SEO

Optimizing Youtube videos

Posted on May 26, 2018 - Posted in: IT Career Training, Blog
Tagged: , ,

As we approach memorial day, many of our readers may want to put a video online about their business, activity or cause. I decided to reprint a chapter from my book, Search engine Marketing Guide for the small business. If you like this chapter, please consider giving our school a call. My book has 32 chapters filled with information about optimizing for search engines. Today we’ll discuss optimizing your Youtube video.

Chapter 24 Optimizing YouTube Videos

Google has provided statistics proving that Internet users spend more time on YouTube than they do on Google. YouTube states they receive over forty million visitors per day. YouTube videos are entertaining. The information presented on all search engines appeals to three types of learners: visual, audio and kinesthetic. Understanding this concept will be of significant benefit to your organization’s bottom line. This chapter will show you how to make your videos stand out for your chosen key phrases on YouTube.

It’s no secret that YouTube is a traffic source with almost limitless potential. There’s only one problem: YouTube is crowded with video content. According to YouTube over 100 hours of video are uploaded to this search engine every minute. When you take into consideration the large amount of content displayed on YouTube, the key question is how to get your customers to view your videos? The answer to this question is to optimize your YouTube video. It probably will not surprise you to learn that your competition simply uploads their videos to YouTube and hopes for the best. After reading this chapter you will be able to do much better than that.

Before we dive into how you can optimize your videos for YouTube, let’s review some of the most important ranking factors that YouTube uses.

YouTube’s ranking is not nearly as complex as Google’s famous 160 ranking signals, which was published in 2015 but YouTube’s algorithm is much focused. It compiles dozens of signals into a weighting system for ranking videos in YouTube search and for suggested videos, like this:

YouTube Sidebar Suggested

Now let’s get started. We will begin with a basic YouTube primer.

YouTube Ranking Factors

Here’s some information to keep in mind about the trust signals YouTube uses. So let me give you a brief list to use containing the most important signals that YouTube ranks videos:

•Title tag information

•Audience retention

•Keywords in description tag

•Tags

•Video length

•Number of subscribers after watching

•Comments

•Likes and dislikes

YouTube

It’s time to show you five strategies that you can leverage these trust signals to bring more traffic to your videos…and ultimately to your site.

1. Write Super-Long content for your Video Descriptions

Please note that YouTube and Google can’t watch or listen to your video. The search engine can only understand the contents of your video by what you write about it.

That means that they heavily lean on the HTML text surrounding the video to index your video’s topic. That’s why it disturbs me to see extremely brief video descriptions. For example: YouTube short non-ranking description “Japanese food”. The more YouTube knows about your video, the more confidently it can rank it for your chosen key words. Even more important to your ranking, YouTube uses keywords in the description to rank you for super-long tail keywords. A better ranking video description would look like this “Japanese food West Los Angeles including: Sushi, Sashimi and Tempura under $25.” If you owned a Japanese restaurant serving these dishes containing these prices, your video would be viewed by potential customers who were hungry for Japanese food. YouTube videos are designed to be niche specific.

2 Find “Video Keywords”

Like a normal practice in SEO, the YouTube SEO process begins with keyword research.

Your goal is to find keywords that have YouTube results on the first page of Google. The Key word tools we provided will be of great help to you in selecting those key niche phrases.

These are called, “Video Keywords”.

Unlike a normal SERP with 10 webpage results, containing Video Keywords, Google reserves a large portion of the first page for video results:

Google Video Results

In general, Google tends to use video results for these types of keywords:

•How-to keywords (“how to install a dish TV antenna”)

•Reviews (“Islands Restaurant review”)

•Tutorials (“Setting up your YouTube Channel”)

•Anything fitness or sports related (“long distance running”)

•Funny videos (“Cute animals”)

Let’s suppose you optimize your video around a keyword that doesn’t have any video results in Google.

In this case, you’ll ONLY get traffic from people searching on YouTube. This will cut your traffic results in half.

If you optimize for Video Keywords, you’ll also receive targeted traffic to your video directly from Google’s first page.

How to Find those High Traffic Video Keywords

The easiest way to find video keywords is to search for keywords in your niche. Then see if any of the keywords you searched for have YouTube video results, like this:

YouTube Results in Google for your selected key phrase.

Does this sound simple enough?

Once you’ve found the right Video Keywords, it’s time to check if there’s enough search volume for that keyword.

Since videos don’t take a ton of time to put together, you don’t need to go after keywords with massive search volumes.

Just make sure your target keyword gets at least 300 searches per month in Google (you can find this information using the Google Keyword Planner):

GKP Results

Why 300 searches per month?

If a keyword delivers at least 300 searches per month, then you know it also gets a decent amount of searches within YouTube itself. The free Keyword Suggestion tool by Wordstream is another excellent tool to verify against Google’s GKP tool.

If you can get that video to rank in Google, then a lot of those 300+ monthly searches will click on YOUR video from the search results.

That means you’ll get more high-quality traffic to your video, and ultimately, your site.

3 Make your (great) Video

When manufacturing a product for your business, the more effort you put into your product, the better your return on investment. This same philosophy also applies to your video.

If your budget can afford a professional look, you might want to consider hiring a professional videographer for the day, pay an editor to add graphics, rent a studio…

YouTube has facilities around the country that offer this service at a reasonable cost. In fact a YouTube facility opened near me in the suburb of Playa Vista, California.

If you’re on a really tight budget, you can record your voice over a PowerPoint presentation using Screencast-O-Matic ($15/year). This service will deliver professional quality at a very reasonable price.

I’m highly emphasizing quality because user engagement is THE most important YouTube ranking signal. Again to repeat Google can’t watch your presentation, but they can digitally judge the reaction to it.

If your video stinks, it won’t rank…no matter how optimized it is for SEO.

Unlike Google — which can use backlinks and other signals to evaluate the quality of a piece of content — YouTube doesn’t have this luxury.

They judge your video’s quality based on how people interact with it.

The User Experience Metrics That YouTube Uses

Here’s what YouTube uses to determine the quality of your video:

•Video retention: The percentage of your video people tend to watch (the more, the better).

Video_Retention•Comments: If people comment, they probably enjoyed the video (or at least watched it).

Video Comment•Subscriptions after watching: If someone subscribes to your channel after watching your video that sends a HUGE Trust signal that you have an amazing video.

YouTube Subscribe Button•Shares: How many people share your video on social media sites like Twitter and Google+.

YouTube Sharing Icons•Favorites: The number of people that favor your video or add it to their “Watch Later” playlist:

Watch Later•Thumbs up/Thumbs down: Self-explanatory 🙂

If you want to see how your videos are performing, you can see user experience data in your YouTube Analytics:

YouTube Analytics

If you make a top-notch video you’re highly likely to get top-retention views, likes, comments and all the things that YouTube likes to see in a video.

Make Your Video At Least 5-Minutes Long

Similar to text-based articles, longer videos rank better.

Since 2013, I’ve consistently observed longer videos outperforming shorter videos in YouTube and Google search.

For example, if you search in YouTube for the keyword “WordPress”, 3 out of the 4 top videos are an hour long.

So make a Video that runs for at least 5-minutes.

If it makes sense for your video to be even longer than that, go for it. Don’t worry about your video being too long. If it’s awesome, people WILL watch it.

OK so you’ve created your compelling video that’s 5-minutes or longer in length. Good job-)

Now it’s time to optimize your video and upload it to YouTube.

Here’s how to extract the most SEO value from your video.

Video Filename

When you’re done with the video make sure that you use your chosen keyword in the video’s filename.

For example, if you wanted to rank for the keyword “computer training Los Angeles”, you’d want to name your video computer_training_Los_Angeles_video.mp4.

Video_Filename

Video Title

The title of your video should be at least 5-words long. That way, you can include your full keyword phrase without keyword-stuffing.

Video Title

Power Tip: Like with a blog post, I’ve found that you get a slight video SEO boost by putting your keyword at the beginning of the title.

So if you were trying to rank for “surfing tutorial” you’d want a title like: “Surfing Tutorial: Learn How to Ride a Wave Today”.

Description

Your videos description is VERY important.

Because Google and YouTube can’t “listen” to videos, they rely on your text description to determine your video’s content.

