End of Life (EOL) Meaning

If you are currently on Drupal 7, you may ask what this means for you. Firstly, the End of Life of this version of the Drupal CMS means that if you are still using D7 after November 1, 2023, you will not be getting community-based and security updates. The Drupal community officially stops supporting D7 after the said date. Therefore, you are bound to be faced with threats that frustrate your efforts to meet the needs of your customers if you’re still using D7 by then.

The EOL of D7 doesn’t mean that it will cease to exist altogether. As explained, it means that it will stop getting official support from the Drupal community and the focus will be shifted to the newer version made. This is bound to affect the maintenance of your website.

Is upgrading to Drupal 9 a difficult task?

Because Drupal 9 is a huge upgrade, the migration process is rather difficult. It necessitates a lengthy process, much research, and specialized knowledge.
Nevertheless, D9 has a ton of features integrated into its core that make it appealing.

To make the upgrading process easier, you can migrate to Drupal 8 first, then to Drupal 9. However, Drupal 8 reached the end of its life cycle in 2021. Because of the large number of sites currently using Drupal 7, the Drupal community agreed to extend the deadline for Drupal 7. That being said, migrating to Drupal 8 before 9 is not necessary. Drupal 9 is mainly a continuation of D8 features and it still maintains backward compatibility.

As mentioned above, this is a major upgrade. Drupal’s underlying technology and architecture were significantly upgraded to produce a more powerful and future-proof platform.

This opens up tremendous opportunities for both businesses and their end-users, but it does not necessitate a major investment of time and resources. New technologies and processes must be learned, modules and themes must be rebuilt, the material must be audited, and objectives must be redefined.

The good thing is, this will only happen once. Drupal’s approach to the version releases was redesigned in tandem with its architecture. Upgrading to a new major version in the future will be more like keeping up with minor updates, and it will not necessitate a substantial change.

Benefit/features of Drupal 9 when compared to 7

For developers and editors, Drupal 9 is extremely similar to Drupal 8.9 except for deprecated code. Drupal 9 includes several features that will be updated twice a year to allow businesses to keep up with the market.

• Drupal 9 provides Backward compatibility, which means it can work with CMS versions 8 and higher. It will be able to access data, configurations, and modules generated on the same website as Drupal 8, preserving the performance of the system. Drupal 10 will also be completely compatible with Drupal 9 and so on, in a similar way.

• With Drupal 9, you won’t have to deal with a million configurations because media handling is included in the core. Furthermore, the media library allows you to manage and reuse media like a pro.

• Faster and better performance is guaranteed with Drupal 9. Dries Buyteart, the Drupal founder, recently stated that upgrades from Drupal 9.1 forward will allow for faster and improved website performance. D9 also offers superior scalability and speed, as well as faster page loading, thanks to in-built Bigpipe support.

• Drupal 9 has also done a step further in its support for presenting responsive pictures that are tailored for different user devices. Responsive photos transmit less data than fluid full-size images because they load the smallest device-size image first and then gradually improve the quality. As a result, your Drupal 9 sites’ pages will be better load optimized.

• Drupal 9 features a well-structured codebase. In Drupal 8, the use of deprecated codes has been discontinued. Hence, Drupal 9 will ensure that the drupal environment no longer supports the deprecated code. The purpose is to make D8 modules compatible with D9 by making it a simpler and cleaner version.

Switching to another CMS

It is expected that upgrading from Drupal 7 to 9 will be a major project. Switching platforms totally, on the other hand, might be more costly and disruptive, but can be the best approach and a painless process if handled by a professional website design agency in Nigeria.

If you leave Drupal, you will have to rebuild your website’s architecture, capabilities, and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) features, as well as its integration. Implementing new technology and product ecosystems come at a price. This begs the question, are you willing to pay the price? Would you rather bear the cost of switching platforms completely or accept the challenge of upgrading to Drupal 9?

