the idea.

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4 Ways to Ensure Your Website is Mobile Friendly

Mobile Friendly Website

Gone are the days of the dial up connections and old desktop PCs. The online world is now faster and it is mobile. People prefer to access the internet through their smartphones more than any other way. With the world going mobile, businesses also have to make sure that they are not left behind. Excellent web design is important to ensure relevance in today’s world. More importantly, to keep up with the mobile world, it is imperative that your web designing is done considering the need for your website to be accessed on the go.

Importance of Having Mobile Friendly Website

There are several advantages of having a mobile friendly web design for your company’s website. For starters, it means that your website will be operating much faster. The accessibility to your company’s website will drastically increase with mobile accessibility. It is also important to note that when a website is made to be mobile friendly, it is also easier to navigate. This increases the chance of engagement. Here’s a look at a few simple ways you can ensure that your web design is mobile friendly.

  1. Reduce Content

No, this does not mean that eliminate everything. It means that you should have only the amount of content that’s necessary. Having too much content on your website is bad for two reasons: Firstly, it becomes too complicated for visitors to navigate. Ease of navigation is crucial. Secondly, the complexities of a website chock full of content will mean it is going to be slower to load.

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Tips On Keeping a Traffic-Friendly Website

Traffic-Friendly Website

Tips On Keeping a Traffic-Friendly Website

While any name-brand web hosting service offers digital marketing and SEO services, there are some simple common-sense tips which anyone can follow to at least get on the radar as far as the World Wide Web is concerned. In addition, once you’re set up with the initial traffic optimization, there are things you can do to ensure that your website keeps growing. These tips will both ensure that your website appeals to both visitors and search engines alike.

Have Plenty of Content

It is very difficult to optimize a site for a search engine when there’s almost nothing on that site. And by content we usually mean *writing*. Written text is still the main thing that search engines see – after all it’s what web searchers type into Google to find your site in the first place. So remember, just images or just having Flash won’t do the job. You should at least be able to have a couple of paragraphs on a page explaining what your site is for.

Follow Internet Standards

Search engines prefer to crawl sites which adhere to standards. While it is difficult to have a site be 100% in compliance, the better you follow good mark-up standards, the better. Check your HTML, XHTML, CSS, and RSS with the relevant W3C services, and check back periodically to make sure that your site is still easy for search engines to navigate.

Market Yourself

Every day that you have a website, you should be thinking of what you can do to promote your website. Do all of your business partners and family know about it? Are you joining social media like Facebook, Twitter, Meebo, or MySpace, and if so is your website in your profile? And while you shouldn’t link-spam your site to social news websites, it is perfectly acceptable to post a link to a section of your site if it’s particularly relevant to a forum topic. You can also submit your site to good quality, genre specific directories, such as Slinky Directory.

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4 SEO Techniques That Will be Effective

SEO Techniques

Digital marketing is continuously evolving, presenting both opportunities and challenges for businesses striving to maintain their competitive edge. In today’s fast-paced online environment, establishing a strong digital presence isn’t just beneficial—it’s essential for long-term success. A critical factor in building and sustaining this presence is the ability to attract and retain more traffic from search engines like Google. But how can businesses achieve this goal in such a dynamic and competitive space?

The answer lies in a well-executed Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy.

According to the experts at SEO Perth, leveraging the power of both on-page SEO and off-page SEO is key to enhancing your website’s visibility and ranking in search results.

On-page SEO focuses on optimizing individual pages on your website, ensuring that content, meta descriptions, and keywords are aligned with what search engines look for.

Off-page SEO, on the other hand, involves external efforts, such as link-building and social signals, to bolster your site’s credibility and authority. With search engine algorithms constantly evolving to improve the user experience, businesses must stay ahead of the curve by implementing comprehensive SEO strategies that encompass both on-page and off-page techniques.

Search engine algorithms are constantly changing in a bid to improve user experience.

Here are some more observations:

  1. Google RankBrain

Google recently announced its new RankBrain Algorithm. This revolutionary algorithm uses AI to power the internet giant’s first machine learning algorithm. The ranking you get using RankBrain is determined by how satisfied Google users are with your content online.

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Building An eCommerce Website With WordPress

eCommerce Website

eCommerce is a growing industry, and there are numerous ways to build an online store in the modern world. However, WordPress remains one of the most popular, and most effective online store builders – but only if you know what you’re doing.

Luckily, there are a lot of great resources out there to help you build your own eCommerce store. I’ve drawn on a few of the best to put together this ultimate guide to building an online store with WordPress. Although it’s short, it includes all the basics that you need to know.