Here are the basic guidelines for the description:

•Put your link at the very top of the video (this maximizes CTR to your site)

•Include your keyword in the first 15 words

•Make the description at least 300-words

•Include your keyword 3-4 times

This SEO-optimized description helps tell Google and YouTube what your video is about without being spammy.

YouTube Description tags

Tags aren’t super-important…but they help.

Just include a few keywords to help YouTube and Google learn what your video is about.

Targeted Tags

Targeted tags will not only help you rank for your target keyword…

…but they will get you to show up more often as a related video in the sidebar area of YouTube:

YouTube Sidebar

When the video someone’s watching has a similar tag as your video– boom! – You’re added to the sidebar.

Once you’re done, hit “Save Changes” and your video will go live!

5 Get Video Views

We talked a lot about user experience signals so far…which are really important.

In order for your video to rank for competitive keywords, it needs to receive A LOT of views.

More views=higher rankings.

But there’s one catch…

…the views need to be real.

YouTube has caught onto fake views. That’s why I don’t recommend using a service on Fiverr to pump up your view count.

As we already discussed, long-retention views are worth their weight in gold.

Here are a few strategies you can use to get targeted views to your video:

Mention Your Video on Quora and Other Q&A Sites

Quora, Yahoo Answers, and other Q&A sites are some of the most popular sites on the web (Quora rocks a top 500 Alexa ranking).

But if you try to go in there and plaster links all over the place, you’re going to get banned in a flash unless you link to YouTube.

Because you’re posting your video in a place where people are desperate for information on a given topic, the views you’ll get are extremely high-retention.

Just search for a question on your video’s topic:

Quora Search Results

And add a link to your video. Or better yet, embed it into your answer:

Quora Answers

Link to Your Video in Your Email Signature

People that email you (like your family or wife) generally like you.

And if you’re like me, you get A TON of emails.

So when you add a link to your latest video in your email signature, that means you get high-retention views like they’re going out of style.

Email Signature

Embed Your Videos in Blog Posts

Whenever you write a blog post (on your site or as a guest post for another site), think to yourself:

“Where can I embed a YouTube video into this post?”

As we stated at the beginning of this chapter Google reports their users spending more time on YouTube rather than searching for information. If your product translates well for videos use them for promotion.

If you want to build websites or make videos, which are highly visible to your audience call ABCO Technology. You can reach our campus by telephone at: (310) 216-3067 from 9 A.m to 6 P.m Monday through Friday.

Email all questions to info@abcotechnology.edu

Financial aid is available to all students who qualify for funding.

ABCO Technology is located at:
11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE #588
Los Angeles, Ca. 90304

Build highly visible webpages and videos today!

Mobile vs desktop web pages have different search engine rankings

Posted on May 13, 2018 - Posted in: Blog, IT Career Training
Tagged: , ,

As if we didn’t have enough to think about with respect to any given SEO campaign, it is now imperative to separate and refine your approaches to mobile and desktop search.

While mobile has moved to 70% of all searches over the past five years, this shouldn’t be to the neglect of desktop. Although SEO for mobile and desktop follow the same basic principles and best practices, there are nuances and discrepancies that need to be factored in to your overall ranking strategy.

Part of this is the keyword rankings: you won’t ever know how to adapt your strategies if you’re not tracking the rankings separately for each. Research from Bright Edge found that 79% of listings have a different rank on mobile devices compared with desktop, and the top-ranking result for a query is different on desktop and mobile 35% of the time. These are statistics that simply cannot be ignored.

Why are they different?

Before delving into how to compare keyword rankings on mobile and desktop, it’s highly important to acknowledge the why and the what: why they rank different and what it means for your SEO strategy.

It’s paramount to understand that desktop and mobile searches use different algorithms. Ultimately, Google wants to provide the best user experience for searchers, whatever device they are using. This means creating a bespoke device-tailored experience and in order to do that, we need to delve deeper into user intent.

It’s all about user intent

The crux of the mobile versus desktop conundrum is that user intent tends to differ for each device. This is particularly important when considering how far along the funnel a user is. It’s a generalization, but overall mobile users are often closer to the transactional phase, while desktop users are usually closer to the informational phase.

For example, we can better understand user intent on mobile by understanding the prevalence of local search. If a user is searching for a product or service on mobile, it is likely to be local. In contrast, users searching for a product or service on desktop are more likely to be browsing non-location-specific ecommerce sites.

Let’s also consider the types of conversions likely to occur on each device, in terms of getting in touch. Users on mobile are far more likely to call, by simply tapping the number which appears in the local map pack section. Alternatively, desktop users would be more inclined to type an email or submit a contact form.

What on earth is a micro-moment?

To better understand the different ways in which consumers behave, it may help to spend a little time familiarizing yourself with micro-moments. These refer to Google’s ability to determine a searcher’s most likely intent, and is particularly important for mobile users, when a consumer often needs to take immediate action.

For example, if a user is searching for a local product or service, the local map pack will appear, but if they are searching for information then the quick answer box will appear. These micro-moments therefore have a significant impact on the way the SERPs are constructed.

Once you’ve understood the user intent of a given searcher, you can ensure that you are providing content for both mobile and desktop users. However, it’s worth bearing in mind that content with longer word counts continues to perform well on mobile, despite the general consensus that people on mobile simply can’t be bothered to consume long form content. This harks back to Google’s prioritization of high quality content. Besides, anybody who has a long train commute into work will understand the need for a nice, long article to read on mobile.

Rankings tools

With that context, we can now return to the matter at hand: rankings. Of course, you could record the rankings for both desktop and mobile the old-fashioned way, but who has time for that? In short, any good SEO tool worth its salt will enable you to track both desktop and mobile rankings separately. Here are some favorites:

◾SEMRush is a personal favorite among the plethora of fancy SEO tools. SEMRush provides a comprehensive breakdown of mobile vs desktop results (as well as tablet if you really want to geek out) and displays the percentage of mobile-friendly results for your domain.

◾Search Metrics offers Desktop vs. Mobile Visibility metrics, detailing individual scores for desktop and mobile, as well as overlap metrics which show how many keyword search results appear in exactly the same position for both. You can also drill down further to view how a website performs with regard to localized results.

◾Moz. Through Moz Pro, you can track the same rankings metrics for both desktop and mobile. Filter by labels and locations to dig further into the data.

◾Google Search Console. Don’t have access to any of the above tools? Don’t panic as you can still rely on the trusty Google Search Console. When looking at your search analytics, filter devices by comparing mobile and desktop. Even if you do have access to a SEO tool that allows you to do comparison analysis, it’s still worth checking in on your Search Console insights.

Rankings are only part of your overall page strategy.

It’s important to remember that rankings are basically a tiny part of the picture; it’s essential to take a more holistic approach to the mobile vs desktop issue. This means taking the time to dig around Google Analytics and unearth the data and meaning beyond the vanity metrics.

You may have higher rankings for mobile, but those users might be bouncing more regularly. Is this a reflection of the user intent or is it a poor user experience? Does higher rankings for one device correlate to higher conversions? If not, then you need to consider the reasons for this. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, so you must take a tailored approach to your search engine strategy.

ABCO Technology teaches a comprehensive course for web development. Call our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday. You can reach our campus at: (310) 216-3067.

Email all questions to: info@abcotechnology.edu

Financial aid is available to all students who qualify for funding.

ABCO Technology is located at:

11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE #588

Los Angeles, Ca. 90304

 

Learn to build highly visible webpages today!

Facebook in competition with Google for Local search

Posted on March 18, 2018 - Posted in: IT Career Training, Blog, News
Tagged: , , , , ,

When you think local SEO, you think Google. But another big name has been making some moves lately to enter the conversation, and that’s Facebook.

In the past few years, Facebook’s made a lot of strides to become a real player in local search, improving their search results to the extent that they rival Google’s. Meanwhile, Google has made investments in Google My Business to justify business owners devoting time to it instead of treating it like a defunct social media listing.

Both of these trends bode well for the impact of search on social, and of social on search.

Let’s review some of the most recent changes in local SEO from Google and Facebook.

Prioritizing local news for community engagement

At the end of January 2018, shortly following Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Facebook would be demoting content from of brands and publishers in favor of those from family, friends, and groups, the social media giant announced that they were tweaking their algorithm to also highlight local news in the News Feed.

