We took a look at the world’s top 100 brands to determine which fonts, colors and formats were the most popular choices. Our infographic provides some good food for thought if you’ve hit a road block on your latest logo design.
Share Our Fonts & Colors Infographic
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Infographic authored by TastyPlacement, <a href="https://tastyplacement.com/">an Austin, TX-Based SEO, Digital Marketing, and web design agency</a>. To view the original post, <a href="https://tastyplacement.com/infographic-fonts-colors-logos">click here</a>.
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About the Study: The Details
We based our research on the latest Forbes list of the world’s most powerful brands. Since brands frequently change or update their logos, our study reflects only the logos featured on the list. The color white was not included as a design feature if other colors were present. Apple’s white logo was the only exception.
The Results
We found that most brands opt for a blue logo featuring the world’s most popular sans-serif font, Helvetica. Serif fonts ended up being the least used typeface, although it hasn’t stopped Google from being listed as the #5 top brand in the world.
…and the thumbnail!:
https://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/Logo-and-Font-Color-Infographic-Thumb.jpg301300Michael Davidhttps://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/tastyplacementneedssvg.svgMichael David2023-01-26 11:19:122023-02-14 11:51:34Infographic: Fonts & Colors That Drive the World’s Top Brands
I wouldn’t trust a plugin to do a WordPress backup, but if you must, try UpDraft and cross your fingers. First of all, how will you ever know that the plugin is secure? How will you know if the plugin is working correctly? Finally, you’ll need the plugin to restore the backup–what if the plugin isn’t updated for the current version of WordPress?
To Backup WordPress the Right Way, Do a Direct Database Backup
A WordPress installation is composed of two separate but integrated components–and a full backup requires you to backup both components. First (and easiest) is the php and script files that run the installation and the template. These are files that exist on your web server/hosting account. You back up these files with an FTP program like FileZilla. An FTP backup is the easy part of backing up a WordPress installation–but won’t represent a complete backup.
Simple Steps to Backup WordPress’ FTP Files
First look at the following photo, it’s what a WordPress installation looks like in an FTP program (you want to backup the folders and files you see here):
So here are the steps to backup:
You need an FTP program installed on your local PC, we recommend open source FileZilla.
Use your web hosting password and log into FTP using FileZilla.
Download the files described above to your local machine.
Part 2: The Database Backup
The second component of a WordPress installation is the WordPress database, and backing up this part is a bit more difficult. The database stores user information, all the text of your pages and posts, and your plugin settings. Your WordPress database runs within software that runs on your webserver–it isn’t a file or set of files that is easy to just copy to your local PC. In 99% of cases, you can get to your database by logging into the admin area for your web hosting account. For a Hostgator or Bluehost account you simply point your browser to yoursite.com/cpanel (cpanel is common web hosting management software). For GoDaddy and some other hosts that use their own administration software, you’ll need to hunt a bit to get to your database.
Step 1: Log in to Cpanel
If I go to tastyplacement.com/cpanel, I get to this screen. From there I use my account password; pretty darn easy.
Step 2: Find phpMyAdmin and Get In!
If you have cPanel, your phpmyadmin is in there somewhere…find it and click to enter the program.
Then you’ll see the phpMyAdmin software interface, and your databases will be listed in the left column. You want to keep your server name and database names private, so I’ve grayed out mine here. Click on the name of your WordPress database to enter the database.
And here it is, your WordPress database. Here’s an important distinction: your WordPress installation has ONE database and within that database is 15 or more tables. In the example below, the tables (like “wp-commentmeta”) are listing in the main column:
Step 3: Export the Database to Your Local PC and Save as a Backup (and Promise You’ll Go Slowly and Carefully)
You need to make sure you backup ALL the tables, because phpMyAdmin will certainly let you backup some, one, or all of the tables within a database. It’s easy: from the view above, scroll to the bottom of the table and “Check All”, and then select “Export” from the drop-down like so:
Here’s a safety note, as you might imagine, the selections on that drop-down menu “drop” and “empty” would be very bad, as in your site would be totally destroyed. And so here is the last screen:
I would use these options without customizing anything. You might be tempted to change the “Format”, but don’t. SQL backup format is going to be the most universal and will cause the fewest problems when restoring your backup. Just click “Go” and download the file to a safe place.
