Those of us who ran businesses during 9/11 or the 2008 economic downturn have had almost a decade to forget the traumatic effect a sudden, global recession can have on a company. In a rapidly evolving situation like we’re facing with COVID-19, it’s almost impossible to balance what’s best for your company, protect your employees, and still deliver a great experience to customers amidst the chaos. For the last two weeks, we’ve been facing unprecedented stay-home orders that have tragically decimated some industries and tested the resolve of others.

This is certainly a before-and-after moment in the history of the economy and the digital transformation. Even when the COVID-19 outbreak is contained, it’s unlikely things will return to normal. Instead, we’re seeing the forced acceleration of previously slow-moving trends that are likely to shape the future for the long haul.

Telecommuting

The mass adoption of telecommuting is the most explosive change to occur as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak. While remote work is more normal now than it was a decade ago, a recent survey found that 49% of workers never worked from home. Whatever objections businesses have previously had to telecommuting, COVID-19 may be the moment that brings it into the mainstream and shows leaders that with the right technology, culture, and expectations, employees can be just as productive and effective from home.

Both in-office and from-home work has its benefits, and it will be worth it for businesses to figure out how to bring the best of the two together. Flexible, shifted, or shortened in-office days could help minimize office sizes and reduce commute hours, and online collaboration practices will accelerate work cycles to offset those shorter hours.

On-demand food and services

With thousands of small businesses forced to shut their doors to enforce social distancing, work from home won’t save everyone. Countless brick and mortar stores (especially cash-poor small businesses) are likely to shut their doors for good, and many of those will be restaurants.

If it works for restaurants, we may see new aggressive adoption of drive-up or on-demand local delivery of essential goods as a result. Some businesses might even find this model is lower cost, helps manage inventory, and makes revenue more predictable. Still, it won’t all be upside. Communities and surrounding businesses may need to compensate for a decrease in foot traffic in certain anchor locations, and it could also mean the painful loss of jobs in the retail and service sector.

Virtual events

One of the biggest and most immediate victims of the COVID-19 outbreak was the events industry and the travel and hospitality industries that support it. Globally, conferences, trade shows, and even the Olympics have been canceled or postponed to mitigate the spread of the disease. Some of these events are being respawned as virtual events, which in the end may not just be a 2020 phenomenon but the new standard for experiences.

Whether this format sticks is unknown. The measure of success for trade shows is in the value of the sales they generate and peer to peer connections they build, so it remains to be seen whether virtual events can drive business with the same success as physical ones. But if they can, their appeal may be lasting. With lower costs for attendees and promoters and more flexibility in content formats, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some events remain virtual in the future.

The cloud helps businesses handle the challenge

All of these disruptions have one thing in common: many businesses are able to rapidly pivot their plans because of cloud technology that enables instant communications from anywhere. The digital transformation has already saved millions of jobs, helped slow the spread of the virus, and allowed businesses to maintain a level of normalcy amidst a chaotic situation.

We’ll keep our fingers crossed that we can return to even greater normalcy soon—though, after COVID-19, we should be ready for normal to look very different.

While online shopping may benefit in the short term, supply chain issues and uncertain consumer demand could dampen the e-commerce outlook.

The assumption that Coronavirus, social distancing and staying home will boost e-commerce is widely held among digital marketing experts. However, early findings suggest the reality will be somewhat more complicated.

Early evidence of increased online sales. Preliminary data from Quantum Metric show that e-commerce associated with selected “Brick and Mortar retailers … saw an average revenue weekly growth rate increase of 52% and an 8.8% increase in conversion rates” compared to a year ago. The company’s findings are based on more than 5 billion U.S. retailer web and mobile site visits between January 1 and February 29.

In Q4 2019, according to U.S. government data, online sales were 11.4% of total retail spending. This year e-commerce is projected to reach 12% or higher, depending on how the virus and its impact on the economy play out.

Pressure on e-commerce too. One bullish scenario argues that consumers will shift more and more purchases online as they avoid public places, with Amazon, delivery services and the online divisions of major retailers (e.g., Target, Walmart) as the biggest beneficiaries. Indeed, foot traffic in shopping malls is down. However, supply chain issues, product shortages and potentially declining consumer demand could also blunt e-commerce growth – if the economy falters or goes into recession.