Facebook

The focus on aggregating and finding local news indicates Facebook plans to double down on local search. The more they can pick up on local search signals, the better they can provide hyper-localized, relevant content for their users. Consumers increasingly expect more personalization, and assuming (like Facebook does) that there is a correlation between personalization and hyper-localized content, this change will make their platform a more valuable source of information for their users. The more valuable the information on the platform, the likelier that user base is to stick on it, using it as both a local search engine as well as a place for updates on friends and family. Let the advertising dollars roll in.

In his announcement, Zuckerberg said,

“People constantly tell us they want to see more local news on Facebook.”

Apparently Facebook wasn’t the only one listening, as earlier that same week, Google launched its own local news app.

Currently only available in two cities, the free Google Bulletin app lets users post news updates and upload photos and video about events and happenings in their area. The app essentially combines the social community features of Nextdoor with the You Report It feature many local news sites rely on to crowdsource content.

You reported

With Bulletin, Google may well be hoping to encourage users to visit it first as the source of immediate information, instead of turning to Facebook as people so often do during an emergency or to find a local event.

Google Bulletin and Facebook’s prioritization of local news are also a strong response to the pressure both companies received for disseminating fake news during the 2016 U.S. election. Both are making the same assumption – that hyperlocal necessarily means more relevant and, since it’s coming from news sources, more trustworthy.

However, both initiatives are in their early days and their assumptions don’t seem fully fool-proof. Facebook’s algorithm currently determines something is local news by noting the domain, and then seeing whether users from a concentrated geographical area engage with the content – a setup which should be fairly easy to game. Meanwhile, there’s currently no vetting process on Google Bulletin that would prevent users from uploading inaccurate information.

Crowdsourcing content to inform business listings

Besides news sources, both Facebook and Google are relying on crowdsourced information to complete, categorize, and rank the business listings in their database. On either platform, users can add places, update address information and hours, write reviews, and answer questions about the business. Then, the platform uses this information to determine the most relevant result based on a searcher’s query, their location, and even local time.

Both Google and Facebook provide robust results that display helpful attributes sourced by user reviews, ratings, and busy times.

Google crowdsourcing

Facebook also includes additional filters based on whether your friends have also visited a place – bringing the social into search.

Facebook crowdsourcing

Facebook’s City Guides do the same at a macro-level, providing trip planning for various large cities around the world, and showing the top places your friends as well as locals have explored.

Facebook city guide

Launched in November 2017, the Facebook Local tab incorporates local event results along with the business listings and displays which of your friends are attending. This hyper social aspect, as opposed to hyperlocal, is a unique differentiator that gives Facebook real value as a local search engine.

To its credit, Google has been working on ways to make its own search results more social. One of the biggest changes they introduced to Google My Business in 2017 was the Q&A feature. Users can click a button to ask questions about a business, which are then available to be answered by anyone, including the business itself, as well as local guides, regular Google users, and even competitors.

Q and A

The fact that anyone can answer leads to misinformation, or less than helpful information as in the last example shown above (“Depends what you order”). Google’s attempt to introduce social discussion to their local business listings shows a singular lack of foresight similar to their failure to include a vetting process with Bulletin.
In their defense, Google may be dealing with information overload. Each month, 700,000 new places are added to Google Maps. They’ve turned to users to help, but they’ve needed to incentivize users to get the information they need, rather than crowdsourcing it as Facebook has successfully done with Facebook Local. The more users answer questions on Google, upload photos, and edit business information, they earn points that designate them as a Local Guide – which they can exchange for early access to Google initiatives, exclusive events, and real monetary benefits like free storage on Google Drive.

Helping businesses convert users from their listings

We’ve been a bit hard on Google in the previous sections, but that’s about to change. Last year, Google also introduced Posts for Google My Business. Google Posts for Google My Business, as opposed to regular posts on a Google+ page, allowing businesses to update their listing with info that appears in the SERP along with their Knowledge Panel.

wellness

Posts offer business owners to promote new products, upcoming events, or simply useful information such as special holiday hours. Early studies indicate that engaging with Google Posts on a frequent basis can positively impact rankings – which may be an indication that Google is using a social feature as a search ranking factor.

Both Google and Facebook have also introduced CTA buttons businesses can add to their profiles, easing conversion from the SERP or social platform. Google users can book appointments with fitness and wellness-focused businesses directly from the SERP. Again, Facebook has outpaced Google here, since they offer seven CTA options which serve a variety of business needs: Book Now, Contact Us, Use App, Play Game, Shop Now, Sign Up, or Watch Video.

The convergence of local search and social

When you think about it, Facebook is the only business who could feasibly take on Google in the world of search. Its 2+ billion monthly users are a formidable force for Google’s 95% market share of mobile search users. While Google has access to email, Facebook has access to social profiles. Both companies have access to an incredible amount of demographic information on their users.

Which will reign supreme in the realm of local search is yet to be decided, although Facebook is giving Google a real run for their money thus far. Facebook’s local search results have become smarter, while Google’s attempts to incorporate social into search seem clumsy at best.

Likely, what we’ll ultimately see is a merging of local search and social as the two platforms meet somewhere in the middle.

If you are interested in using local search and social media as a powerful marketing set of strategies for your webpages, contact ABCO Technology. You can reach our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday. Call today at: (310) 216-3067.

Email your questions to: info@abcotechnology.edu

Financial aid is available to all students who qualify for funding.

ABCO Technology is located at:

11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE #588
Los Angeles, Ca. 90304

Use social media for your web success.

How to make a Google proof website

Posted on March 8, 2018 - Posted in: IT Career Training, Blog
Tagged: , , , , ,

Any SEO or webmaster who has ever had a website affected by a Google algorithm change – or feared being affected by one – has probably wished that they could find a way to make their website “algorithm-proof”.

Still, surely there’s no such thing as a website that’s never impacted by Google algorithms, right? As long as your site is indexed by Google, it’s at the mercy of the algorithms that Google uses to determine website ranking, all the more so if you happen to rely heavily on organic search traffic for your business.

The art – or science – of search engine optimization is about determining as best you can what those algorithms are looking for, and giving it to them.

Yet one website believes it has found the formula for making its content “Google algorithm-proof”. Ranker is a website made up of dynamic, crowdsourced lists that users can vote on, about everything from pop culture to geography, history to sports, celebrities to science.

And according to its CEO, Clark Benson, Ranker has never suffered a negative effect from a Google algorithm change, growing its traffic steadily without interruption over the course of eight and a half years.

ABCO Technology caught up with Benson to find out Ranker’s secret to success, and whether there is a formula for creating an algorithm-proof website.

Rankings, not review sites

So what is Ranker, exactly?

“Ranker’s primary reason for being is to crowdsource anything that makes sense to rank,” says Benson. “Any topic that people are really interested in.

The unique angle that we’ve pursued is that instead of having this being one 23-year-old blogger’s opinion of the best new TV shows of the year, or whatever it happens to be, we would have a dynamic list that visitors could vote on, potentially add items to, and re-rank.

Voting on a list of ‘Historical events you most want to go back and see’ on Ranker

Lists have been a time-honored draw for magazines and other print media over the years, but it was when the internet came along that they really exploded – spawning dozens of list-oriented viral websites and the much-mocked listicle, which became a staple of online journalism. However, Benson – a self-described “lifelong list nerd” – was frustrated by the fact that these lists only ever represented one person’s opinion.

In a similar vein, he found review websites unhelpful, as user-generated reviews represented a single person’s subjective opinion in a format that wasn’t conducive to making a decision.

“Part of the reason to build Ranker was my frustration with review sites, because when I’m looking for an answer to something, like which TV show to watch, I don’t want to read a lot of text reviews.

“I also feel that in typical five-star rating systems, everything tends to be clustered around three and a half to four stars, so you don’t get any true granularity on what is best.”

In a world increasingly “cluttered with choices”, therefore, Benson was convinced that rankings were “the simplest way to dissect a choice in a category, without losing the credibility of the answer”. And so he built Ranker as a website where the wisdom of the crowd could determine the ultimate ranking for any list of items, on any topic.

