Blog

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.

Related articles

A forward-looking history of link building

30 ways to market your online business for free

The 5 SEO mistakes holding your ecommerce site back right now

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!

Five proven tips for optimizing YouTube Videos

Posted on March 6, 2018 - Posted in: IT Career Training, Blog
Tagged: , , , , ,

Just how powerful is YouTube in 2018? According to a solid infographic, which was released earlier in 2017, there are some highly incredible statistics:

◾YouTube is available and used in 88 countries around the world

◾It is the second largest social media platform with over 1.5 billion monthly users, second only to Facebook (2 billion) and more than twice the number of Instagram (700 million)

◾500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute

◾Mobile viewing makes up half of the site’s streaming.

In other words, YouTube is POWERFUL. Not only has it been steadily growing since its initial launch in 2005, it has become the single biggest and most important video service on the web. While there are others that have come in its wake, none have reached the same level of popularity.

With that fact in mind, it is no wonder that so many people are looking to boost the effectiveness of their content on the platform. However, with so much use comes other struggles, like being seen in the crowd. If 720,000 hours are uploaded in a day, you have to do everything known to marketers to stand out and be noticed.

Here are five optimization tips for your YouTube channel and videos that will help you to start doing better in search, get recommended, and gain more traction.

Find the sweet spot with your video title length

There are several things to consider when coming up with the video title:

◾How engaging and catchy it is for the eye

◾How many important keywords you use within your title (those keywords are going to help you rank that video in both YouTube and Google search)

◾Which part of the title is immediately visible when people search YouTube or see your video thumbnail in YouTube-generated related videos.

YouTube suggested

Taking all of the above in the account, the sweet spot for your video title is going to be around 100 characters. That is enough to give a unique, descriptive title while still showing in search without a cut off.

Make sure your title not only describes what is happening in the video and contains key phrases you have already researched, but it is also attention grabbing enough that people will want to click on it.

When crafting a video title, consider including the following:

◾Include the important names and entities (your interviewee, event name, branded hashtag, featured brand name, etc.)

◾Location (especially if you are targeting a specific locale)

◾Your important keyword you’d like the video to show up for.

To distinguish that important keyword, use keyword clustering technique that allows you to see core phrases behind obscure keyword variations. My own trick is to use Serpstat’s clustering feature that allows you to group keywords by how many identical URLs rank in Google for each specific query:

Clustering

You can read more on how Serpstat clustering feature works in this guide.

You may also to match each keyword group to appropriate keyword intent to make sure your future video content will cover the immediate need and prompt engagement.

Make your descriptions longer

Video and channel descriptions are another valuable resource for drawing traffic to all of your content. YouTube allows up to 5,000 characters, which is between 500 and 700 words.

The rule of thumb is obvious: The more original content you have below your video, the easier for search engines it is to understand what your video is about and what search queries to rank it for.

Not every description needs to be that long, but aiming for around 2,000 characters for videos and 3,000 for channels is a good place because it gives you the space necessary to optimize your keyword use and give some context to viewers. More is fine, but make sure you aren’t filling it with a lot of pointless stuff.

Make the first 150 characters of a description count

Of the words you write, the first 150 characters are the most important. That is because YouTube cuts it off with a (More) tag after the point, so the viewer has to specifically opt in to reading the rest. Not all of them are going to do that.

You should make sure those first characters tell the viewer what they really need to know in order to connect with what they are reading. From there you can focus more on keywords and the rest of the description, as it will still count the same towards searches.

It is also a great place to link out to other channels, your website, etc. Make sure your call to action (CTA) is in the first words, such as liking, subscribing, learning more, etc.

Have a good, high-resolution thumbnail

Thumbnails are pretty standard for monetized video channels at this point. You have probably noticed that they follow a certain pattern: silly face, bright colors, something odd in the background, over the top. Sure, it seems annoying. But they follow the formula because the formula works.

Now, you don’t have to do the same thing. You just want to make sure that you have an eye catching, visually stimulating thumbnail in the recommended 1280 x 720 size. There are a few generators out there to help you make one, but my thumbnail maker of choice right now is Adobe Spark.

Adobe Spark

Keep in mind that you want a standard format across all of your thumbnails. For instance, if you do your face on one then you should do them on all. If you use some kind of animation or logo, use that.

You want to be immediately recognizable to anyone who follows your channel right from the suggested videos sidebar, or the search results. If you have old videos, go back and upload thumbnails to each one to start getting some better click results.

Furthermore, make sure your thumbnails are readable: Viewers should be able to easily see what it is about at a glance when seeing it in the right-hand column of the suggested videos or on a small mobile device.

