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madpicks · 8 years ago

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The Best Value Betting Software/Finder 2017

Truthfully, I’ve struggled to find Value Betting Software that’s (a) available to the public, and (b) offers genuine value. I’ve sieved though a lot of so-called Value Bet finders and discarded them one by one. However, finally, there’s some Value Betting Software that I can recommend, and it enables punters to earn long-term profits from their sports bets.

Introduction To Value Betting Software

► What’s Value Betting?

‘Value’, in betting terms, is presented when the odds suggest that the selection isn’t as likely to win as it really is. Value betting puts the ‘edge’ in the player’s favour, meaning it’s profitable long-term. If you’d like to learn more on this, then read my post What Does Value Betting Mean?

► The Shortage of good Value Betting Software

Finding Value Betting Software that actually provides a money-making opportunity is certainly a challenge. Value Betting Software isn’t generally available to the public. After all, why would anyone give access to their profitable Value Bet selections and encourage more competition for odds?

The answer to this question is pretty simple…

Granted, many professionals would never dream of giving anyone else access their software — hence the shortage of available products. But many Value Betting techniques are somewhat limited in terms of profitability. Bookmakers clamp down on Value Bettors by limiting their stakes, and in some cases, closing their accounts entirely…

Therefore professional gamblers tend to make as much money as they possibly can, and then move on to monetising their ‘Bet Finder’ on a subscription basis. This way they can continue earning from it once they’re unable to place bets themselves.

It makes sense, right?

Value Betting vs. Arbing

Value Betting Software is a lot like Arbing Software. Both products present an opportunity for Punters to capitalise on inaccurate prices in the sports betting markets and earn long-term profits.

What follows is a comparison of various factors which have an impact on Value Betting & Arbing.

► Risk

This is where Arbing and Value Betting differ the most. Arbs guarantee the Punter risk-free profits, whilst Value Bets carry a risk (albeit, a calculated one). Value Bettors take on the risk because their bets have an ‘edge’ that wins over time.

► Profitability

Arbing [generally] secures a smaller % profit on each trade than Value Betting. This is, in part, due to the commission paid on winnings earned on the betting exchange (e.g. Betfair).

However, this is only a generalisation. It also depends heavily on the sports/markets used. For example, the margins on Horse Racing — regardless whether Arbing or Value Betting — tend to be higher than on football.

► Account Lifespan

Every betting account that partakes in Arbitrage betting has a lifespan, which can be anything from day to a month before the Bookmaker gives it the chop. Value Bettors get the same treatment. You have to accept that the time will inevitably come where the Bookmaker limits your stakes or prevents you from placing further bets.

► Detection

The good news is that Value Bets are more difficult to spot than Arbitrage Bets. Punters can identify their Value Bets using various methods & techniques, by comparing odds from a range of different sources. Arbitrage Bets are found by simply comparing the Bookmaker odds to the Exchange. So Value Betting is more complex — thus Bookmakers can’t detect it as easily.

Furthermore, because Value Bets generally carry risk, the Bookmaker is more lenient to Value Bettors than Arbers (who guarantee a profit on every trade). However, bare in mind that if you bet frequently and consistently earn a profit, then you’re bound to draw attention to yourself at some point — whether you’re Arbing or not.

Trademate Sports — Value Betting Software

I recently came across a Value Betting Finder named Trademate Sports. I was granted free access to review the product, and I must admit I was very impressed. In my opinion, this is the kind of product that Punters should be using instead of subscribing to Tipsters.

► About Trademate Sports

Trademate was previously known as Edgebet.net.

The Trademate Sports value betting software calculates the true odds of the outcome of a sporting event and provides you with all the tools necessary to identify profitable opportunities in the global sport betting markets.

Their algorithm runs 24 hours a day, 365 days per year across Football, NFL, NBA, MLB, Handball, etc. Each sport represents a new opportunity and their algorithm is able to detect exploitable value.

► In-browser Interface

There’s no need to download anything to use the Trademate Sports Value Betting Software. The in-browser interface means that service it’s fully compatible with any computer or mobile device.

A lot of other Value Betting Finders are made by programmers, for the use of programmers with an interest in sports betting. What stands out about Trademate Sports is that it’s designed for the average Punter. There’s no programming knowledge required to get up and running. It takes about one minute to get set fully up, with bets instantly coming through on the Trade Feed. And if you get stuck there’s a live chat feature, too.

After logging in for the first time I quickly got to grips with how everything works. It’s just a simple case of setting up what Bookmakers you’re going to use, and how much you’re investing into each one.

The user interface is modern, bright & bold — an ease to use.

The user has an option to set a bell sound alert whenever a new trade pops into the feed — which means you can even bet whilst you’re working on something else!

The simple, configurable Value Betting feed.

Note: Bets must be placed in your regular betting account(s). Trademate isn’t integrated with any Bookmakers.

► A Strategy that Works

In their own words:

There’s a number of factors we have to consider when calculating the correct odds of a match, each sport and market have their own individual and sometimes complex nuances, our algorithm determines how these nuances and factors should be weighted to calculate the true odds, based on the liquidity and timing across the various markets.

Trademate Sports doesn’t elaborate further into what they do to identify value. They still maintain some level of secrecy. But from reading their website, and chatting to their staff, I can infer that they are [at least in part] following various prices in order to anticipate market movements. For those of you that read Punter2Pro regularly, you’ll be aware that i’m an advocate of this sort of technique.

For proof of this concept, check out the Punter's Guide To Beating The SP.

Unlike other Value Betting Software, Trademate doesn’t have any Bookmaker affiliate links on the website whatsoever. This is good news, because it makes no sense that a Bookmaker would support this product. Bookmakers only endorse products or strategies where players are set up to lose.

► No need for Excel Sheets

It’s extremely tedious logging each and every bet you’ve placed, updating the results, and calculating the profit. Thankfully Trademate makes life easy in this department. You simply open up your feed, click the ‘trades’ you’ve placed, and enter the stake for each one. You can amend any of the bet details at any point, in case you entered the wrong details (odds, stake etc).

When the trades are settled the results & stats automatically update in the “Settled Trades” list.

Users can also monitor their total bankroll by entering how much money was initially deposited at each Bookmakers. This is a nifty feature — but it’s slightly limited in that it doesn’t yet enable the user to enter subsequent deposits and withdrawals. However, this doesn’t actually impact the important stats, such as the ROI %.

► Full Breakdown of Results (Automated)

Now here’s the really impressive part of Trademate Sports — the data presentation.

The EV (Expected Value) of the bets is plotted against the actual profit on the ‘Analytics’ page. It also shows the Closing EV — which is basically the Starting Price (SP) of the event. This is important to monitor because whilst your bet may have originally had value when it first appeared on the feed, circumstances can change (e.g. a key player is announced injured), and the price adjusts accordingly. This means your bet’s value will be impacted, too. So you want to be ‘beating’ the Closing EV with the prices you’ve bet on.

In this sample my EV has ‘beaten’ the Closing EV, which is good. The profit is well over EV, meaning its over-performed — this will even out over time.

There’s another chart on the same page which presents the Closing Odds vs. the Hit Rate. This gives the user an idea of how well distributed their results are.

To date, I haven’t seen a sports betting chart presented in this way. It’s neat.

Critically, there’s also a full breakdown of the betting results in a table format. ‘Turnover’ represents the total amount staked. Included within this breakdown is the ‘Flat ROI’, which shows how the bets would’ve performed with an equal bet size. I recommend using the ‘Flat ROI’ as a marker, because too often our results (and expectations) are distorted by the increased variance that comes with ranging bet sizes.

The automated Stats Breakdown.

To learn more about variance in sports betting, read my post How Can I Be Sure That I'm Really Winning?

► How much does Trademate Sports cost?

There are 2 pricing plans on Trademate Sports — “Core” and “Pro”. Both offer ample betting opportunities. You’ll receive 30 EUR free credit, too!

Monthly pricing plan: a good introduction to Trademate Sports

Quarterly pricing plan: better value for money

► Is there other Value Betting Software out there? Cheaper alternatives?

I’m on the lookout for more. But for the moment Trademate Sports is the Value Bet finder that impresses.

Over the coming months there should be even more features included on Trademate, too. But right now, as it stands, there’s plenty of value to be had from the feeds currently on offer. It more than justifies it’s monthly fee.