Mixed outlook and uncertainty among retailers. A survey of 304 retailers conducted by Digital Commerce 360 finds a lot of confusion, uncertainty and a very mixed outlook among retailers. A sizeable minority (38%) expect e-commerce sales to jump somewhat or significantly because of the virus. However, the majority anticipate their e-commerce sales will be flat or decline.

Otherwise, the survey expresses retailer concerns about the supply chain and consumer demand. Asked about what they’re doing to respond to coronavirus, 20% said they’re “taking aggressive action,” 44% said they were “taking some action” with more to come, and the remaining 36% were taking a “wait-and-see approach.”

Why we care. In a recent report, Nielsen projected significant growth of U.S. “omnichannel households” over the next five years. While retailers often see the world through a bifurcated lens (online vs. offline), consumers have been “omnichannel” for a long time: using the internet to make offline purchase decisions. Today, they typically care less about the specific channel — though they prefer local returns — than convenience, price, and service.

While we’ll have to wait and see how much of a shock the coronavirus delivers to the economy, this is not a time for hesitation or a “wait and see” approach. Retailers will need to utilize and leverage all their assets to stimulate and sustain consumer demand — that includes maintaining and even boosting digital marketing efforts for the foreseeable future.

 

While most associate blockchain technology with the volatile nature of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, large corporations are making massive investments towards applying the technology to their businesses. Several large companies are leading the charge in leveraging the multitude of benefits that lie beyond crypto.

Within just the last few years, industries from insurance to finance, social media to local government, and everything in between have found ways to utilize the power behind blockchain!

Here are the 5 ways that businesses are leveraging blockchain!

1 — Greater Transparency

“Distributed Ledger” is a term that often gets used when discussing blockchain. Essentially, this is the idea that if there are many ledgers as opposed to just one ledger, records could be more transparent and accurate. The beauty of blockchain lies in the fact that it creates trust out of mistrust. Think of a large pool of people, all with their own ledgers or record books, these people can and will only add to the ledge if a majority of the people agree upon the authenticity of the proposed addition. This group action or “distribution” is incredibly powerful and can provide not only business with peace of mind but customers as well!

2 — Enhanced Security

In the same way that a “distributed ledger” can provide more transparency, it can also provide enhanced security. The biggest problem with a centralized ledger or a handful of centralized ledgers is that it is vulnerable to corruption and/or manipulation. Because of the distributed nature of blockchain, to manipulate the ledger one would have to tamper with a series of ledgers thus significantly reducing the risk and enhancing the security of the records.

3 — Improved Traceability

Perhaps the second most common term used when describing blockchain is “immutable”. This is the idea that the records in the ledger cannot be changed. IBM describes the benefits as such “When exchanges of goods are recorded on a blockchain, you end up with an audit trail that shows where an asset came from and every stop it made on its journey.” Source

4 — Increased Efficiency & Speed

Now, here is where it gets really exciting! To use the example from before ( the pool of people with ledgers) imagine that same pool of people as a self completing automated application. This is a smart contract or a self executing contract built on a blockchain. Essentially, on a smart contract when “INPUT A” is delivered “OUTPUT B” is instantly completed without delay. This makes the transfer of assets such as land deeds, records, intellectual properties and others not only possible on a blockchain but faster and more efficient when compared to conventional means.

5 — Reduced Costs

Today, most businesses devote significant amounts of funds, time, and energy towards creating, trust, transparency, security, and efficiency. We usually see this in the form of middlemen or specialized companies who provide these services to other businesses at a cost. However, because of the nature of blockchain, business can massively decrease their overhead costs and direct those costs benefits to customers or other initiatives.

When will machines be more intelligent that us? How is AI helpful? There are so many questions and so much misunderstanding around artificial intelligence. The following article gives a comprehensive explanation of AI and related concepts.

Hollywood movies and science fiction novels have caused many to fear the rise of machines resulting from the overdevelopment of artificial intelligence.