Questions? Post ’em up in the comments! Your WordPress backup will be your savior if your WordPress site gets hacked.
https://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/wp-tutorial2.jpg384848Michael Davidhttps://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/tastyplacementneedssvg.svgMichael David2015-12-28 13:05:072018-10-17 08:19:57How to Backup WordPress the Right Way
A “click to call” button or link on a mobile or smartphone website can mean the difference between getting a customer to call or losing them forever. Converting customers with mobile sites is a different discipline from converting customers on desktop websites: mobile website visitors are unlikely to read long sales copy, are similarly unlikely to send an email, and are certainly not going to fill out a lengthy web form. In the mobile environment, a phone call is your best route to conversion–after all, your visitors have the phone in their hand!
Coding the Click to Call Link for Mobile Phones (updated for 2015)
To create a click to call link, use the following code:
<a href="tel:8005551212">800-555-1212</a>
“Selling” the Click
Now, let’s improve our click to call link. After all, all we’ve done with the above link is make the phone number clickable; will users know that the phone number is a click to call link? We can “sell” the click by adding a call to action to our link:
<a href="tel:8005551212">Click HERE to Call: 800-555-1212</a>
That’s an improvement, it serves to highlight the link and directs users with a call to action.
Pro Tip: Visually Improving the Click to Call Button
To take our click to call link even further, we can add an arrow to visually guide users to the desired action–and maybe even add a second call to action. You can see this technique in action on the following mobile site:
Pro Tip: Advanced Analytics Tracking for Mobile Calls
https://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/mobileweb.jpg234581Michael Davidhttps://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/tastyplacementneedssvg.svgMichael David2015-07-14 08:12:032016-04-20 08:48:47How to Make a Mobile Site Click to Call Link
We originally wrote this post back in 2010, and now revisit the question. We get asked a lot about WordPress’ suitability for search engine rankings. WordPress’ reputation and having a sound foundation for SEO has certainly seeped into the public’s mind. For the most part, the reputation is deserved. This site, TastyPlacement.com runs on WordPress, and ranks very well for our intended keywords.
There are a few drawbacks with WordPress, but like most things SEO, it’s really about the cumulative effect of everything. Overall, we’d grade WordPress an A- on it’s suitability and power for SEO purposes. But it’s so good at so many things, that it presents a compelling story overall.
First, a summary and then we’ll dig into the nuts and bolts.
Is WordPress Good for SEO?
WordPress generates a very search-friendly URL stucture
Speed of publishing is superb
Built-in Ping services notifies web properties of your new content
Plenty of Plug-in and development support for SEO features from the WP community
Built-in sharing and commenting (depending on the theme used
Benefit: Search-Friendly URL Structure
WordPress seamlessly and automatically handles the creation of URLs through its permalink feature. A permalink is simply WordPress’ way of describing the URL for a particular page. Because keywords in the URL of a page are a ranking factor, If you want to rank for “WordPress Development,” than this URL: mysite.com/wordpressdevelopment
will perform bet ter in search than mysite.com/index.com?page=5 .
WordPress’ permalink functionality gives you descriptive URL st rings for search engines to follow with no effort at all. First, you’ll need to turn on Permalinks within the WordPress dash board—permalinks are not activated in a default installation. To turn on permalinks, log in to the dashboard and follow the left site navigation to “Settings” then “Permalinks”. At the Permalink Settings page, in the section titled Common Setting, click the radio button for “Custom Structure” and enter /%postname%/ . This permalink structure will automatically generate URLs
from your Page and Post titles—but you’ll still be able to manually change them if necessary. Because the titles of your Posts and Pages are relevant to the topic of your content, the permalinks based on your titles will be relevant as well.
In WordPress version 4 and above, you can also simply select the newly included permalink “Post name” instead of “Custom Structure”–but look closely because WordPress will insert a trailing slash at the end of your page URLs. We prefer our URLs without trailing slashes, which you can accomplish with the following:
WordPress SEO Benefit: Speed of Content Creation
WordPress is built to run: it is designed for the speedy and continual publishing of content. Since I have converted nearly all my sites and most of my client’s sites to WordPress, our speed to publishing has increased. On a static html site, the creation of content would generally involve either hard-coding the article, or using a WYSIWYG interface, then adjusting menus–sometimes on multiple pages.
With WP, sites grow big and grow fast. All that content brings breadth to your keyword families quickly, and your large site can quickly become “bait” for inbound links from other websites.
WordPress SEO Benefit: Crawlability
Websites must be crawlable by search engines in order to be indexed properly and appear in search rankings. WordPress’ internal logic and link structure is simple and shared universally among millions of websites–so WP is familiar ground for search engines. This familiarity means that Google’s spiders can find what they are looking for, and index and rank the content with confidence. WordPress won’t generate a lot of duplicate content (although it generates some).