If this is out of your price range, or you don’t have the risk tolerance or bankroll, then I highly recommend that you look into:

Arbitrage

Matched Betting

These are two money-making alternatives that carry no risk. I advise that you begin with these techniques and then progress on to Value Betting.

What’s The Best Sports Arbing Software?

Calculating The Expected Value (EV) Of Your Bets

What Does Value Betting Mean?

The post The Best Value Betting Software/Finder 2017 appeared first on Punter2Pro.

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deliciousrunawaywizard · 4 years ago

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Editing Photo Software For Mac

Apple’s Photos for Mac app is amazing, but it can be limiting. For doing simple photo edits, the tool is perfect, it’s loaded with photo cropper, features for lightening adjustments, setting white balance & a few more things. But if you’re an aspiring photographer, you probably need a powerful Mac Photo Editing App with a wide array of editing tools and other features.

Best Editing Photo Software For Mac

Aug 19, 2020 Adobe Photoshop. The world's most powerful image editing software adds portrait selection, more control over raw file conversion, and auto font downloading. Affinity Photo – Our Choice. Many unique features. Easy to navigate. Doesn’t take much space. The Best Free Photo Editors app downloads for Mac: Adobe Photoshop CC GIMP PhotoScape X Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended trial ACDSee Pro 3 InstantPhotoSk. Jan 04, 2020 The Mac is still the best device for serious photo editing, so you need some serious photo editing apps to make an impact. The built-in Photos app on Mac offers several useful photo editing tools. You can crop, adjust lighting and color, set the white balance, add filters, remove unwanted blemishes, and a few more things. It is the best free photo editing software for Mac. Adobe Photoshop Express Editor: It is a Mac photo editor which provides an efficient way to improve lighting and exposure problems of an.

So, whether you want to brighten up your dark dull images, remove a distracting background or use your creativity to the fullest, there’s a dedicated Mac photo editing app to step up your game. Best of all, most of these image editing tools are extremely affordable (& even free), so dive in to find the best tool to fit your personal/professional needs.

Top 10 Best Mac Photo Editing Apps

Mac Os Photo Editor

There are several image editing software available in the market for MacBook, so it becomes really challenging to pick up the best one. To help our readers, we’ve curated the ten useful photo editors (some are paid while some are free) to enhance your photo collection.

1. Movavi Photo Editor

Movavi is a full-featured photo editing tool designed for both beginners and professional users. It offers some amazing features to improve image quality, do photo restoration (remove noise from old images), perform portrait retouching (remove imperfections), erasing unwanted objects from the picture and so on. Aside from these main features, it offers tools for White Balancing, Color Correction, Makeup, Crop/Rotate/Resize, Add Texts/Images, Replace Background, and much more.

Rating’s Breakdown:Overall:Setup:3/5Photo Editing:3/5Features: 3.5/5Ease-of-Use:4/5Organizing:3/5Help & Support:4.5/5Price:$29.95

Movavi Photo Editor is available in more than 10 languages & requires merely 57.2 MB of space on your storage.

2. Lightroom

Next on our list of best photo editing software for Mac is Lightroom owned by Adobe Photoshop. Pretty much anything you want to do with your pictures can be accomplished through Lightroom. You can effortlessly blend, merge shadows, add highlights, make images sharper, crispier or even blur in a few clicks. The Mac editing app also allows users to add details & tint of colors to make the picture stand out. The MacBook photo editing tool is available in two versions: Classic (usually more preferred) & 2018 CC version.

Rating’s Breakdown:Overall:Setup:3/5Photo Editing:4/5Features: 3.5/5Ease-of-Use:4/5Organizing:3/5Help & Support:3/5Price:Free (In-App Purchases)

Lightroom is offered free for thirty days to let users decide whether their editing needs are fulfilled or not. After the trial period, users can add the CC subscription for using the complete toolkit.

3. Tweak Photos

As the name suggests, Tweak Photos is one of the best batch photo editing app for Macdesigned to tweak your images in a way to bring the best out of it. The image editing software can also be your best bet for ultimate batch editing, it can alter thousands of photos in just a matter of clicks. The interface is modern and easy-to-use, users can easily pick effects & apply to the entire batch of photos, rename them or convert file formats in just one go. Aside from performing basic editing, Tweak Photos offers features for Resizing, Auto-Correction, Rotate, Flip, De-noise images, Add Watermark, and other images, enhance & control Brightness, Sharpness & more. You can even add gorgeous frames & borders to make your image more aesthetic.

Rating’s Breakdown:Overall:Setup:5/5Photo Editing:4/5Features: 4/5Ease-of-Use:4.5/5Organizing:4/5Help & Support:4.5/5Price:$4.99

Comprising all the essential editing tools & features, Tweak Photos is an ideal app to edit photos on mac. The tool automatically stamps the images with the original/modified Date/Time as per EXIF info & your choice of format.

4. Wondershare Fotophire

Fotophire by Wondershare is a popular photo editing toolkit designed for both beginners and professional users. The software is available on both the Windows and Mac platforms. The toolkit features more than 200+ effects and has strong capabilities to remove or replace the background or unwanted objects from any photo. The image editor brings a plethora of tools to create professional-looking blur & vignette effects, adjust white balance, saturation & other enhancements. Apart from it has wide file format support & bundle of filters, blend modes & textures to turn your photo into a piece of art.

Rating’s Breakdown:Overall:Setup:4/5Photo Editing:4.5/5Features: 4/5Ease-of-Use:3/5Organizing:3/5Help & Support:3/5Price:$49.9

What we like the most about Fotophire is its Batch Processing feature that efficiently processes plenty of images in a determined style. Hence, a real-time saver to edit bulk photos.

5. Pixelmator

Known as one of the greatest alternatives to Photoshop, Pixelmator offers an ideal combination of a modern and simple interface with the ability to work on multiple layers for easy editing. The software has a bunch of editing tools, brushes, effects & other textures to enhance your photo collection. Depending upon users’ needs, Pixelmator offers two versions, Standard & Pro. As the name indicates, the Standard version allows users to perform basic photo editing, it proffers refined selection of tools and other filters. While the pro version is packed with extra brushes, photo effects and other editing features to push your creativity to the next level.

Rating’s Breakdown:Overall:Setup:3/5Photo Editing:5/5Features: 4/5Ease-of-Use:5/5Organizing:4/5Help & Support:3/5Price:$29.99

Similar to other Mac photo editing apps, Pixelmator allows users to adjust contrast, saturation, color, definition and much more. The software allows you to save your images in different formats like PSD, JPG, PNG, TIFF, PDF and share them directly with your friends and family.

6. PhotoScape X

Amp up your photo editing skills in no time with a little help from PhotoScape X. It features an advanced range of image-related features including Photo Viewer, Batch editing, Collage, Cut Out, Combine, GIF, Color Picker, Screen Capture and more. PhotoScape has a variety of photo filters, effects & other adjustment settings to make your collection stand out. The tool is a popular choice for removing blemishes, moles, red-eye correction, creating fake HDR, liquify, creating a miniature effect, dehaze and more.

Rating’s Breakdown:Overall:Setup:4/5Photo Editing:3.5/5Features: 3/5Ease-of-Use:3/5Organizing:3/5Help & Support:4/5Price:Price: Free (In-App Purchases)

PhotoScape X is available for both Windows & Mac OS & is a very useful tool Batch Photo Editing as well. It proffers various tools to batch format change, batch resizing, batch rename and more.

7. Affinity Photo

Restyle images for a unique look and feel on your Mac with Affinity Photo Editing Software. Its dashboard might seem overwhelming at first, especially for beginner editors. However, once you get the grip, you’ll know that it’s just the application you’ve been looking for. The image editing software features a great bunch of professional editing tools, filters, and other effects to entice the inner artist in you. The best part? The tool features a Before & After view that lets you compare the original picture with the edited one.

Rating’s Breakdown:Overall:Setup:4/5Photo Editing:3.5/5Features: 3/5Ease-of-Use:3/5Organizing:3/5Help & Support:4/5Price:Price: Free (In-App Purchases)

The mac photo editing app supports more than fifteen file types and formats, including PDF, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, RAW and some other less popular ones as well.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 For Mac

8. Photoshop Elements

With complete control over Image composition (from the contrast to brightness), Photoshop Elements is one of the Best Photo Editing Software for Mac. Its interface is intrusively designed while keeping users’ needs & requirements in mind. The large colorful icons with comprehensive texts and graphics tips help both novices and advanced users. All the features are organized in the same way as most other Adobe products are. Apart from providing basic features for editing and adjusting image orientations, Photoshop Elements features Intelligent Selection of areas, scaling, smart cropper, restoration of damaged parts and much more.