Elon Musk says, that AI is our biggest existential threat. Stephen Hawking fears that machines can become Earth’s dominant life form and replace humans. Mark Zuckerberg defends artificial intelligence and believes that within the next 5-10 years it is going to bring major improvements in our lives.

It is difficult to predict how humans will co-exist with the artificial intelligence when it reaches a critical level of development. But nowadays AI is serving medicine, industry, education, business and entertainment, and has great prospects of becoming the major technology of the century.

Consider this article as an introduction. What is artificial intelligence? What is it capable of? Why are machine learning and natural language processing so important nowadays? What are the real use cases of AI? Is the AI apocalypse possible? Patience, my friend — all these questions will be answered in the next few minutes.

Artificial intelligence — what is it actually?

Modern cinematography is full of stereotypes. Any story that involves artificial intelligence involved turns into a real disaster with the rise of the machines. So, most of us see AI as an army of aggressive robots that aim to conquer Earth. This is similar to Stephen Hawking’s prophecy, but even if this scenario becomes a reality, it’s still decades away.

However, the reality is somewhat different. Artificial intelligence is a subfield of computer science, which has the primary aim of enabling computers to do the work that is normally done by humans. To make this a reality, computers must be able to perceive and analyze information, to think and to make decisions, and to learn from their own experience. So, AI is seen not as an enemy, but as an ally and helper of mankind.

Artificial intelligence classification

There are a lot of criteria used to classify AI, however, let’s take a look at the general classifications first.

Strong AI vs. Weak AI

This classification considers how closely a machine imitates human intelligence. A program is called strong AI if it exactly replicates human reasoning and the way humans think. For weak AI, on the contrary, the result is important, not the process. The program should be able to make the same decision a human would in the same situation, but how it makes this decision isn’t that important.

Narrow AI vs. General AI

Programs can also belong to the group of narrow AI if they are designed to complete specific tasks, and aren’t capable of some decisions beyond the tasks required. General AI are programs that possess general intelligence and “thinking” capability, and are able to perform tasks from different domains of human activity.

Currently, strong general AI remains hypothetical, first of all because scientists still don’t understand how the human mind works, therefore, teaching the computer to think like a human is a bit problematic. And, to calm the alarmists, an AI-caused apocalypse isn’t possible until we invent strong general AI.

Artificial intelligence and its derivatives implemented in modern software

Scientists have found that artificial intelligence can be implemented in many ways, and a lot of directions in AI field have appeared. The most well-known of these are machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), and their subsets.

Machine learning

Since the mid of 1900th when Alan Turing first spoke about self-learning computers, the terms artificial intelligence and machine learning have been inseparable. Machine learning is the science of algorithms that enable a program to learn from the data it has to work with and make decisions based on this data. The program improves itself through its own experience without the intervention of developers.

This sounds like magic, but it is already a reality! Tens of applications are now based on machine learning to simulate email database and predict the open and response rate for every email before it is sent or to analyze millions of symptoms to improve disease diagnosis, which is critical in the medical domain.

Pattern recognition

Being one of the subsets of machine learning, pattern recognition (PR) refers to the ability of a program to recognize regularities in data. It can be supervised, wherein the program learns using labeled “training” data. During unsupervised learning the system can use other algorithms to discover new patterns in data.

Pattern recognition can be used in multiple ways. Many applications nowadays use text, sound or image recognition, which is nothing else as a result of artificial intelligence development. Let’s take a closer look at them as well.

When speaking about computer vision (CV) we mean the ability of a program to recognize and understand digital images and videos, aiming to automate tasks that the human visual ability can cope with. Computer vision has already been implemented in a variety of applications. The most successful use cases are surveillance systems, navigation for autonomous vehicles, species identification, modelling objects or environments, and many others.

Computer vision has already been successfully implemented in sports and gaming.

Hawk-Eye is a system developed to visually track the trajectory of a ball, which is very helpful in sports such as cricket, volleyball, badminton, tennis. Hawk-eye is used in official games to provide a second opinion when the trajectory of a ball cannot be defined in another way.

Kinect is a motion-sensing input device that was developed for Xbox and Windows PC. It enables interaction with a computer or console without using any controllers — only the movements of your own body.