Utilize playlists – I mean it!

Playlists are incredibly helpful. First of all, they help you group together certain videos right on your channel. So let’s say you did a series on how to increase your YouTube views and it was split into ten videos. You would create a playlist on your channel titled “Super YouTube Tips” so that people could find them all in one place. But that has an additional benefit.

Search leans towards introducing playlists right at the top of the results page. It also allows people to specifically search for playlists. That is great because it can introduce viewers to multiple videos instead of one and many will choose to pop on a playlist and watch straight through everything there.

If you do a creative series with a continued plot you will find this is a huge help and makes it a million times easier to sort it out, even if YouTube messes with your order on your channel (an issue more than one content creator has had in the past, take it from me).

To sum that up, YouTube playlists help you:

◾Increase your chances to rank your video content for a wider variety of phrases (which is also helpful for brand-focused results)

◾Improve engagement rate with your videos by giving your audience collections of videos so that they can sit back and watch endlessly. And we know that engagement is the crucial ranking factor when it comes to YouTube rankings.

To illustrate the point, here’s a quick example of how we were able to grab two spots for our show name with the playlist:

Playlist ranking

Bonus tip: Feature your videos on your site

Finally, an obvious but often missed tactic is to increase your YouTube channel performance by prominently displaying your videos on your site. It’s simple: the more people watch your videos (especially if they watch more of each of your videos), the more exposure YouTube offers to your content through suggesting your videos as related.

One of the most effective ways to generate more views for your channel is to promote your videos outside of YouTube, i.e. use your blog and social media channels. There’s a variety of WordPress themes that aim at doing exactly that: promote your YouTube channel prominently on-site.

Furthermore, promote your videos on social media as much as it makes sense for your audience to build additional exposure, links, and re-shares.

ABCO Technology has a powerful web developer program, which includes search engine optimization where this information is covered in detail. Call our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday. You can reach us by phone at: (310) 216-3067.

Email your questions to: info@abcotechnology.edu

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

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

 

Create highly visible videos today!

Database administrator jobs explode because of gun control legislation

Posted on March 5, 2018 - Posted in: IT Career Training, Blog, News

The Florida high school shooting tragedy, which occurred on February 14, 2018 has opened debate in 38 state legislatures and the US congress. Calls for a stronger national database, which will be easily accessible to law enforcement, educators and mental health professionals is on the table for passage. The reason is simple, having accessible information about potential threats will save lives and hopefully prevent tragedies, which took place in Florida. A database will make this information accessible. Constant media reports state the information about the shooter was available, but that data wasn’t made accessible to those who could act upon the information.

A stronger database will require approximately 5,000 new database administrators to coordinate and access this information. This database will have to be able to handle and update large amounts of information, which includes responsive queries, dynamic changes and modifications in state and federal laws.

The database, which most professionals believe will be able to handle this massive amount of data is Oracle 12C. Oracle has a powerful presence in the cloud, ability to design highly secure databases and a strong continuous data backup plan, which will enable the information not to be lost in the event of a disaster.

Another strong point in favor of using Oracle is the fact that many large school districts already employ this database for record keeping. For example, the Los Angeles Unified School District, Chicago school districts and New York city use Oracle to keep track of student records. The fact Oracle is already employed means the training time for the new database will be greatly decreased.

Oracle is the database that can handle the increase in traffic, which will result from gun control legislation. This legislation will include back ground checks, domestic violence reports and mental health information, which will be available if needed.

The question many of our readers are asking concerns how to train and certify for a job as a database administrator.

Oracle has two extensive exams, which are: Oracle Certified Associate, which involves a strong knowledge of structured query language or SQL and the Oracle certified professional, which teaches installation, information back up and security of information.

Most Oracle programs are completed in six months. Students learn to install, configure, administrate, back up and secure information contained in a relational database.

After graduating from an Oracle program, candidates are required to pass two exams. The Oracle Certified Associate and the Oracle Certified Professional. After passing your certification test, it will be time to submit your application for the job of database administrator. If you have database administration skills, employers are looking for you!

If you are interested in training for a career as a database administrator, 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 can successfully qualify for funding.

ABCO is located at:

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

 

Train for a database administrator career today!

A beginner’s guide to using negative keywords in PPC

Posted on March 3, 2018 - Posted in: IT Career Training, Blog
Tagged: , , , ,

Let’s set the scene. You’ve signed up to Google Adwords, entered your payment details, maybe even created a few ads and got to grips with the different types of matches for keywords.

You may even have gone ahead and sent your ads live. Easy enough. But you are fully aware that it doesn’t end there.

