Instructions on Properly "Burning" an ISO Image Onto a USB Flash Drive

So you have an ISO file that you want on a flash drive, or some other USB storage device. You also need to be able to boot from it. Sounds straightforward, right? Copy the file over and you're done!

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Properly burning an ISO to USB is different than just copying the file. It's even different than burning an ISO to a disc. Adding to the complexity is that you plan on booting from the USB drive once you're done getting the ISO image on there.

Luckily, there's a fantastic free tool that will handle all of this for you automatically. Continue on below for an easy tutorial on how to burn an ISO file to USB with the free Rufus program.

I’ll never forget the first time I got 100,000 visitors from Google traffic in one month. I still feel extremely lucky.. Today I’m going to show you how I think I did it.

When you first think about starting a blog you kind of don’t imagine you’ll ever get more than a trickle of traffic.

And then you have your first 100-visitor day.

Then your first 1,000-visitor day.

After a while you might even have a 10,000 or 20,000 visitor a day and you still can’t believe it’s happening.

What I want to do today is show you as much of what I did as possible in the hope that it helps your blog get more traffic. Let’s look at all the ins and outs of how to get over 100,000 visitors a month from natural organic Google search.

Things are so much nicer when you have a plan.

Why is Google traffic still the best?

If you’ve been reading Blog Tyrant for a while you’ll know that I occasionally warn against relying on Google too much.

And I stand by that.

Organic traffic from Google search is still the most valuable traffic you can get because it grows, it’s free (sort of), and people who are using search engines are usually in a buy-ready frame of mind.

A screen shot of my Clicky Analytics account showing one of my first 28 day periods where I had 100,000+ unique visitors hitting my blog from Google searches.

However, if your begin to rely solely on that traffic you run the risk of getting yourself into a bit of trouble in the long-term. Every time Google updates its algorithm there is a chance your blog is going to be less relevant.

And that means your traffic vanishes.

My own little story with this issue

I’ve told this story before but when I first got into blogging I had a few fitness blogs which made money pretty exclusively through Google Adsense. One day I woke up and all my traffic (and revenue!) had gone – I’d received a pretty significant Google penalty for some unknown reason.

Lucky for me, the traffic came back.

But it was a very scary experience and it taught me that I need to ensure that I have diversified traffic sources that act as a back up in case one of them gets accidentally or deliberately turned off.

How long does it take to get 100,000 visitors a month from Google?

Something I want to stress in this post is that my approach to Google traffic is one that is very clean, natural and safe.

And “safe” isn’t always a word that sits well with entrepreneurs.

Because it usually means slow.

If you’re after some short term SEO tricks to help you get an inferior website ranked in two weeks then this isn’t the post for you. This is all about a high-value approach to blogging that you can use on a site that you love and don’t want to take unnecessary risks with.

But saying it will take 6 months or a year is kind of irresponsible of me because every blog and niche is different. It will depend a lot on how prolific you can be, and how willing you are to learn a new approach.

How to get 100,000 visitors a month from Google

Okay, now we can get into the real tofu and potatoes of the post.

And, as always, if you get to the end and think I’ve missed something important or have any questions please leave a comment and let me know.

1. Choose a topic, keywords and target market that has the depth

The very first thing you need to do if you want to have a good SEO strategy is know what keywords you are going after and what target market you are trying to tap into.

Too often I see blogs that have a very generalized topic which leads to a lot of fragmented content, an unresponsive mailing list and not a lot of success.

When researching your topic, please make sure you know what you want to talk about and how your blog is going to be different to all the others out there. It is very important that you think about deliberate ways that your topic is going to stand out.

When researching keywords, it’s a good idea to know who your competition is and how saturated the market is. There are some niches that are very, very hard to compete in. The main worry, however, is a niche with not enough traffic.

One simple place to start is by logging into Google Adwords and using their suite of Tools. One of them will estimate search volume and show you the Adwords bidding competition. This will give you a pretty good idea about whether your market is worth the effort.

Make sure you try a lot of variations of your keywords here. Even small changes like plurals or alternative words that seem similar can have a massive effect on traffic numbers.