Start By Choosing A Reliable Hosting Provider

The first thing you want to do when you’re building an online store with WordPress is find a hosting provider which is both reliable and which can cope with the needs of an online store. Don’t be tempted to go with a base-level shared hosting plan. Instead, look for something a little more expensive. In the case of hosting, you definitely get what you pay for.

Then, Choose A Design

Unfortunately, your store design will depend on your budget to a large extent. If your budget is limited, then you will probably have to use a free or cheap premade theme. However, if you can afford it, I’d definitely recommend paying a developer to put together a custom theme for you.

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Why Should You Use WordPress?

Wordpress

WordPress must be one of the most talked about websites in the world. It would have to be up there with sites like Google and Wikipedia. It is the most popular website building platform in the world, and lets people customise, create, and edit their own websites simply and free of charge.

There are plenty of reasons why you should use WordPress. According to some internet experts, over 25% of the web is now built on the WordPress platform. The sheer amount of number here speaks for itself – WordPress must be doing something right.

Some of the reasons why you should use WordPress include:

You don’t need any coding experience:

One of the best things about WordPress – from an inexperienced web developer’s point of view at least – is that it required zero coding knowledge. Sure, there is room for you to put your knowledge to the test if you want to, but it is absolutely not necessary.

All the code for your website is automatically installed and maintained when you use WordPress. Creating posts is as simple as dragging, dropping, and/or typing new content. If you want to code your website then go for it – but there are probably better options than WordPress out there that have better coding support.

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Disavowing Links: What is It and Do I Need to Worry About it?

Disavowing links

If you know anything about SEO, you probably know that your backlink profile is a crucial ranking factor. What you might not realise is that low quality or spammy backlinks can actually have a negative effect on your ranking.

With this in mind, you need to know what Google’s disavow tool is and how it works. In some cases, it can be a good idea to disavow, or ‘disown’ certain backlinks, especially when they are coming from obviously spam-related websites.

In this article, I’m going to cover some of the things you need to know about disavowing links.

What Is Link Disavowing?

To put it simply, disavowing links involves telling Google that you want it to ignore certain links back to your website. There are a number of reasons why you might do this, but usually it’s because the links are coming from a low quality source that negatively affects your SEO rank.

The Google disavow tool – Basically, if you identify links that you don’t want, you can use Google’s disavow tool to tell it to ignore these links. It can be tricky to figure out which links to ignore and which to keep, but we’ll get to that in the next section.

What Links Should I Disavow?

Now, the exact situation around link disavowing is actually a little bit cloudy. Some people believe that Google already ignores spam links, and that there’s no point in using the disavow tool to ask it to ignore them.

However, it’s better to be safe than sorry – right?

Personally, I’d still recommend using the disavow tool to tell Google to ignore low quality links. Ultimately, it’s not going to cause any problems, but it could result in great search rank improvements if Google wasn’t already ignoring these links.

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How Can I Learn Basic Web Development Skills?

Web Development Skills

If you’re a technological sort of person who enjoys learning new skills, then you might be considering learning web development. Alternatively, you might be trying to build your web development skills so that you become more skilled and employable to open up your career options in the future.

Fortunately, the rapid increase in the size of the internet means that it’s easier than ever to learn web development, with a huge range of resources available.

With this in mind, I’ve put together this short list of the best ways to learn basic web development skills. They include:

Take An Online Course

There is a huge range of online courses teaching basic web development skills available today. Platforms like CodeAcademy and Udemy contain complete web development courses which will teach you both front and back-end coding skills.

If you’re serious about learning basic web development skills then I’d definitely recommend paying for a course. There are plenty of free courses out there, but in my experience paid courses tend to offer much more support and a better overall learning experience including team building exercises.

Practice, Practice, Practice!

Once you’ve learned the absolute basics of web development, the best thing to do is to just keep practising. For example, if you’ve worked through a HTML/CSS front-end development course, consider building your own website from scratch to make sure that you’re familiar with everything.

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What Costs Do I Need To Consider When Using WordPress?

WordPress Website

So you may have thought about starting a new WordPress website, but have been put off by the perceived cost. A lot of people are confused about how much it actually costs to start and maintain your own WordPress website, and a quick internet search does nothing more than add to the confusion. So, what does it actually cost to start and run your own website?

To answer this question, we have broken the main costs down into their components below:

Cost 1: Domain Names

Cost – Free to thousands of dollars.

Once you have decided on a website name, you will have to rent or buy a domain name which is close to or the same as your website name. Most WordPress beginners decide to rent a domain name yearly. For basic names, prices start from just a few dollars per year. However, more sought-after domains can sell for tens of thousands. Some domain name providers do special offers, including free domain name rental for the first year.

Cost 2: Website Hosting

Cost – Anything from a couple of dollars per month to thousands.