PPC can be an expensive hobby and you’re determined that your PPC campaign will become a valuable marketing channel rather than a resented, money-burning pastime.

In order to make the most of your PPC investment, you are going to have to make use of both common sense and data to constantly tailor your ads. You want to hone in on specific buyer personas which, as a byproduct (or whichever way round you want to view it), rid your campaign of wasted clicks.

You can do this by assessing quality score, A/B testing ad formats, revisiting your keywords and adding nice features such as call out extensions.

But as the title suggests, we’re here to talk about negative keywords. In this article we will walk through the basics of negative keywords in order to get you up and running. There’s loads of more detailed PPC tips on ABCO Technology’s Facebook page, so if you’re after pro tips we suggest using the handy search bar!

What are negative keywords?

One of the steps in creating your adverts is to assign the types of search terms that you want your adverts to appear for. Hopefully you have been specific about your keywords, focusing on user intent and relevance.

As you would imagine, negative keywords are almost the complete opposite of your target keywords. They help you give guidelines to Google, dictating the types of search terms for which you do not want to appear.

When would you use negative keywords?

Google defines negative keywords as “A type of keyword that prevents your ad from being triggered by a certain word or phrase. Your ads aren’t shown to anyone who is searching for that phrase. This is also known as a negative match.”

A common example of negative keyword use is ‘cheap’ (Google use ‘free’ as an example). Let’s say you make bespoke furniture or high-end watches; it makes sense that you would not want to pay for clicks from searchers looking for cheaper alternatives.

You also need to banish ambiguity. In her ultimate guide to AdWords keyword match types and negatives, Lisa Raehsler used a good example of ‘blueberry muffins’ in that the user intent could be for both recipes and bakeries – two very different user intents.

In such a situation you would then add ‘recipes’ or ‘bakeries’, whichever suits you, to your negative keywords.

Where do I enter negative keywords?

You may already have noticed the negative keywords tab when you were busy adding keywords for either a campaign or ad group – the tab is right next to the ‘keywords’ tab!

You can either enter Campaign level negative keywords which will apply the negative keyword across your whole campaign or alternatively you can also define them for specific ad groups depending on the complexity of your campaign. Simply select the ad group that you want to add your negative keywords to.

Note that, like keywords, you are able to define whether each negative keyword is exact, broad or phrase match. Amanda DiSilvestro explains more about these different types of keyword matches in her common PPC mistakes piece.

Finding negative keywords

If your campaign has already been running for a while, we would still not advise diving straight into your search terms tab. If you’ve ever read about the concept of ‘anchoring’ you would understand why – ever been asked to describe something without using a particular word, but all you can think about is that word? Same idea.

The data on search terms for which your website is appearing is not going anywhere, so why not take the time to use your own industry knowledge? Brainstorm the types of businesses, products or services that yours could be mistaken for and the search terms which would be used to describe them.

You are likely to uncover some negative keywords that haven’t been used by searchers yet – remember that if it shows up in your search terms, then you’ll have paid for it! After completing your brainstorming you can then use the search terms tab to identify further negative keywords.

SEO can play its part too. The worlds of SEO and Google Adwords can often come to blows, as teams compete for sought-after budgets and are inevitably looking to position their channel as the most effective.

We’re all on the same team, though, right? There is considerable overlap between the two, and PPC and SEO teams can actually work together, sharing data to benefit both campaigns.

If you are already collecting and analyzing data for your SEO campaign, it is advisable to dip into this data. It may well unearth potential negative keywords that your website is appearing for in organic search which have not yet found its way into your Adwords data.

Kill two birds with one stone by adding these negative keywords to your AdWords campaign or ad group and reassess your SEO strategy to hone in on that perfect buyer persona!

Keep checking in

If you don’t need to make adjustments to your campaign after setting it up, then I would suggest quitting your job and becoming a PPC guru!

Your campaign set-up may be top-notch, but things change: new data appears, different search terms develop and competitors change tactics. The knock-on effect is that you should keep checking in on your AdWords campaign (and negative keywords) regularly. If you don’t, you are either braver or sillier than I am (probably both).

Don’t waste your hard-earned cash by missing opportunities to maximize your investment; or, in the case of negative keywords, allow Google to charge you for clicks via search terms that are irrelevant to you and your business.

ABCO Technology teaches a comprehensive program for web development, which includes search engine optimization and marketing.

Call our campus today, you can reach 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. STE #588
Los Angeles, Ca. 90304

 

Build highly effective and visible webpages today!