Computer audition (CA) is a branch of pattern recognition and refers to the ability of a program to identify and understand audio, such as natural sounds, music, etc. Speech recognition isn’t the focus of CA. Computer audition has already been implemented in a range of applications. It successfully contributes to sound and music recognition, tool and machinery monitoring and maintenance, traffic cameras controlling, etc.

Recently, enthusiasts at the University of Surrey have even taught a machine to recognize certain sounds or a human voice filtering them from the background noise. The prospects of this technology are very promising!

Natural language processing

Another field of artificial intelligence is natural language processing (NLP). The main subject of study is the interaction between human language and computers. NLP aims to teach a computer to perceive and understand the actual spoken or written language of humans, to derive meaning from it, and react in an intelligent way. NLP can be combined with machine learning, and the program then educates itself by analyzing huge corpuses of texts. The more data that is analyzed, the smarter the system will be.

Are there real-life applications for NLP? I bet you have already interacted with it. Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Home, Microsoft’s Cortana — these are personal assistants that use natural language processing to understand user queries and to act in an appropriate way. In addition, all these assistants improve with their experience of interaction with the user, which means they also use machine learning.

Computer security news is usually pretty dismal, from malware crippling the web to ransomware taking down hospitals. But the web is getting safer in an important way.

Today the average volume of encrypted internet traffic finally surpassed the average volume of unencrypted traffic, according to Mozilla, the company behind the popular Firefox web browser. That means when you visit a website, you’re now more likely than not to see a little green lock right next to its address. That little lock indicates that the page you visited came to you via HTTPS, the web’s secure protocol, rather than plain old HTTP. Mozilla’s estimate represents a two-week running average, so the figure could still slide around over the next few days. But this milestone is a still a big deal.

“The significance of this tipping point really can’t be overstated,” says Ross Schulman, co-director of the New America Foundation’s cybersecurity initiative.

Not that you’re free from prying eyes entirely: HTTPS doesn’t hide the fact that you’re visiting a particular website. But it does mean everyone, including internet service providers and the government, will have a harder time seeing what information you’re reading or posting to the web. And it can help ensure that when you visit a website, you’re seeing what its authors intended. Without encryption, it’s all too easy for, say, a repressive government or a malicious hacker to replace Wikipedia entries or other webpages with their own content, or to trick you into downloading malware.

The total cross-border market of European-owned marketplaces represents a turnover of 9 billion euros. This corresponds to a fifth of what’s generated by all cross-border marketplaces in Europe, with Amazon generating 28 billion euros. Here’s the top 20.

Amazon is the biggest marketplace in Europe, but when we look at just the European-owned marketplaces, Zalando is number one. The top five is dominated by UK players, as Fruugo, Asos and Farfetch take up the second, third and fourth place. The top five is completed by French multichannel retailer Carrefour.

‘Market is worth €15 billion by 2020’

This can be seen in the first edition of the ‘Top 20 marketplaces cross-border Europe’, a study from Cross-BorderCommerce Europe. This platform expects that European-owned cross-border marketplaces will grow by more than 50 percent to reach a total value of 15 billion euros by 2020.

The top 20 is based on different parameters such as cross-border ecommerce sales in 16 Western European countries and the number and percentage of cross-border visits. The ranking excludes travel and only looks at B2C online platforms that offer at least two of the services payment, storage and logistics. (So, for example, Miinto and Takeaway are excluded.)

Top 20 of cross-border marketplaces from Europe

The total cross-border market in Europe was worth 52.25 billion euros last year. And 17 percent came from marketplaces that are owned by European companies. Here’s the top 20:

More niche marketplaces will launch in Europe

Cross-Border Commerce Europe expects more niche marketplaces will launch in Europe. In the US and the UK, these are already very popular. There’s for example Newegg for electronics, Reverb for musicians, Zibbet for independent artists, artisans and vintage collectors, Houzz for interior designers, Wayfair for home accessories and furniture and Folksy for crafts.