At this stage you’ll also want to look at your competition using a service like Majestic to see what keywords are going around, who is working on what, etc. You can then go and spend some time manually searching and clicking through to websites to see if there is anything that you can do better than what is already out there.

At this point I’d like to just mention that passion really is the most important thing here. It’s something I’ve heard successful bloggers like Glen from ViperChill say again and again. Even if you find a profitable niche to work in, you’ll soon lose interest at all the hard (and boring tasks) if you don’t love it and sincerely want to help your readership.

That is very important.

2. Get your own domain name and self-hosted WordPress setup

How many times have you seen a free blog like Tumblr or Blogger in the first position on Google? Not often is the answer.

Google gives a much higher weighting to websites and blogs that have their own domain name and host because it is a pretty basic signal that that website is going to be taking itself more seriously – hence better quality. 

So how do you choose a good domain name? Well, there are several options:

• Exact match keywords
  A few years ago if you could get an exact match phrase you’d be more likely to rank at the top. Now this isn’t so popular and can look a bit spammy. However, for local search, things like ArchitectMelbourne.com.au still rank extremely well if you can get them.
• Keyword + noun
  Another popular method is to take the keyword that you are targeting and add a noun or adjective to it. Blog Tyrant could be an example of this approach if I was targeting the keyword “blog”.
• Distinctive domains
  This is actually now the best option given that all the good keyword domains are taken. Being distinctive is important. Look at a site like ViperChill where the domain name has nothing to do with anything but you’ll never forget it.

Once you’ve decided on your domain name you can register it and do all your WordPress set up through BlueHost. This is a good idea because then everything is in the one place. Here is a tutorial on how to start a WordPress blog and bit more about blog hosting in general if you’re interested.

3. Change your general WordPress settings for better SEO performance

For the most part, WordPress is a pretty SEO-friendly platform. That being said, there are a few little default things that we want to change from the get go.

The first is your default permalinks structure which is often set to some combo of the date and name. I like to set this to just post name as we will want the keywords that we are targeting to show up in the post. Just go Settings > Permalinks > Post Name.

Remember, if you already have your blog up and running you don’t want to change any existing permalinks as that will result in any links pointing to that old structure to throw an error. We only want it for future things.

The next thing you want to make sure is that your post titles are set to h1 tags and not anything else. Often you find that WordPress themes have the site name as the first header and then the post title is h2 which is a mistake. You can change this by going Appearance > Editor > Single Post and then changing your post title to the right tag.

The last basic WordPress thing we want to change is your sidebar. Get rid of everything in there except for an email subscriber opt-in form and maybe some links to your most popular posts. You don’t need all that Meta stuff in there, and you especially don’t want any blogroll links.

4. Install an SEO-specific plugin like WordPress SEO by Yoast

Now you’ll want to get a little more advanced and install a plugin that has been specifically designed for improving your WordPress blog’s search engine performance. The most popular and well respected is WordPress SEO by Yoast.

This plugin is actually quite intimidating for beginner/intermediate level bloggers. There are a lot of settings and options and you will be introduced to a whole new lexicon of SEO-related words.

Don’t panic.

Firstly, Yoast has written a really comprehensive guide on how to get yourself properly setup. Secondly, it’s not the kind of thing you need to get totally correct before you do anything else – you can tweak as you go. I would earmark half a day of your time to add the plugin and go through the above article making changes and then just leave it for a while.

The great thing about this plugin, as you can see above, is that it will tell you if you are making any large mistakes or errors as you go along. Combine this with the installation guide and you will find yourself learning a lot about SEO best practices for a WordPress blog setup.

5. Carefully tweak and improve your user experience ranking factors

The above plugin and settings mostly tweak your site to make it look better in the eyes of Google bots. But what we want to do now is make sure it looks good in the eyes of your human readers.

The interesting thing about this is that improving a blog’s user experience also leads to a better ranking performance because Google only wants to refer its customers to highly useful sites.

Start by making sure you have a mobile responsive WordPress theme. This is especially important since the Google mobile update that happened a few weeks ago.

If you’re not sure whether your site looks good to Google then use their mobile testing tool. 