Rating’s Breakdown:Overall:Setup:4/5Photo Editing:5/5Features: 5/5Ease-of-Use:4.5/5Organizing:5/5Help & Support:4.5/5Price:$99.99

Photoshop Elements is one of the most ideal apps to edit photos on mac, as it comes complemented by automatic tools for editing that are only available within itself & not other versions of Adobe Photoshop.

9. DxO OpticsPro for Photos

Let your photos shine with DxO OpticsPro for Photos tool. With a tagline ‘Reveal the RAW emotion’ Dxo offers a simple user-friendly interface with amazing photo retouching features & deep color correction tools. The application aims to analyze your images intelligently, correct orientations, adjust balance & exposure, alter the calibration levels to enhance your collection. It’s Magic photo retouching feature literary works like a charm; just select the photo(s) you want to improve in terms of color or quality & click ‘magic; button to intensify the image.

Rating’s Breakdown:Overall:Setup:4/5Photo Editing:5/5Features: 4/5Ease-of-Use:3.5/5Organizing:4/5Help & Support:5/5Price:$9.99

In addition to basic editing features, DxO photo processing for compatible cameras can easily be managed within the editing mode. DxO OpticsPro acts as a third-party extension for the same. It is capable of applying White Balance Correction, Smart Lightning, applying Optical corrections and so on.

10. CameraBag Photo

An easy to use, lightweight photo editor tool, CaneraBag Photo is an amazing app that brings out the best of your photos. It features a clean and easy-to-use interface, on the right side of the dashboard, you’ll find the whole range of filters & customization tools. Unlike other best photo editing software for mac mentioned in the list, CameraBag Photo features 200+ Default Presets, which allows users to edit the photo(s) on the fly.

Rating’s Breakdown:Overall:Setup:4/5Photo Editing:3.5/5Features: 4/5Ease-of-Use:4/5Organizing:3/5Help & Support:4/5Price:$20

In addition to photo editing basics: adjust exposure, saturation, contrast, fix the noise, add blur, vignette effect. CameraBag Photo boasts other photo editing utilities like Hue Masking, HSV Mask, adding borders, watermark, fixing dead pixels, color mixer, filtered B+W, split tone and more.

How Do You Edit Your Photographs?

All the aforementioned Photo Editing tools for Mac are well-designed and great looking pieces to easily edit images. However, if you ask us, we recommend using Wondershare Fotophire & Tweak Photos that works suitable for both amateur & pro photographers. Both the photo editing tools have enticing editing feature set to make your photo collection stand out & both have strong capabilities for Batch Editing & Processing!

Do let us know your favorite editing tips, tricks, and hacks in the comment section below. And which Mac photo editing tool is your personal favorite?

Photos in macOS Catalina has an immersive, dynamic look that showcases your best photos. Find the shots you’re looking for with powerful search options. Organize your collection into albums, or keep your photos organized automatically with smart albums. Perfect your images with intuitive built-in editing tools, or use your favorite photos apps. And with iCloud Photos, you can keep all your photos and videos stored in iCloud and up to date on your Mac, Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and even your PC.

A smarter way to find your favorites.

Photos in macOS Catalina intelligently declutters and curates your photos and videos — so you can easily see your best memories.

Focus on your best shots.

Photos emphasizes the best shots in your library, hiding duplicates, receipts, and screenshots. Days, Months, and Years views organize your photos by when they were taken. Your best shots are highlighted with larger previews, and Live Photos and videos play automatically, bringing your library to life. Photos also highlights important moments like birthdays, anniversaries, and trips in the Months and Years views.

Your memories. Now playing.

Memories finds your best photos and videos and weaves them together into a memorable movie — complete with theme music, titles, and cinematic transitions — that you can personalize and share. So you can enjoy a curated collection of your trips, holidays, friends, family, pets, and more. And when you use iCloud Photos, all edits automatically sync to your other devices.

The moment you’re looking for, always at hand.

With Search, you can look for photos based on who’s in them or what’s in them — like strawberries or sunsets. Or combine search terms, like “beach 2017.” If you’re looking for photos you imported a couple of months ago, use the expanded import history to look back at each batch in chronological order. And in the My Albums tab, you’ll find your videos, selfies, panoramas, and other media types automatically organized into separate albums.

Fill your library, not your device.

iCloud Photos can help you make the most of the space on your Mac. When you choose “Optimize Mac Storage,” all your full‑resolution photos and videos are stored in iCloud in their original formats, with storage-saving versions kept on your Mac as space is needed. You can also optimize storage on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, so you can access more photos and videos than ever before. You get 5GB of free storage in iCloud — and as your library grows, you have the option to choose a plan for up to 2TB.

Make an edit here, see it there. When you make changes on your Mac like editing a photo, marking a Favorite, or adding to an album, they’re kept up to date on your iPhone, your iPad, and iCloud.com. And vice versa — any changes made on your iOS or iPadOS devices are automatically reflected on your Mac.

All your photos on all your devices. iCloud Photos gives you access to your entire Mac photo and video library from all your devices. If you shoot a snapshot, slo-mo, or selfie on your iPhone, it’s automatically added to iCloud Photos — so it appears on your Mac, iOS and iPadOS devices, Apple TV, iCloud.com, and your PC. Even the photos and videos imported from your DSLR, GoPro, or drone to your Mac appear on all your iCloud Photos–enabled devices. And since your collection is organized the same way across your Apple devices, navigating your library always feels familiar.

Resize. Crop. Collage. Zoom. Warp. GIF. And more.

Create standout photos with a comprehensive set of powerful but easy-to-use editing tools. Instantly transform photos taken in Portrait mode with five different studio-quality lighting effects. Choose Enhance to improve your photo with just a click. Then use a filter to give it a new look. Or use Smart Sliders to quickly edit like a pro even if you’re a beginner. Markup lets you add text, shapes, sketches, or a signature to your images. And you can turn Live Photos into fun, short video loops to share. You can also make edits to photos using third-party app extensions like Pixelmator, or edit a photo in an app like Photoshop and save your changes to your Photos library.

Light

Brilliance, a slider in Light, automatically brightens dark areas and pulls in highlights to reveal hidden details and make your photo look richer and more vibrant.

Color

Make your photo stand out by adjusting saturation, color contrast, and color cast.

Black & White

Add some drama by taking the color out. Fine-tune intensity and tone, or add grain for a film-quality black-and-white effect.

White Balance

Choose between Neutral Gray, Skin Tone, and Temperature/Tint options to make colors in your photo warmer or cooler.

Curves

Make fine-tuned contrast and color adjustments to your photos.

Levels

Adjust midtones, highlights, and shadows to perfect the tonal balance in your photo.

Definition

Increase image clarity by adjusting the definition slider.

Selective Color

Want to make blues bluer or greens greener? Use Selective Color to bring out specific colors in your image.

Vignette

Add shading to the edges of your photo to highlight a powerful moment.

Editing Extensions

Download third-party editing extensions from the Mac App Store to add filters and texture effects, use retouching tools, reduce noise, and more.

Reset Adjustments

When you’ve made an edit, you can judge it against the original by clicking Compare. If you don’t like how it looks, you can reset your adjustments or revert to your original shot.

Bring even more life to your Live Photos. When you edit a Live Photo, the Loop effect can turn it into a continuous looping video that you can experience again and again. Try Bounce to play the action forward and backward. Or choose Long Exposure for a beautiful DSLR‑like effect to blur water or extend light trails. You can also trim, mute, and select a key photo for each Live Photo.

Add some fun filters.

With just a click, you can apply one of nine photo filters inspired by classic photography styles to your photos.

Share here, there, and everywhere.

Use the Share menu to easily share photos via Shared Albums and AirDrop. Or send photos to your favorite photo sharing destinations, such as Facebook and Twitter. You can also customize the menu and share directly to other compatible sites that offer sharing extensions.

Turn your pictures into projects.

Making high-quality projects and special gifts for loved ones is easier than ever with Photos. Create everything from gorgeous photo books to professionally framed gallery prints to stunning websites using third-party project extensions like Motif, Mimeo Photos, Shutterfly, ifolor, WhiteWall, Mpix, Fujifilm, and Wix.

