Here are the 10 best Mac apps for entrepreneurs, bloggers, and freelancers.

10 Best Mac Apps Every Entrepreneur & Blogger Should Use

1. Noizio

Noizio provides ambient background sounds for your Mac. Just turn on Noizio, select the ambient sound you’d like to play in the background, and block out all the distractions.

Want to experience the feeling of meditating on a desolate sea shore? Just select sea waves. Want the hustle and bustle of a coffee shop to help you concentrate on your work? Select Coffee House.

The ambient sounds will help you relax, but at the same time, also boost your productivity by helping you maintain your focus on the task at hand.

Price: $2.99

2. Spark for Mac

Bored of Apple mail and Outlook? Then try Spark for Mac. Spark is one of the best email clients for Mac and highly popular among entrepreneurs and freelancers.

Spark is loaded with features. The Smart Inbox feature lets you quickly see what’s important and clean up the rest. All new emails are categorized into Personal, Notifications, and Newsletters.

It’s also customizable and has a design that’s both minimalist and fresh – not an easy feat for an email app.

Price: Free

3. Escape 2

Do you ever get distracted by social media when you have important things to do? Then you’ve got to use Escape. Escape will remind you every time you open something distracting and it will show you how many minutes you already gave it in a week.

It also lets you set aside a ‘quota’ for each social network to help you stay within the limit.

Price: $9.99

4. Muzzle

Muzzle is a simple Mac app that lets you silence embarrassing notifications while screen-sharing. Automatically turn on ‘Do Not Disturb’ when screen-sharing starts. It works with almost anything – Slack, Join.me, Skype, FaceTime, etc.

Price: Free

5. Unsplash Wallpapers for Mac

Unsplash is a free stock image site which truly has some of the most breathtaking images you’ll ever find. And now they have a Mac app which lets you select one of their pictures as your wallpaper. Download this app if you’re bored of the standard wallpapers on your Mac.

Price: Free

6. Evernote

Although the Notes app on Mac has its uses, Evernote takes note-taking to the next level. Being the most popular note-taking app in the world, Evernote lets you capture, organize, and share notes from anywhere.

Plus, you can enhance your notes with links, checklists, tables, attachments, audio recordings, and even handwritten notes.

Price: Free

7. FlagTimes

Work with clients in multiple timezones? Then this app is for you.

FlagTimes is a MacOS timezone app for anyone working with people from multiple countries. Furthermore, unlike some other timezone apps, FlagTimes doesn’t drain your battery.

Price: $1.99

8. Vu

Vu is the most efficient Instagram client for your Mac. And the best part? It’s totally free. Vu allows you to upload photos directly from your Mac. Vu sits in the status bar and has minimal mobile-like design. You can add as many accounts as you like and switch smoothly.

Price: Free

9. Tyke

Tyke is a tiny app that lives in your Mac menu bar. It’s your scratch piece of paper when you need to write something down. It’s a simple and efficient app that allows you jot something down without opening a text editor or a note-taking app.

Price: Free

10. Hemingway 3.0

Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear. It’s like a spellchecker, but for style. It makes sure that your reader will focus on your message, not your prose.

Hemingway recently released version 3.0 of their desktop app. With Hemingway 3.0, the team has rewritten the editor from the code up to increase performance and bring in pro-level features writers have asked for. Whether you want to edit without distractions or publish right to your favorite platforms, Hemingway 3.0 has got you covered.

Price: $19.99

Below, the article is summarized in the form of an infographic. Feel free to share it on Pinterest, Tumblr, and Twitter. 

Best Mac Apps for Entrepreneurs and Bloggers [Infographic]

Over to You

So these are some of the best Mac apps every entrepreneur and blogger should use to streamline their tasks and boost productivity.

Did we miss out on any of your favorite apps? Let us know in the comments below.

Related Articles

• 25+ Places You Should Be Sharing Your Content
• 15 Best WordPress Plugins for Bloggers
• 21 Movies Every Entrepreneur Should Watch for Inspiration

The post 10 Best Mac Apps for Entrepreneurs and Bloggers [Infographic] appeared first on 99signals.

Surprisingly, site structure is often overlooked by SEOs because they believe it has very little to do with SEO. On the contrary, having an organized site structure is incredibly important for ranking high in search engine result pages (SERPs).

There are several ways in which site structure affects your SEO. While these issues may seem complicated at first, more often than not, they are easy to fix.

In this article, we’ll help you understand the importance of site structure in SEO and examine some of the ways you can create an SEO-friendly site structure.

Why Site Structure is Important for SEO

Without having an organized site structure, all your SEO efforts may amount to nothing. Here are some key reasons why site structure matters for SEO:

1. A Good Site Structure Improves Site Crawlability

Site Crawlability is a search engine’s ability to crawl through your website’s entire text content to ascertain what the website is all about.