The next most important user experience ranking factor is speed. Google only wants to send visitors to website that load extremely quickly because they know that people are impatient. If your site is taking longer than about 2-3 seconds to load then it is too slow.

Some of the basic things you can do to ensure your blog is loading quickly include:

• Shrinking images
  I’m always surprised at how often bloggers upload images that are > 2MB. It’s too large. Ideally you want to shrink your images down to around < 50KB or smush them.
• Talking to your server technicians
  If you are on a good web host you will usually find that your server technicians will offer you some free advice on how to best optimize your blog. Open up a support ticket and tell them you need to make some site speed improvements and see what tips they give. They can do things like enabling GZIP which is a server-side speed improvement.
• Using a caching plugin
  Caching is another big topic that takes a while to get your head around. A lot of it can be done on the server side of things, but there are also several good WordPress plugins like W3 Total Cache which you can install and get good results with.

Now that you’ve taken some steps to speed up your blog, you’ll want to start looking at the layout of your theme and ensuring that you have the design setup in a way that will encourage visitors to take an action.

For example, it’s a very good idea to ensure that you important stuff is above the fold. This is the area of your blog that people see before they have to scroll. Any opt-in forms, calls to action, etc. really need to be in this area, or at least catered to in a design that encourages scrolling.

You’ll also want to look at things like your typography and replace any slow self-hosted fonts with either web safe versions or a Google Font version which always seem to be quicker and you can test out text to see what looks nice.

Make sure you use a large, easy to read font size that fits with your branding. The general wisdom is that fonts like Arial, Verdana and Georgia are good choices because people are used to reading them and thus it feels familiar. Here’s some interesting recommendations from Apple on the topic.

6. Create strategic content based around keywords, value and point of difference

Ever since I first sold a blog in college I’ve preferred to approach blogging, SEO and online business with a “quality first” attitude where my stuff hopefully helps people.

And one of the mantras you hear a lot in the blogging world is the idea that content is king.

Well, I actually think that is a pretty ordinary phrase.

Quality content alone is not enough. It needs a strategy. – Tweet this.

If you really pay attention to what is appearing at the top of Google these days you’ll notice that there is a mix of local stuff, videos, long form content, aged content, fresh content, photos, etc. Have a look at a few results for the term “email marketing”.

It is quite varied. So instead of just attempting to write something “quality”, what we need to do is really dig deep into the niche and figure out what we can create that is not only useful, but different. How can I make something that will get attention?

That is very important.

But that content that we create also has to form part of an overall blogging strategy otherwise it is all a complete waste of time. There is absolutely no point in getting over 100,000 visitors to your blog each month if they aren’t taking some type of action towards your goals.

Here’s some more reading on why a blog is not enough in and of itself.

Let’s look at WPMU DEV as an example of someone who does strategic content very well. If you do a Google search for “most beautiful responsive WordPress themes” you’ll see they have this article ranking near the top.

This is a really clever way to build traffic using organic methods in order to sell a product that you own and control. A lot of their tutorials and articles are very closely related to the plugins and WordPress themes that they develop. This has the dual effect of benefiting their existing customers as well as finding new ones through Google.

Oh yeah – they have over 370,000 customers paying minimum $24 a month.

7. Leverage other sites’ authority and build links by providing value around the web

There is something quite intangible about this point but I want to write about it anyway because I feel like it has been really important for my own Google rankings.

Over the last few years I’ve noticed something interesting.

If you can write something really good about a topic everyone knows but have a new angle to it, and then get yourself in front of influencers regularly, you will find that they start to link to your articles quite naturally.

In the last few weeks alone I’ve had links from Neil Patel, Moz and Search Engine Watch all for things I’ve done on my About page or my article about About pages!

Another example would be the link I got on Boost Blog Traffic for an article about controversial titles where they featured a controversial title that I wrote.

Simple stuff.

This is another example of the fact that you don’t have to be first in your niche, you just have to try to find a way to stand out and be noticed. Sometimes you can do that with something as basic as your own personal story.

One of the other ways I do this is to make sure I link to all my favorite bloggers regularly when I write something that I think is pretty good. Bloggers really love getting links, and if you’ve included them on some awesome new resource that you’ve made you might just find that they link back to another one of your posts when they’re writing something new.

