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10 Ignored SEO Tasks That Can Boost Your Rankings
InsightsIn this post, we go into detail on ten often ignored tasks that will boost your rankings. The original article is from semrush.com. The author, Lenny Johnson is is a freelance writer and content strategist at B2B Content Lab. He engineers high impact content that builds authority, drive sales and increases customer loyalty for B2B SaaS and marketing brands. SEMrush’s digital marketing blog is an innovative resource for content strategy, content marketing, SEO, SEM, PPC, social media and more. Image courtesy of Sikov via Bigstockphoto.
Search ranking will make or break your business, 46.8% of the global population accessed the Internet in 2017, and that figure is expected to reach 53.7% by 2021. The number of daily searches on Google is over 4 billion, and the top five results get 65% of the clicks.
In fact, 75% of users don’t even click past the first page of the search results. Paid Ads won’t save you either, with 80% of search engine users avoiding them all together.
With so much on the line for those lucrative top spots, the competition is fierce. Content marketing is expected to be a $300 billion industry by 2019. More and more businesses are realizing its importance, and even view their blogs as an essential asset.
The SERPs are becoming a vicious battleground, and it is crucial, now more than ever, to focus on SEO. Every second you waste is time your competitors are using to get higher rankings and most of the money in your niche.
For those that don’t live in the SEO world, the tasks required to compete in the SERPS can seem overwhelming. In this post, I will show you some overlooked SEO tasks that will help skyrocket you to the top.
1. Create Rich Cards
Rich cards are a form of structured data; they give users visually appealing information that is easy to understand and provides a flawless mobile search experience. They are Google’s way of taking advantage of the rise in mobile usages, which has surpassed desktop.
They aren’t just easy on the eyes though. Analysts at Google state that Schema markups will become more important when it comes to search ranking as time goes on.
Despite this coming straight from Google, only 20% of marketers are using structured data.
Rich card results stand out significantly from plain, old text results and even other forms of structured data like featured snippets and rich snippets.
This is a rich snippet:
And this is a rich card:
These eye-catching cards can boost your CTR through the roof. Understand the type of content your customers search for that regularly displays as rich cards. Then create this type of content, and optimize them as rich cards.
Rich cards can really give you an edge. Schema markups are an inexpensive and effective way to boost your organic rankings. You can read more about creating structured data here.
2. Disavow Negative Backlinks
More backlinks do not always mean higher rankings, and you should reject certain types of backlinks.
As you know, Google focuses on the authority of the website linking to your domain. What you might not know is that spammy sites linking to you can negatively impact your ranking. Even if you have absolutely nothing to do with them.
Doesn’t sound fair, I know. But Google does monitor where your backlinks are coming from, and a lot of bad websites linking back to you raises red flags.
There are three ways you can get negative backlinks:
They can link back to you from a large number of spam sites that make it look like you purchased backlinks or engage in spam. They can even duplicate your content on multiple websites.
Unfortunately, sabotage is so prevalent it even has a name, “Negative SEO.”
This website specializes in Negative SEO services.
If you are engaging in Blackhat SEO, you have to stop, or your website will get banned by Google. On the other hand, protecting yourself from negative backlinks, either organic or by design is relatively simple.
To see which sites are linking to you, go to your Google search console:
From here you can see the websites linking back to you. Simply disavow if they are low-quality websites. You can learn how to properly disavow a backlink here.
Ultimately, you will want to schedule time for backlink review, to examine if some of the websites linking to you can hurt your ranking, and deal with them before they cause real damage.
3. Create Skyscraper Content
If you haven’t heard of or don’t use skyscraper content, then you’re missing out on a lot of SEO juice. The term was coined by Brian Dean, who used it to boost his traffic by 110% in 14 days.
Skyscraper content involves finding high performing content in your niche and creating something better, and then shamelessly promoting it.
Skyscraper content takes a lot of work to do right, and you might get a mild caffeine high before you are done, but boy is it worth it.
Here is how to get started with skyscraper content
Find Competitors on Google
Run a Google search for keywords related to your niche.
For example, the search term ‘B2B Marketing’ brings up Hubspot.
You can pick the first four results for now. When you have an idea of who your competitors are, your next task is to find content that has done well for them.
You can find your competitor’s most popular contents with SEMrush and Buzzsumo.
Using SEMrush
This process is as simple as inputting your competitor’s URL in the SEMrush search bar. Choose organic research and examine the results.
Not only will you see your competitor’s top content, but SEMrush will also display the keywords they rank for.
Using Buzzsumo
You can also find popular content in your niche with Buzzsumo. All you have to do is input keywords related to your niche in the search bar, and Buzzsumo will provide you with popular content.
For example, if you are in the personal finance niche, you could use the keywords ‘personal finance tips for moms’. And Buzzsumo will provide you with the most shared content for that keyword.
Now that you have samples of the most popular content in your niche, you can create something objectively better.
How to create better content:
Skyscraper content has to be better than anything else out there. No one ever points to the 245th tallest skyscraper in the world and goes “Wow.” You have to be number one. Get creative and make something better.
But you can’t stop there. Once you have created great content, you also need to promote it. Go back to the top performing content in your niche on Buzzsumo and find the people linking back to it or sharing it.
You can do this with Buzzsumo by clicking the view sharers button.
This link will display all the people who shared that content, along with their websites.
Then you can either send them a direct message or email them by using the contact form on their websites. Keep the message short and straight to the point.
Like this:
Hi (Name)
I noticed that you shared (or linked to) (article).
It was a great article and even inspired me to write something similar. Only updated and with greater detail (Your link).
I think your readers will find it helpful.
Have a nice day.
Cheers,
(Your name)
Then wait for the magic to happen.
PRO TIP:
Your message might get lost in the influencers email, so make sure you follow up a day after.
4. Optimize Your Landing Pages
One key factor Google uses to gauge the quality of a post is its bounce rate. How quickly people leave your website after clicking on it in the search results.
If people search Google and click on your website on the search results page, then discover it’s not relevant to them and quickly go back.
Google takes notice, and if this happens a lot more, Google will drop your raking for that search term.
This is where relevance comes into play. Sometimes it is not that you have poor content, it is just that what you are offering is not relevant to the user at that particular time.
Every page on your website must have a goal based on where your users are on the buyer’s journey. This goal will help you determine whether you should teach, convert, sell or delight.
Trying to sell to someone looking for information will just annoy them and cause them to bounce. That is why you need to understand your users, where they are coming from and what they need at that stage.
The team at Groove creates a different landing page for each website they guest post on.
Before creating a page or posts, ask yourself:
Your page cannot target everyone. When you market to everyone, you market to no one.
5. Use infographics
People love infographics, but not a lot of marketers create them. I can’t stress how much of an effective SEO strategy they can be.
Consider that 65% of people are visual learners and are educated by images better. Images are also easier to remember.
In Social Media Examiner’s 2018 social media marketing report, 32% of marketers said visual marketing was the most important form of content for their business, above blogging at 27% and videos 24%.
The first step to creating an epic infographic involves knowing what content to produce. What does your audience need to know and what will people be interested in finding out? Take those ideas and brainstorm; what can you offer?