More importantly, by switching to a CMS platform like WordPress, you will also benefit from similar advantages that Drupal has to offer, which are flexibility and security, accessibility and content editor experience improvements, and data portability.

Before we start with the tips, it would be good for you to understand what a domain name is.

So What is a Domain Name?

A domain name is the given name to a website on the Internet. It is usually made of letters, but sometimes, numbers and symbols are combined with letters to form a domain name. Before you can use a domain name for your business website, you have to buy it from a domain name registrar. Also, two persons or businesses cannot own the same domain name at the same time.

The motive behind the use of domain names to name websites is to facilitate easy remembrance of websites names by humans. At the operational level of websites, information transfer between the browsers and the web servers is through numerical IP addresses.

In essence, domain names are the human-friendly version of numerical web IP addresses.

Now let’s go through the tips on how to choose a domain name for your business website in Nigeria.

1. Go for “.com” domain extension: While we now have lots of domain extensions such as “.com.ng,” “.org,” “.shop,” “.biz” , it is advisable you should stick with .com domain extension. This is because .com is the most popular top-level domain; when people type a domain name in their browser, they only want to end it with .com as that’s what they are most familiar with.

Therefore, going with domain extensions like “.com.ng,” “.ng,” or “.biz” may not be helpful to your business.

Besides lots of people now browse using their phones, and the auto-complete domain extension provided in most smartphone browsers, after typing the domain name, is .com. If your business website ends in “.com.ng” or “.ng,” you are making these people do extract typing. Don’t forget we are all lazy.

2. Make it stand out: An outstanding domain name is catchy, unique, and memorable. To make your domain name stand out, you should check out the domain names of competitors in your industry, and think of how to make yours different from theirs.

Researching your competitors’ domain names would also save you from picking a domain name close to your competitors’, which saves you from a possible allegation of misbranding and trying to use your competitors’ trademark name.

4. Don’t make it too long: The maximum allowed characters for a domain name is 253 characters – but of course, you don’t want to use all the characters. The recommended number of characters for a domain name is 15. Shorter domain names are easy to remember and reduce the possibility of people making typo errors while typing your domain name into the address bar.
5. Make it easy to spell and easy to pronounce: Domain names that are easy to spell and pronounce are easy to remember. So when choosing a domain name for your business, you should make it simple and pronounceable.

Also, you should avoid the use of symbols (such as hyphens, underscores, etc.) and numbers in your domain name.

People are comfortable with domain names written all together, without symbols or numbers separating the letters or words forming the domain name. For example, people are more comfortable with “www.topyougo.com” than “www.top-you-go.com”.

Making your business domain name easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and free of symbols and numbers would make people easily remember it.

5. Add keywords: Although search engines would use the meta-description of your website to know what the website is all about, adding keywords to your domain name would make search engines understand your website In a similar vein, if you run a local business, adding the city or town where you operate to your domain name would make people instantly know your business is in their location.

For example, a domain name like www.pizzalagos.com tells people that the business specialises in pizza and serves people that reside in Lagos.

6. Consider buying mistyped domain name and other domain extensions: People are likely to mistype your domain name or use a different domain extension with your domain name; to prevent losing traffic from this, you should consider buying the possible mistyped domain names and extensions of your website.

Using the www.pizzalagos.com example, you can buy mistyped variation and domain extension like www.pizalagos.com (one Z is missing from PIZZA) and www.pizzalagos.com.ng. After buying the mistyped variations and the other domain extensions, you can then 301 redirect them to your main website, and you would never lose traffic from mistyped domain names and extensions again.

Now that you have the tips on how to choose a domain name for your business website, the next thing is brainstorming on the perfect name. You then need to hire a good web designer that would translate your business philosophy into a stunning website.

If you need help in coming up with a good domain name and designing and hosting your website, don’t hesitate to talk to our expert.

Whatever strategies you implement, and through whichever channel or medium you employ them, the end result has got to be that one thing – driving organic traffic to your website.