The secret to Ranker’s SEO success: Content freshness

Since Ranker’s launch in 2009, the site has amassed more than 100,000 rankings across dozens of broad categories, encompassing almost any topic that people could have a passion for.

When the website first launched, however, it had very few resources, and Benson explains that he had to learn SEO from scratch in order to give the website a strong foundation.

Luckily, earning traffic was never a problem for the site, because the type of content published on Ranker was uniquely suited to catering to Google’s algorithms.

“We’ve never been hit by any algorithm changes – we’ve always grown our organic search traffic year over year over year, steadily, for the eight and a half years we’ve been live.

“You never exactly know what works in SEO, because Google doesn’t tell you what works, but I’ve always believed that the best intelligence on what to do comes from the public statements Google makes – their best practices.

“And one of the key factors that Google says is in their index is freshness of content. Content has a lifespan. In our case, because our rankings are dynamic and always changing – people are adding things to them, voting things up and down – this makes for perpetually fresh content.

“We have a lot of content that is six, seven, even eight years old that is still doing as well as it was years ago, and in some cases it’s even growing in traffic.”

One of Ranker’s most evergreen pieces of content is a list ranking the ‘Best Movies of All Time’ – which is more than 5,000 items long.

“Obviously that’s a topic that there’s a lot of passion and a lot of competition for [in search rankings]. And in the last few years, we’ve been on the top three or so results on Google for that term.

“We’ve watched that page just grow in rankings over the span of seven or eight years. I can only guess it’s because the page is always changing.”

User-curated content

At the time of writing this article, Ranker’s front page is currently spotlighting a list of best-dressed celebs at the 2018 Oscars, a best TV episode names ranking, and a list of possible game-changing deep space observations to be made by the Webb Telescope.

Anyone can add an item to a list on Ranker, although Ranker’s content is not purely user-generated. Ranker has an editorial team which is made up of people who, in Benson’s words, “have a mind for cataloging things” rather than people who specialize in writing a lot of prose.

Lists are typically started off by one of Ranker’s editors, and when a user wants to add a new item to a list, it’s cross-referenced with Ranker’s database, a huge data set made up of more than 28 million people, places and things. If the item isn’t found in the database, it’s added to a moderation queue.

Rather than UGC (user-generated content), therefore, Benson thinks of Ranker’s lists as something he terms UCC – user-curated content.

How did Ranker build such a huge data set? Beginning in 2007, a company called Metaweb ran an open source, collaborative knowledge base called Freebase, which contained data harvested from sources such as Wikipedia, the Notable Names Database, Fashion Model Directory and MusicBrainz, along with user-submitted wiki contributions.

This knowledge base made up a large part of Ranker’s data set. What’s interesting is that Freebase was later acquired by none other than Google – and is the foundation of Google’s Knowledge Graph.

Additionally, not every list on Ranker is crowdsourced or voted on. Some lists, such as Everyone Who Has Been Fired Or Resigned From The Trump Administration So Far, don’t make sense to have users voting on them, but are kept fresh with the addition of new items whenever the topic is in the news.

Can other websites do ‘Ranker SEO’?

Benson acknowledges that Ranker’s setup is fairly unique, and so it isn’t necessarily possible to emulate its success with SEO by trying to do the same thing – unless you just happen to have your own crowdsourced, user-curated list website, of course.

With that said, there are still some practical lessons that website owners, particularly publishers, can take away from Ranker’s success and apply to their own SEO strategy.

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Mystified by martech? Introducing the ClickZ Buyers Guide series

First and foremost: content freshness is king

As you’ve no doubt gathered by now, the freshness of Ranker’s content is probably the biggest contributing factor to its success in search. “We’re convinced that the dynamism of our content is what really lets it just grow and grow and grow in search traffic,” says Benson.

“While our approach is somewhat unique to the way Ranker works – we have a bespoke CMS that makes lists out of datasets – I’m positive that there are other ways to apply this kind of thinking.”

To put content freshness front and center of your content marketing efforts, make sure that your publication or blog is well-stocked with evergreen content. For those articles or posts that are more time-sensitive, you can still publish a refreshed version, or look for an up-to-date spin to put on the old content, for example linking it in with current events.

According to research by Moz, other factors which can contribute to a positive “freshness” score for your website as a whole include:

◾Changes made to the core content of your website (as opposed to peripheral elements like JavaScript, comments, ads and navigation)

◾Frequency of new page creation

◾Rate of new link growth (an increase in links pointing back to your site or page)

◾Links from other fresh websites, which have the ability to transfer their “fresh value” (Justin Briggs dubbed this quality “FreshRank” in 2011)

Internal links trump external links

Other than content freshness, Benson attributes Ranker’s SEO success to one other big factor: its intricate network of internal links, which Benson believes are far more valuable to SEO than an impressive backlink profile.

“I think a lot of people who are new to SEO focus too much on trying to get outside links, versus optimizing their own internal infrastructure,” he says.

“We have a very broad site with millions of pages – not just lists, but a page for every item that’s included in a list on Ranker, showing you where it ranks on all of our different lists.”

The Ranker page for Leonardo da Vinci

“We made the mistake early on of leaving all of those pages open to Google’s index, and we learned over time that some of them are very thin, content-wise. New links are added to them, but they’re thin pages. So we quickly adopted a strategy of noindexing the thinner pages on our site – so they have utility, but they don’t necessarily have search utility.

“We’ve really focused a lot on internal link structure and on interlinking our content in a very intelligent and vertical-driven, page-optimized way. We’ve put a lot of engineering and product resources towards building a robust internal link structure that can also change as pages become more valuable in search.

“Outside links are very important, but they’re increasingly difficult to get. If you have good, unique content, and a strong internal link structure, I think you can get by with far fewer backlinks. Ranker has a lot of backlinks – we’re a big site – but we’ve never tactically gone out to build backlinks. And we get more than 30 million organic search visits per month.”

Think about how your content will appear to searchers

Benson emphasizes the importance of paying attention to basic on-site optimization like crafting good title tags and meta descriptions. These elements dictate how your website appears in the SERP to users when they search, and so will form the first impressions of your content.

“When it comes to creating new content, our editorial team definitely focuses on best practice with regards to title tags and meta descriptions – the basic stuff still applies,” says Benson. “Anyone doing editorial still needs to think about your content from the lens of the searcher.”

Optimizing for Google’s rich results and using Schema.org markup are additional ways that website owners can make sure that their website listing appears as attractive as possible to a searcher encountering it on the SERP.

The future is psychographic

What plans does Benson have for the future of Ranker? Up to now, the site has been concentrating mostly on search and social distribution (Facebook is another big source of organic traffic), but are now beginning to focus more on ad sales, media tie-ins and getting the brand name out there.

“We’re always focused on growing traffic, and we’re certainly investing a lot more into our brand,” says Benson.

However, the most exciting future project for Ranker is something called Ranker Insights – a psychographic interests platform which makes use of Ranker’s thousands of data points on what people are interested in and like to vote on.

Drawing connections between people’s interests on Ranker Insights

Big data on anything is extremely valuable in marketing, but big data on the things that people like is near enough invaluable – particularly in a world where psychographics (classifying people according to their attitudes, aspirations, and other aspects of their psychology) are increasingly more important than demographics (classifying people according to things like age, gender, race and nationality).

“The marketing world in general is steering a lot more towards psychographics rather than demographics,” says Benson. “Netflix doesn’t care what country you live in – when it comes to marketing or even recommendations, all they care about is your tastes. They stopped using demographics entirely years ago – and clearly they’re doing something right.

“We feel that in an interconnected world, what you like says at least as much about you as your age or your gender.

“And in a world where what you like tells people how to market to you and how to reach you, we have very, very granular, deep data on that front. There’s a lot of different applications for insights like this in a very data-driven world.”

Rebecca Sentance is the Deputy Editor of Search Engine Watch.

“The end result is a very wisdom-of-crowds-based answer which is always changing and dynamically moving along as tastes change, and as more people vote on things.”

Voting on a list of ‘Historical events you most want to go back and see’ on Ranker

Lists have been a time-honored draw for magazines and other print media over the years, but it was when the internet came along that they really exploded – spawning dozens of list-oriented viral websites and the much-mocked listicle, which became a staple of online journalism. However, Benson – a self-described “lifelong list nerd” – was frustrated by the fact that these lists only ever represented one person’s opinion.