Some ways of finding similar information for ideation purposes:
Once you have an idea that you think is good based on the above research, your next task is to create it.
Ways to create infographics:
You are not done yet. Once you have created an awesome infographic, the next step is to promote it.
Submit it to a few quality directories, and use the skyscraper technique to find influencers that shared and linked to other infographics and get them to notice yours.
6. Create More Videos
According to Omnicore, Youtube’s monthly active users has surpassed 1.5 billion as of 2018.
Cisco even predicts online video will make up 80% of all online traffic by 2021, and even though there are more videos now than ever before, 85% of people say they would like to see more video from brands in 2018.
Google even incorporates videos into the results page, and since they own YouTube, we can only expect video results to rise. Videos have always been important, but now they are downright essential.
They pop up at the top of the search results page:
And Google even shows featured videos:
If you are not incorporating videos into your content marketing strategy, it is time to join the bandwagon.
Here is how to begin:
You don’t have to hire a Hollywood studio or use a $20,000 camera to begin. An ordinary camera and some good lighting and editing software will do.
PRO TIP:
Always add descriptions to your videos; use a minimum of 200 words. Most people either avoid descriptions altogether or mash a bunch of keywords together.
Remember that Google doesn’t know what your video is about. It relies on a text-based description to know if the video you just uploaded will be relevant to a user.
7. Create Your Own Keyword or Phrase
Bold I know. While it does require a bit of creativity and celebrity, it deserves mention.
I have already talked about Brian Dean and his skyscraper technique. What do you think would happen if you searched for that keyword right now? Who do you think would show up at the top?
If you thought Brian Dean, you are right.
When you create a unique system, a product or brand, you are the only one that is going to get traction for it, as long as it is truly original. And if it becomes popular, you are the default expert on the topic and could earn a number one ranking.
You can probably think of some unique concepts, systems, or products linked to a particular individual.
Maybe you know of Ramit Sethi and his briefcase technique?
You must know Tim Ferris and his four hour work week brand, right?
All these individuals thought of a concept or system, added their own spin on things, gave it a name, and now rank for it.
Creating Your Own keyword
Once you have given your system or observation a name, link yourself to it and optimize your web presence for it. Use it regularly in your posts and share with influencers.
If it catches on, you will be the only one ranking for it.
8. Take Advantage of High-Performing Posts
You know that internal linking is a good SEO practice. But, do you optimize your internal linking for maximum effect?
At the beginning of this post, I told you that 73% of users don’t click past the first page. That means that your pages with less authority will be left out in the cold and will receive only the occasional stray or lucky click.
You can remedy this pretty quickly. If you have pages with high authority showing up on the first page of the search results, take advantage of this and link to lower ranking posts from these high-performing posts. This strategy can lead to more clicks and higher rankings.
How to Optimize Internal Linking
Identify your top ranking content with SEMrush. The video below shows you how to find your top ranking page.
Once you have found your highest performing pages, simply link from high ranking posts to a few low performing but high-quality articles to give them an organic boost.
9. Use Entity Salience
This is an advanced SEO technique. Entity salience is a relatively new concept brought about by search engines to improve the accuracy of search results by leveraging the known relationships between entities.
Entity salience steps beyond the boundaries of keywords. It is similar to co-occurrence, but instead of repeating keywords over and over again, or even variations of those keywords. It takes advantage ofrepeating themes for those keywords.
In short, entity salience looks beyond keywords on a page and instead focuses on the relationship between objects or entities.
To make it easier to understand, Cyrus Shepard paints a clear example of entity salience at work. Let’s say a page references Iron Man, Tony Stark, Pepper Potts, sci-fi, and the term Marvel Comics is only mentioned once.
That page despite only including the term “Marvel Comics” once, has a strong entity salience with Marvel Comics because it has a lot of keywords strongly related to Marvel Comics.
Let’s take another example, say, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, and Cyborg appear on a page. They would have a pretty strong entity salience with DC Comics now, wouldn’t they?
How does this apply to SEO?
Let’s say you are a fitness blogger and you created a post about interval training. Rather than stuffing your page with “Interval training” or even its variations, you can leverage entity salience by including strongly related subject matter in your post.
You can go into types of interval training, like Tabata and even include individuals strongly related to it like its discoverer Dr. Izumi. This technique shows that your page is relevant to the search term “Interval training” which is better than keyword stuffing.
How to Leverage Entity Salience in Your Pages
Once you have found a topic you want to write about, all you have to do is:
10. Optimize For Voice Search
When was the last time you thought about optimizing for voice search? According to Alpine.ai there are over 1 billion voice searches per month. Emarketer estimates that 35.8% of millennials use voice-enabled digital assistants at least once a month in 2017.
Here is a breakdown of usage by generation:
Why You Should Optimize for Search
Besides the fact that search is a growing medium for getting information and that voice e-commerce sales reached $2 billion in 2018, below are a couple of other reasons why you should start optimizing.
Search Utilizes Long Search Queries
When we use voice search, we tend to be very specific about what we want. This verbalization makes long-tail keywords more valuable, and it gives less established websites an opportunity to rank.
Search Accurately Shows Intent
Going back to the specificity of search, when we use voice search we tend to be more specific; hence our intentions are more evident.
Just look at this line graph showing the difference in query length between voice and text.
Compare the text search term ”fridge” and the voice search term “How much does a fridge cost.”
The text search query is vague and can mean anything from trying to decide the price of a fridge, reading information about one or comparing brands.
The voice search term clearly shows that the person wants to buy. You can bet the second search term will matter a lot to someone that sells refrigerators.
Search is Heavily Local
We know that Google has begun to prioritize local search, but voice search takes this to a whole other level, voice search is three times more likely to be local-based.
If you own a local business voice search will be very important to you, could allow you to rank for a greater selection of terms than ever before.
So how do you optimize for search?
As time goes on, voice search will become even more important than it is now, the sooner you start optimizing for it, the better.
Conclusion
The SEO game is tough; there are very few winners and a pile of losers. Search results pages two and three have a combined CTR of just 6%; you don’t want to be stuck on these pages. However, a lot of people like to avoid SEO because they feel it is too technical and boring or it costs too much.
Burying your head in the sand won’t make it go away; you have to start making SEO a priority, and optimizing on all fronts will give you an advantage. You have to build a strong SEO foundation to get the great content that you produce seen by the people you created it for and to help you do that you will need some great tools.
The ten ignored tasks I have broken down above can help any business get started.
To recap you should:
31 Power Tips for Chrome That Will Improve Your Browsing Instantly
InsightsThis guide covers power user tips for making the most of Chrome’s features and someextensions that will expand Chrome’s functionality. About the author: Lori Kaufman (MakeUseOf) is a freelance technical writer living in the Sacramento, CA area. She’s a gadget and tech geek who loves to write how-to articles about a wide range of topics. MakeUseOf is a technology website, focused on bridging the connection between users, computers, devices and the Internet through education. Feature image courtesy of PixieMe via Bigstockphoto.