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markvillacampa · 4 years ago

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Week 31, 2020

Documents from the Hearing on “Online Platforms and Market Power: Examining the Dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google

House Judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee - July 29, 2020

Tech news were eclipsed this week by the antitrust hearings. The CEO depositions were what we expected: a lot of empty words and half truths. But more revealing was the trove of internal documents, mostly emails, from the past 10+ years released by the committee.

The verge has a series of articles dissecting the documents but I want to highlight this conversation from 2012 between Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom and one of his investors at Benchmark talking about a possible acquisition by Facebook. Talk about value-add investors!

Three people have been charged for Twitter’s huge hack, and a Florida teen is in jail

The Verge - July 31, 2020 - 7 min

A 17-year-old in Tampa, Florida, a 22-year-old in Orlando and a 19-year-old in the UK were responsible for wreaking havok on Twitter last week hacking the accounts of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Joe Biden and more to spread a Bitcoin scam.

TikTok's new CEO says company will reveal how its algorithms work

Axios - July 29, 2020 - 3 min

TikTok will launch a Transparency and Accountability Center in Los Angeles for moderation and data practices that will house all of its data flows and code moving forward. The center will host online tours of its data during the pandemic.

I have absolutely no idea what any of that means, but looking forward to taking that online tour, I guess 🤷🏻‍♂️.

ByteDance investors value TikTok at $50 billion in takeover bid

Reuters - July 29, 2020 - 4 min

The investors’ bid values TikTok at 50 times its projected 2020 revenue of about $1 billion

If the online tours don't satisfy US regulators, a $50B exit would not be a bad outcome either.

Microsoft Said to Be in Talks to Buy TikTok, as Trump Weighs Curtailing App

The New York Times - July 31, 2020 - 4 min

And if investors can't come up with the 💸, Microsoft might be ready to integrate TikTok into their 365 subscription 🤡.

Trump says he's banning TikTok in the U.S.

NBC News - July 31, 2020 - 3 min

I really don't know what to think anymore 🤷🏻‍♂️.

From Education App to Global Video Phenomenon

Medium - November 15, 2019 - 19 min

If you’re not in the Gen Z age group and have never used TikTok, this is the best rundown of TikTok’s history I’ve read so far and your best chance at understanding what all the fuzz is about.

The Concorde, the Space Shuttle and Space Shuttle Bus at the Paris Air Show in 1983

Airbus' self-flying plane just completed successful taxi, take-off, and landing tests, opening the door for fully autonomous flight

Business Insider - July 26, 2020 - 5 min

Fully automous commercial planes sound very plausible in 5 years. Cars on the other hand... not so much.

SAP to spin out Qualtrics via an IPO

Axios - July 26, 2020 - 1 min

SAP plans to have a majority stake after the IPO, while Qualtrics co-founder and CEO Ryan Smith will be the largest individual shareholder.

Imagine selling your company for $8B, then taking it public and still be the largest individual shareholder 😳.

Everyone’s a Day Trader Now

The Wall Street Journal - July 25, 2020 - 11 min

But when she couldn’t work, her unemployment checks weren’t enough to pay her bills. Her boss suggested she try day trading. She read “Trading for Dummies,” watched YouTube videos, opened an E-Trade account and dove in.

Day trading is starting to look like the new sports betting epidemic.

Intel Makes Changes to Technology Organization

Intel - July 27, 2020 - 2 min

Intel is not having a good time, after AMD surpassing them as leaders in x86 CPUs and Apple transitioning to their own ARM-based chips. As a result of deep internal reorganization, Murthy Renduchintala, Intel's Chief Engineering Officer, is leaving the company.

How an Irish Beer Became the Authority on World Records

How Stuff Works - October 24, 2016 - 4 min

Did you know the Guiness World Records and Guiness Beer are one and the same Guiness? Me neither, but the story behind it is quite... Irish.

Tech CEOs Deserve an Apology

The Wall Street Journal - July 28, 2020 - 4 min

Sure, there are screw-ups: Amazon favors its own products, Apple its own apps, Google its own YouTube videos; Facebook collects too much personal data. Yet none of these habits necessarily harm consumers and all could be easily fixed without decadeslong antitrust inquisitions.

I just sent my apology letters, what are you waiting for? 🤣

The Pandemic-Era Appeal of Getting Lost in a Labyrinth

Bloomberg - July 29, 2020 - 5 min

Lars Howlett is one of the country’s foremost labyrinth makers.

TIL: Labyrinth maker is an actual job title!

Google to Keep Employees Home Until Summer 2021 Amid Coronavirus Pandemic

The Wall Street Journal - July 27, 2020

Do they know something that we don't? 😬

You really don't need to work so much

New Yorker - August 21, 2015 - 6 min

The irony is that the people at the top are often as unhappy and overworked as those at the bottom: it is a system that serves almost no one

Translation of The instructions of Shuruppak

The instructions of Shuruppak is a 4600-year-old Sumerian text, one of the oldest in the world, and possibly the first self-help book.

It’s Not Debt, It’s Better

Alex Danco - July 28, 2020 - 19 min

Pipe creates a new asset class to sell: the software subscription. Founders can now sell the recurring revenue from a cohort of software customers, as an easily tradable asset, and fund their growth without taking dilution.

Remember when coding bootcamps started securitizing future revenue from cohorts of students? Turns our any SaaS can do it now. But should they? 🤔

Our Series E Funding

Stack Overflow - July 28, 2020 - 10 min

Stack Overflow, the Q&A site used by every programmer to be able to do their jobs, is raising an $85 to push their enterprise SaaS product.

Introducing the Slack Certified program

Slack - July 16, 2020 - 7 min

Are you really an enterprise IT company if you don't have certification courses for your product? If you ask Slack (or Cisco) the answer will be a resounding No.

Mischief managed

The Verge - July 27, 2020 - 15 min

A profile of MSCHF, the viral product company that's like if SUPREME and TikTok merged. Their latest creation: the $1200 Jesus Shoes. A $200 pair of Air Max 97 sneakers with water from the River Jordan injected in the soles 🤷🏻‍♂️.

States Issue Warnings About Seed Packets From China

The New York Times - July 26, 2020 - 5 min

Americans have been receiving mysterious unsolicited packages from China containing seeds.

Turns out it's probably sellers buying their own products in e-commerce platforms with real USA addresses, then shipping a cheap product, all to boost their ranking and reviews in the platform.

Inside the World’s Only Sourdough Library

Atlas Obscura - May 16, 2018 - 7 min

Unlike books, the starters need to be fed regularly

Have you boosted your baking game during quarantine? Then you might be interested in this library.

Apple Buys Startup to Turn iPhones Into Payment Terminals

Bloomberg - July 31, 2020 - 2 min

There already are multiple products in the market to accept credit card payments with your phone, Square being the most notorious, at least in the US market.

This deal means Apple could become a merchant account provider, offering business a way to accept payments with any iPhone. B2B is the next step after shipping their first B2C product with the Apple Card last year.

How I Growth Hacked Instagram to Drive $13,000 of Card Game Sales

David Kemmerer - June 16, 2020 - 9 min

I growth-hacked the College Cards Instagram page with fake followers, fake engagement, and fake everything to make it look like the game was all the rage.

Great overview of social media tactics many DTC (Direct To Consumer) companies use... applied to selling a card game to college students!

0 notes

t-baba · 5 years ago

Photo

New versions of both Firefox and Chrome arrive

#420 — December 11, 2019

Read on the Web

Frontend Focus

Z’s Still Not Dead Baby, Z’s Still Not Dead — A fun look at five CSS properties, including background-blend-mode, that can add “depth and richness to your designs”.

Andy Clarke

Firefox 71: A Year-End Arrival — Introduces a “plethora of new developer tools” including the web socket message inspector, console multi-line editor mode, log on events, and network panel full text search.

Chris Mills (Mozilla)

Chrome 79 Released with Tab Freezing, Back-forward Caching, and Loads of Security Features — Version 79 shipped yesterday with support for predictive phishing, real-time Safe Browsing detections, and a built-in Password Checkup tool. Here’s a video from Google running through what’s new.

Catalin Cimpanu

DNS Issues? Five Practical Strategies to Avoid Single Points of Failure — This year, several high profile outages have proven the adage that no provider is too-big-to-fail. This article details safeguards against DNS outages, including a deep-dive into major outages, their cause, and their impact over the last 20 years.