In a similar vein, he found review websites unhelpful, as user-generated reviews represented a single person’s subjective opinion in a format that wasn’t conducive to making a decision.

“Part of the reason to build Ranker was my frustration with review sites, because when I’m looking for an answer to something, like which TV show to watch, I don’t want to read a lot of text reviews.

“I also feel that in typical five-star rating systems, everything tends to be clustered around three and a half to four stars, so you don’t get any true granularity on what is best.”

In a world increasingly “cluttered with choices”, therefore, Benson was convinced that rankings were “the simplest way to dissect a choice in a category, without losing the credibility of the answer”. And so he built Ranker as a website where the wisdom of the crowd could determine the ultimate ranking for any list of items, on any topic.

ABCO Teaches classes regarding building crowd funding websites in our web development program. Call our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday at: (310) 216-3067

Email your questions to: ibnfo@abcotechnology.edu

Financial aid is available to all students who qualify for funding.

ABCO Technology is located at:
11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE #588
Los Angeles, Ca. 90304

 

Learning to build crowd funding websites today!

A guide to web technologies

Posted on February 25, 2018 - Posted in: IT Career Training, Blog, News
Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,

As a certified Internet web developer, your role will invariably lead you to interactions with people in a wide variety of roles including business owners, marketing managers, content creators, link builders, PR agencies, and developers.

That last one – developers – is a catch-all term that can encompass software engineers, coders, programmers, front- and back-end developers, and IT professionals of various types. These are the folks who write the code and/or generally manage the underlying various web technologies that comprise and power websites.

In your role as a web developer, it may or may not be practicable for you to completely master programming languages such as C++ and Java, or scripting languages such as PHP and JavaScript, or markup languages such as HTML, XML, or the stylesheet language CSS.

And, there are many more programming, scripting, and markup languages out there – it would be a Herculean task to be a master of every kind of language, even if your role is full-time programmer and not a web developer.

But, it is essential for you, as a certified web developer professional, to understand the various languages and technologies and technology stacks out there that comprise the web. When you’re making website recommendations, which developers will most likely be executing, you need to understand their mindset, their pain points, what their job is like – and you need to be able to speak their language.

You don’t have to know everything developers know, but you should have a good grasp of what developers do so that you can ask better questions and provide SEO recommendations in a way that resonates with them, and those recommendations are more likely to be executed as a result.

When you speak their language, and understand what their world is like, you’re contributing to a collaborative environment where everyone’s pulling on the same side of the rope for the same positive outcomes.

And of course, aside from building collaborative relationships, being a professional web developer involves a lot of technical detective work and problem detection and prevention, so understanding various aspects of web technology is not optional; it’s mandatory.

Web tech can be complex and intimidating, but hopefully this guide will help make things a little easier for you and fill in some blanks in your understanding.

Let’s jump right in!

The internet vs. the World Wide Web

Most people use these terms interchangeably, but technically the two terms do not mean the same thing, although they are related.

The Internet began as a decentralized network of independent interconnected computers.

The US Department of Defense was involved over time and awarded contracts, including for the development of the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) project, which was an early packet switching network and first to use TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol).

The ARPANET project led to “internetworking” where various networks of computers could be joined into a larger “network of networks”.

The development of the World Wide Web is credited to British computer scientist Sir Tim Beners-Lee in the 1980s; he developed linking hypertext documents, which resulted in an information-sharing model built “on top” of the Internet.

Documents (web pages) were specified to be formatted in a markup language called “HTML” (Hypertext Markup Language), and could be linked to each other using “hyperlinks” that users could click to navigate to other web pages.

Further reading:

◾History of the Internet

◾History of the World Wide Web

◾ARPANET

Web hosting

Web hosting, or hosting for short, are services that allow people and businesses to put a web page or a website on the internet. Hosting companies have banks of computers called “servers” that are not entirely dissimilar in nature to computers you’re already familiar with, but of course there are differences.

There are various types of web hosting companies that offer a range of services in addition to web hosting; such services may include domain name registration, website builders, email addresses, website security services, and more.

In short, a host is where websites are published.

Further reading:

◾Web Hosting Service

Web servers

A web server is a computer that stores web documents and resources. Web servers receive requests from clients (browsers) for web pages, images, etc. When you visit a web page, your browser requests all the resources/files needed to render that web page in your browser. It goes something like this:

Client (browser) to server: “Hey, I want this web page, please provide all the text, images and other stuff you have for that page.”

Server to client: “Okay, here it is.”

Various factors impact how quickly the web page will display (render) including the speed of the server and the size(s) of the various files being requested.

There are three server types you’ll most often encounter:

1.Apache is open-source, free software compatible with many operating systems such as Linux. An often-used acronym is “LAMP stack” referring to a bundling of Linux, Apache, MySQL (relational database) and PHP (a server-side scripting language).

2.IIS stands for “Internet Information Services” and is proprietary software made by Microsoft. An IIS server is often referred to as a “Windows Server” because it runs on Windows NT operating systems.

3.NGINX – pronounced “Engine X”, is billed as a high-performance server able to also handle load balancing, used as a reverse proxy, and more. Their stated goals and reason for being include outperforming other types of servers.

Further reading:

◾Apache

◾IIS

◾NGINX

Server log files

Often shortened to “log files”, these are records of server activity in response to requests made for web pages and associated resources such as images. Some servers may already be configured to record this activity, others will need to be configured to do so.

Log files are the “reality” of what’s happening with a website and will include information such as the page or file requested, date and time stamp of the request, the user agent making the request, the response type (found, error, redirected, etc.), the referrer, and a few other items such as bytes served and client IP address.

Web developers should get familiar with parsing log files. To go into this topic in more detail, read JafSoft’s explanation of a web server log file sample.

FTP

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, and it’s how you upload resource files such as webpages, images, XML Sitemaps, robots.txt files, and PDF files to your web hosting account to make these resource files available and viewable on the Web via browsers. There are free FTP software programs you can use for this purpose.

The interface is a familiar file-folder tree structure where you’ll see your local machine’s files on the left, and the remote server’s files on the right. You can drag and drop local files to the server to upload. Voila, you’ve put files onto the internet! For more detail, Wired has an excellent guide on FTP for beginners.

Domain name

A domain name is a string of (usually) text and is used in a URL (Uniform Resource Locator). Keeping this simple, for the URL https://www.website.com, “website” is the domain name. For more detail, check out the Wikipedia article on domain names.

Root domain & subdomain

A root domain is what we commonly think of as a domain name such as “website” in the URL https://www.website.com. A subdomain is the www. part of the URL. Other examples of subdomains would be news.website.com, products.website.com, support.website.com and so on.

For more information on the difference between a domain and a subdomain, check out this video from HowTech.
URL vs. URI

URL stands for “Universal Resource Locator” (such as https://www.website.com/this-is-a-page) and URI stands for “Uniform Resource Identifier” and is a subset of a full URL (such as /this-is-a-page.html). More info here.

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

I’ve grouped together HTML, CSS, and JavaScript here not because each don’t deserve their own section here, but because it’s good for web developers to understand that those three languages are what comprise much of how modern web pages are coded (with many exceptions of course, and some of those will be noted elsewhere here).

HTML stands for “Hypertext Markup Language”, and it’s the original and foundational language of web pages on the World Wide Web.

CSS stands for “Cascading Style Sheets” and is a style sheet language used to style and position HTML elements on a web page, enabling separation of presentation and content.

JavaScript (not to be confused with the programming language “Java”) is a client-side scripting language to create interactive features on web pages.

Further reading:

◾HTML intro

◾CSS intro

◾JavaScript intro

AJAX & XML

AJAX stands for “Asynchronous JavaScript And XML. Asynchronous means the client/browser and the server can work and communicate independently allowing the user to continue interaction with the web page independent of what’s happening on the server. JavaScript is used to make the asynchronous server requests and when the server responds JavaScript modifies the page content displayed to the user. Data sent asynchronously from the server to the client is packaged in an XML format, so it can be easily processed by JavaScript. This reduces the traffic between the client and the server which increases response time and speed.

