One of the advantages of turning your home into a smart home is the convenience. You can now control temperature remotely and even secure your home using your smartphone. If  you’re thinking about making your home “smarter” you’re in the right place because we have some suggestions for you.

Smart TV

Smart TVs don’t only feature high definition pictures; they are also capable of music and video streaming, voice control and universal search. Smart TVs can also be used with your smart phones and the best thing about them is that they can be set up very easily.

Being able to stream services like Netflix on a huge TV is more than enough reason to buy one. No more streaming and watching on small smartphone screens and tablets. Aside from this, you can livestream using other smart TVs when you’re not at home.

Best of all, you can browse the internet with your smart TV as a monitor. This eliminates the need to buy other devices to stream content since the operating system is built into the TV. All you need is a wifi password and your mobile device with the streaming app.

Smart Thermostats

Going home to a very cold or hot house is not very welcoming. Having a smart thermostat is not only convenient; it can also help you save money by allowing you to set the right temperature every time. This is probably one of the best investment choices you will make in terms of heating and cooling costs.

The best smart thermostats allow you to set the temperature of your home using an app on your smartphone even when you’re away from home. You can turn the heat up or turn on the a/c right before you leave work so that you arrive in a well heated or cooled home.

Since the thermostat is connected to your phone, you can adjust temperature anywhere in the world. These features save money because you can always turn off your heating or a/c if you accidentally leave it on; and turn it up according to your schedule.

Smart Lighting

This is another money-saving feature because you guessed it – lighting can now be controlled using your smartphone. Just like your thermostat you can turn on or turn off lights using your phone enabling you to save on electric bills. This is also very helpful if you don’t want to come home to a dark house.

Smart Security Camera

Security is always a good investment and having a smart security camera can help make your home safer. There are many smart security features like smart locking, motion sensors and surveillance devices. These features are usually available through a low monthly fee. Footages are stored in the cloud, making it safe for the police.

Perhaps the best feature of a smart security system is the ability to let you live stream footage of your home in real time while you’re away. Some systems require professional installation while ther are also others that can be DIY-ed.

Smart Home Hub

Perhaps the best way to turn your home into a smart home is by installing a smart home hub. This device allows you to control everything in your home from the lighting to the security system. Instead of controlling your thermostat, lighting or security system separately, you use a main hub controlled by a smartphone app or voice command.

Luckily, smart hubs aren’t expensive or complicated to set up. They are easy to install and come in a variety of settings. All you need is a wifi password and a dedicated spot to set up your hub.

Other smart devices such as Google Home and Amazon Echo can also make your home “smarter”. Just remember that these devices are here to make your home life more convenient and comfortable.

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Fortunately, there are a number of useful SEO tools, either free or paid, which can help you understand what works and should be removed in terms of SEO. The question is: How can you measure SEO with any of those tools?

Read on as I show you the four SEO metrics you should measure.

Let’s first ask three questions to know what would make sense to measure SEO:

What Can You Measure?

There are literally thousands of different metrics one can try measuring, but only a limit on what one can measure. For example, big companies have tons of data on metrics, while small businesses would rely on gut more so than data on customer reach or market shares.

What’s Important to the Company?

You must get the reasonable metrics that will make your business strive and matter. Learn about what you want to achieve when measuring SEO. Maybe you want to earn more revenue, traffic, or an average position on the search engine page. Define what success is.

What to Control?

It’s best not to measure yourself on uncontrollable things. If you aren’t able to change your website’s content or other aspects of your website you can’t control, then it will pose a problem if that’s what you want to measure.

So consider what you can control first and avoid measuring yourself on the things you are unable to create an impact on.

Once you have the answer to the key questions mentioned above, here are the four main areas to measure for SEO:

Organic Traffic

First of all, you should be tracking the number and trend of your website’s visits, which were driven from SEO sources. Depending on your goals and preferences, one may want to measure only Google’s organic traffic, or you might also want to track different search engines or organic completely.

There are many businesses and website owners that track organic traffic and put it as part of their percentage of regular traffic. However, this metric is a bit flawed for various reasons, especially if you have had paid activity which impacts the traffic. Instead, it’s yes tho track traffic of certain sections in your website, such as your:

Main pages
Blog and/or news pages
Products and informational pages
Category pages
When you do measure it this way, you can effectively narrow the impact your different pages have based on its individual number of visits.

Search Engine Ranking

There are many SEO experts who have said they hated ranking reports. The ranking may be considered as a flawed metric, which is generally true. Because of the many factors which play in search engine results pages (like localization or personalization), being number one for a term only has a bit of meaning.

Instead of looking into your ranking, I recommend that you look at trends. You can do so by:

Grouping keywords in categories then track it over long periods of time. After that, check the average position of the selected keywords over the time spent observing it.
Measure your result’s true rank. Is it really number one for organic traffic, or is it really a number six when you factor in local listings and PPC?
Lastly, track your page ranking using keywords. Does the rank stay consistent or does it fluctuate? If it fluctuates, then that keyword may have internal competition. If ever it continues to have a good ranking, then it means you’re doing well and to implement what you’re using to other pages of your website.