For this reason, it is essential to know how to drive targeted visitors to your website in Nigeria. In this post you will get to know 7 fail-safe tactics that you should employ to attract target website visitors whilst utilising the endless pool of resources available online to your advantage.

1. Optimising your website content to comply with search engine parameters

Search engine optimization is a focal factor to the success of your website in securing a healthy amount of traffic that yields positive results for your service. Efficient optimization of search engine parameters include using relevant keywords, making useful and descriptive titles, providing relevant visual content, creating concise metatags, link building etc.

There are many factors that you can work on to make your content unique and appealing to your target website visitors. Some of which are creating engaging subheadings and submitting your URL to search engines. See this post on top SEO tips that ranks your business higher in Nigeria.

2. Making use of Paid Advertising

Paid advertising is one of the most effective and efficient ways to draw in target audiences that are looking for the services and products you offer. Paid advertising campaigns require realistic and sustainable investment to attract traffic to your webpage directly from your ads.

When your services cannot attain organic reach, paid advertising can get your ad on the first page of a search result page that is relevant to your ad, thus increasing chances of getting at least a lead. Google AdWords and Facebook Ads are great examples of paid advertising that can get you immediate sales if well setup. The good think about Paid advertising is that you can decide to only pay if a certain objective is achieved, or when someone actually click on your ad.

3. Utilizing Social Media Platforms to reach target audiences

Social media platforms offer some of the best options for reaching out to specific target audiences, and making sure your business reaches those visitors to whom your service is useful and relevant to.

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ are a few social media platforms that filter the needs and preferences of users to bring to them relevant posts. Similarly, social sharing tools like StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit bring relevant traffic and help to create a bigger audience pool for your ads. If you need a social media marketer to create your social media pages, and/or manage your business pages for you, TopYouGo Digital Agency can help engage your audience, nurture your leads, and convert your leads to sales. Find our more

4. Forum Posting

Relevant online forums offer great niche-specific media for your service to get noticed by potential audiences. Posting short, helpful and attractive content and using a marketable forum signature to get recognized is very helpful. A forum signature should be a visual representation of your service in a small image. Examples of such forums in Nigeria are Nairaland.com, Naijapals.com, EarlyFace.com, and NaijaBestForum.com.

5. Blog Posting and Blogging

Blogging about your services and any relevant content can generate a lot of traffic into your webpage and also account for unique visitors to your webpage who find your blog interesting and want to know more about your service. Therefore, it is important to provide unique and engaging contents on your blogs. A good content marketing service will help you to put together an article that your audience will find very useful and shareable. Some top blogs in Nigeria are Bellanaija.com, naij.com, vanguardngr.com and punchng.com.

6. Conducting Webinars

Webinars are online live seminars where companies can initiate live interactive sessions with potential audiences, clients, business partners and professionals. Webinars will not only help you procure expert opinions on how to drive targeted visitors to your website, but also create important connections with your target audience

7. Question/Answer Platforms

Question/answer platforms offer a great way to draw in traffic by providing relevant support or assistance with topics that concern your service. Try to keep answers short, useful and unique. It is also important to cite your webpage as a reference, provide social media links, and remember not to spam the post in an effort to attract website visitors.

If you need further assistance on bespoke digital marketing strategies or require help on implementing the tips provided here, do contact us and one of our experts will be in contact.

However, the updates actually make it easier for many businesses in Nigeria to get to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) by adopting very straightforward SEO practices and avoiding those deemed by the mighty Google as ‘black hat’.

There’s no secret to good SEO, although it does require some de-mystifying and mastering. Here we give you some top SEO tips that actually ranks your business higher in Nigeria. These tips will further help to maximise your chances of hitting the top spot when potential customers and clients are making searches relating to your business. Here are the tips:

Don’t Overthink your SEO

Google wants its users to have a better search experience, and for that reason, it matches search enquiries to web pages that provide the most recent information with the most relevance to the searches being made. So if you avoid thinking about the complexities of SEO and focus your own effort on providing a good experience for visitors to your website, you’re more likely to be successful. Once you know your business, and you have identified the keywords that describes your business, which are the same or similar keywords your visitors will be searching for online, the rest becomes easier.