Getting your mind around quantum computing

Posted on February 27, 2018 - Posted in: IT Career Training, Blog
Tagged: , , , , , ,

Over the years, I’ve written and reprinted many articles for ABCO Technology’s Facebook page. Today I want to reprint and give special credit to Tiernan Ray who writes for Barron’s magazine. This article about quantum computing is published with an investment perspective, however readers interested in information technology careers will grasp the job possibilities represented in this brilliant article written by Tiernan Ray.

Technology Trader

Getting Your Mind Around Quantum Computing

Is five years beyond your investment horizon? If so, ignore what I’m about to say: In five years, we will have practical quantum computers, long the holy grail of computer scientists.

That prediction comes from Microsoft (ticker: MSFT), which is pursuing novel avenues to build a computer that operates on the strange quantum mechanical properties of subatomic particles. Such computers may solve previously intractable problems in information technology.

Even if quantum computing lies outside your portfolio considerations, there are implications worth pondering. Quantum computers are already being “simulated” by Microsoft, meaning that some of their basic operations are being mimicked on plain old microprocessors and memory chips.

As quantum computing grows nearer, and as programmers eager to learn about it explore it through mimicry, it could ripple through technology. The race for innovative chips, software, and cloud computing could be affected. Companies that shoulder the risk and reward include chip makers Intel (INTC), Nvidia (NVDA), and Micron Technology (MU), and cloud-computing operators such as Microsoft, with its Azure cloud service; Alphabet’s (GOOGL) Google; and Amazon.com (AMZN).

QUANTUM COMPUTERS EXPLOIT nonlinear aspects of quantum particles such as “entanglement” and “superposition,” in which particles exist in not one but several states simultaneously. That makes possible computations in parallel, rather than the traditional one-by-one processing of classical computing. Nobel physicist Richard Feynman helped propel the field in a series of 1981 lectures, when he proposed a computer built using individual atoms. Because atoms have “measurable physical attributes,” known as “spin,” said Feynman, digital ones and zeros could be represented, or encoded, in them. Later, scientists broadened the concept. Instead of ones and zeros at a subatomic level, the qualities of entanglement and superposition could give quantum computers the ability to dramatically multiply the work that can be done in a given amount of time.

Making quantum computing practical has taken decades of fundamental research. A turning point came in 2012, Microsoft’s quantum team leader, Todd Holmdahl, told Barron’s last week. That was the year a team that included Leo Kouwenhoven, principal researcher on Microsoft’s quantum team, found evidence of the Majorana fermion. The Majorana is a particle with the property of being both matter and antimatter at the same time. Prior to that, its existence had only been hypothesized.

Kouwenhoven and the Microsoft team have gained greater control of the Majorana since then, says Holmdahl. Today, they are using it as a storage medium to manipulate a qubit, the fundamental unit of information in a quantum computer.

The Microsoft approach has its detractors, but Holmdahl and his colleague, physicist Julie Love, who heads business development, believe that the company will end up with the best qubits, that is, those with the lowest error rates. Minimizing errors means that the eventual Microsoft quantum computer should involve a far simpler design than rivals, and one that’s more scalable and practical.

The eventual quantum machine could offer breakthroughs in computationally intense fields, such as the chemistry of heavy metals. Artificial intelligence could be dramatically sped up.

OUTSIDE OF MICROSOFT, MANY FIRMS, including Alphabet, IBM (IBM), and various start-ups, are actively working on the technology, and programmers increasingly want to simulate the computers before they’re available commercially. That could further boost demand for DRAM memory chips. To simulate a relatively simple quantum computer involving just 40 qubits requires 16 trillion bytes of DRAM, a thousand times as much as the average laptop. That’s nice for Micron Technology (MU), which makes such components, along with Samsung Electronics (005930KS) and SK Hynix (000600.Korea).

Such simulations should fuel demand for Azure and other cloud-computing providers. After all, it’s much easier to roll out trillions of bits of DRAM if you’re Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or Amazon AWS than it is for the average shop to buy tons of memory chips for laptops. Moreover, the algorithms to simulate quantum computing are still being theorized and tested. By rolling out new software, Microsoft and its cloud rivals can make the case that their services are perfect for learning about the new technology.

Quantum simulation may also put a strain on today’s chips. After all, current chips were first developed 60 years ago for processing simple bits, not for qubits with their multiple simultaneous states Traditional processors that manipulate integer or floating-point arithmetic might suffer by comparison to novel designs based on other principles.

The chip industry is already undergoing great change, and industry veterans are reinventing themselves with new start-ups. One is Ampere Computing, led by former Intel software executive Renee James. While James declined to describethe design of her new chips, she says some will be built to handle tasks such as artificial intelligence. Quantum could fuel such specialization, if there is enough demand to run the new emerging algorithms. While Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) are both seeing a renaissance for their graphics chips, they may have to prepare for computers with very different requirements.

