Month: December 2022

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7 Best Grammar Checkers to Improve Your Writing

Don’t you just love writing? It’s one of the best ways to express yourself and your ideas, but it can be sometimes difficult to stay up to date with spelling and grammar rules. That is why having a grammar checker as an extra set of eyes on your work is always helpful.

Why is it important? Well, it means that you don’t have to be a professional essay writer to come up with a perfectly written piece. Even the most experienced writers can sometimes make simple mistakes, and having a grammar checker can help to identify and correct these errors.

So what are some of the best grammar checkers out there? In this post, we will show you our list of seven that should do the trick. Let’s take a look!

1. Ginger

Ginger is a powerful new English grammar-checking tool that’s revolutionizing the world of digital writing. The Ginger grammar-checking tool is an excellent way to ensure accurate and correct grammar in your writing. 

Rather than relying on algorithms alone, this tool also uses advanced artificial intelligence technology that can highlight context errors and provide suggestions for improvement. With a quick scan of what you have written, it can quickly identify common errors such as misspellings, misused words, incorrect subject-verb agreement, incorrect phrase usage, and other errors. 

By providing readers with a well-crafted piece of text free from mistakes, the Ginger grammar-checking tool can drastically improve the quality of your work and make you look professional in the eyes of your peers.

2. After the Deadline

After the Deadline is an open-source grammar-checking platform. It uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing to detect errors in spelling, grammar, and style in your written work. The tool also comes with a variety of features:

  • Auto-correction of typos
  • Auto-correction of homonyms and abbreviations
  • A thesaurus
  • Contextual spell-checking 

All this makes the tool incredibly useful for both casual and professional writers.

3. Grammarly

Grammarly is a powerful, easy-to-use grammar-checking site that can save you time and energy when writing or editing. Packed with features designed to catch typos, punctuation errors, wrong verb tense and other grammar mistakes, it’s an ideal solution for anyone who wants to eliminate common mistakes from their writing. 

Moreover, Grammarly even offers suggestions on how to improve your style and clarity in the writing. With advanced feedback delivered in plain language, it’s quickly becoming an indispensable tool for students, business professionals and writers of all kinds.

4. The Hemingway App

The Hemingway App is changing the way we write. It takes the guesswork out of editing by providing an easy-to-use grammar checker with powerful features such as highlighting passive voice, flagging sentences that are too hard to read, and offering solutions for more concise writing. 

With this user-friendly tool’s help, writers of all levels can produce clean, professional content in a fraction of the time. The app even gives helpful tips on managing word choice, structure and tone—helping make your writing unbeatable. If you’re looking to save time while improving the quality of your work, upgrade your writing game with the Hemingway App.

5. NounPlus

NounPlus is a comprehensive English grammar and spell-checker that’s designed to help you create clean, error-free writing. It can spot mistakes you might have missed in your own writing, such as typos, spelling mistakes, incorrect word usage, and much more. 

The tool also offers detailed explanations of corrections and helpful suggestions on how to improve your writing. With NounPlus, you can be sure that your writing is accurate and up to the highest standards of quality.

6. WhiteSmoke

WhiteSmoke is a must-have tool for all writers who value accuracy and precision in their work. It is the ultimate grammar-checking tool, as it instantly identifies potential errors in spelling, punctuation, and syntax with unparalleled accuracy. 

Furthermore, it also offers contextual advice on how to improve your writing, making both your writing quality and confidence soar. With its career-specific features such as professional email writing assistance and resume support, WhiteSmoke ensures that you always put forward the best possible version of yourself. 

Whether you’re a student or in a corporate environment, this invaluable tool should be your go-to for all grammatical needs.

7. LanguageTool

LanguageTool is a powerful grammar-checking tool that can be used to improve the accuracy and clarity of your writing. 

Not only does it detect hundreds of errors, such as typical spelling mistakes, incorrect verb conjugation, typos and punctuation problems, but it also checks for style issues like phrasing for conciseness or appropriateness for the intended audience. 

Through its intuitive user interface and features like auto-correction, bidirectional text support and integration with third-party tools like Microsoft Word and Gmail, LanguageTool makes proofreading and editing much easier and more efficient. It is suitable for writers at all levels—from novice to expert—and helps ensure that any document you produce meets professional standards.

Conclusion

Writing is not the simplest thing on Earth, but it gets easier when you have the right tools. The grammar checkers mentioned above are all reliable and user-friendly, so you can be sure that your content is error-free. No matter what writing goals you have, these essentials will help ensure you meet them with excellence. 

