Code to Craft

The official collection of thoughts and stories by DIGICORP.

[codetocraft-blog]

We all have apps on our phones, which we have not used for a long time. Some of them we don’t even remember installing. Why?

Whatever you are building right now — think really hard. Unless you are making something very compelling for a large enough audience, it will be very hard to acquire users and keep them loyal.

[codetocraft-blog]

How to Validate your “Leap of Faith” Assumptions

Eric Ries, in his famous book Lean Startup defines startup as:

“A human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty.”

In the lean startup community, the term “Leap of Faith” is used to describe the riskiest assumptions we are making about our idea.

Leap of faith has two kinds of assumptions — Value and Growth Hypothesis. It is crucial to understand and validate both before moving ahead with execution.

[codetocraft-blog]

Our Engineering Manager always pushes to write a clean code. He suggests that writing a code & an article follows the same process.

[codetocraft-blog]

If you are a startup, SEO or Search Engine Optimization might be the last thing on your mind! Here are few things you could do to get started with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for your Startup:

1. Identify Target Keywords

“Think about what a user is going to type” — Matt Cutts

The foundation to an SEO strategy is the keywords used within your website. Keywords are relevant words and phrases related to the topic of your website’s content. When strategically placed within website content, search engines index your site based on the keywords to generate search results when user types in a related search query.

Make a list of all products and services you offer. How do you refer to them? How do potential clients and customers refer to them? Come up with as many combinations of phrases as you can manage.

Use Google Keyword Planner tool to get additional keyword ideas. Conduct keyword research to find the most appropriate keywords that have the potential to raise the visibility of your website on search engines.

Once you have a hefty list, integrate these search terms into the content of your website, in the HTML tags as well as the links. This will help search engines understand what your website is about.

2. Create Page Title Tags

Next to content, page titles are the second most important onsite SEO element. Write a unique title tag for each page, using one or more target keywords you’ve assigned to that page. Be sure to include your business name. Keep the entire title tag under 60 characters.

3. Develop Meta Description

Many people forget to include meta descriptions for their pages. Meta descriptions provide a brief summary of the webpage’s content to tell search engines users what your page is about.

Write a unique meta description for each webpage, using one or more target keywords you’ve assigned to that page. Keep the entire meta description under 155 characters.

4. Use Heading Tags

Heading tags used to highlight various headings, sub-headings and important points on web page. Most CMS’s (like WordPress) automatically add the H1 tag to your blog post title. If that’s the case, you’re all set. You don’t need to use any more H1 tags anywhere in the article. One is enough. For section breaks, stick to H2 and H3 tags. Also, don’t use too many H2 or H3 tags as Google’s algorithms won’t like that.

Make sure you write keyword rich headings in the order of priority in H1, H2 and H3 title tags. They are used by many crawlers to differentiate important content.

Listen what Google’s Matt Cutts has to say about repeating heading tags:

5. Optimize Images on Website

Image optimization does help a lot in driving traffic from image searches.

Keywords in the “image title” and the “alt text” help to make your blog post more focused and targeted.

But more important than that:

Images create engagement.

Content that contains images receive as much as 94 percent more views than those without; the more engaged a user is, the more likely they’ll stick around, thus increasing your overall rank.

One very important point to note. Large images will slow down your site, and slow loading site will decrease your Google rank. So, it is important to keep file size small to promote a fast load time as 40 percent of people will leave a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Here’s a nice infographic from Kissmetrics explaining how loading time affects your ranking.

Continue Reading SEO for Startup Strategies

[codetocraft-blog]

[codetocraft-blog]

From 0 to 100,000 users in 7.5 months — The only strategy you need.

On 17th Oct 2016, we scored a first cricket match on CricHeroes.

We crossed 100,000 users on 6th June 2017. It took us slightly more than 7.5 months to achieve this feat.