Google Chrome is a fast and easy-to-use browser with a simplistic and minimalistic design. Many features have been added over the years to make your browsing experience easier and more enjoyable.
Today we’ll cover power user tips for making the most of Chrome’s features and some extensions that will expand Chrome’s functionality.
1. Try Out Chrome’s Experimental Feature
Chrome contains many experimental features that are not enabled by default. These are features being tried out and some may make it into the main browser program.
These experimental features, or flags, may not work perfectly and may be removed at any time. If they cause problems in Chrome, disable any flags you enabled. That should put things back to normal. You can use the Reset all to default button at the top of the chrome://flags page to change all the flags to their default settings at once.
Several of the tips in this article involve changing flags, so our first tip shows you how to access them.
2. Prevent Videos From Automatically Playing
Do you hate it when videos automatically play when you open a webpage in Chrome? There’s an experimental feature in Chrome that can require user intervention to play videos on webpages.
If you decide you want videos to automatically play again, go back to the Autoplay policyflag and select Default from the dropdown list. Relaunch Chrome again.
There are also some extensions that allow you to disable autoplaying videos in Chrome:
3. Create Multiple Chrome Profiles
Chrome allows you to create multiple profiles. Each profile stores apps, extensions, settings, browsing history, bookmarks, saved passwords, themes, and open tabs separately. So you can create separate profiles for work, hobbies, social media, shopping, and any other activity you might do in a browser.
To access the Profile Manager, follow these steps:
Clicking on a profile in this dialog box also opens that profile in a new window, just like using the Profile menu above.
To add a new profile, click Add Person.
To create the new profile, follow these steps:
On a Mac, you can also switch profiles using the People menu.
4. Search Sites Directly Using the Address Bar
You can quickly search many websites, besides search engine sites, from the address bar without going to those sites, if those sites are in your list of search engines. To search a site from the address bar, that site must be on your list of search engines.
You must initially visit the site you want to add and then follow these steps.
To set up the site so you can search it using the address bar, follow these steps:
The search engine is already set up, but we want to assign a shorter keyword to type in the address bar, so enter a new Keyword and click Save.
For example, we want to be able to type “muo” in the address bar to quickly search the MakeUseOf site.
To search MakeUseOf, we type “muo” in the address bar and press Tab. The left side of the address bar now reads “Search makeuseof.com”. We type our search term in the address bar and hit Enter.
Search results for only MakeUseOf display on the tab.
5. Open Search Results From the Address Bar in a New Tab
When searching using the address bar, you can have the results display in a new tab. This works when using your default search engine or when searching a specific site using the trick in the previous tip.
Press Alt + Enter (Alt/Option + Enter on a Mac) after typing your search term. The search results display on a new tab and that tab becomes active.
6. Drag Text to Address Bar or Tab Bar to Start a Search
If you want to use some text on a webpage in a search, there are two ways you can do that without having to type the text. Select the text and do one of the following:
7. Search Your Bookmarks Using the Address Bar
Do you have way too many bookmarks? Having trouble find the ones you want? It’s easy to search through your bookmarks using an extension called Holmes.
Install Holmes and then do the following:
You can also hit Alt + Shift + H, or click the Holmes icon, to open the Holmes popup window and enter your search term there.
You can also launch your Chrome bookmarks using keyboard shortcuts.
8. Search Your Google Drive Files or Gmail Account Using the Address Bar
We’ve covered several tips to help you find anything in your Google Drive account. You can also search your files on Google Drive directly in Chrome, without first going to your Google Drive account.
This tip allows you to search the Google Drive account associated with the current Chrome profile. If you need to search a different Google Drive account, either switch to a different profile or create a new one for that account. See tip #3 above.
To add the ability to search your Google Drive account, you must add a search engine for Google Drive. To get to the Add search engine dialog box, do the following:
On the Add search engine dialog box, do the following:
http://drive.google.com/?hl=en&tab=bo#search/%s
To use the new search engine to search your Google Drive account, do the following:
Your Google Drive account opens on the current tab and files matching the search display.
You can use this same trick to search your Gmail messages. Follow the steps above for adding a search engine, but enter the following on the Add search engine dialog box:
Now you can search your Gmail messages the same way you can search your Google Drive files. The only difference is you enter “gm” in the address bar, rather than “gd”.
9. Use Chrome as a Basic File Explorer in Windows
There are many alternatives for Windows File Explorer, including Chrome.
To use Chrome as a basic file explorer, type “C:\” in the address bar and hit Enter. All the folders and files on your hard drive is listed on the current tab. You can navigate around and even open files from within Chrome.
10. Perform Calculations Using the Address Bar
If you need to do a quick calculation, you don’t have to open the Calculator app on your computer or pull out your phone. You can perform simple calculations right in the address bar in Chrome.
Type a mathematical equation in the address bar using standard operators, like +, -, *, /, %.
For most search engines you would use as your default, like DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Yahoo, you don’t need to hit Enter to see the result. It’s displayed in a list below the address bar. But if Google is your default search engine, hit Enter to see a calculator with the result displayed.
Even though it’s not necessary with most search engines, you can press Enter after entering the equation in the address bar. Just like with Google, a calculator displays showing the result. It’s a working calculator so you can use it just like the calculator included with the operating system.
11. Open a Specific Set of Webpages When You Open Chrome
If you access the same set of webpages every time you open Chrome, you can set these pages to open when you load Chrome. The easiest way is to change an option in Chrome’s Settings:
The next time you open Chrome, the specified webpages will all open on separate tabs automatically.
12. Set a Custom URL as Your New Tab Page
By default, the New Tab page in Chrome displays a Google search box and thumbnails of your most visited sites. There are many ways you can customize the New Tab page, but what if you want to use a different page as your New Tab page?
You can have Chrome open a specific webpage or set of webpages on startup (see tip #11), but you can’t change what opens on a new tab in the Settings. However, there is a way around this.
The New Tab Redirect extension allows you to specify a webpage to display when you open a new tab. Once you install New Tab Redirect, a Welcome page displays on a new tab. To set up your custom URL for new tabs, click Set Options on the Welcome page.
Enter the URL for the webpage you want to display on a new tab in the Redirect URL box and click Save. A green Options saved message displays on the right.
Now the URL you specified will display each time you open a new tab.
13. Save All Your Open Tabs as Bookmarks in a Folder
If you have a bunch of tabs open and you want to bookmark all of them, there’s a quick and easy way to do that. Hit Ctrl + Shift + D on Windows, or Cmd + Shift + D on a Mac, then do the following:
When you want to open all the bookmarks you saved, right-click on the folder you created and select Open all. All the bookmarks open on new tabs, preserving the currently open tabs. You can also choose to Open all in new window or Open all in incognito window.
You can also open any of the bookmarks in the folder by clicking on the folder and then clicking on the bookmark in the folder you want to open.
14. Pick Up Where You Left Off
You can use tip #13 to bookmark to preserve webpages you currently have open if you must close Chrome. However, what if Chrome crashes or you close Chrome when you didn’t mean to?
When Chrome starts, you can have Chrome open the tabs that were open in the last session.