SEO Benefit: Plug-Ins and Support
Because the WordPress community is so large (enormous, really), the variety and number of plug-ins for SEO support has grown tremendously (Plug-ins are small software modules that website owners can optionally install in addition to the default WP installation). The All in One SEO Plug-In, or the Platinum SEO Pack are both quick and easy “one stop” plug-ins that accomplish a basic, but sound set of SEO goals such as manual Title Tags and Meta Descriptions. These plug-ins extend WordPress’ functionality to rival the control and customization you would achieve under a static site.
SEO Benefit: New Content “Bump”
Another great feature of WordPress, which is also shared by other blogging platforms is the “new content bump”. A new post (generally not a “page” though–WP divides its content into two classes of webpages: “posts” and “pages”) will receive an initial lift in rankings during it’s first few days after publishing. This is logical: blog posts are intended to be topical and current, like a news item–Google treats this fresh content as noteworthy and rewards it with a bump in initial rankings. Ranking position will generally settle down after a few days.
SEO Benefit: Pings, Comments and Trackbacks
Pings, Comments and Trackbacks are interactive features built into WP–these supplemental tools let other blogs and individuals interact with a WordPress site: this brings inbound links and traffic (in the case of pings and trackbacks), and free content and visitors (in the form of comments to blog posts).
SEO Drawback: Poorly Designed Themes
But it’s not all rosy: I see a lot of poorly designed themes that undercut WordPress’ SEO power. Here’s an example I often see: a theme/template will be designed with the blog’s title bearing a Heading 1 (h1) tag–that’s not the way to go. The h1 tag should speak to the subject/topic of each page or post–to repeat an h1 tag mindlessly throughout hundred of pages on a blog is a waste of a valuable SEO tool.
The fix? Code the Blog Title in a plain old CSS class–and utilize the powerful h1 tag for the on-page title for each post or page.
SEO Drawback: Rigidity in Menu Presentation
The biggest hang-up that WP forces upon us is perhaps the way menus are presented. The Page/Post methodology described above generally means that posts and pages are kept separate in menus. That’s not an insurmountable problem, but excluding individual pages from particular menu locations (like a top bar menu, where space is limited) can require coding the WP template’s core .php files, or inserting page ID’s in Widget boxes ad nauseum. Now, to get advanced: If you want to “nofollow” certain page links, say to a contact page or a privacy policy page (in a static site, this task is a breeze) you can either forget it, or go hunting for a plug-in.
When it comes to menu presentation in WordPress, I have learned “the wisdom to recognize that which I cannot change”. I have adapted, and I got over it. It’s a small price to pay for all this power.
https://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/tastyplacementneedssvg.svg00Michael Davidhttps://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/tastyplacementneedssvg.svgMichael David2015-05-08 20:39:062018-10-17 09:38:28Is WordPress Good for SEO?
How we tripled a client’s PPC conversion rate in 6 weeks, and lowered Google Adwords cost-per-conversion by 63.22%
We love conversion rate optimization and cost-per-conversion optimization. This is the heart of the matter–it sits at the core of what any advertising campaign should look towards. This case study will show how we did the following for one of our client campaigns with sound analysis and swift and informed action:
We created at least $5,000 of net benefit by our calculation (it may actually be more depending the client’s net profit)
We increased the client’s conversion rate by 3 times: The conversion rate increased from 1.49% to 4.49%.
We lowered the client’s overall ad spend while increasing conversions: Total Adwords monthly spend went from $11,592.28 to $7,301.72
Overall monthly conversions went from 147 to 254
We lowered the client’s cost of converting website visitors by well more than half: The Adwords cost per conversions went from $78.18 to $28.75
Here’s the teaser
Here’s the teaser: massive, immediate gains in conversion rate on Google Adwords immediately following our conversion rate optimization. Note that the gains were immediate, but grew incrementally throughout the month, and also remained sustainable.
Ok, so now let’s move on to how we got there.
Step 1: Adwords campaign analysis with Google Analytics
So, we started with an analysis of the campaign performance from a conversion rate standpoint. We saw a ho-hum performance here, with a 2.2% conversion rate:
Step 2: Brainstorm ideas on how to improve conversion rate; where are the buyers?
The client sells a self-help course of a personal nature (we don’t want to say more than that) and so we brainstormed ideas on where the higher conversion rates are. There are always higher conversion rates somewhere: on improved landing pages, during particular times of day, in various cities and regions, by particular keywords and groups of keywords, by device, etc. The list of available optimization pathways truly is endless.
The short end of the story is that we keyed in on time of day for this particular client. Because the product is of a personal nature, we thought that customers might only purchase/sign up when they were in the privacy of their own home–and that meant outside of work hours.