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Learn 10 SEO Practices to Attract Visitors to Your Blog: Basic to Advanced Guide

So you’ve been hit by a lightning bolt of inspiration. You know exactly what you want to tell the world. You probably plan to start a business, build your brand, or simply want to create content but your mind goes blank on how to do it.

Creating a blog is one of the answers, but it isn’t as simple as you might think. While the content might come flowing out, many aspects of building a blog need to be considered. Search engine optimization (SEO) is one such hot topic, and knowing how to do it properly will make a massive difference to your blog’s performance.

In this article, you’ll learn 10 SEO practices for improving your blog performance on search engines. We’ll cover on-page SEO tactics such as keyword research, link building, and mobile optimization, as well as off-page SEO methods such as meta descriptions, featured snippets, and other ranking factors. 

By the end, you’ll know exactly how to make the search engine work for you. And if you’d like to learn more about how to start a blog from scratch, click here!

A Basic Guide to Blog SEO

SEO doesn’t have to be confusing. You can make various simple adjustments to your blog that will immediately make a difference in your search engine rankings. Let’s dive in.

1. Keyword Research and Planning

Appearing on organic search results when people make search queries is essential. You want people to find your blog, which involves knowing how search engines understand the data on your website. Search engines will prioritize websites that feature a lot of relevant keywords. Google’s algorithm needs to understand the content quickly to direct visitors to you. 

It is crucial to know what essential words people use on search engines to find what they’re looking for. This is called keyword research, and it’s necessary to do it as much as possible. Use analytical tools such as Google Analytics or WordSteam to discover what kinds of related keywords you need to focus on.

With this knowledge, you can create content to meet the needs of your visitors. When writing a new blog post, you’ll know what words will help you reach the right people.

2. Add Keywords to Blog Content

So you’ve done your keyword research. Now it’s time to put it into practice. 

If your blog is about gardening, and you use sentences such as ‘how to cut a lawn’ or ‘planting a tree,’ it will tell search engines that your website features valuable information for keen gardeners. If your blog aims to create a community around surfing in Los Angeles, then it’s a no-brainer to include text that will be found by anyone using Google to search for the same thing.

You can add keywords in more subtle ways to improve your Google search rankings. For example, adding keywords to alt text on photos will help your blog site appear in image search results too.

3. Use Meta Titles and Descriptions

A meta description is an element of your blog page containing a short page summary. It’s visible on the Google search engine underneath the site’s title.  

Here’s an example of a meta description:

A meta description has an optimal length and should be snappy to make visitors want to click. A good meta description will boost your search ranking because, like the other tips we’ve covered so far, it’s about making the whole experience for the visitor as worthwhile as possible.

The above example also contains a meta title that you should also set up – it’s the name for the page displayed on search results. Keep it interesting, topical, and between 50-60 characters to make sure your content is easily discoverable.

4. Build Internal Linking

An internal link points to another page on your website. It fulfills two purposes. It allows the readers of your pages to seamlessly navigate your website and find other content. It also gives Google an idea of the structure of your website. Search engines find your pages quicker when they link to and from. 

Internal linking helps create a hierarchy. The most important pages on your site lead to more specialist pages. It helps Google determine what your website is about and who to show it to.

5. Optimize the Blog for Mobile Devices

It’s likely that most of your site’s visitors access it on mobile. By 2025, more than 75% of all people are expected to use a smartphone to access the internet. Search engines prioritize websites that are optimized for mobile, so it should be a priority for you to make sure your website functions well in your hand. That means making it mobile-responsive.

There are plenty of ways to do so. Look at your site and consider how a user would experience visiting it on their phone. Make it easy to scroll through your pages, improve the page speed, and ensure your website’s fonts can be read on smaller screens. This might seem obvious, but many websites are not mobile-optimized.

Advanced Guides for Blog SEO

Now you’ve got some SEO basics you can employ to improve your website quickly. We will dig a little deeper and examine some advanced search engine optimization techniques. Check out this guide for a comprehensive overview of advanced SEO techniques.

6. Organize Topic Clusters

Creating topic clusters is one of the biggest ranking factors that can add a significant boost to your Google rankings. It’s essentially doing an audit of your blog’s existing content and reorganizing it in a way that makes more sense. 

Here’s an illustration of a topic cluster:

Source

A topic cluster is like a house. Your website should be arranged in a way that’s easy to navigate. Rooms should come off from the main hallway, and the kitchen and bathroom should be easy to locate. Your website should be intuitive, both for the user and Google. 

How do you do this? Organize your blog site around a central ‘master’ page and consider it the place to which the other pages link. Make it logical and effortless to navigate. It’s highly valued by Google, and search engine algorithms will reward you for it.