Now, when you start Chrome, it will automatically open all the webpages you had open last time on separate tabs.
15. Pin Tabs
You can keep tabs open by pinning them to the tab bar. Right-click on a tab you want to keep open and select Pin tab.
The tab is moved to the far left side of the tab bar if it wasn’t there already, and it’s sized down to just the favicon. Pinned tabs remain persistent and reopen the next time you start Chrome.
If you decide you don’t want a pinned tab to open all the time, right-click that tab and select Unpin tab. The tab is sized up to regular size and is moved to the left side of all the open tabs, but to the right of any other pinned tabs.
16. Quickly Reopen the Most Recently Closed Tabs
Did you close a tab by mistake? It’s very easy to reopen recently closed tabs. Simply hit Ctrl + Shift + T on Windows, or Cmd + Shift + T on a Mac, to reopen the last closed tab. Keep pressing the keyboard shortcut to keep reopening tabs from most recent tabs to older ones.
If you want to go back to a tab you had open last week or a few weeks ago, you can access your browsing history by pressing Ctrl + H on Windows or Cmd + Y on a Mac.
All the webpages you visited displays on a new tab, grouped by date. Scroll through the list and click on the webpage you want to reopen. By default, the webpage opens on the current tab. To open a closed tab on a new tab, right-click on the webpage in the History list and select Open link in new tab.
You can also clear your browsing history using the hamburger menu (three horizontal lines) in the upper-left corner of the History page.
To view the history for a tab, go to that tab and click and hold on the Back button to the left of the address bar until a list of visited sites displays.
In Chrome for Windows, you don’t have to keep holding down the mouse on the Backbutton. You can release the mouse button and scroll through the list before clicking on a webpage to reopen it from the list.
In Chrome for Mac, you must keep holding the mouse button down on the Back button to keep displaying the list of visited sites. While holding down the mouse button, move your mouse down to select a tab to reopen. Then, release the mouse button.
If you want to open a closed tab on a new tab, using either method above, hold down the Ctrl key while clicking on the webpage in the History list on Windows, or the Cmd key on a Mac. You can also use the middle mouse button to select the webpage to reopen in a new tab.
Shift-click reopens a closed tab in a new window on both Windows and Mac.
17. Move or Close Multiple Tabs at Once
The ability to select more than one tab at a time is not available in Chrome anymore. But you can select multiple tabs using an extension called Cluster and move or close all of them at once.
Once you’ve installed Cluster, hit Ctrl + M to open the Window Manager page on a new tab. Check the boxes for the tabs you want to move or close.
The Active Windows screen lists all Chrome windows currently open, even if they’re minimized. You can also use Cluster to save windows, so you can open all tabs from that saved window in a new window later. Click Saved Windows on the left to access them.
To move the selected tabs, click the Move tabs button (the button on the left in the upper-left corner of the Window Manager. Click the Close tabs button in the middle to close the selected tabs. The Save Window button on the right saves the currently active window.
Use the X on a window heading to close that window.
18. Quickly Find and Switch Tabs
If you have a lot of tabs open, it’s hard to find the one you want. The size of each tab shrinks and eventually you have so many open that you can’t read the title of each tab. And there’s no way to have multiple rows of tabs in Chrome, at least that I’ve found. If you find a way, let us know in the comments!
If you get to the point where you can’t tell what each tab is, and Chrome is slowing down your system from all the open tabs, it’s probably time to close Chrome and start again. But you might want to find certain tabs you don’t want to lose and pin them (see tip #15) so you have access to them after reopening Chrome.
The Tabli extension allows you to search through your open tabs. It displays a searchable and scrollable view of all tabs in all open Chrome windows. After installing Tabli, do the following:
You can also use Tabli to save an entire window of tabs by checking the Save all tabs in this window box in the upper-left corner of the window box you want to save.
Enter a Window Title on the Save Tabs dialog box.
To open the saved tabs in a new window, click the window title at the top of the window box.
Once you save a window, you can open other tabs in the same window. If you want to go back to only the tabs you saved, open Tabli and click the Revert to bookmarked tabsbutton. All the other tabs you opened on the window are closed.
This is another way you can easily open a set of tabs you visit often, just like we talked about in tip #11. But, using Tabli, you can go back to your saved set of tabs without closing Chrome and reopening it.
The Revert Saved Window dialog box shows a list of the tabs that will be closed. A message displays on the dialog box saying the action cannot be undone. However, you can use tip #16 above to reopen closed tabs, even when using the Tabli extension.
Click OK to close all the tabs except the ones saved in the window.
If you don’t want the window saved anymore, click the Stop managing this window check mark in the upper-left corner of the window box you don’t want saved anymore.
19. Use the Keyboard to Scroll Up and Down on a Webpage
Here’s a simple but useful tip. You’re probably used to scrolling with the scroll button on your mouse or using the scrollbar.
A keyboard shortcut for scrolling up and down a webpage is the space bar. Press the Spacebar once to scroll down one page’s length at a time. To scroll up one page, hit Shift + Spacebar.
20. Assign Keyboard Shortcuts to Extensions
Some Chrome extensions have keyboard shortcuts you can use to open or activate them. For some extensions that don’t have shortcuts, you can set them up yourself.
To access the screen for setting up extension shortcuts, type “chrome://extensions/shortcuts” in the address bar and hit Enter. On Windows, the main Extensions page displays. Scroll to the end of the Extensions page and click the Keyboard shortcuts link.
On a Mac, the Extensions page for setting up keyboard shortcuts displays on the current tab, skipping the main Extensions page.
We’re going to use Chrome on Windows to show how to assign a shortcut to an extension, but it works the same way on the Extensions keyboard shortcuts screen on the Mac.
Find the extension in the list for which you want to set up a keyboard shortcut. Some extensions allow you to set up different keyboard shortcuts for multiple actions.
Click in the box for the extension and action you want to set up and type the shortcut you want to use.
The shortcut is entered automatically. Click OK to close the dialog box. Now you can use that shortcut to perform that action on that extension.
21. Use a Keyboard Shortcut or the Home Button to Go to the Default Home Page
By default, the Home button is not available on the address bar or the toolbar in Chrome. However, on Windows, you can hit Alt + Home to return to the Home page.
If you’re using a Mac, the Alt + Home shortcut doesn’t work. Even if it did, Mac laptops do not have the Home button that’s available on the number pad, unless you buy a separate number pad.
To add the Home button to Chrome on Windows or on a Mac, type “chrome://settings” in the address bar and press Enter. Under Appearance, click the Show home button slider button.
By default, the Home button takes you to the New Tab page. But you can change that to a website of your own choosing by selecting the second option and entering the URL you want to go to using the Home button.
22. Quickly Go to a Website on a New Tab
To save time, you can enter the main part of a website’s domain, like “makeuseof”, then hit Ctrl + Enter. Chrome fills in the rest for you. The website opens on a new tab.
23. Quickly Look Up Words on a Webpage
Expand your vocabulary as you read webpages. The Google Dictionary extension allows you to quickly see the definition of any word on a webpage.
After installing Google Dictionary, double-click a word on a webpage to see the definition in a popup. To get more information about the word, click More.