Keep Content Fresh, Compelling and Relevant

When people are searching online for goods or services or just information on a field of interest, they want to get the most accurate, relevant and up-to-date results. If you regularly update and refresh your web content, your results will be favoured by the search engine. Your prospects don’t want to have their time wasted by reading something that is not specific to their enquiry. So once you have engaged interest, you want to stimulate it further. Find out more about how to keep your contents fresh and well-linked for maximum SEO impact – click here.

Make Sure your Website is Mobile-Friendly

Most people use their mobile devices to make their online searches and so you have to make sure you deliver a good user experience no matter what device your visitor is using. It is important to optimise your website so it displays neatly on a small screen as well as a large screen, and it’s easy to navigate and packed with functionality. Having a quick website load time is the key, if you don’t want visitors to lose interest while trying to access information. You can use software like Website Auditor to crawl your site regularly and identify any technical flaws. Please note that search engines like Google favours businesses using responsive website design with higher search engine result page ranking over their competitors using non-responsive website design.

Building Relationships are more important than Links

Link-building has always been considered an essential part of good SEO, but not any more however. Now it’s more important to build your credibility within your sphere of enterprise by creating relationships with non-competing concerns. Credibility is built when others perceive your brand as an authority or influencer and as a consequence, they link to your website. For example, if you have a gym you can create a relationship with a health supplement provider and develop two-way SEO advantages that way. Build connections that add value to your client or customer base and you will naturally attract more traffic to your online content.

Pay Close Attention to your Keyword Use

Don’t stuff your website with too many relative keywords and expect to see your business ranking anywhere on the first page of SERPs. This is now broadly considered the ultimate act in black hat SEO and can result in penalties which would definitely damage your online visibility.

The importance of keyword research cannot be overemphasized – be specific and moderate in the use of keywords. You’ll know that there are endless variants on the words relating to your products, goods or services and so you can still get away with a liberal smattering but the important thing is to keep them in context.

In other words, your content has to make sense and should be well written to attract positive attention from Google searches. Mentioning where your workshop or offices are based too often is known as ‘Location stuffing’, which is also a cardinal sin in SEO. However, you can still mention your location and any other localities near you as long as you do it so that it reads well and makes grammatical sense.

Research your Customers and Create Keywords that Relate

The most important aspect of SEO is to know what questions your target market is going to be asking the oracle, that is Google. You want to get into the demographic of your audience and relate to them in the terminology they’re familiar with so that it engenders good communication and increase sales.

Consider the fact that they will be typing questions in the search engine box and if your website contains the answer to those specific questions, it will naturally rank higher in the results. Remember that you’re an expert in your field and your customers and potential customers want to pick your brains. If you become a trusted source of information, your name will be foremost in the minds of your audience when it comes to buying.

Use Meta Descriptions to attract more Traffic

This is an area that’s often neglected by marketers when it comes to SEO. Each page on your website can be described very succinctly in a short sentence which is then ‘tagged’ to the page to encourage click-through to your website on SERPs.

You can see when you search with Google yourself that some of the results have your search terms highlighted in the heading, and some have a short but sweet description. That is how using Meta data displays if you use them correctly.

Conclusion

There is no secret to achieving SEO success if you are passionate about your business and just want to tell the world about it. If you’re just trying to get as much online attention as you can have without having anything to deliver to the user, you’ll be cutting off your nose to spite your face.

The current Google search algorithm has zero-tolerance for spammy SEO and is determined to stamp it out in favour of websites that represent value to those using its search engine.

By following the above tip, and keeping your website specific and of great use to interested visitors, you really can’t go wrong.

Everyone knows that there’s more to establishing an online presence than just having a website or blog full of amazing content. One of your major considerations is how to get people to stumble across your website and then how to keep them there!