7. Submit a Blog Sitemap

Submitting a blog sitemap takes the idea of topic clusters one step further. You can submit a detailed map to your website via the Google Search Console. You can use a plugin such as Yoast to create a sitemap for you. 

Your blog’s sitemap lists the most important pages to make it easier for Google to crawl your website. Having a sitemap for a new website can dramatically improve your rankings. 

8. Conduct an SEO Audit

What if you do something that negatively affects website rankings? Conducting a full technical SEO audit using a full range of SEO tools can highlight issues that might make the Google algorithm turn its back on you. 

An SEO audit ensures your site is properly crawled and indexed by search engines. It identifies ranking factors and suggests how to get more organic traffic to your website. 

You might lose out on traffic due to one or two issues. An SEO audit can help tame Google’s algorithm and bump you up the search engine results. We recommend reading this SEO audit guide.

9. Optimize Content for Google Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are specific search results found at the top of Google. These snippets answer frequently asked questions, such as how tall Everest is or what the best things to do in Berlin are. They can be lists, sentences, or entire paragraphs, provided they answer the question.

 

Optimizing your own site so it becomes one of the search results that answer the question is highly prized. How do you do it? Check out SEO tools such as Ahrefs or SEMrush and adhere to SEO best practices, such as the ones listed in this article.

10. Avoid Keyword Cannibalization

The right keywords and their usage are extra important for search engine optimization. Search engine algorithms often have very little to go on when crawling a web page, so it is crucial to use the correct language. 

However, it’s not about stuffing your content with as many keywords as possible. Overuse can do you more harm than good on search engine results pages because of keyword cannibalization. 

Targeting a specific keyword across multiple pages will only confuse Google’s algorithm. Which page should it display? Which one is most relevant? Are other sites offering more quality content? Cleaning up your pages and focusing your keywords will allow the algorithm to work better with your site. 

Conclusion

We’ve covered a wide range of SEO tips that will help improve the chances of your blog appearing on the search engine results pages. These tricks range from basic to advanced, and knowing them will help you stay ahead of the competition.

Topics covered:

  • Keyword Research and Planning
  • Adding Keywords to Blog Content
  • Using Meta Titles and Descriptions
  • Building Internal Linking
  • Optimizing the Blog for Mobile Devices
  • Organizing Topic Clusters
  • Submitting Blog Sitemap
  • Conducting an SEO Audit
  • Optimizing Content for Google Featured Snippets
  • Avoiding Keyword Cannibalization
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A Field Guide To Industrial Design Rights In Software and How They Work? 

Two decades ago, software was a preserve of big tech, and no one thought it would turn out to be anything like it is today. Today there are countless options for software for almost every activity you can think of. 

According to statistics, the software industry will be worth $737 billion in 2023. With such high figures, this field is quite competitive, creating the need for unique designs to help a developer stand out. 

As a result, registering for industrial design rights is always on the mind of every software developer.

Source – Pixabay

But What Are Industrial Design Rights?

Industrial design refers to the aesthetics of an item, such as shape, contour, texture, patterns, etc. Creating unique product designs can be time and money intensive, and you do not want to have another profit from your hard work. 

Luckily you can keep others from profiting off your designs by registering them as part of your intellectual properties. 

A unique design also ensures that your products stand out from the competition and are easily recognizable by potential customers. According to a study by CIPO, firms that invest in creating and registering unique designs have a 16% higher revenue per employee than those that do not.

If you want to get a deeper understanding of industrial design rights, HeerLaw explains it in detail, so you may want to check out their website. 

Industrial Design Rights Application for Software Designs

IP laws existed long before software became a thing. As a result, laws in many jurisdictions never envisioned a situation where digital assets or products would require industrial design protections. However, different countries, including Canada, have had to amend their IP laws to include software designs under the industrial design bracket.

Some aspects of the software that may qualify for protection under industrial design rights include its graphic user interfaces, graphical symbols, and screen layouts. It’s important to understand that this protection only covers the visual aspects of the software. If you wish to get protection for the functional aspects of the software, you should consider patent protection.

What Is a Patent

A patent is a legal document granting an inventor or their exclusive organization rights to an invention or process for a limited period. Governments grant patents upon registration and give inventors the exclusive right to profit from their creations. However, the inventor can sell their patent rights to other organizations. 

An invention must be first in the world, helpful, and non-obvious to be eligible for patent registration. Additionally, the invention must be described in detail in the patent application and must be able to be reproduced or used in some way. Finally, the invention must be in a field of technology that is eligible for patent protection.