A Google search is opened on a new tab with “define” added before the word you selected. The Dictionary entry displays first, and additional search results follow.
24. View Security Information About the Current Website
The icon to the left of a website’s URL in the address bar indicates whether a website is safe to visit. It tells you if the site has a security certificate, if Chrome trusts that certificate, and if Chrome has a private connection with the site. You’ll see one of the following icons:
Get additional information about the site’s security by clicking the area of the address bar containing one of the above icons.
If there’s any Flash content on the site, you can have Chrome Ask you before playing the content. Or you can Always allow or Always block Flash content on that site.
You can view the site’s security Certificate and each of the Cookies in use on the site. When you click the “in use” link below Cookies, a popup dialog displays showing you the Allowed and Blocked cookies on separate tabs. On the Allowed tab, you can select a cookie and click Block at the bottom of the popup. Use the Remove button to remove a selected cookie.
Click Done when you’ve finished managing cookies for the site.
25. View How Much Memory Chrome is Using
Ever wondered how much memory each of your tabs and your extensions in Chrome is using? Chrome has its own Task Manager, like the Windows Task Manager.
On Windows, hit Shift + Esc to open Chrome’s Task Manager in its own window. You can view the Memory and CPU usage for each tab and extension. To terminate the process for a tab or extension, select the item and click End process.
When you use Chrome’s Task Manager to end a tab’s process, the tab is not closed. It’s just unloaded. To view the page again, go to the tab and click Reload.
31 Power Tips for Chrome That Will Improve Your Browsing Instantly
On a Mac, there is no keyboard shortcut for opening the Task Manager in Chrome, but there are two other ways you open Chrome’s Task Manager. One way is to open the Chrome menu in the browser window and go to More Tools > Task Manager. This method also works in Windows.
The second way is to open the Window menu on Chrome’s menu bar and select Task Manager. This method is only available on a Mac because there is no menu bar in Chrome for Windows.
26. Move Extension Buttons Off the Toolbar
When you install an extension in Chrome, it may add a button to the toolbar to the right of the address bar. If you’ve installed a lot of extensions, the toolbar can get very crowded and shrink the size of the address bar.
If you’re using a laptop with a small screen, or you’ve reduced the size of the Chrome window, you can move all or some of these buttons to the top of the Chrome menu.
To remove a button from the toolbar, right-click on the button and select Hide in Chrome menu.
Click the Chrome menu to access the moved extension buttons.
27. Switch to Full Screen Mode
To avoid distractions when reading a webpage, you can put Chrome into full-screen mode. This mode hides all the Chrome window elements like the bookmarks bar, the Chrome menu button, extensions buttons, and the tab bar. Operating system elements are also hidden, like the Taskbar, system tray, and clock in Windows and the top panel and dock on a Mac.
The text on the webpage is not made larger or zoomed in (see tip #28 below). You just see more of the text and the rest of the webpage. You can also remove elements of the webpage to make more of the main text available on the screen at one time. We’ve talked about tips and tools to help you print webpages, which also help with reading webpages on the screen.
To switch to the full screen mode in Chrome on Windows, hit F11. The Chrome window takes up the entire screen, hiding the Chrome window and Windows desktop elements. A message displays at the top of the Chrome window reminding you how to exit full-screen mode. Press F11 again to return to normal mode.
The F11 keyboard shortcut for going to full-screen mode in Chrome is not available on the Mac. To go to full-screen mode in Chrome for Mac, go to Chrome menu > Zoom and click the full-screen icon.
To exit full-screen mode on a Mac, click the green, full-screen icon in the upper-left corner of the Chrome window. This icon an also be used to enter full-screen mode.
28. Easily Zoom In and Out on Webpages
If you’re having trouble reading a webpage because the text is too small, you can easily zoom in on the webpage, enlarging everything on the page.
To quickly zoom in or out on a webpage, press Ctrl + + (plus sign), Cmd + + on a Mac, to zoom in, or Ctrl + – (minus sign), or Cmd + – on a Mac, to zoom out. Each time you press one of these keyboard shortcuts, Chrome zooms in or out 25 percent. A box at the top of the window shows you the current zoom level and provides buttons to zoom in (plus sign) or zoom out (minus sign).
The Reset button takes you back to the normal 100 percent view. You can also hit Ctrl + 0(zero), or Cmd + 0 on a Mac, to return to normal view.
29. Add a Website to the Desktop as a Shortcut
We all have our favorite sites we visit often. You can bookmark sites to which you want easy access or set them up to open automatically when you start Chrome (tip #11 above).
But if you don’t want to add more bookmarks, or you don’t want to open certain sites every time you open Chrome, you can add shortcuts for your favorite sites to your desktop for quick and easy access.
To begin creating a desktop shortcut to a website on Windows, follow these steps:
On the Add to desktop dialog box, do the following:
A shortcut is added to your desktop using the favicon for the site. Double-click the shortcut to either open the site in a standard Chrome window or in a standalone, app-like window, depending on how you set up the shortcut.
If you’ve created a shortcut that opens in a standard Chrome window, but it doesn’t open in Chrome, you may need to change the default browser app in the Windows settings.
If you set up the shortcut to behave like a Chrome Web App (you checked the Open as window box), the site opens in a standalone window with none of the standard browser window elements.
The method we covered for created a desktop shortcut to a website doesn’t work in Chrome for Mac. The Add to desktop option is not available under More tools.
But there is a quick and easy way to create a desktop shortcut for a website on a Mac and on Windows. Click on the View site information part of the address bar and drag it to the desktop. Or you can highlight the URL and drag that to the desktop.
This method creates a shortcut that opens the website in a standard Chrome window. If you’re using Windows and you want a shortcut that opens a Chrome Web App style standalone window, use the method we covered above.
30. Save Downloaded Files Directly to Google Drive
If you have a Google account, you automatically get 15GB of free storage on Google Drive. This is handy for downloading files when you’re not on your own computer.
Google’s official Save to Google Drive extension for Chrome allows you to save web content and downloaded files and media directly to your Google Drive account.
After installing Save to Google Drive, right-click on a download link on any webpage and select Save Link to Google Drive.
If this is the first time you’re using Save to Google Drive, or you’re not signed in to a Google account (Chrome menu > Settings > People), you’ll be asked to choose an account and to enter your password. You’ll also have to Allow the extension to access your Google account.
The Save to Google Drive dialog box shows the progress of the file being saved. Once that’s done, you get a link to the file, so you can view it and a chance to Rename it right from the dialog box.
The My Drive link on the dialog box opens your Google Drive account in a new tab and highlights the saved file.
You can also use Save to Google Drive to save a webpage for offline reading. To do this, you must select the format you want to use when saving the webpage.
Right-click on the Save to Google Drive button on the toolbar and select Options.
On the Save to Google Drive extension options page, select a format under Save page asin the HTML pages section. The best option for being able to open the saved webpage in Chrome for offline reading is Web archive (.mht). This saves the entire webpage, with all its elements, in one file. You can open this file in Chrome later, even if you’re offline.