Scraping data from a website likely doesn’t violate anti-hacking laws as long as the data is public, a US court has concluded. Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said LinkedIn probably couldn’t tell an analytics company to stop pulling profile information from its platform. LinkedIn had sent the company, HiQ, a cease-and-desist letter — which has been enough to declare companies “unauthorized” in earlier cases. Here, however, the court ruled that LinkedIn couldn’t use anti-hacking rules to control how HiQ used the data.

As University of California, Berkeley professor and computer law expert Orin Kerr lays out, this seemingly limits one section of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). The CFAA prohibits accessing a computer “without authorization.” It was conceived as a way to punish hacking in the 1980s, but it’s frequently used against companies that access social media website data. Facebook, for instance, stopped a company called Power Ventures from automatically aggregating social media posts with users’ permission.

Yesterday’s ruling distinguished between how Facebook and LinkedIn guard their data. Facebook “tried to limit and control access to its website,” requiring users to log in with a username and password. But “the data HiQ was scraping was available to anyone with a web browser.” Therefore, LinkedIn couldn’t specifically order HiQ to stop accessing this publicly available information under the CFAA.
“Sending a cease-and-desist letter isn’t enough to deny access”

Many civil liberties advocates opposed the Power Ventures decision, and as Techdirt’s Mike Masnick writes, the court is drawing a pretty fine line between Facebook and LinkedIn. Facebook’s data might have been password-protected, but users were freely granting account access to Power Ventures. It seems plausible to call this access “authorized” as well — but the LinkedIn ruling disagrees with that logic.

The court also says LinkedIn could still potentially claim other violations, including copyright infringement — this is just a preliminary ruling on specific issues. But ruling out CFAA charges is a big deal, because the CFAA can be broadly weaponized against anybody who uses a computer in a way a company or government disagrees with. Kerr calls the ruling a “critical limit” on the law’s interpretation.

As Stanford Internet Observatory director Alex Stamos pointed out on Twitter, this comes with trade-offs. “Cease and desist letters followed by civil action or criminal CFAA referrals are one of the few legal tools available to large providers looking to stop spammers or scrapers,” Stamos wrote. Now, that option appears much less viable. That’s annoying in the case of spammers, but it also raises privacy questions at a point when companies are using big public data sets to train tools like facial recognition algorithms. Even so, Stamos reiterated that he agreed with the court’s decision.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/10/20859399/linkedin-hiq-data-scraping-cfaa-lawsuit-ninth-circuit-ruling?fbclid=IwAR1WVhTUVrLXKjQSBxgAnlHgKzyNgxuIFHDyKRqFqfaSjeBZxngUyEfRQ9Y

What is a responsive website?

A responsive website changes the layout to offer an experience based on the device being used, especially ideal for mobile viewing.

A mobile responsive website includes design elements such as:

• Readable text without requiring zoom
• Adequate space for tap targets
• No horizontal scrolling

Did you know the number of smartphone users internationally surpassed 2 billion in 2016?

Websites not optimized for all these smaller screens can experience a decline in their search engine rankings. Meaning, they are not getting found online.

It’s true that over 60% of searches online now come from a mobile device.

To ensure your website offers an experience tailored to handheld devices (without creating a separate app), consider why responsive design is important as a mobile solution.

Source: Volusion

Let’s get into the details about the why and how.

First of all…what the heck is mobile responsive design and why should you care?

What is Responsive Web Design?

Responsive web design (RWD) creates a system for a single site to react to the size of a user’s device—with one URL and one content source. A responsive website has a fluid and flexible layout which adjusts according to screen size.

The importance of responsive web design is that it offers an optimized browsing experience.

Basically, your website will look great and work well on a desktop (or laptop), a tablet, and a mobile phone’s browser.

Get this:

In the past, developers built more than one site in order to accommodate different screen sizes. With the number of device types out there on the market today, this seems completely inefficient…right?

Now you can understand why responsive web design is not a shiny trend anymore, but more of a shift in the thinking behind building websites. The term was actually coined in 2010 by web designer Ethan Marcotte.

“Responsive web design offers us a way forward, finally allowing us to design for the ebb and flow of things.” -Ethan Marcotte

Having a mobile responsive website is not just another option—it’s a requirement!

Benefits of Mobile Responsive Design

The number one benefit of a responsive layout is the guarantee that any user on any device will have the best experience possible on your website. And, the most consistent.