XML stands for “Extensible Markup Language” and is similar to HTML using tags, elements, and attributes and was designed to both store and transport data, whereas HTML is used to display data. For the purposes of SEO, the most common usage of XML is in XML Sitemap files.

Structured data (AKA, Schema.org)

Structured data is markup you can add to the HTML of a page to help search engines better understand the content of the page, or at least certain elements of that page. By using the approved standard formats, you provide additional information that makes it easier for search engines to parse the pertinent data on the page.

Common uses of structured data are to markup certain aspects of recipes, literary works, products, places, events of various types, and much more.

Schema.org was launched on June 2, 2011, as a collaborative effort by Google, Bing and Yahoo (soon after joined by Yandex) to create a common set of agreed-upon and standardized set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages. Since then, the term “Schema.org” has become synonymous with the term “structured data”, and Schema.org structured data types are continually evolving with new types being added with relative frequency.

One of the main takeaways about structured data is that it helps disambiguate data for search engines so they can more easily understand information and data, and that certain marked-up elements may result in additional information being displayed in Search Engines Results Pages (SERPs), such as review stars, recipe cooking times, and so on. Note that adding structured data is not a guarantee of such SERP features.

There are a number of structured data vocabularies that exist, but JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) has emerged as Google’s preferred and recommended method of doing structured data markup per the Schema.org guidelines, but other formats are also supported such as microdata and RDFa.

JSON-LD is easier to add to pages, easier to maintain and change, and less prone to errors than microdata which must be wrapped around existing HML elements, whereas JSON-LD can be added as a single block in the HTML head section of a web page.

Here is the Schema.org FAQ page for further investigation – and to get started using microdata, RDFa and JSON-LD, check out our complete beginner’s guide to Schema.org markup.

Front-end vs. back-end, client-side vs. server-side

You may have talked to a developer who said, “I’m a front-end developer” and wondered what that meant. Of corse you may have heard someone say “oh, that’s a back-end functionality”. It can seem confusing what all this means, but it’s easily clarified.

“Front-end” and “client-side” both mean the same thing: it happens (executes) in the browser. For example, JavaScript was originally developed as something that executed on a web page in the browser, and that means without having to make a call to the server.

“Back-end” and “server-side” both mean the same thing: it happens (executes) on a server. For example, PHP is a server-side scripting language that executes on the server, not in the browser. Some Content Management Systems (CMS for short) like WordPress use PHP-based templates for web pages, and the content is called from the server to display in the browser.

Programming vs. scripting languages

Engineers and developers do have differing explanations and definitions of terms. Some will say ultimately there’s no differences or that the lines are blurry, but the generally accepted difference between a programming language (like C or Pascal) vs. a scripting language (like JavaScript or PHP) is that a programming language requires an explicit compiling step, whereas human-created, human-readable code is turned into a specific set of machine-language instructions understandable by a computer.

Content Management System (CMS)

A CMS is a software application or a set of related programs used to create and manage websites (or we can use the fancy term “digital content”). At the core, you can use a CMS to create, edit, publish, and archive web pages, blog posts, and articles and will typically have various built-in features.

Using a CMS to create a website means that there is no need to create any code from scratch, which is one of the main reasons CMS’ have broad appeal.

Another common aspect of CMS’ are plugins, which can be integrated with the core CMS to extend functionalities which are not part of the core CMS feature list.

Common CMS’ include WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, ExpressionEngine, Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify, Squarespace, and there are many, many others.

Read more here about Content Management Systems.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Sometimes called a “Content Distribution Network”, CDNs are large networks of servers which are geographically dispersed with the goal of serving web content from a server location closer to the client making the request in order to reduce latency (transfer delay).

CDNs cache copies of your web content across these servers, and then servers nearest to the website visitor serve the requested web content. CDNs are used to provide high availability along with high performance. More info here.

HTTPS, SSL, and TLS

Web data is passed between computers via data packets of code. Clients (web browsers) serve as the user interface when we request a web page from a server. HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) is the communication method a browser uses to “talk to” a server and make requests. HTTPS is the secure version of this (hypertext transfer protocol secure).

Website owners can switch their website to HTTPS to make the connection with users more secure and less prone to “man in the middle attacks” where a third party intercepts or possibly alters the communication.

SSL refers to “secure sockets layer” and is a standard security protocol to establish communication encryption between the server and the browser. TLS, Transport Layer Security, is a more-recent version of SSL

◾More info on HTTPS, SSL, & TLS

HTTP/1.1 & HTTP/2

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the HTTP protocol in 1989, the computer he used did not have the processing power and memory of today’s computers. A client (browser) connecting to a server using HTTP/1.1 receives information in a sequence of network request-response transactions, which are often referred to as “round trips” to the server, sometimes called “handshakes”.

Each round trip takes time, and HTTPS is an HTTP connection with SSL/TSL layered in which requires yet-another handshake with the server. All of this takes time, causing latency. What was fast enough then is not necessarily fast enough now.

HTTP/2 is the first new version of HTTP since 1.1. Simply put, HTTP/2 allows the server to deliver more resources to the client/browser faster than HTTP/1.1 by utilizing multiplexing, compression, request prioritization, and server push which allows the server to send resources to the client that have not yet been requested.

Further reading:

◾HTTP/2 FAQ

◾What is HTTP/2 and how does it benefit SEO?

Application Programming Interface (API)

Application is a general term that, simply put, refers to a type of software that can perform specific tasks. Applications include software, web browsers, and databases.

An API is an interface with an application, typically a database. The API is like a messenger that takes requests, tells the system what you want, and returns the response back to you.

If you’re in a restaurant and want the kitchen to make you a certain dish, the waiter who takes your order is the messenger that communicates between you and the kitchen, which is analogous to using an API to request and retrieve information from a database. For more info, check out Wikipedia’s Application programming interface page.

AMP, PWA, and SPA

If you want to build a website today, you have many choices.

You can build it from scratch using HTML for content delivery along with CSS for look and feel and JavaScript for interactive elements.

Or you could use a CMS (content management system) like WordPress, Magento, or Drupal.

Or you could build it with AMP, PWA, or SPA.

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and is an open source Google initiative which is a specified set of HTML tags and various functionality components which are ever-evolving. The upside to AMP is lightning-fast loading web pages when coded according to AMP specifications, the downside is some desired features may not be currently supported, and issues with proper analytics tracking.

Further reading:

◾What will Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages mean for marketers?

◾Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) one year on: stats and infographic

◾Accelerated Mobile Pages vs Facebook Instant Articles: Is Google winning the mobile war?

PWA stands for Progressive Web App, and it blends the best of both worlds between traditional websites and mobile phone apps. PWAs deliver a native app-like experience to users such as push notifications, the ability to work offline, and create a start icon on your mobile phone.

By using “service workers” to communicate between the client and server, PWAs combines fast-loading web pages with the ability to act like a native mobile phone app at the same time. However, because PWAs are JavaScript frameworks, you may encounter a number of technical challenges.

Further reading:

◾Progressive Web Apps versus Android Instant Apps: Which is better for marketers?

◾Google I/O: What’s going on with Progressive Web Apps?

SPAs – Single Page Applications – are different from traditional web pages which load each page a user requests in a session via repeated communications with the server. SPAs, by contrast, run inside the browser and new pages viewed in a user session don’t require page reloading via server requests.

The primary advantages of SPAs include streamlined and simplified development, and a very fast user experience. The primary disadvantages include potential problems with SEO, due to search engines’ inconsistent ability to parse content served by JavaScript. Debugging issues can also be more difficult and take up more developer time.

It’s worth noting that future success of each of these web technologies ultimately depends on developer adoption.

Conclusion

Obviously, it would require a very long book to cover each and every bit of web technology, and in sufficient detail, but this guide should provide you, the professional web developer, with helpful info to fill in some of the blanks in your understanding of various key aspects of web technology.

I’ve provided many links in this article that serve as jumping off points for any topics you would like to explore further. There’s no doubt that there are many more topics web developers need to be conversant with, such as robots.txt files, meta robots tags, rel canonical tags, XML Sitemaps, server response codes, and much more.

In closing, here’s a nice article on the Stanford website titled “How Does The Internet Work?” that you might find interesting reading; you can find that here.

ABCO Technology teaches a comprehensive program for web development. Call our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday at: (310) 216-3067

Email your questions to: info@abcotechnology.edu

Financial aid is available to all students who can qualify for funding.