Once you choose a format, go to the webpage you want to save and click (not right-click) the Save to Google Drive button on the toolbar. A file in the chosen format is automatically saved to the default Save to Folder in your Google Drive account.
The Save to Google Drive extension can’t save “chrome://” pages (like “chrome://settings” or “chrome://extensions”) or Chrome Web Store pages due to security restrictions.
To change the Google account to which you save downloaded files and content, change to a Google profile that uses that account. If you don’t have a profile for the account you want to use, create a new profile using that account.
31. Quickly Restart Chrome
Instead of restarting Chrome by closing and reopening it, you can type “chrome://restart” in the address bar and press Enter. Chrome restarts and reopens all the tabs you had open.
This restarts all open Chrome windows. If you have multiple profiles open, they are all closed. All incognito windows are also closed.
When Chrome restarts, all normal Chrome windows are reopened and all tabs in each window are reloaded. The window and tab that was active when you used the “chrome://restart” option will be the active window and tab when Chrome restarts.
If you were filling out data on any webpages, that data is lost. Incognito windows are not reloaded and the next time you open an incognito window, the tabs you had open last are not reloaded.
You can also add a bookmark to the Bookmarks bar, so you can restart Chrome with one click. To begin, do the following:
On the Edit bookmark dialog box, do the following:
Now you can click the Restart Chrome bookmark on the Bookmarks bar to quickly restart Chrome.
5 Lesser-Known Free Stock Image Sites for Images That Stick Out
InsightsThese lesser-known stock photography sites are just as good as any of the popular ones. Try them for royalty-free images. About the author: Mihir Patkar (MakeUseOf) is a freelance writer on technology and life hacks, who firmly believes chocolate is the answer to any question. You can usually find him saying other such silly things on Twitter. MakeUseOf is a technology website, focused on bridging the connection between users, computers, devices and the Internet through education. Feature image courtesy of byrdyak via Bigstockphoto.
Photos and images have copyrights. If you want to use an image, you need permission from the photographer or employ other legal ways to use a photo. The easiest free option is to use a royalty-free image.
The internet is full of amazing stock photography sites that give you such free images. You’ve probably heard of the more popular ones like Pexels, Unsplash, and Pixabay. But everyone goes there! So if you want to stand out from the crowd, you need images from places that most people don’t know about.
These lesser-known stock photography sites are just as good as any of the popular ones. But since you are one of the lucky few MakeUseOf readers to know about them, chances are that they will be unique in your circles.
1. UnDraw: Illustrations for Designs and Mockups in SVG Format
Whether you’re designing a new app or creating a PowerPoint presentation, a few good illustrations can really spruce things up. SVG, or Scalable Vector Graphics, is the most popular format for that. And UnDraw is a resource for such free, hand-drawn illustrations.
All of the graphics on the site are completely free and don’t even require an attribution, so you can include them without any linkbacks or credits. Since every file is in the SVG format, you can resize it to make it as large as you want, even large enough to print billboards out of it.
And SVG also makes the color palette customizable, so you can change the colors to your liking. Or pick a color and UnDraw will show illustrations to match it.
UnDraw is a shockingly good site for the number of clean illustrations it offers for free. In fact, it’s better than most of the high-quality vector art sites you already know. Designers and app developers will especially love these since they can be a template to create something magnificent.
2. Moose: Professional Photographers and Models Make Stock Photos
Usually, stock photography is all about cheesy images or amateur photography. But Moose takes a different approach, with professionals in both the photography and modeling spheres.
Moose’s aim is to make stock photos that you can ideally use together. That’s why you will often find different pictures with a similar background, or the same model in different settings, and so on. The lighting is also kept as static as possible so that you can Photoshop two pictures into one without it being jarring.
At any point, you can sort Moose by the category of photos, the models, or the photographers. All the pictures are free to use as long as you link back to Moose with accreditation, or you can buy the picture and not link or attribute it.
3. Clipstill: Free Cinemagraphs to Stun Your Viewers
Cinemagraphs are images with one small part of the scene in motion. It’s a visually stunning end result, adding just that little bit of action to bring the photo to life. Cinemagraphs are a creative way to use animated GIFs, and now you can get a few for free.
Clipstill all about paid stock cinemagraphs, but every month, it offers six high-quality items for free. It’s probably a good idea to download these for the future since the site will change those as time goes on.
Of course, it’s only six. So here’s another lesser-known site with ten more royalty-free, attribution-free stock cinemagraphs. Over at Free Cinemagraphs, the makers took free stock video footage and turned them into cinemagraphic GIFs.
4. Reshot: A New Alternative to Unsplash
Since it first launched, Unsplash has become a stock photography darling. We’d go so far as to say that it’s the best site for guaranteed free-to-use high-quality images. But it has also become a bit boring, and you will see images from the site used in many places.
Reshot, in some ways, is the new Unsplash. It too has images that are manually curated by its staff, so you will only get good quality photos, not a bunch of nonsense. Importantly, Reshot seems to scour through a lot of other stock photography sources that Unsplash doesn’t, so its collection is markedly different. If you’re bored of Unsplash or its search is giving you the same results, Reshot is a breath of fresh air.
Importantly, Reshot offers a “Diversity Matters” pack with photos that celebrate all the diversity in humans, be it race, age, sex, or whatever else. This is guaranteed to make your pictures look more inclusive and connect with a wider audience.
5. Librestock: Multi-Site Search for Stock Photos
Many of the popular stock photography sites are actually aggregators. Both Pixabay and Pexels feature plenty of imagery from other sources. So now we have a “super-aggregator” in Librestock, which searches through several of these existing aggregators.
Librestock searches Stocksnap, Negative Space, Picography, ISO Republic, Gratisography, Shotstash, Pexels, and Foodie Factor. The thumbnails are large enough to give you a good look at the image before you go to the host site, saving you a few of those back-and-forth clicks.
Librestock also has a section for video search to help you find quality copyright-free stock footage, searching the best sites that cater to videos instead of images.
A Lot More Than Just Stock Images…
Speaking of videos, the whole “stock media” space is much larger than just photography. And it’s not just these big aggregators. Individual artists often put up their work for free so that anyone in the world can use it.
To get started, check out these sites to find stock audio, video, images, and icons. You won’t be disappointed!
Why Your Small Business Website Sucks and How to Fix It
InsightsCheck out some of the common reasons why your website could be struggling to convert visitors, and see some fixes for each potential problem. The original article is from semrush.com. The author, Deb Dey is a Digital Marketing Consultant with over 10 years of industry experience. He is the founder and the CEO of a small digital branding agency – 3Leaps. SEMrush’s digital marketing blog is an innovative resource for content strategy, content marketing, SEO, SEM, PPC, social media and more. Image courtesy of pyty via Bigstockphoto.
If you are a small business owner and your website isn’t delivering returns along expected lines, it is time to take a cold hard look at it. You need to identify what is wrong with it (why it sucks) and then fix the problem. You can’t shut your eyes to the problem, especially if your website is the beating heart of your business.