Ably sponsor

Six Web Performance Technologies to Watch in 2020 — The author argues not to place big bets “on 5G and HTTP/3 to make things faster” as there are a range of other technologies that he believes will have a bigger impact on web performance over the next twelve months.

Simon Hearne

Accessibility Testing by People with Disabilities — Reviews the challenges associated with accessibility testing and how you can go about formally including testers with disabilities to further improve your testing processes.

Becky Gibson

A Roundup of Web Development 'Advent Calendars' for 2019 — The idea of having developer-oriented 'advent calendars' where one article is posted on each of the 24 days of advent has really caught on. So if you want more reading, fill your (Santa) boots here.

💻 Jobs

Front-End Developer / UX Developer - in Berlin, Germany or Remote — One of Germany´s fastest growing Tech-Startups is looking for a Design-Driven Software-Enthusiast.

virtualQ

Find a Job Through Vettery — Make a profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers. Vettery is completely free for job seekers.

Vettery

Technical Content Producer (Interim) at Ably (London, Remote OK) — Ably builds tools and cloud infrastructure for the realtime internet. They need a developer/tech writer on a temporary basis to coordinate, outsource, and review the creation of technical content for a developer audience.

Ably

📙 Articles, Tutorials & Opinion

prefers-color-scheme in SVG Favicons for Dark Mode Icons — Chrome will soon be supporting SVG favicons, meaning you’ll be able to use CSS and the prefers-color-scheme media query to serve up a favicon that’s unique for dark mode users. Here’s a little demo.

Thomas Steiner

Beautiful Scrolling Experiences – Without Libraries — A look at the relatively new CSS Scroll Snap spec and how it can control the scrolling behaviour of a web page (to a degree) – without resorting to heavy libraries.

Michelle Barker

Take Your Front-End Skills to the Next Level — In our 4.5-day course learn how to craft responsive web apps, build performant backends, & simplify design through maintainable user interface components.

Big Nerd Ranch sponsor

▶ Building Responsive Layouts in The Browser — Una Kravets presents this well-rounded introduction to building a responsive layout, and how the browser can help with just that.

Google Chrome Developers

"Link In Bio" Is A Slow Knife — Thoughts on how the ‘link in bio’ phrase (often seen over on Instagram) can be seen as a subtle, and yet pervasive, attempt to “kill the web”.

Anil Dash

How to 'Fight Back' Against Google AMP As A Web User and A Web Developer — There continues to be a push back against AMP from the developer community. If that includes you, this post is something of a quick guide to avoiding using it.

Marko Saric

How DNS Works — A fun little comic that explains in a straightforward manner what happens when you browse to a website.

DNSimple

Understanding the Difference Between CSS Resolution and Device Resolution

Elad Shechter

Tried & True Productivity Tips from 25 React Experts

Progress KendoReact sponsor

Create A JAMstack Site with Open Authoring Using Netlify CMS

Brian Rinaldi

🔧 Code, Tools & Resources

noUiSlider: Lightweight Range Slider with Full Multi-Touch Support — Pretty powerful and flexible. There’s a full page of examples.

Leon Gersen

OpenLayers: High Performance Frontend Mapping Library — A system for putting dynamic maps onto your pages that can render map tiles pulled from various sources, vector data layers, markers, etc. Supports both Canvas and WebGL as appropriate. Examples here.

OpenLayers

Falco: Helps Monitor, Analyze, and Optimize Websites — This open-source performance tool can audit your site automatically, delivering WebPageTest results/reports to action against.

Theodo.FR

Find Out Who Can Use Your Color Combination — A tool that brings attention and understanding to how color contrast can affect different people with visual impairments.

Who Can Use

ResponsiveViewer — A Chrome extension for testing responsive sites. Shows multiple screens in one view.

skmail

🗓 Upcoming Events

Flashback Conference, February 10-11 — Orlando, Florida — Looks at cutting-edge web dev, browser APIs and tooling, but adds the understanding of how they’ve evolved from the past to the web of today.

FrontFest, February 15 — Madrid, Spain — A Spanish conference, now in its fourth year.

Frontend Developer Love, February 19-21 — Amsterdam, Netherlands — Three full days of talks from 35+ global JavaScript leaders from around the world.

CityJS Conf, March 27 — London, UK — A 'JavaScript festival' across London.

by via Frontend Focus https://ift.tt/348zEAV

#HTML5 Branding #HTML5 Weekly

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toddbirchard-architect · 5 years ago

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Data Engineering, Big Data, and Other Vague Vocabulary https://ift.tt/2Kh85xj

I've spent the majority of my life dreading an eternal question that governs our lives. You know the one. It's the one that comes after our ritualistic handshakes and "nice to meet you"s. The one that summarizes our place in society, in 5 words or less: "what do you?"

Most managers never seem to have this problem. My previous peers in product or engineering management roles had little trouble letting others fill in the blanks for them, but I've never been one comfortable with accepting hyperbolic inferences. For non-producing members of skilled teams, I doubt the integrity of one who nods in response to "oh, so you're the boss?" I instead relived groundhog day eternally, watching the progression where an acquaintance's eagerness to care deteriorates into realizing they don't.

A lifetime later, I landed my first title as a data engineer, and boy did that feel great! After years of enduring the cocktail-party-existential-crises, I had a real title. Fine, "manager" is a title, but this title had tangible substance! The first chance I had to introduce myself as a Data Engineer happened to be in Ibiza, in all places. As it turns out, an American stranded in Spain making friends with somebody from Bosnia has its language barriers, so the phrase "data engineer" wasn't quite translating well. The best stand-in explanation I could find was "hacker."

Data Engineers Are Definitely Not Hackers

I had a lot of assumptions about what it meant to be a "data engineer" going into it, and none of them were particularly outrageous. I'd had my hand in software development for over ten years at the time. The boom of mainstream data science bit be like a bug, like the rest of us, and something about the problems we could solve seemed to make software fun again. We weren't building worthless landing pages, or tired login screens. Instead, we could write sports betting algorithms, or mine the world's unprotected data. I already loved engineering like I loved Oreos, and this particular flavor of engineering felt like taking two Oreos apart and stick them back together: less of the lame stuff, more of the awesome stuff.

Data Engineering isn't really Software Engineering

Obviously you need to be a software engineer to some capacity to be a data engineer. That said, the concerns of data engineers fall further away from the tree than I ever initially anticipated.

Most programming work I engaged in before data revolved heavily around algorithms, whether I realized it at the time or not. Building consumer and business-facing products entails more moving parts than any single human can account for. Software worth using is an effort between many people accountable for many services, which make up some abstract entity used by vast quantities of unreasonable people (I kid). The challenge of engineering something complex comes in the clever decisions we make to leverage simplicity. The first time I ever dissected a Walkman, or took the lid off a toilet, or taken apart a mechanical pen, the reaction is always the same: "that's it?" And yet, "that's quite genius."

A Day In The Life

The skills and duties of data engineering teams zero consistency between companies. Some shops integrate data engineers with data scientists and analysts to supplement those teams. Other companies have massively siloed "big data" teams, which are almost always made up of Java developers who have seemingly found a comfortable (and lucrative) niché, forever married to MapReduce without the burdens of cross-department communication. Unfortunately, this scenario is far more common.

Most of a data engineer’s responsibilities revolve around ETL: the art of moving data from over there to over here. Or, perhaps also there. And yet, likely here, there, and there (and oh yeah, it nothing is allowed to break, even though those things are different). The concept feels straightforward. It is. We're also dealing with incomprehensibly massive amounts of data, so it's also repetitively stressful. Straightforward and stressful aren't the sexiest adjectives to live by.

Tools Over Talent

Luckily for us, our company isn't the first company to work with data- that’s where our predetermined catalog of “big data” tools comes in. No matter how different data teams are between companies, the inescapable common ground is that data Engineering is largely about tools. We’re talking Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, Apache Airflow, Apache 2: Electric Boogaloo, and so forth.