And what of Microsoft? Its quantum efforts have to be reckoned with. The effort may be the most promising development at the company since Satya Nadella became CEO four years ago. Regardless of whether Microsoft makes it across the finish line before others, the fact that it is competing in the race is encouraging for those rooting for the company.

Related: Microsoft: We Have the Qubits You Want

Getting Your Mind Around Quantum Computing

TIERNAN RAY can be reached at: tiernan.ray@barrons.com

ABCO Technology offers classes in five major areas of information technology, which include: networking, cyber security, web development, computer programming and Microsoft Office products. Call our campus today between 9 AM and 6 PM. We are available Monday through Friday 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

 

Train and certify for a career in information technology today!

What IBM is doing with Blockchain technology

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

For one of the world’s largest tech companies, “small” is a relative term.

So when IBM, a tech conglomerate that boasts 380,000 employees, says it has a “small” team working on blockchain, by startup standards, it’s anything but. Far from just building a garage and staffing it with a few engineers, IBM has created a network of global offices seeking to operationalize its team of 1,500 blockchain professionals now operating out of a dozen offices.

Perhaps more impressively, all those moving parts are choreographed by one person: Marie Wieck, a 20-year veteran of IBM and the general manager of the newly created blockchain unit.

In an exclusive interview with Coin Desk, Wieck explained what it takes to build distributed networks using both its proprietary IBM Blockchain Platform and the open-source Hyperledger Fabric, which her firm helped pioneer. For companies looking to gain access to one of those networks, build their own network or compete against IBM, the step-by-step description provides a rare glimpse into how the $135 billion company conducts its blockchain business.

Speaking from her office at IBM’s Watson headquarters in downtown Manhattan (one half of what is internally referred to as “Blockchain North”), Wieck painted a picture of a distributed team that in many ways mirrors a blockchain in its design.

She told Coin Desk:

“We’re trying to keep as co-located as possible with the teams working together so we can really focus on the speed to market that we want to see.”

Blockchain North

Thomas J. Watson Research Center,

While her job now is buzzing back and forth between the Manhattan location and the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York (the other half of Blockchain North), Wieck first started working with IBM back in 1997 when she joined as a founding member of the company’s nascent internet unit.

As part of this team, she began a career of finding business use cases for cutting-edge technology that would eventually include XML, web services and mobile, preparing her in many ways for her current task of helping IBM’s clients with blockchain.

The “solution work” of this process – as Wieck calls it – is centered around Blockchain North, the assembly line mechanism of the project, where staff help clients around the world build applications using the IBM Blockchain Platform.

Due in large part to the open-source code at the core of IBM’s blockchain strategy, one which lets clients build on their own distributed ledgers as well, Wieck frequently doesn’t get involved until the clients – or potential clients – are already well advanced in their work.

As for work on that open-source platform, and the IBM Blockchain Platform itself, that largely takes place 511 miles south.

Blockchain South

IBM Research Triangle Park

Known as “Blockchain South,” the Research Triangle Park offices in Raleigh, North Carolina, are home to what Wieck calls IBM’s “platform work.”

This is where the IBM Blockchain Platform – unveiled for enterprises last month – has been developed for the past three years. The platform is designed to be an end-to-end or “full-cycle” solution where developers and managers can experiment with the technology, building it and testing it either by the hour or via subscriptions.

This platform is the machinery that in part cranks out the solutions in Blockchain North. But “platform work” also has another meaning at Blockchain South.

For builders around the world with a more adventurous bent, this is also where they can go to hire help on projects that bypass IBM’s proprietary platform and go straight to its open-source core: Hyperledger Fabric.

While Fabric comprises about one-third the total code used in the proprietary IBM Blockchain Platform, anyone can build on it – even if what they want to create is a direct competitor to IBM.

“Whatever they need to do at the technical level to operate or to build a blockchain network, we would like to see continuing to expand in that platform,” said Wieck.

Littleton, Massachusetts

IBM Mass Lab – Littleton campus

IBM’s newest blockchain offices are located at the IBM Mass Lab in Littleton, Massachusetts.

Originally opened in January 2010 as what was then touted by IBM as the largest software development lab in North America, the location now serves as a satellite location of sorts for Blockchain North.

But instead of being focused on solutions work generally, the location is helping develop what Wieck calls “solution accelerators,” or frequently used widgets such as the provenance engine required by many of IBM’s clients to track items.