If you’re doing a guest post on someone else’s blog then this is the absolute best time to mention someone that you’d like to get in front of.

8. Update old stuff (including titles and descriptions)

These days Google is giving a lot of weight to fresh content.

What that means is that some of the brilliant articles that you wrote five years ago, even though they may be the best thing on the web, might not be appearing as high as they should be because some new whipper snapper is stealing your thunder.

One way to combat this is to go back and figure out which posts might need a bit of a fresh coat of paint and add things like new information, graphics, photos, videos, etc. and really make it feel modern again.

One of the good things about the WordPress SEO plugin mentioned above is that it lets you re-write your titles for search engines. One of the main reasons you might want to do this is to show that it has been updated.

For example, in 2014 I wrote a post about the things to know before starting a blog in that year. The content is still perfectly relevant today in 2015 so I updated the description to reflect that fact.

If it still had the old 2014 information in there I might see a lot fewer people clicking through from Google. I don’t recommend you go and do this for every post in your archive either – just try and keep the posts that need to be updated updated.

9. Reinvest part of your earnings to increase exposure

I know a lot of you might be getting sick of me talking about this but it’s so important so I’m going to keep saying it.

Advertising on Facebook Ads and Google Adwords is actually a really big part of good SEO.

Expert SEOs are going to laugh at me for saying that but I don’t care, hear me out.

When you have a really good piece of content that you’ve invested countless hours into researching, writing and editing, you want to make sure it does well. Now, even if you main goal is to get that article to rank on Google you’ll want to make sure you spend money on social advertising.

And the reason is simple.

The wider reach your article has the more likely it is to get seen by someone who’ll eventually link to it.

Think about it.

You can go onto Facebook and in five minutes create an advert that will target only people interested in XYZ niche. That might include other bloggers in the XYZ niche – hopefully even some influencers. If your article is any good it’ll be on their radar next time they are writing about that topic.

This type of promotion works extremely well for long form content and types of content that people can download and use as an everlasting resource. I reckon I’ve probably link to Jon Morrow’s headline PDF at least five times.

10. Listen to Google but don’t be afraid of Google

One of the things that I’ve learned from ViperChill that I’m very grateful for is the idea that you should listen to Google but not always be afraid that you are doing something terribly wrong.

Glen takes a lot of risks with his SEO approach, something that I’m not willing to do here, but he’s also kind of helped me loosen up about trying out new things without fear of a Google penalty.

When Matt Cutts told everyone that guest posts were a dangerous way to build backlinks everyone just kind of stopped doing guest posts.

That’s silly.

Guest posting is still a fantastic way to get traffic to your site and find a whole new readership, many of whom will link to your content, promote it on social media and share it with their own audiences. So guest posting for SEO is still very much alive, it’s just smarter now.

Make sure you know what Google wants and doesn’t want, but don’t be so scared of the rules that you stop making content that people want to consume.

One practical task you can do right now

I want to end this post by giving you one practical task that you can start today that will get you closer towards your first 100,000 visitors from Google in a single month.

Start by reading this post (I’m assuming you have if you’re this far) and taking into account all the ideas on keyword research, strategic content, etc. your task is:

Write one brilliant post of at least 3,500 words (include links to big bloggers in your niche, graphics, photos, etc.) based around one strategic keyword set and a point of difference. Find another blog to give it away to as a guest post.

This is something that I notice a lot of bloggers still really struggle to do. When it comes to getting traffic from Google a lot of it really starts with getting your name out there and building links by building up your brand awareness. And that can be done really simple with some good guest posting.

How much traffic do you get from Google?

If you have any questions about how to get more Google traffic I’d be more than happy to try and answer them in the comments below. I’d also be really interested to know how much traffic you get from Google searches and whether you think you could be doing better.

In a virtual machine environment, the host virtual machine (HVM) provides resource allocation to guest virtual machines.  HVM capture all I/O requests from the Guest VM and reroute them to the physical system’s resources.