Let’s look at some of the reasons why your small business website sucks and what you can do about it:
Website Doesn’t Grab Immediate Attention
Do you know how much time you have to make an impression on users landing on your website for the first time? Hold your breath! It is five seconds. Yes, you only have a few seconds to grab the attention of your users. If you don’t, you probably will lose them forever. As a small business, you can’t afford to let that happen. So, look at your website and check and see if it can hold the attention of its visitors immediately. If you think it doesn’t, it is time to make some changes to your website.
The Fix
Use customizable templates (this is taking into consideration the fact that designing a website from scratch will demand the kind of investment you might not be able to afford). Make sure you pick templates that have been created keeping eye-tracking studies in mind. This guarantees the templates’ ability to grab user attention and make the necessary impression on him/her. Also, keep the page load speed in mind. A page that loads quickly is the kind of page that is appreciated by target visitors.
There is another way to figure out why your website is failing to grab the attention of the viewers. You can send the URL of your website to your friends and relatives and ask them to share their honest opinion about the website. Don’t tell them that it is your website as this can cloud their judgment, and they might not be honest you with. You could tell them that you have come across this website and would like to know what they think about it.
You can also use eye-tracking software to get an overview of your website. This type of application will let you know what part of the website is grabbing the most attention of the viewers and which sections visitors are paying very less attention to or ignoring. Once you get a complete picture of how your visitors are looking at your website and how they are responding to each section, you can make certain adjustments in the design to make the layout more engaging.
Your Website Doesn’t Understand Its Target Audience
A website, its design, and its functionality must be a fine balancing act between satisfying the needs of target customers and achieving business objectives in terms of increasing brand awareness, generating leads, and triggering conversions. Very often, businesses forget they are creating a website for their users and make it completely brand oriented. This leads to a situation in which the design and usability of the website cater to the needs of the business and not the users.
Does your website suffer from this problem? If it does, it is time you fix it.
The Fix
First, you need to understand what your target audience needs and expects from your website. While conducting a survey in this regard is a good idea, you might not have the time and money required for this purpose. Don’t worry. Create social media profiles across a variety of social networks (if you don’t have them already) and ask your followers’ questions about their needs and requirements and the kind of information they expect your website to deliver. Once you get their feedback, keep it in mind while redesigning your site.
Building a persona for content is a great idea. A content persona can be a mascot that represents an event or an organization, and it helps people relate to a brand with its different assets and benefits. So, rather than just writing content for your website or brand, you should spend some time to build a persona and endow it with some nice or quirky characteristics so that it stands out from others. For example, if you are selling warehouse safety products, you might use a bear as a mascot for your brand and maybe you should allow it to wear safety glasses so that the readers can understand what this weird looking bear stands for.
Another way to get valuable insights about your customers and understand their psychology is by talking to your salespeople. Your customer care representatives and salespeople deal with clients directly on a daily basis, and you will be pleasantly surprised to learn how much they know about your targeted audience.
They can share a lot about your targeted audience(s), and you will get ideas about what they like, dislike, and what they are looking for from your employees directly. No need to spend an astronomical amount on some fancy tool or spend hours on some random data to understand the activities of your targeted audience. Just take a walk and talk to your colleagues and you will have a better understanding of your customers.
Lacks Emotive Appeal
Most decisions made by individuals are emotional in nature. No doubt, they think about the pros and cons while making such decisions, but when they finally have to make a call, the decision is based on their emotions. This remains true for all decisions, even the ones they take while browsing your site. The decisions to know more about your products and services, buy your product, fill out registration forms, etc., are emotional. No doubt, they are making informed decisions, but these are prompted by positive emotions brought to the fore by your site.
So, does your website have emotive appeal?
If not, you need to take steps to instill a bit of emotion into your website’s design.
The Fix
One of the first things you must do is pick the right images for your website. Make sure they are unique, have a high resolution, and are able to evoke the right emotion amongst website visitors. It is pretty simple really. If your website is promoting your pizza place, a picture of a person eating a delicious looking pizza is the kind of imagery that will strike a chord with website visitors. It arouses feelings of envy, desire, and even hunger. You get the drift.
Color can also be used to improve the emotional resonance of your site. For example, light blue or green colors inspire feelings of calmness, while the use of a dark red inspires visitors to take action.
Ignoring the Importance of Contact Details
There are some websites that ask visitors to fill in a contact form if they want to get in touch with the business. That’s it. There is no other contact information anywhere on the website. This essentially destroys the credibility of the site and the business it represents. “Why is the business being coy about its contact details?” is the question visitors will ask themselves. This lack of easily accessible contact information creates doubts in the minds of your visitors, and they will usually move to some other website (more often than not, your competitor’s site).
Is your website missing contact details?
The Fix
Make sure your business’s contact details are found on every page of your website. Also, ensure that your website has a fairly comprehensive Contact Us page.
Now, there are few things that you need to take a careful look. Since more and more people are using mobile devices to browse the web, you need to make sure that the Contact Us page is optimized for the mobile devices.
These are some vital questions that you should not overlook at any cost. It is a common practice to display all the contact details of an organization in the footer section of all the pages of the website so that people don’t necessarily have to visit the contact us section.
Test the Contact form from as many mobile devices as possible and also don’t forget to check audience interaction on different mobile platforms via Google Analytics to get a clear picture. If you see higher bounce rate of Contact Us page from a particular mobile platform, you will have to test your website on that mobile platform to understand the problems that some people might be facing.
Overpowering Visuals
If your website is packed to the brim with visuals, that is probably where the problem lies! Gone are the days when visitors expected websites to offer striking visuals. What contemporary website visitors expect from a site is to get their hands on the information they want quickly and conveniently.
You don’t want their attention to be distracted by eye-catching visuals in the form of illustrations, images, unique typography, videos, animation, etc.; you want them to find the information they need and invest. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use these design elements; only use them if they have a purpose attached to them. Don’t use them to only improve the visual appeal of your site.
The Fix
Don’t clutter your website with visuals. Use them as a means to enhance the UX of the site. The ideal website doesn’t waste a visitor’s time with non-essentials. They want information, and they want it now! Use visuals as a means of getting access to the information they need faster and more efficient!
You should try an eye tracking application to understand how your targeted audience is interacting with your website. You will delve deep into the minds of your customers, and you will be able to get an in-depth understanding of the psychology of the consumers. For example, by harnessing the power of eye-tracking application, you will get to know what elements of your website getting the most eyeballs. If you find that some not-so-important design elements (overpowering visuals) are grabbing all the action and thus discouraging the visitors from clicking the Call to Action Button, you need to get rid of them.
If you find that the users are spending more time looking at a certain section of a web page, you might have to move the most important texts or design elements in that section so that you can send your message across more clearly and loudly.
Also, double check the focal point of your website that your visitors are looking at and ensure that all the elements and functions that are placed on that section are working fine otherwise you will be missing out on opportunities here.
A/B testing is another way to improve users experience on your website and to identify overpowering visuals. If you are not sure what visual elements are wreaking havoc with your marketing campaign, you might have to look run two different versions of the same web page and then track the reactions of the target audience. If you find that one version is performing way better than the other version, maybe it is time to get rid of the less effective visual.