Crucially, however, this is also the base operations for another kind of solution: governance.

Based on the lessons learned from other implementations, IBM uses the Littleton branch to help companies write software to onboard new members, develop consensus mechanisms so they can find ways to agree, and if things go wrong, kick bad actors off the network.

Or as Wieck put it:

“How to actually operate a network at scale.”

In the garage

IBM Bluemix Soho

Arguably the most startup-like component of IBM’s blockchain work, Wieck also oversees nine “Bluemix Garages” scattered around the world, in New York City, Toronto, San Francisco, London, Nice, Tokyo, Singapore, Austin and Melbourne.

Initially launched in 2014, the collaborative locations are similar to WeWork facilities, but with startups hand-selected to receive support from IBM.

Gradually, those locations are being adapted to accommodate increasing demand by blockchain companies. Most recently, this July, the BlueMix Garage in the Soho area of New York (pictured above) expanded to include support for blockchain services.

At these disparate locations, and in any real garages where people build on the open-source technology Wieck helped develop, she said the basic principles that form IBM’s blockchain networks first take root.

“To me, it’s kind of like a mall,” she said, concluding:

“You may have the anchor tenants, but you don’t stay in a mall unless the food court is good, there’s good movies playing. You want all of those value-added services around that network.”

ABCO Technology teaches courses for cyber security. Learn about blockchain technology and what it can do for your business. Call our campus today between 9 AM and 6 PM 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

Block Chain is more than bitcoin, learn about it today1!

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!

Amazon, Berkshire, and JP Morgan to partner on health care

Posted on February 23, 2018 - Posted in: IT Career Training, Blog, News
Tagged: , , , ,

Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase on Tuesday announced a partnership to cut health-care costs and improve services for their U.S. employees. The announcement slammed the shares of multiple companies in the health-care sector.

The giant companies, which together employ more than 1.1 million workers, will launch an independent operation that’s intended to be free from profit-making incentives.

Investing In Health Care Innovation

The new company’s goal at first will be to target technology solutions to simplify the health-care system.

Details of the new company were sketchy, with principles of Amazon, Berkshire and J.P. Morgan noting that the way it will work remains to be seen. They’re hoping that their sheer size will help bring the necessary scale and resources to tackle the issue.

“The ballooning costs of healthcare act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy,” Berkshire CEO Warren Buffett said in a statement. “Our group does not come to this problem with answers. But we also do not accept it as inevitable. Rather, we share the belief that putting our collective resources behind the country’s best talent can, in time, check the rise in health costs while concurrently enhancing patient satisfaction and outcomes.”

Shares of Amazon and JP Morgan were off slightly in morning trade, while Berkshire edged higher..

However, shares of health-care companies fell sharply. Express Scripts sank 10 percent; Cigna was down 5 percent as was CVS and UnitedHealth, and Aetna slid about 3 percent.

Three top executives, one from each company, will take the lead on the project: Berkshire investment officer Todd Combs, J.P. Morgan’s Marvelle Sullivan Berchtold and Beth Galetti, a senior vice president at Amazon.

Combs was a hedge fund manager before joining Berkshire in 2010. Berchtold was previously global head of mergers and acquisitions at drug maker Novartis before joining J.P. Morgan last year, and Galetti was FedEx’s vice president for planning, engineering and operations before joining Amazon in 2013, according to their LinkedIn profiles.

“The healthcare system is complex, and we enter into this challenge open-eyed about the degree of difficulty,” said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. “Hard as it might be, reducing healthcare’s burden on the economy while improving outcomes for employees and their families would be worth the effort.”

“Our people want transparency, knowledge and control when it comes to managing their healthcare,” said J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon. “The three of our companies have extraordinary resources, and our goal is to create solutions that benefit our U.S. employees, their families and, potentially, all Americans.”

J.P. Morgan currently uses Cigna and UnitedHealth Group to administer health benefits on a self-insured basis and Amazon uses nonprofit Premera Blue Cross, according to Evercore analysts. Amazon uses ExpressScripts as its pharmacy benefits manager, said Leerink Partners’ Ana Gupte.

The move also speaks to the desire to rip apart the traditional health-care system from distinctive silos. Experts have anticipated more deals and vertical integration in wake of CVS announcing its intention to buy Aetna.

“I think it is good news,” Allergan CEO Brent Saunders told Fox News. “The health-care delivery system is antiquated and in dire need of positive disruption. My hope is these three companies light the spark!”

Adam Fein, president of Pembroke Consulting, said it’s “long past time” for employers like these three to force innovation into the health-care system.