Due to the limitation of IP laws regarding software and other digital assets, software patentability is unclear. The reason for the confusion is the fact that the lines of code used to create the software are not patentable. 

As a result, many people get the impression that software solutions are not patentable. However, code and the functional aspects of the software are two distinct things, with the latter being patentable. 

Other IP Protections for Your Software Design

Industrial designs and patents run for a limited period. In Canada, industrial design protections lapse after ten years, while patents expire after 20 years, leaving you vulnerable to copycats. Thankfully other protections, such as copyright and trademark, can help ensure that you retain significant control of your creations for a lifetime and beyond. 

Copyright protections cover all original works of art such as drawings, songs, videos, poems, books, computer programs, android and IOS apps, and webpages. They apply by default to the software creator, but registering them helps make enforcement much easier. In Canada, copyright protections last for the creator’s lifetime and 50 years after their passing.

Trademarks are also essential IP rights that apply to your software design. It covers software identifiers such as names, logos, graphics, slogans, and any visual aspect that distinguishes your product from its competition. Trademarks last for ten years, renewable upon the payment of renewal fees. 

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Useful Tools to Establish Your Business Branding

Whether you are just starting out in your field or are a company that has been around for years, creating a strong brand is vital for the continuance, longevity, and overall success of your business. To put it simply, your brand is your company’s distinct identity. It allows you to target your consumers and your audience. Your brand can include your business’s mission, visual design, its logo, and tone of voice as well as other features. It also normally includes your commitment to high-quality products, and customer service and can even involve pricing your services or products. According to the American Marketing Association define as follows: “a brand is a name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s goods or services as distinct from those of other sellers.”

Importance of Establishing Your Business Branding

The purpose of your brand— in its most basic form—helps your customers know what you have to offer. Effective branding includes following brand guidelines as well as following a strategic plan for building your brand identity. Consequently, having a well-established brand will help promote customer recognition and loyalty and will help you effectively stand out among your competitors. It will even help you attract good quality talent for employees when you create an environment they want to come work within.

What Makes up a Branding

Your branding is everything from your logo and the colors you use to your font and the types of videos you post. It communicates what your business is passionate about, its mission, and its purpose. It also communicates the message of your business. What you want to say to the world, what you want to provide with your service or your product, etc. It is, in essence, the embodiment of everything your business does, provides and is passionate about.

Useful Tools to Establish Your Business Branding

Now that we have considered what business branding means and what it can involve, it’s time to look deeper into the tools that are available that can help you establish your business branding. The following are some of the most user-friendly and applicable tools available that can give you a head start in creating your ideal brand:

Frontify

With this service, you can effectively simplify your brand management, connecting everyone and everything on one easy-to-access platform. Frontify understands that your brand is your bottom line in today’s competitive market. Thankfully, the software offered at Frontify helps everything brand-related for your company to come together and thrive. This platform provides everything for brand management from start to finish. Brand management execution on Frontify includes cross-team collaborations between various branding projects. This means you can use this to organize several branding elements all in one location.

Tailor Brands: Logo

One important aspect of any branding endeavor is coming up with a logo that fits your business’s mission and purpose and truly exudes what you want to say as a brand. Thankfully, Tailor Brands offers you a true one-stop shop. You can use the AI logo maker to easily create a logo that perfectly matches your brand, taking your vision to the next level as you create your website and can then be used to add to digital business cards and print branded merchandise. In just a few clicks, you can easily launch an online presence that adheres to your overall brand through various logo creation tools. Remember, your logo is your first impression on your audience, so getting your logo right, and ensuring that is truly a reflection of your brand is immensely important. You want your brand to instantly recognize your brand simply by seeing your logo.

Visme: Branded Visuals

This platform features everything you need to create documents, presentations, videos, and data visualizations for your brand. It puts the power of visual communication in your hands. It also is user-friendly, meaning you don’t have to have any prior design experience in order to use Visme. This allows you to turn figures and statistics into attractive visuals, allowing data visualization that is compelling for your audiences, even giving you the ability to attract a new audience, perhaps. Visme allows you to create, collaborate and store various brand-related items, maintaining consistency throughout your entire team. This means you can do everything from simple branded visuals of perhaps data that would promote your product or service, to creating fully interactive content and everything in between.