If you want to build a website, you need to have somewhere to store it. Although many people don’t really understand where websites “come from”, they actually do have a physical location. While it is possible to host your own website, most people choose to use a specialist hosting provider. When you do this, you pay a hosting company to store your website and data securely on a server. For small websites and blogs, this will only cost a couple of dollars per month. However, prices for larger sites can easily run into the thousands.

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HTML5 Roundup For Web Designers

HTML5 Roundup

Web designers, here’s some more HTML5 links that you’ve just got to see. If you’re still plugging along on an XHTML (or mercy forbid, HTML4) site, this will be your last call to leave the Stone Age.

html-five.net – The HTML5 Showcase – This is the first we’ve seen of design showcases similar to the ones that popped up after CSS3 and AJAX hit the mainstream. Only this time it isn’t just about being pretty, but having powerful functions, such as sites with drag-and-drop code builders and interactive art galleries.

html5blog.org – HTML5 blog – So far, the closest thing to a guru we have. A rich resource of book reviews, tutorials, and industry news about HTML5.

html5video.org/blog/ – HTML video blog – One of the chief capabilities of HTML5 is to easily manipulate video content without relying on painful third-party plugins. Kaltura, the world’s first open source online video platform, is leading the charge to publicize this aspect.

html5games.net/ – HTML5 Games – If all of the above doesn’t whet your appetite (or you feel a little overwhelmed), head here for a refreshing break and a demo of yet more HTML5 capability. Again, HTML5 is poised to replace Java and Flash as the web gaming platform of choice.

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Importance of SEO in 2018

Importance of SEO

We’re into the last month of 2017 and SEO consultants like Peter Brittain are now finalizing the strategies they will be using for their digital marketing for 2018 and beyond – and thus setting their goals. The most important aspect which everybody is considering is the SEO. Everybody wants to understand more about SEO and how important it will be for their businesses to be more successful this year than the last.

It goes without saying that SEO is of the utmost relevance now than it has been ever before. With every passing year, more businesses are realizing the importance of SEO and how it is capable of driving their success in an internet-centric world. This is why more investment is being made into SEO and improving it.

Google has been striving to improve the algorithm it uses which is in turn pressuring businesses all around to improve their websites in a bid to keep up with the latest SEO trends. With the constant improvements, SEO is a practice which will continue to grow and evolve.

Marketers will need to realize that there are new elements to factor in when it comes to SEO with every passing year. Here are some of the main SEO trends to keep in mind in 2018.

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Using TV Mysteries As Inspiration For Your Emails

Email Marketing

Whether you are young, old or somewhere in-between one thing that people of any age enjoy is a good story especially those that leave us on the edge of our seats. This is certainly true in the case of TV mysteries, but what, you might ask, does this have to do with email marketing?

Good question and we will reveal the answer at the end of this article.  Only kidding…we’ll reveal it now, but make sure you read to the end to get the full story.

This is a tactic that all the very best TV shows employ to keep their audience waiting in suspense for the next episode. You must have seen those programmes where each episode ends in an exciting climax, but just as you are about to see how the hero gets out of what seems an impossible fix, the titles start to scroll. You are told to tune in next week to find out what happened and if the producers are being especially mean you get a sneak peek at next week’s episode, without them revealing how our hero escaped, if or even if they escaped at all.

This is a classic technique, and the great news is it is one which you can use to great effect when crafting emails to your subscribers. It is based on a psychological phenomenon that exists whereby people do not like having situations or scenarios which are not resolved. in other words, when we have a puzzle or a story which has no conclusion or finish, we strive to find one and are impatient to do so.  This is why TV producers end episodes with cliffhangers because their audience will be so desperate to see what happens next, they are certain to tune in the following week.

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Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Your Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing

social-media-marketingSocial media marketing is something that many businesses do because they know their potential customers hang out on social media sites. In fact, social media plays a big part in how your company is perceived, such as exposure from Facebook Ads. However, it does take quite a lot of time and patience, something that not all business owners have a lot of.  The work can be outsourced, but there are pros and cons that you need to be aware of. Here are some of them.

Pros

  • You will have a lot more time to spend on other aspects of your business, something that most business owners will appreciate.
  • Outsourcing to an experienced professional will ensure the job is done properly and regularly. Plus by working with them you’ll gain valuable knowledge about marketing that can be used in other ways, or may be used later on should you decide to take the reins again.
  • Small businesses often lack manpower. Outsourcing jobs such as these gives you access to more’ muscle’ for less cost than hiring an employee full time to do the work would.
  • If you are not a ‘people person’ you may not like being on social media sites, it will be difficult for you to get it right. Some people thrive in and around others and have a natural ability to add to their professional one.
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