It’s important for your business to find out as much as you can about the people who visit your website or read your blog, to determine if there’s a chance of doing business with them in the future.

The more you learn about the prospects reading your contents, the more likely it will be that they’ll become paying customers. So how can you use your content to generate new leads and get hold of vital data like email addresses, phone numbers and social media profiles.

Use Landing Pages to Highlight Content and Generate Leads

The purpose of a landing page is to convert visitors into leads. It is a simple, single web page that acts as a gate for prospects to find out more about your products or services. A good landing page should have a simple design with no distractions, a clear and concise call to action, an eye-catching image and a hassle-free opt-in form.

Where to Link your Landing Page to instead of your Website

The most common place to link landing pages to is the homepage of a website, although you can up your game by linking to landing pages that specifically target visitors from other sources, like social media.

Rather than having a link to your website on your Twitter or Facebook profiles, try linking to a landing page instead. This is an effective strategy because you can customise your landing page to appeal to readers preferring to connect via social media.

For example, you can send a landing page specifically to your Twitter followers with just 140 characters of content, with a form requesting their email address.  You can appeal to your Facebook audience by designing a landing page that resonates with your prospects’ interests.

The Importance of the Call to Action

The call to action (CTA) is a simple one-liner at the bottom of your posts and emails that requests the reader to do something. It can be to find out more about a specific offer, download your latest price list, request a quote for your service, or simply to register interest in your products or services.

Keep it simple with statements like, “click here to share this post on Facebook” or “Leave a comment and have your say”. It is important to remember that if someone has clicked on your call to action, they have read your email or landing page through to the end which goes a long way to qualifying your new leads as being genuinely interested.

When you create your landing page you need to have a clear idea of what your objectives are. If you want to encourage downloads of your new white paper in exchange for personal information, make the CTA absolutely clear. There shouldn’t be too much going on design-wise with your landing page as that complicates the issue, although you should aim to attract the attention of your audience with a large CTA.

Get into Guest Blogging

The advantage of blogging on other related websites is that you can use the opportunity to link to a landing page. By doing this, you can appeal to a whole new audience which of course, represents a significant number of potential leads.

Make your link clearly visible in your blog pieces by placing it in the middle of your byline or bio at the bottom and tease readers to follow the link. All you have to do is ensure that your offer speaks directly to the audience you are trying to reach and that your links to customised landing pages always work.

Use Video to Attract Traffic to your Landing Pages

Using video is a really effective way of digging up new leads and also networking with others in your sector and can easily be done with YouTube and Vimeo. When using video, make sure you make full use of the description section by linking it to a customised landing page that targets your specific audience. For example, if your video is a book promotion, link to a landing page that allows your audience to learn more and buy the book.

You can make the most of videos by adding custom links known as ‘annotations’. These links ‘float’ over the video enticing viewers to explore your content. You can place links to landing pages in your annotations at the end of a video encouraging viewers to find out more.

The Golden Rule of Keeping your Focus Narrow

As mentioned above, it is always best to keep the design of your landing pages simple and that applies to your offer also. Research shows that it takes longer for people to make decisions when faced with more choices and so you really want to be quite specific about what you want the reader to do next.

Don’t make your landing page too busy. There’s no need for a navigation bar or loads of images. You don’t want to have elements other than your CTA for the reader to click on. Also make sure that you request only the information you need when you use forms. The more fields there are for your visitor to enter, the less chance you’ll have of getting good responses.

Conclusion

There are no limits to how many landing pages you choose to have – it’s more about using the ones you have wisely. Each time you create a landing page, you should have clear objectives that are obvious to the reader and more likely to encourage further engagement.

With every new product you add to your range or for those special offers, you should create at least one landing page. It’s a great way to target your prospects and reach your audience in a more personal way to encourage future business. If you are creating and designing a landing page is beyond your technical know-how, we are happy to assist you with your requirements, just contact us.