How Writers Can Use Markdown in WordPress to Improve Blogging Experience?
InsightsIn this article, we’ll go over what Markdown is all about and how you can start using it with WordPress. This article is originally from instantshift.com. InstantShift is leading design and inspiration related community for web designers and developers daily resource, inspiration and premium web design and development. Image courtesy of romankosolapov via Bigstockphoto.
If you’re a WordPress user, you must have come across the term Markdown. In case you’re wondering What is Markdown? How to get started with it? You have landed on the right page.
Everything that you need to know about Markdown is right here. We’ll briefly discuss the benefits and working of Markdown after covering all the basic aspects.
So, without any further delay, let’s jump into the first question.
What is Markdown?
It is a markup language that uses simple and unobtrusive syntax for formatting. Markdown uses simple punctuations for the purpose of formatting. It’s used for writing on the web. Normally web pages are written via HTML, which uses heavy syntax for formatting. Markup language does the exact same formatting job in a simplified manner. The main goal for Markdown’s syntax is to make it as readable as possible. It’s not a substitute, but a subset of HTML.
What makes Markdown a fine choice?
Listed are the main reasons to write in Markdown:
How to Get Started with Markdown into WordPress?
We all know that WordPress is the best platform for newbie as well as experienced writers to become professional blogger. Although WordPress doesn’t support the Markdown by default, but it does allow the users to add additional functionalities by installing plugins. Every plugin handles Markdown in its own way. So, make a choice that consists the features that you need the most, in accordance to your workflow.
There is a Markdown cheat sheet, that consists all the formatting tags that are used while writing in Markdown system. Getting used to Markdown could take a while, but once you get familiar with all the formatting tags, you won’t have to take your fingers off the keyboard to do the formatting. It’ll not just pace-up the content generating process, but will also improve the all over blogging experience for the writer.
However, not all the plugins that work with Markdown in WordPress provide the same set of functionalities. Irrespective of which WordPress theme you are using, you need to add any of the following plugins to use Markdown efficiently:
Following are some well-recognized plugins:
Jetpack
Starting from the free version, there are three more versions provided: Personal, Premium, and Professional. Additional features like extra themes are provided in the paid versions.
It’s recognized widely that jetpack works best with Markdown in WordPress. Jetpack provides, along with basic features, some additional tools like code blocks and tables.
Prettypress
Along with supporting Markdown it allows gives a live view of the post while you’re still writing it. This plugin gives a choice between free and $10 premium version. It creates a concentrated environment around the writer, and everything is placed in one place.
How to Write in Markdown?
Markdown cheat sheet explained:
Heading:
To make a heading you need to tag “#” in front of the text that you’re intending to turn into a heading. The size of the text depends on the number of “#” tags in front of the text. One tag results the largest text size and six tags result the smallest.
Listing:
There are several ways of making lists while writing in Markdown depending on the type of list you’re aiming to make. In order to make an ordered list, simply number the items in the list as shown in the figure above. As you’ll number the first item, it’ll automatically number the next item in progression. While making an unordered list, you can use “-” “*” or “+,” and it’ll be turned into the bullet as illustrated in the picture above.
Links:
Depending on the type of the link, you have to go by different approaches. If you want to link an email address, you simply need to start from a “smaller than” symbol (<), put the email address, and end it with a “greater than” symbol (>). Inline links are added in the same manner; you just need to put the URL between symbols instead of email address.
To embed link you have to close the text, you want to attach the hyperlink to, between two square brackets ( [hyperlink] ) and then give space before putting the needed link between parentheses.
The picture above illustrates how Markdown is used for formatting.
Along with the basic text formatting, you can also insert pictures, blockquotes, tables, etc.
Inline Image:
To embed an inline image in the document follow the guidelines shown in the picture below:
In order to embed an inline image, you need the URL of the image. You need to start with an exclamation mark, put the name of the image between square brackets, and then to continue without space put the link of the image between parentheses.
Blockquote:
Just start the line with “>” this sign and the text written after that will go into a blockquote.
These tags are extremely easy to remember and give the same results as HTML. So, that makes Markdown quick, easy, and efficient for the writers. In the era where urgent writing has become a norm, writers seek the quick and efficient ways to get the job down, and markdown provides that kind of feasibility to the users.
Markdown is extremely easy to get started with. The tags that we use while writing in Markdown are quite simple to remember. Plugins provided by WordPress marks the formatting work even simpler. If you want to improve your blogging experience on wordpress, you have all the information that you need to get started.
Is Periodic Website Redesign a Waste of Money?
InsightsEvery few years organisations undertake yet another website redesign project. But is this the right approach or is there a better way? Written by Marie Boulton, jerram.co.uk. Jerram Marketing is a team of four highly experienced marketing, design and development professionals. Formed in 2006 they bring over 60 years of combined experience and are each highly trained in specialist areas. Image courtesy of PixelsAway via Bigstockphoto.
Is Periodic Website Redesign a Waste of Money?
Ok, so as a Digital Agency, I probably shouldn’t be putting into your mind that you don’t need to periodically redesign your website. After all, we make money by you needing a new website. But don’t you think it would be better and easier for both parties if your Digital Agency created a website that could be easily updated and kept up with the times? Instead of having to have a whole new website created every couple of years?
The Short Life of a Website
This article is probably already resonating with you. You launch a new website, it’s all shiny and new and looks great. They give you some tips and tricks to keep it going; how to upload content and how to change some font. Then slowly over time, you get overrun with everyday work, your website takes a backseat and the next time you look at it, it’s like Dorian Grey looking at the painting of himself.
Everything looks dated and the technology used was dropped in the early 2000’s. Your staff stop utilising the website as a sales tool. And those clients who do make it to your website? Well, they leave you a note telling you they’ve left, and your heart is broken.
So, what do you do? Well, you go to a Digital Agency and you ask them to build you a new website. And as predicted, this pattern is repeated over and over again. Money just chucked into numerous websites, none outliving the last.
Time to Try Something Different
But how’s this for an idea – why don’t you ask your Digital Agency to make you a website that can be kept up to date? In fact, why don’t you ask them to create a website that they can help keep up to date? (take a look at our article about the importance of website support and maintenance).
For a start, your website will always be performing at its maximum capacity; to put it into perspective, a Digital Agency that can maintain a 99.99% uptime (like us!) means that your website will only have downtime for 9 hours in the entire year. With 1% of the top 100,000 websites working on less than 99% uptime, they’re losing 36 DAYS of uptime a year! (click here to work out what your uptime percentage is). Can you really afford to have your website down for over a month a year?
It’s Probably Not As Much As You Think
You might think it would be cheaper not to keep a web design agency on retainer. But consider this: how does their cost per month retainer fee compare to the cost of a new website every few years? How much have you spent on website redesign in your business life? They will always be on hand to fix any problems you have. They will know the website (and the business) inside out and importantly, you’ll know them well too.
So next time you think you need a new website, talk to your Digital Agency about what they would suggest. It might be that your website is beyond saving and you do need a new one. But even if you just need it to be redesigned, ask about website maintenance and support, you won’t regret it.