Working with each of these things is a proprietary skill of its own. PySpark is essentially its own language masquerading as Python. Hadoop's complexity serves little purpose other than to ensure old school data engineers have jobs. Each of these tools are behemoths, each of which was created to do a very specific thing in a very specific way. Becoming adept at Spark doesn’t make you a better engineer, or a problem solver: it just makes you good at using Spark. Airflow is a powerful tool for organizing and building data pipelines. With all it’s included bells and whistles, Airflow offers teams power and structure at no cost. It’s obvious that Airflow (and equivalent) are “the right tool” upon using it, but structure comes at a price to human beings. It’s only a matter of time before I’m aware I’m mindlessly executing things in the only possible fashion they might be executed. Unlike building complex systems, it feels like data engineering only has so much room for clever optimization.

This doesn’t seem so bad to a 9-5 worker looking to live their non-office lives: hoarding lucrative knowledge is an easy way to pay the bills. What bothers me is this mindset can only prevail if the person harnessing does not actually enjoy programming. In every software engineering interview I've ever had, there's inevitably been some sort of hour-long algorithm whiteboard session where you optimize your brute force O(n^2) algorithm to O(n). While those are stressful, people who enjoy programming usually walk out of those interviews feeling like they enjoyed it. I've never been asked an algorithm question in a data engineering interview. Those go more like this:

Have you ever had a situation where you had to configure a Kafkta instance using the 76C-X configuration variable on the 27 of May during a full moon?

I see you've worked with SQS, Kinesis, Kafka, Pub/Sub, and RabbitMQ, but have you ever worked with [obscure equivalent service this company uses, with the implication that it isn't exactly the same]

I know you're not too hot on Hadoop, but can you tell me about the inner workings of this specific feature before it was depreciated 3 years ago anyway?

I'm running a PC with 4 cores and 16 gigs of ram, looking to parse a 200,000-line JSON file while vacationing with my family in Aruba. Which Python library would you use to engage Python's secret Hyperthreaded Voltron I/O Super Saiyan skill, and what kind of load would my machine be under as a result?

I'm barely kidding about these... even the last one. If Silicon Valley's primary hiring philosophy prioritizes smart people who can learn, data engineering interviews measure whether your wealth of useless trivia is culturally acceptable by people who value that sort of thing.

We Need To Address "Big Data"

I've been making some vast generalizations so far. I don't truly believe all data engineers share the same personality traits. In fact, there are at least two kinds of data people in this world: people who say "big data" unironically, and those who don't. I'm the latter. The complaints I have about our profession are directed at the former.

There's a big difference between a startup looking to "revolutionize the world with AI," and startups looking to leverage machine learning to optimize a case where it makes sense. Given the cheapness and implied misunderstanding of the term, simply hearing the phrase "AI" in a conversation has me questioning credibility. Don't get me started on Blockchain.

Big data has no actual definition other than "a lot of data." Trying to track down the origins of the phrase results in endless pages of data companies spewing absurd jargon (and hilariously copy+pasted definitions from one another), proudly aligning themselves with the new world order of Big Data. One article titled "A Brief History of Big Data" starts at the year 18,000 BCE. Get over yourselves.

In reality, the phrase "Big Data" started to pick up pace around 2012:

trends.embed.renderExploreWidget("TIMESERIES", {"comparisonItem":[{"keyword":"big data","geo":"","time":"2004-01-01 2019-06-29"}],"category":0,"property":""}, {"exploreQuery":"date=all&q=big%20data","guestPath":"https://trends.google.com:443/trends/embed/"});

We have Doug Laney to blame for coining the phrase in 2001, but if I had to guess, the trend seems much more closely correlated with the rise of Hadoop.

Hadoop enabled companies to work with and process much larger data than before, thus "Big Data" was technically relatively accurate. Java was by far the most common programming language being learned by new developers, being the de facto choice for school curriculum and general programming. I imagine it was an easy choice for many to double down on the language they knew by leveraging their knowledge and being Hadoop subject-matter experts. That's twice the job security and twice the skills!

Most people I know who overly emphasize their "big data" expertise are in fact Java/Hadoop guys. They're quick to ask how many petabytes or exabytes of data your last pipeline ran, fiercely keeping the gate open for only the Biggest of Data. They don't want to learn new programming languages. They don't want to see which data warehouse best fits their needs by reading the whitepapers. They don't want to question if it's really necessary for a cluster of hundreds of nodes to run small nightly jobs. They want to cling to a time where they made two good consecutive life decisions and partied to the Big Data anthem.

Bigger Doesn't Mean Better

Some data engineers are exactly what their titles imply: engineers with a specialty in data. On the other side of this, there's a rampant culture of gatekeeping and self-preservation which is almost certainly destroying company budgets in ways which aren't visible.

Data engineering teams with headcounts in the double-digits clock 8 hours a day, over-implementing systems too obsolete to turn profits for Cloudera, Hortonworks, or MapR. If these teams had consisted of software engineers as opposed to big data engineers, we would have teams focused on creating the best solutions over the easiest ones.

July 31, 2019 at 12:24AM

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infiniteundo · 8 years ago

Text

Software As Narrative Parts 1-8 Collected

I was asked by Twitter to switch to long form writing about testing, QA and risk. Here are the early raw results of my return to blogging about… all of those things Please note that part 7, the [further reading page.](http://infiniteundo.com/post/158412712773/further-reading-s-as-n-7n "The Further Reading page is constantly being updated with new resources!") is not included here as that is a living document.

Table of Contents

Part One: in which the map disturbingly turns out to be the territory

Part Two: in which robust partition tolerance is found to be desirable but impossible

Part Three: in which someone got punched in the face

Part Four: in which the significance of software as narrative is expounded upon

Part Five: a brief examination of the social forcing functions exposed by narrative tactics

Part Six: in which a fictional old-timer relates tales of the SDLC

Part Seven: list of further reading materials

Part Eight: in which the hidden art of de-noising is shewn for the non-initiate

Part One

> Any software system begins as a shared narrative about a problem and > the people who come together around solving that problem.

If you don't accept the above proposition completely then nothing I have to say about software is going to work for you.

Chthulhucene Devops: staying with the trouble as a service

This is and always has been the core proposition of my "way of Devops." Which I am now finally able to articulate and which I differentiate from other devops as Chtulhucene Devops, so as to acknowledge that it is not "mine" in any sense except as far as I know I am its sole practicing engineer. Designers and executives and other leaders may practice it --- but developers mostly have a hard time with the tolerance for chaos required for what Donna Haraway has so insightfully now labeled: "staying with the trouble."

Software is narrative

> The problem with intelligent communication is the illusion that it > has taken place. > > -- GB Shaw

Suspend your disbelief and just run with this for one minute if you will: commercial software is a narrative about a problem and the community of people who come together around said problem. Note that I haven't said anything about money or value streams yet. That's the beauty of this approach: you start at the highest-possible view of the project: the gods-eye view. This is what the narrative approach can deliver to you, the confused but eager software hacker-er.

You see, a big problem in software -- the main problem -- is that you wake up one morning and find that you've spent 3 months building the wrong thing. It seemed like the right thing 3 months ago, communications got dropped, mistakes were made, it's wrong now. This can happen so easily with software.

The problem of what was it even supposed to do in the first place

In order to not build the wrong thing we must know with clarity what we are meant to be building. It sounds like a tautology and if we were talking about any medium but the digital medium it would be a tautology. But as all software engineers immediately come to learn, there is a Lovecraftian, Non-Newtonian gulf between "what we build" and "what we were meant to be building."

"Know what is meant to be happening not just what is happening" is anything but a tautology in software. It is a yawning conceptual gulf that can swallow projects whole.

How do you know what is meant to be happening?

As people we have something called an inner narrative that we compare to the external happenings in the world and that's how we do sense-making. The thing is that the "external happenings" of the world aren't external at all. Events in the world around us impinge on and irrevocably merge with our "inner" narratives.

The world is made of stories

Stories are how we do sense-making. Stories are literally the tool that allowed us to come down from the trees. We couldn't master fire until we could fashion a story about how to master fire.

But with fire there was a physical thing to point to: the thing that is on fire. Get that thing. Such were our stories. For almost our entire time on earth as a species, stories were basically: there is thing, do something with thing.

But now we can't use that narrative any more even. Because with the digital domain there is no "raw material" that we start with to create products. That this is the case causes a lot of mis-spent Web budgets, because it is counterintuitive so people tend to budget in spite of it not in alignment with the reality that Web products all begin as stories and some are less fictional than others.

There is no thing

> A monk asked Joshu, a Chinese Zen master: Has a dog Buddha-nature or > not?' > > Joshu answered:Mu.'