Website responsiveness is also a great way to refine the content on your site, making sure that people using a mobile device are only seeing the most essential information.

With the Google algorithm update, a responsive web design increases visibility on search engines—because it is mobile-friendly. A site with an effective mobile experience will show up in search results above one without.

Why Responsive Design is Important for Business

• Increase reach to customers and clients on smaller devices (tablets & smartphones)
• A consistent experience that can increase lead generation, sales and conversions
• Analytics, tracking, and reporting can all be in one place
• Time and cost on-site content management is decreased
• Stay ahead of the competition (even 44% of Fortune 500 companies are not mobile-ready at this time!)

Note, that there are two other methods by which to offer a mobile-friendly experience. The first is called Dynamic Serving, which uses the same URL but different HTML and CSS code. Pages recognize the device they are viewed on, and serve up the correct code.

The second method, is a separate mobile site altogether. When users visit on a mobile device, they are sent to a different mobile-specific URL.

As long as the correct steps are taken to optimize fully for mobile users, the most useful method really depends on any given situation. Figure out which works the best for your online presence, before diving into it.

Google accounts for over 5.7 billion searches conducted on the web daily.

The Google-recommended configuration for smartphone-optimized sites is responsive web design.

Google even offers a mobile responsive test, so that you can see how easily a visitor is able to use your page on a mobile device. You simply enter a page URL and receive a score.

How to Make a Responsive Design

There are a number of things to think about when creating a responsive layout. It is a process that requires a design system and hierarchy of content across devices.

The three main components of a responsive web design include:

• A fluid grid
• Flexible text & images
• Media queries

I’ll explain each further.

A Fluid Grid

The grid is a crucial element for creating a responsive layout.

Now, grids aren’t anything new.

Web designers have used grids for building websites since the beginning. However, in the past, these grids were fixed width and didn’t lend themselves to support a fluid website layout.

A fluid grid used for responsive sites will ensure that the design is flexible and scalable. Elements will have consistent spacing, proportion, and can adjust to a specific screen-width based on percentages.

With a fluid grid, users will have the best experience on whatever screen they view your responsive website on.

Flexible Text & Images

The way to display text varies depending on what device a user is viewing your site on, but it should be readable no matter what. On mobile responsive websites, there is an opportunity to increase font size and line height (the spacing between each line of text) for legibility.

Flexible text and images adjust within a website layout width, according to the content hierarchy set with the CSS (stylesheet). Text can now be legible regardless of the end user’s device. With a flexible container (within the grid), text can wrap with an increase in font size on smaller devices.

Flexible images can prove to be more challenging because of load times on smaller device browsers. But these images can scale, crop, or disappear depending on what content is essential to the mobile experience.

Media Queries

This is code that powers the flexibility of a layout on responsive websites. Media queries specify the CSS to be applied accordingly, depending on a device’s breakpoint (for example, iPhone portrait orientation or iPad landscape orientation, etc.).

Media queries allow for multiple layouts of a design, which use the same HTML-coded web page.

There are other areas that can help define and refine responsive web design for mobile.

Take a look:

User Testing of Responsive Websites

The information about how users interact with your site is invaluable and worth investing in, to create an optimal experience for them.

There are many ways you can conduct user testing to get the most useful feedback possible.

Browser and Device Testing for Responsive Design

Make sure a responsive design layout is compatible with all relevant browsers and retains the integrity of your user experience & design.

Don’t rely only on dragging the browser in and out to test a responsive web design for mobile; try viewing a site on as many physical devices as you can.

You’ll be surprised at what may be uncovered from one operating system to the next.

Inspiration from Responsive Websites

As with any design project, find other responsive websites that execute responsive web design in creative ways.

This can be as simple as thinking about the following questions:

• Which websites or apps do you frequently use on your mobile phone or other portable devices?
• Why do you prefer one site over others that might provide similar services?
• Do you prefer their mobile experience or desktop experience?

Finding answers to these questions can help you find pain points that you may have never noticed during your everyday browsing.

SEO tips and tricks to increase your traffic

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is becoming more and more important to every site.  Historically, some of the techniques used have given SEO a bad name, but there are several simple ways to ensure your site benefits from natural search results.