“For better or worse, there are warped incentives baked into every aspect of the U.S. health-care system, from medical innovation to care delivery to insurance and benefit management,” Fein told Fox News. “Rather than merely bashing the current system, I hope this new organization can help patients and their physicians make more informed and more cost-effective decisions. Technology will be necessary but not sufficient to make positive changes.”

Analysts echoed the sentiment that the health-care system is outdated and ripe for disruption, paving the way for the new endeavor. However, they cautioned it could take time.

“If this winds up being the low cost provider to make insurance more affordable at the employer level, it could wind up being a real disruptive competitor to an industry that has not seen any new players in years/decades,” Jefferies analyst Jared Holz told Fox News. “[I’m] not going to call this a black swan event yet because there are few details and would be making too many assumptions but it has potential to be.”

Amazon in particular can play a strong role if it promotes a greater presence for technological advances including artificial intelligence and information sharing platforms into health care, said Idris Adjerid, management information technology professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.

“We find that technology initiatives which facilitated information sharing between disconnected hospitals resulted in significant reductions in healthcare spending,” Adjerid said in a statement. “That said, it is unclear what the scope of this effort will be. If this partnership is to meaningfully improve healthcare delivery, it needs to include more than the employees of these companies

ABCO Technology teaches a comprehensive programs in database administration, networking and computer programming. All of these areas of information technology will play a vital part in reducing the cost of health care for all in America. 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 qualify for funding.

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

 

Information technology will reduce health care costs. If you want to make a difference, join this field today!

Personalized search gets local results

Posted on February 22, 2018 - Posted in: IT Career Training, Blog, News
Tagged: , , , ,

As marketers in the ever-changing world of digital, success depends on knowing what consumers want and expect from us. After all, it’s the only way we can deliver.

So, it’s interesting to see that a recent data release from Google tells us that personalized search is becoming more and more prominent among internet users.

No longer are they turning to friends and family for personal advice and recommendations, but search engines too.

Of course, we already knew that… that’s why we work so hard at getting to know our audience and understanding their micro-moments and pain points, delivering the right content at the right time, in the right way.

But what Google is telling us is that rather than searching, “How often should you wash your hair?”, we are now searching “How often should I wash my hair?”. Changing those two little words is making the way that we use search engines far more personal than ever before.

And the data suggests that consumers now truly trust that their most specific needs can be answered by content on the web. In fact, in the last two years Google has reported that mobile searches using “…for me” has grown by a huge 60% over the last two years.

On top of this, they have also seen an 80% increase in mobile searches including “…should I?”. As a result, we really are treating search as one of our best, most trusted friends.

And that’s great news for content marketers.

For those of us working in motor, beauty, finance, fitness and pet care, it seems that this new insight is especially relevant – these are the industries in which users are most frequently turning to Google to solve their personal pain points.

How can we prepare and optimize our content for these types of search?

Tools

Creating calculators and tools is a brilliant way of targeting personal search terms and providing our users with the personalized response they are looking for. Let’s use a fitness example to demonstrate this:

This recent data circulation from Google suggests that users are starting to search for something like, “how much water should I drink each day?” in higher volumes than something like, “how much water should you drink per day?”.

Now, most of us know that the answer to this question will depend on a number of different factors including gender, body composition, activity level and so on.

What our audience is expecting from this search is a personalized answer that takes all of these things into consideration and tells them exactly how much water they should personally be drinking each day.

A water consumption calculator would do this well, and if the user wants the specificity of an individual result, they will be willing to fill in the necessary personal details to retrieve it. A blog post that simply states the average recommended fluid intake for a man or a woman as recommended by the NHS is no longer user focused enough.

Case studies and testimonials

Providing personalized content will not always be easy, and at times users may need encouragement to spend a little longer on a page to find the personalized answer they are looking for. In this instance, case studies and testimonials are a great way to push users further through their journey in the right direction.

For example, “How much money do I need to retire?” is a more complex question than our fitness example. There are so many variants that could alter the accurate and personalized response to this question, so it’s difficult to answer it quickly in a personalized way.

However, if we provide users with a testimonial or case study at the right stage in their journey – one that was created after a lot of persona research and uses someone or a situation that will resonate with them – they are likely to engage with the content.

Creating engagement via a case study will increase the likelihood that they’ll enquire with your brand for a more personalized answer, continuing their journey on their way to the personalized answer they are looking for.

Hygiene content

Informational content (something we refer to here in ABCO Technology’s search engine class as ‘hygiene content’) is absolutely essential in light of this evolution of search.

It’s critical that all the informational content and resources on your website are up to date, and as specific to the different types of users you’re expecting to visit your site as possible. Not only this, but ensuring that on-page content is optimized for long tail search (tying back to your personas) is a must.