• The version 4.0 of Angular will be available in March 2017.
• Going forward, it seems like the Angular team is going to skip version 3.0 and go straight to version 4.0.
• Major versions will be shipped every 6 months.
• It wasn’t long ago, when Angular 2 was announced as a rejuvenated version of Angular.
• Angular patch versions will be shipping each week.

Angular 4.0 will be available in March 2017. 

Even many of the titans of the internet could do with a bit of optimization of their mobile sites. Contributor Marcus Miller offers a comprehensive view of how to ensure you're making the most of the opportunity to forge ahead.

 In 2016, the inevitable happened, and mobile overtook desktop as the primary device used to access websites. This didn’t come as a huge surprise because, as far back as 2015, Google reported that more searches were conducted on mobile than on any other device category.

In many industries, this may be conservative and, at the agency I head up in the UK, Bowler Hat, our B2C clients are seeing up to 85 percent of all site sessions conducted on mobile devices.

Suffice it to say, mobile has well and truly arrived. Yet, while responsive design has been around for a while now and is fairly well-established, the majority of sites tend to fall down on usability. That is, the majority of sites are still built for desktop and then dialed back for mobile. That form-fill that was mildly annoying on desktop is an absolute pig on mobile. Even if it is responsive.

This is not good enough in the mobile-first world we are racing toward in 2017.

In this article, I am going to look at how you can ensure you are truly optimizing for mobile users. We will look at the fundamentals of responsive design and page speed, but we will also look beyond this at user experience tailored to mobile devices. We will then wrap this up with a mobile optimization checklist that you can use to identify optimization opportunities.

Our goal here is to go the extra distance to create fully mobile-focused websites; to delight our users and drive conversions; to use mobile optimization to develop a strategic advantage over the competition. And, of course, Google wants to delight mobile users so we can improve engagement and on-page ranking factors and also benefit from improved SEO. Better for users. Better for search engines. Win-win.

What Google wants

At this time of year, many SEOs are looking forward, and, referring to an SEO best practices post for 2017, Google’s Gary Illyes complimented those who suggested mobile is the big drive for 2017.

The following are three key stats that I have lifted from Google’s promotional materials that clearly illustrate the importance of mobile optimization:

1. Today, more people search on mobile phones than computers.
2. People are five times more likely to leave a site if it isn’t mobile-friendly.
3. Over half of mobile users will leave a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load.

Because more people search on mobile than on computers, mobile generates more page views. If your site is not mobile-friendly, users are less likely to stick around. And if your site is slow, they may not even wait for the page to load.

Add in the unreliability of mobile data networks here and your site has to be a mean, lean mobile-friendly machine, or you may not even get a shot at that customer.

The mobile-first index

The absolute nail in the coffin for a desktop-first approach to websites and search is the mobile-first index. Adopting this philosophy makes sense as more searches happen on mobile than desktop. Yet, at the moment, ranking is still primarily based on the desktop version of a site.

When this happens, the content and links of your mobile site, along with any other factors — speed, user experience and so on — will be the key drivers of your search engine visibility. Desktop will likely still be a factor, but it will be in a secondary capacity. Mobile first.

The writing’s on the wall here, folks — mobile has been important for a good while now, but 2017 is the year that it will become the key factor in your quest for improved rankings and conversion rates from site visitors.

The good news is that this represents a chance for those who really put in the work to develop an advantage over their competition. It will take work, but climbing over this obstacle is the way forward, and doing so before your rivals will put your site in better stead.

Mobile-friendly approach

Our first focus in gaining this advantage is to look at just how we deliver mobile-friendly content. There are three possible approaches::

• Responsive web design
• Dynamic content
• Separate URLs (mobile site)

Responsive website design is Google’s recommended way to tackle mobile-friendly sites and, as such, is the approach you should take unless you have very strong reasons not to.

Responsive design has been around for a while, so this is not a new concept. However, we still see sites that are technically responsive while not providing a strong experience for mobile users.

Ultimately, responsive design is just a small part of creating truly mobile-friendly websites.

Mobile optimization

Google has a number of tools for testing for mobile usability and, beyond that, Search Console has a mobile usability report that details problems on a page-by-page level.

You should utilize these tools while developing your new site and use Search Console to keep tabs on problems throughout the life of the site.