ABCO Technology is located at:
11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE #588
Los Angeles, Ca. 90304

 

Learn web development today!

Oracle database administrator information

Posted on January 20, 2018 - Posted in: IT Career Training, News
Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

There is an old saying, which dominates the marketing and search engine industries. This saying states “content is king.”

Content comes from information. If content is king, then information is power.

The question of how to use this information begins with its storage and access. Information is stored in columns, rows and tables, which makes up what information technology experts call a relational database. The term relational means one piece of information relates to another. This information must be easily accessible, have the flexibility to be manipulated into a report and the presentation should be in such a way that other relationships can be drawn from that information.

One occupation, which has the job of making all of this activity take place is that of an Oracle database administrator. Oracle, handles the nation’s largest databases including those from the US government, major educational institutions and Fortune 1,000 companies. Google uses a customized version of Oracle for its search engine.

#Oracle #Database administrators are responsible for the accessibility, security and safety for a company’s information.

This includes client records, financial data, product information and all other documents needed for an organization’s successful operation. Oracle database administrators do not have to possess a four-year college degree. The person entering into this occupation must be well organized, enjoy categorizing information and have a passion for making that information accessible to those persons who need to use it. Security is also a major concern. The database administrator will become proficient with Oracle’s database security protocols and procedures.

The Oracle database administrator is accomplished when students train and pass two Oracle certification exams. The first exam a student must successfully complete is that of Oracle Certified Associate. The #OCA is usually completed after eight weeks of training in an accredited Oracle class.

The final exam, which is the Oracle Certified Professional, which carries the title of database administrator is usually passed after three additional months of training.

Oracle database administrators are experiencing a wide variety of job openings throughout the country. The job sites of Indeed and Glass door show the average salary for Oracle database administrators at approximately $93,000 per year. As you gain experience in this occupation, your salary will increase. Oracle has specialized databases, which include Oracle financials, Oracle medical and Oracle biological. Students can specialize in one of these databases after passing the Oracle certified Professional exam. Naturally specializing in a specific field will mean an increase in salary.

If you are interested in training for this exciting career, contact #ABCO #Technology. You can reach our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday at: (310) 216-3067.

Email your questions to info@abcotechnology.edu

Financial aid is available to all qualified students.

#ABCO #Technology is located at:
11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE #588
Los Angeles, Ca. 90304

Database administrators are in demand, train and certify for a job today!

Google’s assistant competes with Amazon

Posted on January 14, 2018 - Posted in: IT Career Training, News
Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

Amazon Echo and its voice assistant, Alexa, might be the current market leaders in voice-activated smart technology, but recent announcements from the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show have shown that Google fully intends to challenge Amazon for that crown.

The past few days have seen some big developments – and a couple of even bigger teasers – for the future of Google’s smart assistant, the imaginatively-named Assistant.

On Tuesday, the first day of CES 2018, Google published a post to its official blog announcing partnerships with more than a dozen electronics companies to produce Google Assistant smart speakers – some with a very significant upgrade.

The blog post also highlighted the breadth and depth of “Actions”, the name given to built-in apps and integrations for the Google Assistant. At the same time, Search Console users began receiving notifications that their podcast, recipe and news content was eligible to be included in a new “Actions directory”, which is being rolled out over the next few days.

This appears to be part of an increased focus on what can be accomplished with Assistant, shifting its emphasis from finding information (Google’s long-time speciality) to carrying out tasks.

There’s a lot of news to unpack, so let’s look at what exactly these developments involve, and what they mean for SEOs and the wider industry.

SEOs using structured data are first to the Google Assistant party

While a comparatively smaller development than the flashy revelations of major electronics partnerships and smart displays, Google’s introduction of native support for podcasts, recipes and news to the Assistant is nevertheless big news for SEOs.

I owe a hat tip to Aaron Bradley of SEO Skeptic, whose post to the Semantic Search Marketing Google+ group first tipped me off to this development. In turn, he was tipped off by SEO consultant Dan Shure, who tweeted about a Google Search Console alert he’d received inviting him to “improve discovery” of his podcast in the Google Assistant

Google is gradually rolling out a browsable directory of Actions for the Google Assistant, allowing users to more easily discover what the Assistant is capable of.

Podcasts, recipes and news will be the first wave of content added to this directory – though only content published with AMP, or marked up with structured data such as Schema.org, will be getting the nod.

This means that webmasters and SEOs who have been marking up their content with structured data are already ahead of the curve in making that content available via voice – while those who haven’t must hop on the structured data (or AMP) bandwagon if they want to be eligible.

Structured data has long been touted by its fans as a great way to get search engines to better surface content from your site, particularly in the form of things like rich snippets or Quick Answers. But it can be time-consuming to add and maintain, and the immediate benefit isn’t always so obvious.

This new use case, however, shows that there is a huge potential advantage to “future-proofing” your website by adding structured data markup. If Google continues to make Assistant a primary focus going forward, then this could be the key to content optimization and discovery in a voice-driven world.

Hey, Google – look what I can do!

As discussed, Google is clearly keen to shift the focus of its voice capabilities away from information discovery towards actions.

To this end, it’s heavily promoting “Hey, Google” as the slogan for the Google Assistant, placing it in huge letters on top of its CES installation, and creating a #HeyGoogle Twitter hashtag (complete with a unique Assistant emoji) to accompany their Assistant-related updates.

But wait, you might be thinking – isn’t “OK Google” the wake phrase for the Assistant?

Yes, Google has been a bit unclear on this point, but it seems that “Hey, Google” has been an alternative wake phrase for the Assistant for a while now. In late 2016, the website Android Police reported that the Google Home responds to both “OK Google” and “Hey, Google”, but Google voice search (e.g. on mobile) responds only to “OK Google” – making it possible to differentiate if you have multiple devices within earshot.

Now, as Google moves its focus away from search and towards actions, “OK Google” is out and “Hey, Google” is in.

#ABCO #Technology teaches E-commerce courses in its web design program. Voice search is powerful and you need to get onboard with it now! Call our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday. You can reach us at: (310) 216-3067.

Email your questions to: info@abcotechnology.edu

Financial aid is available to all students who qualify for funding.

ABCO Technology is located at:
11222 South La Cienega Blvd STE #588
Los Angeles, Ca. 90304

Get started marking your pages for voice search today!

#Amazon Echo and its voice assistant, Alexa, might be the current market leaders in voice-activated smart technology, but recent announcements from the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show have shown that Google fully intends to challenge Amazon for that crown.

The past few days have seen some big developments – and a couple of even bigger teasers – for the future of Google’s smart assistant, the imaginatively-named Assistant.

On Tuesday, the first day of #CES 2018, Google published a post to its official blog announcing partnerships with more than a dozen electronics companies to produce Google Assistant smart speakers – some with a very significant upgrade.

The blog post also highlighted the breadth and depth of “Actions”, the name given to built-in apps and integrations for the Google Assistant. At the same time, Search Console users began receiving notifications that their podcast, recipe and news content was eligible to be included in a new “Actions directory”, which is being rolled out over the next few days.

This appears to be part of an increased focus on what can be accomplished with Assistant, shifting its emphasis from finding information (Google’s long-time speciality) to carrying out tasks.

There’s a lot of news to unpack, so let’s look at what exactly these developments involve, and what they mean for SEOs and the wider industry.

#SEOs using structured data are first to the Google Assistant party

While a comparatively smaller development than the flashy revelations of major electronics partnerships and smart displays, Google’s introduction of native support for podcasts, recipes and news to the Assistant is nevertheless big news for SEOs.

I owe a hat tip to Aaron Bradley of SEO Skeptic, whose post to the Semantic Search Marketing Google+ group first tipped me off to this development. In turn, he was tipped off by SEO consultant Dan Shure, who tweeted about a Google Search Console alert he’d received inviting him to “improve discovery” of his podcast in the Google Assistant

Google is gradually rolling out a browsable directory of Actions for the Google Assistant, allowing users to more easily discover what the Assistant is capable of.

Podcasts, recipes and news will be the first wave of content added to this directory – though only content published with AMP, or marked up with structured data such as Schema.org, will be getting the nod.