Moreover, having a clear call to action that points the user in the direction of personalized answers to their questions is also important. It isn’t always possible to answer their query in an individualized way using written content, but pointing the user towards a ‘contact us here’ call to action could make all the difference in their user journey, and ultimately, whether they end up with you or your competitor.

Thought leadership and expert content

Finally, with consumers turning to search like a trusted friend or family member more than ever before, you need to ensure that the content you’re putting out there is seen as being the most reliable. Therefore, it’s never been more important to be viewed as a thought leader within your field.

Expert content will naturally help to strengthen the consumer-brand relationship. It also means that when you are appearing in SERPs, your expert reputation will stand you in good stead when it comes to users choosing which ‘friend’ they want to seek advice from.

We can’t wait to see how the evolution of search changes the way that Google is rewarding and penalizing brands’ content. The above is just a start, but we are certain we will be kept on our toes as time goes on!

ABCO Technology teaches a comprehensive program for web development, which includes search engine optimization and social media strategies. 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 qualify for funding.

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

 

Build highly visible WebPages today!

information technology careers, best paying jobs out of high school

Posted on February 21, 2018 - Posted in: IT Career Training, Blog, News
Tagged: , , , , , ,

best paying careers out of high school

Congratulations, you’ve recently graduated high school. That’s a great achievement. You completed twelve years of education and now the time has come to search for a good paying full time job. you begin your search.

Are you finding that job search to be more difficult than you believed?

Would you like a better job than working at that fast food restaurant?

Have you been told by many employers that they would like to hire you if you only had those important job skills?

Have employers emailed you that you don’t have the right experience?

Would you like a profitable solution to this problem that will not take a lot of time and cost a lot of money?

Would you want that solution to have career advancement and give you excellent raises?

An outstanding solution to your problem is to enroll in a career or vocational school, which teaches information technology. According to the United States Department of Labor, information technology is leading the job hiring fields today, because the education is performance based, which is what employers are looking for in their new hires. Information technology training is based upon training, performance and certification. This training does not require a college degree. Many students who get a job in this field wind up working for a company that will pay all or part of your college tuition after working for that company for more than one year. If you have heard or read about attending a vocational school will stop you from ever attending college in the future, this statement is truly a myth. Many students use vocational training as a steppingstone to finance future debt free college degrees. Many employers, especially colleges and universities offer tuition free classes to university employees who have been employed for a certain length of time. This is one way to graduate from college with no student loans. A great example of one university offering free tuition to college employees is: Loyola Marymount University located about three miles from our ABCO Technology campus. UCLA and all community colleges offer education to their employees at a substantial discount or totally free!

What certifications will get that great job?

If you are a person who enjoys repairing and solving problems with a computer, the CompTia A+ certification is just for you. The A+ is completed in six weeks. After completing this training you can look for that better paying job as a computer repair specialist or as a desktop support technician.

After repairing computers, you can advance to higher paying fields of networking, which include the MCSE or Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert and the Cisco Certified Network Associate. With a little experience and a few certifications your job title will be network administrator.

High school graduates can also train and certify in other fields of information technology including Web Development, database administration, and computer programming.

Students certifying in web development build websites, which all businesses need to advertise their services. The database field has the job title of database administrator, which involves handling large amounts of corporate information. Computer programmers write games, design smart phone applications and write programs for Windows and other operating systems.

Some of the certifications listed in this article will take six months to complete.

Get Hired and Get To Work

Vocational training is in high demand by countless employers because the training is performance based. Employers substitute your performance for countless years of experience when you fill out that important job application, which lists your performance based skills. Employers in 2018 want to view at a glance what you can do for them. Businesses are spending less money on training. A certification in information technology saves companies countless training dollars spent in time and money.

ABCO Technology is an ACCSC accredited institution. When an institution is accredited students may apply for financial aid and receive help with their education if they qualify.

Students enrolling at ABCO Technology receive a diploma instead of a certificate. The diploma is highly valued when placed next to that important certification.

If you would like to receive more information about how a vocational education will jump-start your job career, contact ABCO Technology.

You can reach our campus by phone at: (310) 216-3067 Monday through Friday from 9 Am to 6 PM.

Email us for information at: 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

Get those important information technology job skills today!

×

Request Info with No Obligation

    How much is tuition?Can I get financial aid?What are my career prospects?When does it start?

    By checking this box, I give consent for ABCO Technology to use automated technology to call and/or text me at the number provided above, including my wireless number if applicable. Call us for information: 310-216-3067

    I understand & agree