Step 3: We find the gusher: Massive conversion rate opportunity
Our instincts were correct: time of day was the great divider between tire-kickers and serious shoppers. We customized Google Analytics’ Adwords Hour of the Day report to gauge user behavior throughout a 24 hour cycle, and sorted by conversion rate. The report, shown below, shows a conversion rate variance of nine times throughout the course of a 24-hour period. The prior PPC managers had spent the client’s budget uniformly throughout the day, so we had plenty of data to work with.
Remember, the client sells a personal self-help product, and sure enough, the high-converting hours were the evening like 11pm, and definitely not in the afternoon at 2pm and 11am, for example. But the data tells the tale:
Step 4: Turning data into action
The next step was easy; the work was really already done. We simply needed to direct Adwords spend into the high-converting hours [it’s called dayparting and it worked on Madison Avenue, and it works with digital marketing as well, see our article on Moz.com about another success]. At the campaign level, we used Adwords Ad Schedule feature to up the spend in our high-converting hours and reduce/eliminate spend in low-converting hours. We actually got a little push-back from the client who was afraid of losing traffic, but we persisted and pushed through the change.
There were a few other changes we made to landing page routing and some proprietary tricks we know, but the main essence is described here.
Final Results:
The final results show a tremendous success:
Some highlights from the end result:
Note that Sessions went down, from 9861 to 5652, but who cares? Despite lower website visits, the corresponding conversion rate still went up…
Conversions increased from 147 to 254, despite the drop in Sessions.
The lower number of Sessions was a direct results of a lower Ad Spend, in this case from about $11.5k to $7.3k.
But with conversions increasing despite the lower spend, cost per conversion dove from $78.18 to $28.75
https://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/general-awesomeness-thumb.png234581Michael Davidhttps://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/tastyplacementneedssvg.svgMichael David2014-11-18 12:50:022019-04-17 11:58:42A PPC Case Study of Awesome Excellence
We did some research on startup companies in Austin and discovered the following results. This infographic takes a look at the current startup scene and should provide some insight into where your own company stands in the bustling Austin market.
Feel Free to Share Our Austin Startup Infographic
You’re free to display our infographic on your website; however, the license we grant you requires that you properly and correctly attribute the work back to us with a link to our website by using the embed code provided below:
Here’s an Easy Embed Code, Just Drop it in to Your Site
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<a href="https://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/start-up-infographic_9.24.png">
<img src="https://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/start-up-infographic-thumbnail.png" alt="A Guide to Startups in Austin, Texas" /></a>
Infographic authored by <a href="https://tastyplacement.com/">TastyPlacement</a>, an Austin SEO consulting company.
To view the original post, <a href="https://tastyplacement.com/start-up-infographic">click here</a>. </div>
About the Study: Some Details
We based our research on the CEO Magazine Business Climate Index, the JLL Report, and the mentioned companies’ websites. All companies reflected in this infographic are based on the most recent information provided in regards to the Austin market. The largest investment sector was software with $22 million to 13 companies alone.
Want an Infographic for Your Site?
Check out our Infographic Development services and see what TastyPlacement can do for you!
…and the thumbnail!:
https://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/wordpress-tutorial.svg00Matthew Beyhttps://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/tastyplacementneedssvg.svgMatthew Bey2014-09-09 15:50:282023-02-06 10:58:05Infographic: A Guide to Startup Scene in Austin, Texas
How Social Media Activity Impacts Organic Search Rankings
Can social media activity impact organic search rankings? Popular wisdom says yes, but we set out to prove it with a simple test. We’ve compiled our findings into an easy-to-follow infographic.
Use This Graphic for FREE on Your Site!
You may use the infographic above on your website, however, the license we grant to you requires that you properly and correctly attribute the work to us with a link back to our website by using the following embed code.
Embed Code
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alt="Infographic: Testing Social Signals" /></a><br/>
Infographic authored by TastyPlacement, an <a href="https://tastyplacement.com/">
Austin digital marketing, SEO & PPC agency</a>. To view the original post, see the original
<a href="https://tastyplacement.com/infographic-testing-social-media-signals-in-search">
Social Media Infographic</a>. </div>
Want an Infographic for Your Site?
Check out our Infographic Development services and see what TastyPlacement can do for you!
…and the thumbnail!:
https://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/nseo-thumbnail.jpg356400Michael Davidhttps://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/tastyplacementneedssvg.svgMichael David2012-04-25 14:12:292019-11-12 18:56:29Infographic: Testing Social Media Signals in Search
