Author: Ross
Tracking website rankings
When a website goes live the search engines will rank it for certain keywords and phrases based on their own criteria. Although no one (apart from the search engines) know exactly what they check for when ranking sites they do give us an idea of what they are looking for.
Checking the progress of your website can be a mundane task and eat up hours of your day or week. There are many companies out there that offer tracking software. If you use a marketing company then they may have tracking software and already doing this for you, if not then you may wish at looking at a third party tracking software package. They often start from about £20 per month dependant on how many websites and how many keywords you wish to track and possibly how often you want them tracked. If you are going to use this software always get a free trial and do your research to make sure the results they show you are accurate.
Using Google Adwords to market your business
There are many ways in which to market your business. Often people are turning to online methods to allow them to easily track the return on investment. Google Adwords is a great way to market a business especially if you want to see quick results.
Google Adwords allows you to choose specific geographical locations in which to target, which can be very useful if you only supply goods or services locally to you. You can set up a number of key phrases to target and create highly relevant ads for each group. This allows you to target specific groups of people searching for a product or service you have and will make sure that you don’t waste money on clicks from customers that you cannot make a sale with.
Google Adwords is also very easily tracked through their statistics package and will also integrate with Google Analytics meaning you can have information such as which keyword the visitor clicked on, which pages they viewed and how long they spent on the site almost instantly.
Why is IT a good industry to work in?
IT stands for Information Technology and is essentially working with computers. It includes working with the hardware of a computer along with the software and many people also include work on the World Wide Web as a section within IT.
A job in IT can be very rewarding, often these types of jobs are quite well paid and often the job will also be quite varied allowing you to do different tasks and manage different challenges every day. Jobs in It are said to be amongst the most secure, as technology is ever evolving and more and more people and businesses are turning to computers to carry out tasks within their business. This means that for the foreseeable future there will always be the need for people within the IT industry. If you have a flare for IT and enjoy working on computers then you can often get yourself a promotion quite quickly if you are willing to learn and work hard.
Making sure your website has the latest tech
If is easy to have a website and then not do anything to it for a number of months or even years. When this happens it is likely that you site will start to drop down the search engine rankings and it can be hard to recover from this.
Not only should you be adding fresh, relevant content to the site you should also be adding new technology to give your visitors the best experience. This may be adding a mobile version or app for your site, adding in calculators or improving the way customers view your products such as adding videos or 360 degree views.
All developers should be aware of new technology that can be added to sites and if you start to notice a lot of your competitors adding such items, then you may wish to contact your website developer to discuss if they can add the functionality to your site.
Using social media as a marketing tool
Social media websites can help grow a business in terms of brand awareness, sales and enquiries. Some companies only use social media to give their customers information such as where they are based, contact details and a brief overview of the business, whereas others will use it more like a website adding lots of products, services, images and videos and allowing people to enquire about anything they sell through the social media sites.
Some businesses even sell products through the social media sites allowing people to bid or agree to purchase items. Although the initial sale may be done through the social media sites, you cannot actually take payment through them so this would need to be done separately through PayPal or similar.
Social media marketing can literally build your business overnight and many companies start off their online presence this way then progressing on to their own standalone website.
Checking website rankings
If you have a website and you want to get a lot of traffic to it then you need to understand how website rankings work on the search engine sites such as Google or Yahoo. You may hear a marketing company talk about SEO which stands for Search Engine Optimisation. This is a process which is carried out to a site to improve its presence on the search engine results pages.
You need to be able to track your web rankings in order to see if the site is improving. Depending on how many keywords or phrases you wish to track, you could do this manually but it can be a little time consuming. There are some companies that offer a ranking software package that allows you to add keywords for a website and then it will go and check where it is in terms of positioning on the search engines.
Cyber attacks
Over the last 12 months we have seen a huge rise in cyber-attacks. This is an attempt by hackers to damage or destroy a computer network or system. Some of the largest organisations in the world have been victim to this sort of attack including, Nasa, Minstry of Defence, PlayStation Network and HSBC bank.
Although all of them claim that they take cyber security very seriously they have not had sufficient systems in place to ensure that an attack does not affect them and their customers. It can be almost impossible to totally eliminate the risks but if a company does become victim to a cyber-attack the effects can be devastating for the company attacked and their customers. Data can be stolen and sold on or misused to access people’s bank accounts, card details and phone numbers / addresses. This can make many customers lose confidence in a company and chose not to use them again.
Drone industry at threat before it’s even began
20 years ago no one would ever have thought of a day when our post and parcels get delivered through cyber technology such as drones, but over recent years this distance dream is fast becoming a reality.
Many companies have been piloting drones over the past 12-18 months to see how they work and how reliable they are but with the issues they have faced and risks from cyber attacks, the drone days could well be over before they have even started.
One of the main concerns regarding drones in the affect it will have on airspace and how it is going to be trafficked to avoid collisions with other drones or indeed aircrafts. This is a huge safety issue as well as insurance issue which needs to be addressed before the system can grow.
Another issue raised is the privacy infringement and it is one of the most significant concerns as well as the carelessness of drone operators and the vulnerability of the drones themselves to cyber-attacks.
Working in IT
IT is a massive industry and is growing day by day. With technology advancing every day, there is always a call for more IT staff. Many companies are switching from paper systems to computer based systems and the ones that already had this are now going toward cloud software.
If you are looking for a job in the IT sector you will need to have a good general knowledge of PC’s and how they work. Depending on what area you want to go in to you may need experience or additional qualifications.
Most companies have some sort of IT department or IT staff so you can often get in to an IT role within another industry. Rates of pay vary drastically depending on what job role you apply for. Full time Entry/Junior positions can start from around £13 -£18K per year DOE, whereas head of IT departments and senior developers can easily earn upwards of one hundred thousand pounds.