Prezi: Branded Videos

With Prezi, you can create high-quality video content that supports your brand. This means you can easily create video-based presentations for your online meeting, and webinars, or share on social media. You can also use this to easily issue company-wide announcements of updates throughout your entire business. Aside from branded videos, Prezi allows you to create a brand kit that includes fonts, logos, colors, and then sit back and relax, knowing your entire team is on the same page. With Prezi, you can create branded video content that displays right on the screen, next to you, meaning it will not cover your face when in a virtual meeting. It works seamlessly with many top virtual meeting software including Microsoft Teams, Zoom, YouTube, Google Meet, slack, Facebook, and more. This is the singular best way to connect and engage in the office or anywhere.

Piktochart Information Design

Your visual content should always reflect your branding. Thankfully, tools like Piktochart allow you to take advantage of visual branding tools to design professional-level graphics, images, and artwork. Conversely to tools like Illustrator or Photoshop that require intensive training to use, meaning months of time invested, Piktochart can help you create a professional-looking design in less than an hour. No graphic design experience or training is necessary to use this helpful tool. Using this, you can easily drag and drop in the editor to create brochures, infographics, and presentations in mere minutes, all of which spotlight and showcase your brand for all to see.

Lantana: Brand Tracking

Another way to promote the growth of your brand is through measurable tracking, showing your brand performance. The #1 solution for tracking your overall performance as a brand is Lantana. This tool allows you to build brand loyalty by giving you the ability to connect with your audience. In essence, this means you can get inside the head of millions of consumers located all across the globe. It also helps you understand all aspects of brand performance and how your brand is perceived, all without the cost associated with the costs and hassle of running a more complex research project. Lantana is a one-stop shop for a myriad of brand metrics that are helpful to track when building your brand’s reputation is a priority. With this tool, you can learn what groups to target for your brand and how to increase the perception of your brand, which means you optimize these various segments as part of your overall marketing plan.

Snaplytics: Social Media Analytics

Another important tool to utilize when building your brand’s social media presence is Snaplytics. This tool provides everything you need to do to create engaging stories that you can then share on social media platforms like Snapchat and Instagram. Snaplytics give you the ability to improve or alter your social media stories. The dashboard is easy to use, and you can even create a library of past content to look by on. This allows you to determine what worked well for your varying purposes.

Business Branding is Important, and These Can Help

Business branding is important to establishing your brand as a leader and authority in your industry. Thankfully, the tools listed above will help you create various elements of your brand and consolidate the entire process, meaning your data analysis, logo, and video creation is all part of promoting your brand and maintaining your brand throughout all the ways your business reaches out and the way you are considered in public.

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5 Vue JS Project Ideas For Beginners

There are a number of reasons you may want to start a simple Vue JS project. Practicing with Vue JS ideas makes it easier to code in future, providing another skill to help you get  hired or to start your own endeavor.

Vue JS is an excellent framework to learn as it is highly flexible and progressive. It uses the best features of other JavaScript libraries, melding them together to offer a huge range of possibilities. It is for this reason that huge companies like Alibaba, Xiaomi, Grammarly, Adobe, and even Nintendo use Vue JS.

If you haven’t started learning to use Vue JS just yet, we recommend starting with the basics. But if you are getting the hang of it and want to try out some interesting projects, you can try one or more of the following.

Calculator

The easiest Vue JS project to start with is a simple calculator. Calculators are not the most exciting thing to create, especially now that you can just type your equation into Google. However, it provides a way to experiment with the framework. It won’t take you long at all to create the calculator, and then you can play around with the UI and style.

Checkout Forms

This is a big step up from a calculator, but not because the Vue JS components of this project are particularly hard. Rather, it is because a checkout form may need to combine a number of components. If you want to create some simple components that require user input, you can use this Vue WYSIWYG editor, which provides great out-of-box experience.

Checkout forms are a good project to experiment with because they contain components used for so many other purposes. Remember to mess around a bit – you will benefit more from trying and failing than from only doing what you know.

Weather App

Creating a weather app is a fun use of your time and a good way to get to know Vue JS. It will take just a few hours to efficiently code a well-designed weather app that looks great. You don’t need to provide accurate data from the start, as you are just experimenting, but you can use live data from reliable sources once your app looks and acts as you want it to.

Tutorials and Recipes

Vue JS is perfect for creating to-do lists, which also makes it ideal for tutorials and recipes. When you are creating a tutorial or a recipe, you are essentially building a to-do list that requires tasks to be completed in a specific order. Your app can provide a number of tutorials to choose from, in which the user learns to create something themselves.

There are many ways to level-up an app of this kind. Being able to break down certain steps, for instance, may help users who need a bit more guidance. You can add alternatives and substitutes for ingredients of any given recipe.

The above 5 projects are great ways to explore Vue JS. Get started with this intuitive framework used by some of the biggest companies and you won’t look back.