In software there is no "thing" that you can point at. In order to point at a "thing" in software you have to construct the thing, starting with the environment in which the thing is going to exist.

You always have to design both "the product" your customers want and "the environment" in which your product will run in production. Thus any software product begins with two obvious categories of "work to be done." People ignore this because it seems counterintuitive.

Now you have two problems

> A programmer has a problem and says I know I'll use Perl. > > Now they have 2 problems.

This is a class of Boundary Problem -- you always have to design the environment your software product "lives" in, no matter how hard you try to isolate your project from the vagaries of its environment.

This observation generalizes and goes back at least to Wittgenstein who said of Boundary Conditions in general:

> Can't we imagine a rule determining the application of a rule, and a > doubt which [it] removes — and so on?

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supervillainproject · 6 years ago

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SEO Is Now 'Search Experience Optimization'

The last few years, search engines such as Google, Bing, and even Apple, have been upgrading their algorithms and machine learning processes to account for the end-user's experience. But, since their algorithms are built upon the work completed by automated crawling bots (pieces of software that manually scour the internet), it has always been difficult for them to truly simulate the actions of a flesh and blood user. And it's not feasible for them to create an algorithm that's based on the anecdotal feedback of an army of individual users that submit their findings. Instead the search engines have started to write logic that, to their best estimation, is what a user experience should be on a website. Some of the criteria they are now measuring are site speed, mobile optimization, site structure, content, and dozens of other signals that should give the algorithm an idea of whether or not search engine users are getting what they expect from a website. Related: Top 7 Things You Don't Know About SEO So, what does this mean for companies, marketers, and website owners when it comes to their SEO? Basically what I, and dozens of other SEO industry experts, have been writing about for years has now come to fruition. We've exited the era of search engine optimization (SEO), and have now entered the new age of search experience optimization (also... SEO). And this is great news for anyone that performs digital marketing correctly. It means that "gaming" the system has become less and less viable, and that groups who rely on black hat techniques are seeing their efforts become less effective. So, how should websites be optimized for the search engines now that user experience plays such a big role? Ask questions, provide answers. Previously, marketers used to obsess over ideas like keyword density, meta descriptions, and link profiles. They had everything down to percentages and numbers and it all made sense when it was placed into an excel sheet. But how on earth was a website that was built from data on an excel sheet supposed to appeal to a human being? That's the problem the search engines set out to fix. And you need to accommodate the changes they've made. Related: Here's What Really Matters for SEO in 2016 Specifically, you need to think about your website visitors at every stage of your web design and marketing process. And this can be done easily with a series of question and answer audits you can ask yourself as you're creating your marketing campaign. For instance, if you're designing a web page and you're wondering how to make it appear in the Google search results, you should start by asking what your customers are typing into the search engine. This sounds rudimentary, but think it through for a moment. Previously marketers would optimize for terms such as "snow tires" or "weight loss products". But search habits have become more semantic and people are no longer typing in general terms, but rather they're asking questions. Thus, the search term "snow tires" has evolved into, "what are the best snow tires for a 2008 Ford F150?" And it's the companies that are answering the questions for their customers that are starting to win in the search engine rankings. So, stop fretting over how many times you mention the keyword in the content you're writing on the page, and instead start asking yourself what your customers need help with. Embrace mobile. If you've been living under a rock for the last 10 years, you may be shocked to hear that most people use smart phones and that smart phone searches now account for a more search volume than desktop searches. However, if you've been living in the world with the rest of us, this isn't too surprising. So, if everyone is using mobile devices to browse the web, shouldn't you likewise be optimizing your site for mobile traffic? Last year, Google made waves in the SEO community by releasing a major algorithm update that specifically improved the search engine visibility of mobile optimized sites over their less optimized competitors. It was lovingly termed " mobilegeddon" by marketers. And while it wasn't the end of the world, it did cause quite a stir with digital marketers. Across the board, mobilegeddon caused the search results to shuffle about and it didn't just impact small businesses. In fact, over 40% of Fortune 500 websites weren't mobile optimized at the time of the update. Which is staggering when you think that this all just happened less than a year ago. So, some major brands took hits to their online presence. Related: SEO Is So Hard That Even Google Needs Help With It And what this taught everyone, painfully in some cases, was that we needed to start prioritizing the needs of mobile internet users. You see, mobile users don't have the same bandwidth as desktop users. They have data limits and often the speed of their internet is much lower than a desktop computer. So, if they're trying to interact with a page that has a lot of data and animations to load, it's going to take forever for them to actually see something on their mobile device. Which, as we've been discussing, is not ideal for user experience. So, instead of building a website that is dramatic from a visual standpoint, but requires the equivalent effort of a million hamsters running on wheels to power up a switchboard to manage all of the data and bytes your site is throwing at the visitor, you should probably go with a more "minimalist" approach. I recently sat down with Mitul Gandhi, an SEO expert and the co-founder of SEOClarity, a next-generation enterprise-level SEO platform. "The search engines are no longer kidding around when it comes to mobile optimization," says Mitul. "Google has released AMP Pages, their tool to allow web designers to quickly optimize their pages for mobile devices, and Apple is building their entire algorithm based on the actions of mobile users, based on their massive mobile phone market share." As Mitul mentioned, Google has recently released a product called AMP pages, which stands for accelerated mobile pages. This product is a great solution for website owners and marketers that don't have web design degrees but understand they need to make significant changes to their website in order to accommodate mobile users. Pay Attention To Your User Experience Metrics Once you've optimized your website content and the mobile experience, the next steps are heavily data driven. You should now begin understanding what is happening when visitors are coming to your site and how they are interacting with it. To do this, you can utilize robust tools like the one Mitul's group offers, or for those that don't have the budget, you can analyze your Google Analytics data, which is free to use. What you'll want to look for are signals that tell you if you're providing a positive user experience past mobile speed and onsite content. To do this, look at metrics like time on site, bounce rate, pages per visit, return visitor rates, and conversions. This data will give you insights as to whether your visitors are enjoying themselves once they are browsing your site. Once you identify problem pages or sections, work on optimizing those through A/B testing. The reason you want to do this is the search engines are now leveraging the data that is mined from people using their internet browsers. Wait... Google, Bing, and Apple are tracking what you're doing on your browser? Um, yes. Why else would they sink millions of dollars into a piece of software they give away for free. Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge (previously SEO Blog9T Internet Explorer), and Apple Safari are all spying on you and reporting data points back to their creators. Now, I can't pretend to know whether they're using this data for nefarious reasons (I can almost bet they are), but we do know that they use this data to understand whether users are having a positive user experience on a website. And the metrics I just told you to measure, are the same ones these browsers are reporting back to the search engines. Don't Forget Social Media Finally, you'll want to ensure that you are not just giving lip service to the idea of blog9t SEO social media. Regardless of how dry and boring your industry is, you need to be engaging on social media. We have dozens of B2B clients in some pretty dull industries that still actively participate on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And they're not using us because they think they're going to get a bunch of customers from Facebook. But they understand that the search engines are taking major cues from social media signals as to whether a site offers a positive user experience or not. After all, if you enjoy something online, what do you usually do? You talk about it. And where do a lot of people talk about things? On social media. So, it's only logical that if you're trying to measure whether a site is providing a great user experience, that there would also be a social footprint signaling this. So, make sure that you're sending links back to pages on your site when you are posting on social media. And don't just link back to your homepage, but link to product pages, your company information page, and your location pages. These are all places that should be getting signals from the social networks. And this is also why you should be blogging, as I've talked about ad nauseam in previous articles. Not only do blogs provide great content to your visitors (read: user experience) they also encourage social media sharing and interaction, which leads to social signals, which is what I've been talking about for the last few paragraphs! So, if you've been wondering how to get your website to rank well in the search engines and have been wondering what the secret sauce is, you can forget about some mystical equation that perfectly balances links, keyword density, and unicorn dust. It doesn't exist. And that's a good thing. Because search experience optimization is a much more common sense endeavor and anyone can figure it out with a little bit of time and effort.