According to Matt Cutts, former head of the web spam team at Google, site crawlability is the number one factor for preventing indexing problems on Google.

Web crawlers like Googlebot crawl a website’s structure to add its pages to search engine index. Their whole aim is to crawl and index the content for search results. Having a good site structure will make it easier for crawlers to crawl and index the pages on your site.

Image Credit: Moz

2. A Good Site Structure Provides Your Site with Sitelinks

Sitelinks are links to website subpages that appear under certain Google listings in order to help users navigate the site.

Here’s how sitelinks look like:

Sitelinks are awesome from SEO perspective. They improve the navigability of your website, point users to cornerstone content within the site, and even enhance your brand’s reputation.

But how do you get sitelinks?

You can’t add any sitelinks on your own. Google uses secret automated algorithms to generate sitelinks for your site. In other words, Google’s algorithms award websites with sitelinks. One of the factors which Google takes into consideration while awarding sitelinks is a site’s structure.

If your site’s structure is strong, chances of your site getting sitelinks are quite high. On the other hand, if you have a poor site structure, it’s highly unlikely your site will ever receive sitelinks.

3. A Good Site Structure Enhances User Experience

A good site structure provides much-need clarity to users and makes them stay on the site longer. An organized structure improves dwell time and reduces bounce rate, resulting in good user experience which is an important ranking factor on Google.

A bad site structure, on the other hand, results in bad user experience which can have a negative impact on your SEO.

5 Steps in Creating an SEO-friendly Site Structure

Now that you know the importance of having a good site structure, let’s examine some of the steps in creating an SEO-friendly site structure for your website.

1. Plan Your Site Hierarchy

If you are starting your website from scratch, it’s a good practice to plan out your site’s hierarchy before you start creating your pages.

Here’s an example of a site hierarchy:

Image Credit: Yoast

Keep your site hierarchy simple and organized. Make it easy for crawlers as well as users. Don’t have too many main categories (2-7 would be ideal) and balance the number of sub-categories within each main category.

2. Optimize Internal Links on Your Website

According to Moz, internal links are important for three reasons:

• They allow users to navigate a website.
• They help establish information hierarchy for the given website.
• They help spread link juice (ranking power) around websites.

You cannot build an SEO-friendly site structure without internal links. The basic idea of internal linking is to have every page on your website include a link to another page on the site.

Several websites make the mistake of hiding their most important links in ways that web crawlers can’t access.

Image Credit: Moz

Internal linking makes a web crawler’s job easier by pointing out what pages are important on your site and how you can get there.

Moz recommends using descriptive keywords in anchor text that give a sense of the topic or keywords the source page is trying to target.

3. Create a URL Structure that Matches Your Site Hierarchy

You should ensure that your URL structure matches your site hierarchy. The ideal URL structure should be like this: Category -> Sub-category ->Product.

If you use a CMS like WordPress, then it’s quite simple to create search-engine friendly URLs. Go to Settings -> Permalinks within your dashboard and select a link structure option that includes your post title within the full URL.

By default, URLs in WordPress sites look like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/?p=123

Select the option ‘Post Name’ to make your URL look like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/sample-post/

This will make your URL SEO-friendly, allowing you to include your target keywords.

4. Create Your Site Navigation in HTML or CSS (Avoid Javascript and Flash)

Keep your coding simple by creating your site navigation in HTML or CSS. Avoid coding in Javascript, Ajax, and Flash as this will make it difficult for search engines to crawl your website.

5. Create a Shallow Depth Navigation Structure

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of having a good site structure is creating a shallow website.

But what exactly is a shallow website?

According to marketing expert, Sujan Patel, a shallow website is “one that requires three or fewer clicks to reach every page and is far more preferable than a deep website which requires lengthy strings of clicks to see every page on your site.”

Ideally, the navigation structure of your site should follow the site hierarchy. As such, you need to make sure that all the important pages are easily navigable to users. Having a shallow depth navigation structure is good both from user experience and SEO perspective.

Conclusion

Site structure is an important, yet often overlooked, aspect of creating an SEO-friendly website. The better your site structure, the better your chances of ranking high in SERPs. So make sure you spend enough time in creating a site structure that search engines will love.

Related Articles

• How to Create an XML Sitemap for Your Website (and Submit it to Google)
• Negative SEO: 6 Ways to Safeguard Your Site Against Negative SEO
• 7 On-Page SEO Techniques That Google Hates (And What You Should Do Instead)
• How to Get High Quality Backlinks with Infographics (and Boost Your SEO)
• How to Rank in Google’s Featured Snippets (aka Position 0 on Google)

The post Site Structure and SEO: 5 Ways to Create an SEO-friendly Site Structure appeared first on 99signals.