Customer Engagement

Ranking your customer engagement is actually tough to track, as it’s made up of hundreds of things!

But all in all, you would first want to know: When you have a visitor come into your website, do they take action in something? The action you’re looking for varies by the type of business or website you have.

One website may aim for their visitors to stay on their website to read many pages. So their goal is to look at visitors who stay on the website for a long time and the number of people who view pages per session.

Another website might want customers to make a purchase, so the goal is to make that progression to create a sale.

Find out what you want your audience to do on your website and that’s how you can measure the success.

Revenue or Number of Leads Generated

Last but not the least: We look into revenue, which is probably the most important aspect for websites. You’re looking into measuring the number of completed sales or how much quality leads you have generated.

While revenue is straightforward to track, lead tracking may be a different thing. What you can do is to set up a lead tracking system. Once you have a lead, classify it into an understandable system. Through doing so, you’ll keep the SEO team on-the-loop about the number of leads that were generated every week. After that, it would become a metric you can easily track.

Wrapping It Up

With the right type of strategies and putting your main focus in important factors of SEO, you will be able to achieve your goals and have your website on top of popular search engines. While it’s a gradual process, continuing to measure these SEO metrics will get you up there in time.

I hope that these four SEO metrics you should measure gave you an idea of what to focus on today. Whether you’re looking for the best SEO quotes from experts or doing the measurements yourself, it’s best to know what you should check up on.

If you have any questions or want to share your tips and experiences on SEO optimization, then comment below. I would love to hear what you have to think.

Author Bio –

Joel House is founder of Joel House Search media. He provides SEO advice and his team of experts will provide best SEO quotes for your business. Quotes can help you to think about your budget and you will get idea about what work will be done.

The post 4 SEO Metrics You Should Measure appeared first on Creativ Digital.

Link building methods

The methods of link building are changing from time to time, and the latest updates have to be employed for your website to make sure that your site is at par with the latest technologies and work smoothly on any device and interface that operate on the latest technologies. It is important to have a thorough understanding of the link building campaigns and the benefits that you can get from them. When a website has many backlinks from various sources, it is considered to be a quality site with quality content and hence would rank higher up in the Google ranking. Google now also focuses on the link quality and not just the quantity. That is why you must keep in mind some of the latest link building updates for 2017 when you are creating your own link building strategies.

The page you link back to

There are different kinds of links on the internet, and they can have a different impact on your website ranking. When you are linked back from a relevant web page which has a PageRank powerhouse, it can influence your Google ranking to a large extent. It has been observed from years of research that the authority of the page that is linking to your website has a huge impact on your ranking and is one of the most important factors which must be taken into consideration. The main reason behind this is that the authoritative pages would be able to pass more authority which is also called PageRank to your site, unlike a website which does not have as much exposure or audience online. There are applications like the Ahrefs to check the proxy indicator of the PageRank for a site to determine whether it is powerful enough and would help you at all with your ranking.

Try and get in touch with a website or a blog with is relevant to your site and get a link back to them than getting many link backs from no-name bloggers.

The relevancy of the site

It is important to take note of the relevance of the website which you are linking with to ensure that it does not look like you are trying to manipulate the Google algorithms for increasing your ranking. Further, when you link with a website randomly, it affects the quality of the content that your site has. If your audiences are looking for certain information from your site but end up being redirected to another website which has an entirely different topic of interest on their reading list, the audience would feel betrayed and that their time is being wasted which would have an adverse impact on our traffic and audience psyche. With the help of the SEO keyword research template, you can easily manage this issue of relevancy. You can look up the relevant keywords which are suitable for the links and the content on your website and at the same time make sure that these keywords are taken care of such that you get a better ranking.

When you have the relevant link backs from another website with similar topics and the link is suitable for the context of the content, then it is considered to be a good link building campaign.

The position of the link on the page

When you are publishing an article that has anchor texts that are part of your link building campaign, it is essential to take note of the position of the anchor text on the page. If the anchor text is in the first couple of paragraphs and is the beginning of a sentence, it can send out a negative impression to the audiences. Further, it can look like a manipulation of the Google bots and the Google algorithm and hence a violation of the Google webmaster guidelines. If this is so, the ranking would be negatively impacted for your website. In case the link is further down the article, it may go unnoticed by the audience if they choose not to read through the entire article.

It is always safe and better to use the link back related anchor text in the middle of the content such that it is relevant to the things that you are writing there. One must make sure that the anchor text which is being used for the link building is relevant to the content and whatever you are talking about in the middle of the article.

Conclusion

It can be concluded that when you take note of some of the latest methods of link building you can reap the maximum output from the website. There are various methods of link building that are available to you, and you can come up with prosperous link building strategies when you take note of them.

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