This means that webmasters and SEOs who have been marking up their content with structured data are already ahead of the curve in making that content available via voice – while those who haven’t must hop on the structured data (or AMP) bandwagon if they want to be eligible.

Structured data has long been touted by its fans as a great way to get search engines to better surface content from your site, particularly in the form of things like rich snippets or Quick Answers. But it can be time-consuming to add and maintain, and the immediate benefit isn’t always so obvious.

This new use case, however, shows that there is a huge potential advantage to “future-proofing” your website by adding structured data markup. If Google continues to make Assistant a primary focus going forward, then this could be the key to content optimization and discovery in a voice-driven world.

Hey, Google – look what I can do!

As discussed, Google is clearly keen to shift the focus of its voice capabilities away from information discovery towards actions.

To this end, it’s heavily promoting “Hey, Google” as the slogan for the Google Assistant, placing it in huge letters on top of its CES installation, and creating a #HeyGoogle Twitter hashtag (complete with a unique Assistant emoji) to accompany their Assistant-related updates.

But wait, you might be thinking – isn’t “OK Google” the wake phrase for the Assistant?

Yes, Google has been a bit unclear on this point, but it seems that “Hey, Google” has been an alternative wake phrase for the Assistant for a while now. In late 2016, the website Android Police reported that the Google Home responds to both “OK Google” and “Hey, Google”, but Google voice search (e.g. on mobile) responds only to “OK Google” – making it possible to differentiate if you have multiple devices within earshot.

Now, as Google moves its focus away from search and towards actions, “OK Google” is out and “Hey, Google” is in.

ABCO Technology teaches E-commerce courses in its web design program. Voice search is powerful and you need to get onboard with it now! Call our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday. You can reach us at: (310) 216-3067.

Email your questions to: info@abcotechnology.edu

Financial aid is available to all students who qualify for funding.

ABCO Technology is located at:
11222 South La Cienega Blvd STE #588
Los Angeles, Ca. 90304

 

Get started marking your pages for voice search today!

How to ensure your local Search Engine Marketing campaign is working for your business

Posted on October 16, 2017 - Posted in: IT Career Training, Blog
Tagged: , , , , ,

 

For local businesses, having a strong presence in local search results is fundamental to those all-important conversions

Just to be clear, a “local business” refers to any business that has either a physical location that offers face-to-face contact with the customer, such as a showroom or shop, or one that offers a face-to-face service within a certain area.

When it comes to local search, it’s simple: if searchers can’t find you on the web, then frankly, you are web invisible. It’s the way of the modern world.

It’s all very well dominating the SERPs for your more general target keywords, but if you fail to rank highly for location-specific terms then you are missing a great opportunity.

When users are searching for a local term, they are far more likely to be looking for a service or product. Hence why the conversions on local search tend to be higher, and why you need to ensure that your local search engine marketing is on target for your business.

Of course all the usual SEO 101 knowledge applies. Offer an unrivaled user experience, nail your on-site optimization, provide exceptional content and build quality links.

Those fundamentals will set you up for ranking well for local search terms, but there are extra steps you must take to differentiate yourself from the competition and really bolster your local SEM strategy.

Local business listings

The first place to start is with local business listings. Ensure that your business is included in all the major directories (Yell, which is the UK’s local directory, Yelp, Thomson Local, etc.), as well as any industry specific ones. Some listings may already exist, and it may just be a case of claiming your business so that you can take ownership of the listing.

We recommend keeping track of all your business listings in one comprehensive spreadsheet to save you repeating or forgetting any entries. It also enables you to be consistent (more on this in the next point) in your information across all listings.

Remove all duplicated entries, as multiple listings for one business or location can become confusing, both to potential customers but also to Google. And we certainly don’t want to be confusing the Big G.

Be thorough but don’t be reckless. Avoid spammy directories as these could have a detrimental effect on your SEO. Deploy a spot of common sense to identify the spammy directories but if you are really unsure then it’s worth checking the spam score via Moz’s Open Site Explorer or via other similar tools.

Google My Business

So this technically falls under business listings, but it’s so important we’ve given Google My Business its own subheading. Arguably the most important business listing because, well, it’s Google. Remember to implement the following:
◾Claim your business via a verification process
◾Include accurate information: contact details, location and opening hours
◾Carefully select a small number of highly relevant categories to represent your business
◾Ensure up-to-date branding, such as in any images of logos or premises
◾Use high quality images to represent the business

Be comprehensive and accurate in the information you provide in order to strengthen your Google My Business profile and improve your chances of being featured in Google’s three-pack.

For further information, have a read of Google’s guidelines on representing your business. Don’t forget to also cover off the equivalent for Bing and Yahoo with Bing Places and Yahoo! Local.

NAP consistency

NAP consistency sounds a like a fancy term but the concept is very simple. NAP stands for Name, Address and Phone number, although it is sometimes expanded to NAP+W to include website address too. As mentioned above, it is crucial that your business information appears consistently across the web.

This is particularly important to consider if your business has changed address, contact details or even rebranded. Any mentions of your business will need to be checked and updated to ensure accuracy.

Simply google your business name (do the same with your previous business name if you have undergone a name change) and work your way through the listings. Maintain a spreadsheet of your progress so you can keep track.

Reviews

Reviews can bring both utter joy and absolute misery to any business owner. Unfortunately you cannot simply ignore them, as reviews are indeed used as ranking signals in the eyes of the search engine. This is especially true for your Google My Business reviews.

Not only are reviews important in terms of local rankings, they are also key in terms of click-through rates. According to a recent study by BrightLocal, 74 per cent of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more.

Apart from providing the most incredible customer service you can muster, how else can you seize some control over your reviews? No, this isn’t about getting your mum, brother and great-nan to write a review for your business. It’s about a bit of gentle encouragement and managing a bad customer experience before it reaches the review stage.

It is also important to check the rules and regulations of each review platform, as they all have very different policies on asking customers for reviews and responding to them.

We’ve had several students who have received a negative one-off, anonymous review for their business or website that is either quite clearly spam, or in some cases, a bitter competitor or personal enemy. These situations can get a bit sticky, but sadly there isn’t an awful lot you can do.

Generally people won’t be deterred by one bad review, and the best course of action is to encourage other happy customers to get reviewing. This will push the bad review down and push the average star rating back up.

Many review platforms allow you to reply to reviews. This can be a good opportunity to set the record straight but you have to be careful about it. For this reason, sometimes it is best to get someone who is not as emotionally invested in the business to either write the response or edit it before it gets published. Be professional, remain calm, and kill them with kindness.

Location pages

If you don’t already have location pages on your website, then you could be missing a valuable opportunity to target all the relevant locations. For each key location that your business operates within, create a page dedicated to that location on your website. This is easier if you have a unique physical address in each location, as it is important to include as much location-specific information as possible.

Where there is a physical location, be sure to include an interactive map and images to further enhance the page. If you do not have separate physical addresses, try including testimonials and case studies relevant to each location.

This will help you to avoid duplicating content across your location pages; it’s a fine art to differentiate the copy, but do it right and it can have seriously good effects on your local SEM strategy.

Schema markup

Once you have your location pages set up, the cherry on the cake is schema markup. The whole concept of structured data can sound very daunting to markup newbies, but it’s easier than it sounds. Schema markup simply helps search engines to understand what your website is about.

This is particularly important for local information, as it will help those spiders crawl your location pages and you’ll benefit as a result.

According to a study by Searchmetrics, pages with schema markup rank an average of four positions higher in search results. Now that’s a pretty good incentive. Get your head around schema markup and you’ll have that crucial advantage over your competitors in the local search results.

Ensuring your local search marketing strategy is up to speed shouldn’t be difficult or convoluted. Follow the above steps and obey the usual SEO rules. With some hard work and perseverance, you’ll start dominating those coveted top spots and see your conversions skyrocket in no time.

ABCO Technology teaches a comprehensive program for web design, which includes search engine marketing and social media strategy. Call our campus to receive information about this program or other classes. Call us between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday at: (310) 216-3067.

Email your questions to: info@abcotechnology.edu

Financial aid is available to all students who can qualify for funding.

 

ABCO Technology is located at:
11222 South La Cienega Blvd. in STE # 588
Los Angeles, Ca. 90304.
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