Search Console looks at the following mobile usability issues:

1. Flash usage — Most mobile browsers do not render Flash and, as such, you will want to use more modern technologies.

2. Viewport not configured — The viewport metatag aids browsers in scaling a page to suit a specific device.

3. Fixed-width viewport — This problem attempts to circumvent mobile design with fixed width pages and is best shelved when a responsive design is adopted.

4. Content not sized to viewport — Here the page content does not fit the window, and a user has to scroll. This can be fixed with relative rather than fixed widths.

5. Small font size — This is a scaling issue and requires users to pinch the screen to zoom in.

6. Touch elements too close — This is a common usability issue where it is too hard to tap a given element without also hitting the neighboring element.

7. Interstitial usage — A full-screen pop-up often represents poor user experience on a mobile device and is something that Google is looking to crack down on in 2017.

These are the key technical elements that Google is looking for and reporting on to webmasters.

Optimizing your site to remove these issues may have positive effects on how the usability of your site is graded by Google and certainly has positive implications for users. Again, win-win.

Mobile optimization resources:

1. Mobile-Friendly Websites — https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/
2. Mobile-Friendly Test — https://search.google.com/search-console/mobile-friendly
3. Mobile Usability Report — https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6101188?hl=en

Page speed

Page speed is important on all devices, but it can be critically important on mobile when users are out and about looking for quick answers. A page that may load relatively quickly on a WiFi network may not be quite so snappy on a mobile data network. 4G has delivered some great speed improvements, but coverage (in the UK, at least) is not something that can be relied upon.

There are, however, a range of best practices for improving page speed and, once again, Google has come to our aid with the PageSpeed insights tool. This enables us to easily assess how fast our pages load and get some pointers on what we can do to improve.

Page speed insights is now built into the Mobile-Friendly test:

https://search.google.com/search-console/mobile-friendly

https://testmysite.withgoogle.com/ — the more attractive front end

To show how this works, I’ll share details below for a small local B2C business called Vinyl to Digital, which agreed for me to use them as a case study.

Here we can see that average page load is almost four seconds, which is above the ideal two- to three-second loading time. We can also see that almost half of that is attributed to the average server response time.

Making the basic improvements from the PageSpeed insights tool and finding a faster hosting partner could likely get the loading time down to around two seconds.

The main takeaway here is that you can get accurate metrics on loading time and clear insights on what you can do to improve things. You will have to customize this to your own CMS or approach, but you can often get 80 percent of the results with only 20 percent of the effort.

We also can’t talk about mobile page speed without considering Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). AMP has been designed to enable the often slow, clunky and frustrating mobile web to load instantly anywhere.

Be fast. It makes your users and search engines happy.

Page speed resources:

• Mobile-Friendly Test — https://search.google.com/search-console/mobile-friendly
• Website Test — https://testmysite.withgoogle.com/
• Google Analytics — https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1205784?hl=en
• Make the Web Faster — https://developers.google.com/speed/
• AMP Pages — https://www.ampproject.org/

Mobile user experience

Mobile-friendly design and page speed are the fundamental components of a mobile-optimized website. However, these two elements by themselves don’t always add up to a perfectly optimized website.

I first wrote about responsive design in 2012, and yet, despite the semi-maturity of the approach, many sites implementing responsive are still not truly optimized for the wants and needs of mobile users.

The raw technical implementation of a responsive layout isn’t enough to solve this problem. Instead, the designer must put himself or herself into the user’s shoes and take into account what people will do and want to accomplish on a mobile phone.

Fortunately, the good folks at Google and AnswerLab conducted a research study to determine how users interact with a wide range of mobile sites. The goal of this report is to establish a set of best practices for mobile site design.

I have not seen much noise regarding this report yet, which is unfortunate, as it provides the best overview I have yet seen regarding how to go beyond the basic mobile-friendly and page speed optimizations detailed above.

The results of the study were distilled down into 25 mobile site design principles across five primary categories:

• Homepage & Site Navigation
• Site Search
• Commerce & Conversions
• Form Entry
• Usability & Form Factor

The key takeaway from the report was that mobile users are goal-oriented. They expect to be able to achieve their goal quickly and easily with a minimum of fuss. No pinching to zoom. No confusing navigation or touch elements too close together to really use.

