Wow, things sure move fast on the web! Less than one year after the launch of our #Blog dedicated inbound marketing platform, we are excited to announce the release of a new and improved version. Here are the highlights of the key improvements and new features just rolled out.
Mobile Usability
Mobile web browsing continued to grow tremendously during the past year with some sites getting as much as 50% of their traffic from mobile devices. This shifts our focus to a totally mobile-first approach to usability of web sites and user experience. We have therefore continued to improve on mobile usability, adopting the latest industry best practices in this area and further tuning our platform for use on tablets and other mobile devices.
Our new #Blog interface now scores 100% on Google Mobile Usability scale!
Social Media Integration
A very large portion of traffic to your blog will come from social media and social networks. Sharing, liking and other social interactions have become the main method of spreading the word and therefore bringing visitors to your content. With this in mind, #Blog now provides additional social media functions, giving content creators more control over how their posts show and are shared on social networks (using the OpenGraph protocol).
Whilst social media started off as an alternative to search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques to generate inbound traffic to your sites, it has now become very complimentary. As search engines such as Google become smarter, social media signals are contributing both directly as well as indirectly to your site's ranking.
Check out this great article from SearchMetrics to learn more about how social signals affect search engine ranking.
Infinite Scroll
This very popular interface technique is taking over the web and quickly becoming a favourite with blog and content sites. Familiar to Facebook and LinkedIn users, Infinite Scroll allows users to browse lists of posts and bring up more and more items as you scroll downwards. This proves to save on clicking and moving between pages and particularly appreciate by mobile device users. It however could cause undesired effects on search indexing if not done properly.
In this latest version, #Blog optimises the Infinite Scroll interface to provide a fallback mode to allow search engines to fully reach and index all posts published. This ensure that SEO does not suffer while offering visitors the comfort and convenience of Infinite Scroll.
Additionally, we have also enhanced our dynamic sitemap system to further optimise search indexing and visibility of posts in line with industry standards and best practices.
Page Speed
The speed of loading pages from your blog has a direct impact on visitor acquisition, retention and overall effectiveness of your content. Even more, Google and Bing search engines both have long included page speed in their ranking algorithms and slow sites are penalised in more than one way.
As part of our ongoing exercise to optimise and improved the speed of our platform, we have now made a number of technical changes to serve pages quicker and more efficiently. Using compression and minification (text compression) of resources, such as images and CSS ,we have managed to achieve faster page loads, benefitting readers as well as the all important page ranking algos.
About #Blog Inbound Marketing
#Blog is a ready made, effective and feature rich software platform that enables you to create and run your own business blog alongside your existing website or e-shop. Whilst your web presence will provide information about your business, products and services, the blog makes use of a wide variety of techniques such as SEO and Social Media to bring traffic, maintain interest and engage with your readers.
Find out more about #Blog.
Get in touch with us to learn more about our solutions.