Search can be classified as either organic (natural) or paid. Organic (natural) results are those that occur naturally in search engine results pages (SERPS) and high results depend on both the technical construction of your site and the content within it.

Paid results, often referred to as Pay Per Click or PPC, are the results site owners pay for and which usually surround the organic listings.

Research shows web users prefer organic listings to paid listings, considering them more relevant and trustworthy.

The goal of SEO, then, is to improve your organic listings performance, which in turn should boost traffic to your site.

Organic results

Search engines index the web using large clusters of computers, known as bots, which spider the web by following links found on web pages. These URLS are populated into the search engine indexes and it’s this index that’s queried every time a user performs a search.

Search engines employ complex mathematical equations, known as ranking algorithms, to order search results. Google’s algorithm alone relies on more than 200 individual factors to decide which result, in which order, to return to its web searchers.

Organic SEO can be further split into two categories: On-page: The code and content you use to manage and deliver your web pages. Off-page: External factors effecting SEO.

This is primarily focused around link building – getting other websites to link to your content. Here we’ll focus on on-page optimization methods, which are all under your control.

The most important thing is to maximize accessibility to ensure search engines can find all your content. There are two ways to get discovered by search engines.

One is to submit your site directly to their index (Google; Yahoo; Bing). The other is to wait for them to find it through links to you from other sites during their crawling process. For more information on Google’s crawling process, see this page.

Google url submission

To make sure your website is accessible to search engine spiders, follow these simple steps:

1. Ensure you’re not preventing the search engines indexing your site via The Robots Exclusion Protocol with use of a robots.txt file, which is used to give instructions to search engine bots. More information on this can be found here.

2. Ensure your content is machine-readable. Avoid using Flash, video or imagery to exclusively house your content. Remember, search spiders cannot see images or video: they can only read written text on a web page.

3. Ensure you have a clear internal linking architecture. Promote important content to the homepage and link to key site sections via dedicated navigation. Group content into clear site sections reflected in your site navigation to aid both users and search engines. For example:

www.mysite.com/ /news /products /category-1 /category-2 /blog /about /contact

4. Eliminate duplicate content. This could be caused by the way your server is set up or how your CMS serves up content. Either way, this needs to be addressed. We’ll cover how to fix the most common duplicate content issues later on.

5. Ensure you’re targeting the appropriate keywords for your business objectives. Just as successful advertising campaigns contain content that appeals to a target demographic, successful websites need to focus on keywords that have the highest relevance to their target audience.

Google Sitemaps

You can help Google out by providing a sitemap file (called sitemap.xml) that lists all of your content and how often it’s updated. Visit the Webmasters webpage to provide Google with this information.

Duplicate pages are a bad thing, and making pages that specifically detect the Googlebot (Google’s web-crawling tool) and serve up something designed for it is an absolute no-no.

If you’re using a CMS such as WordPress, it’s worth having it create static versions of pages where possible. It’s not crucial – Google can handle dynamic pages these days – but it doesn’t hurt.

This text version makes it clear what’s being used to figure out your site’s content.

Where possible, it’s also preferable to have permalinks like ‘/products/fridges/dynatech-coolfreezepro/’ for pages, rather than addresses that end with things like ‘?page=42132’. Every scrap of data you give the crawler will boost your chances in search results.

As far as raw content goes, the most important thing is that your site uses the keywords that people search for.

Visit the Webmasters webpage again and request a copy of the data that Google’s search engine uses, then examine it. If your site doesn’t use the phrase ‘humane spider catcher’, Google won’t direct people looking for those words to your site.

That sounds obvious, but content in frames, videos, pictures, pulled from Twitter or generated on the fly can be left out.

After that, the challenge is to get good links to boost your authority.

SEO explained

These are straightforward tips, but SEO is really pretty simple – the people who claim otherwise have something to sell you. Never be tempted to pay for dodgy tricks.

In most cases they don’t work, will only send worthless traffic rather than actual readers, and could well come back to bite you later on.

Much as exercise and a good diet are the only way to lose weight, good content is the only true way to achieve a good Google rank.