Success comes from focusing on the mobile experience. Give users what they need and on their own terms. Make it easy for them to achieve their goal.

It is also worth noting that, while these tools are useful, you can’t beat good old-fashioned user testing. Determine the goals a site user has while on your site, and then have multiple users within your demographic test across a range of devices. The insights you may achieve here are valuable and allow you to understand the real-world implications of how a user interacts with your site.

I am also a big fan of tools that record how a user interacts with your site. At Bowler Hat, we use inspectlet. This provides us with videos of user sessions, along with heat maps, scroll maps and a bunch of other features. With a tool like this recording user sessions, you are always conducting usability testing (so long as you watch the videos).

The tool offers a strong set of filtering options so you can easily identify patterns and review real users as they use (or attempt to use) your site. Combining this tool with information from Google Analytics can be insightful. Say GA is telling you that 50 percent of mobile users drop off at the second page of your checkout. Now you can see exactly what those users are doing and why they are having problems.

When it comes down to it, the essential elements to performing mobile optimization are a combination of tools and real user testing.

Mobile usability resources:

1. Design and UI — https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-ui/
2. Mobile usability testing — http://usabilitygeek.com/usability-testing-mobile-applications/
3. Google and AnswerLab optimizing for multiple screens — http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//intl/ALL_ALL/think/multiscreen/pdf/multi-screen-moblie-whitepaper_research-studies.pdf
4. Inspectlet — http://www.inspectlet.com/

Mobile optimization checklist

So we have three fundamental components of building mobile sites that your users will love (or that will delight your users and drive conversions in Google’s vernacular).

1. Responsive design
2. Page loading speed
3. Mobile design and usability

The following is a checklist based on the the three key areas reviewed in this article. We use this approach to review sites to determine areas that can be improved for mobile users.

We have reviewed many sites and have yet to find any that provide a perfect mobile experience. In most cases, the sites have a wide range of potential optimization opportunities.

Review this list point by point and refer back to the designing for multiple screens whitepaper for any required clarifications.

Basic mobile optimization

1. Responsive design
2. Page speed
3. Hosting speed

Home page and site navigation

4. Keep calls to action front and center.
5. Keep menus short and sweet.
6. Make it easy to get back to the home page.
7. Don’t let promotions steal the show.

Site search

8. Make site search visible.
9. Ensure site search results are relevant.
10. Implement filters to improve site search usability.
11. Guide users to better search results.

Commerce and conversions

12. Let users explore before they commit.
13. Let users purchase as a guest.
14. Use existing information to maximize convenience.
15. Use click-to-call buttons for complex tasks.
16. Make it easy to finish converting on another device.

Form entry

17. Streamline form entry.
18. Choose the simplest input method for each task.
19. Provide a visual calendar for selecting dates.
20. Minimize form errors with labeling and real-time validation.
21. Design efficient forms.

Usability and form factor

22. Optimize your entire site for mobile.
23. Don’t make users pinch to zoom.
24. Make product images expandable.
25. Tell users which screen orientation works best.
26. Keep your user in a single browser window.
27. Avoid “full site” labeling.
28. Be clear why you need a user’s location.

Mobile optimization as a competitive advantage

By working through this list, we go beyond the basic and obvious. We create a mobile user interface that aims to make the experience of goal-driven mobile users truly delightful. Certainly, in my day-to-day experience of the web, I rarely find this to be the case. If I put my SEO and UX hat on, then even some of sites of the titans of the online world could do much to improve.

So we focus on each of these areas to create a site that is blisteringly fast and a pleasure to use on a mobile device. We help our users achieve their goals and, in return, we get better results from our marketing. From improved visibility in organic search to boosted conversion rates from all other inbound channels — focusing on mobile users allows us to develop a strategic competitive edge over our competitors.

Competitive advantages are not easy to forge. There is a clear opportunity here for the fast and the brave. In 2017, focus on your mobile users and leave your competitors in your digital dust.

I would love to hear from any of you optimizing for mobile, and you can get me on Twitter.