0 notes

unlovedaddict · 6 years ago

Text

SEO Is Now 'Search Experience Optimization'

The last few years, search engines such as Google, Bing, and even Apple, have been upgrading their algorithms and machine learning processes to account for the end-user's experience. But, since their algorithms are built upon the work completed by automated crawling bots (pieces of software that manually scour the internet), it has always been difficult for them to truly simulate the actions of a flesh and blood user. And it's not feasible for them to create an algorithm that's based on the anecdotal feedback of an army of individual users that submit their findings. Instead the search engines have started to write logic that, to their best estimation, is what a user experience should be on a website. Some of the criteria they are now measuring are site speed, mobile optimization, site structure, content, and dozens of other signals that should give the algorithm an idea of whether or not search engine users are getting what they expect from a website. Related: Top 7 Things You Don't Know About SEO So, what does this mean for companies, marketers, and website owners when it comes to their SEO? Basically what I, and dozens of other SEO industry experts, have been writing about for years has now come to fruition. We've exited the era of search engine optimization (SEO), and have now entered the new age of search experience optimization (also... SEO). And this is great news for anyone that performs digital marketing correctly. It means that "gaming" the system has become less and less viable, and that groups who rely on black hat techniques are seeing their efforts become less effective. So, how should websites be optimized for the search engines now that user experience plays such a big role? Ask questions, provide answers. Previously, marketers used to obsess over ideas like keyword density, meta descriptions, and link profiles. They had everything down to percentages and numbers and it all made sense when it was placed into an excel sheet. But how on earth was a website that was built from data on an excel sheet supposed to appeal to a human being? That's the problem the search engines set out to fix. And you need to accommodate the changes they've made. Related: Here's What Really Matters for SEO in 2016 Specifically, you need to think about your website visitors at every stage of your web design and marketing process. And this can be done easily with a series of question and answer audits you can ask yourself as you're creating your marketing campaign. For instance, if you're designing a web page and you're wondering how to make it appear in the Google search results, you should start by asking what your customers are typing into the search engine. This sounds rudimentary, but think it through for a moment. Previously marketers would optimize for terms such as "snow tires" or "weight loss products". But search habits have become more semantic and people are no longer typing in general terms, but rather they're asking questions. Thus, the search term "snow tires" has evolved into, "what are the best snow tires for a 2008 Ford F150?" And it's the companies that are answering the questions for their customers that are starting to win in the search engine rankings. So, stop fretting over how many times you mention the keyword in the content you're writing on the page, and instead start asking yourself what your customers need help with. Embrace mobile. If you've been living under a rock for the last 10 years, you may be shocked to hear that most people use smart phones and that smart phone searches now account for a more search volume than desktop searches. However, if you've been living in the world with the rest of us, this isn't too surprising. So, if everyone is using mobile devices to browse the web, shouldn't you likewise be optimizing your site for mobile traffic? Last year, Google made waves in the SEO community by releasing a major algorithm update that specifically improved the search engine visibility of mobile optimized sites over their less optimized competitors. It was lovingly termed " mobilegeddon" by marketers. And while it wasn't the end of the world, it did cause quite a stir with digital marketers. Across the board, mobilegeddon caused the search results to shuffle about and it didn't just impact small businesses. In fact, over 40% of Fortune 500 websites weren't mobile optimized at the time of the update. Which is staggering when you think that this all just happened less than a year ago. So, some major brands took hits to their online presence. Related: SEO Is So Hard That Even Google SEO Blog9T Needs Help With It And what this taught everyone, painfully in some cases, was that we needed to start prioritizing the needs of mobile internet users. You see, mobile users don't have the same bandwidth as desktop users. They have data limits and often the speed of their internet is much lower than a desktop computer. So, if they're trying to interact with a page that has a lot of data and animations to load, it's going to take forever for them to actually see something on their mobile device. Which, as we've been discussing, is not ideal for user experience. So, instead of building a website that is dramatic from a visual standpoint, but requires the equivalent effort of a million hamsters running on wheels to power up a switchboard to manage all of the data and bytes your site is throwing at the visitor, you should probably go with a more "minimalist" approach. I recently sat down with Mitul Gandhi, an SEO expert and the co-founder of SEOClarity, a next-generation enterprise-level SEO platform. "The search engines are no longer kidding around when it comes to mobile optimization," says Mitul. "Google has released AMP Pages, their tool to allow web designers to quickly optimize their pages for mobile devices, and Apple is building their entire algorithm based on the actions of mobile users, based on their massive mobile phone market share." As Mitul mentioned, Google has recently released a product called AMP pages, which stands for accelerated mobile pages. This product is a great solution for website owners and marketers that don't have web design degrees but understand they need to make significant changes to their website in order to accommodate mobile users. Pay Attention To Your User Experience Metrics Once you've optimized your website content and the mobile experience, the next steps are heavily data driven. You should now begin understanding what is happening when visitors are coming to your site and how they are interacting with it. To do this, you can utilize robust tools like the one Mitul's group offers, or for those that don't have the budget, you can analyze your Google Analytics data, which is free to use. What you'll want to look for are signals that tell you if you're providing a positive user experience past mobile speed and onsite content. To do this, look at metrics like time on site, bounce rate, pages per visit, return visitor rates, and conversions. This data will give you insights as to whether your visitors are enjoying themselves once they are browsing your site. Once you identify problem pages or sections, work on optimizing those through A/B testing. The reason you want to do this is the search engines are now leveraging the data that is mined from people using their internet browsers. Wait... Google, Bing, and Apple are tracking what you're doing on your browser? Um, yes. Why else would they sink millions of dollars into a piece of software they give away for free. Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge (previously Internet Explorer), and Apple Safari are all spying on you and reporting data points back to their creators. Now, I can't pretend to know whether they're using this data for nefarious reasons (I can almost bet they are), but we do know that they use this data to understand whether users are having a positive user experience on a website. And the metrics I just told you to measure, are the same ones these browsers are reporting back to the search engines. Don't Forget Social Media Finally, you'll want to ensure that you are not just giving lip service to the idea of social media. Regardless of how dry and boring your industry is, you need to be engaging on social media. We have dozens of B2B clients in some pretty dull industries that still actively participate on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And they're not using us because they think they're going to get a bunch of customers from Facebook. But they understand that the search engines are taking major cues from social media signals as to whether a site offers a positive user experience or not. After all, if you enjoy something online, what do you usually do? You talk about it. And where do a lot of people talk about Blog9T things? On social media. So, it's only logical that if you're trying to measure whether a site is providing a great user experience, that there would also be a social footprint signaling this. So, make sure that you're sending links back to pages on your site when you are posting on social media. And don't just link back to your homepage, but link to product pages, your company information page, and your location pages. These are all places that should be getting signals from the social networks. And this is also why you should be blogging, as I've talked about ad nauseam in previous articles. Not only do blogs provide great content to your visitors (read: user experience) they also encourage social media sharing and interaction, which leads to social signals, which is what I've been talking about for the last few paragraphs! So, if you've been wondering how to get your website to rank well in the search engines and have been wondering what the secret sauce is, you can forget about some mystical equation that perfectly balances links, keyword density, and unicorn dust. It doesn't exist. And that's a good thing. Because search experience optimization is a much more common sense endeavor and anyone can figure it out with a little bit of time and effort.

0 notes

bluejanuarysky · 6 years ago

Text

SEO Is Now 'Search Experience Optimization'

The last few years, search engines such as Google, Bing, and even Apple, have been upgrading their algorithms and machine learning processes to account for the end-user's experience. But, since their algorithms are built upon the work completed by automated crawling bots (pieces of software that manually scour the internet), it has always been difficult for them to truly simulate the actions of a flesh and blood user. And it's not feasible for them to create an algorithm that's based on the anecdotal feedback of an army of individual users that submit their findings. Instead the search engines have started to write logic that, to their best estimation, is what a user experience should be on a website. Some of the SEO Blog9T criteria they are now measuring are site speed, mobile optimization, site structure, content, and dozens of other signals that should give the algorithm an idea of whether or not search engine users are getting what they expect from a website. Related: Top 7 Things You Don't Know About SEO So, what does this mean for companies, marketers, and website owners when it comes to their SEO? Basically what I, and dozens of other SEO industry experts, have been writing about for years has now come to fruition. We've exited the era of search engine optimization (SEO), and have now entered the new age of search experience optimization (also... SEO). And this is great news for anyone that performs digital marketing correctly. It means that "gaming" the system has become less and less viable, and that groups who rely on black hat techniques are seeing their efforts become less effective. So, how should websites be optimized for the search engines now that user experience plays such a big role? Ask questions, provide answers. Previously, marketers used to obsess over ideas like keyword density, meta descriptions, and link profiles. They had everything down to percentages and numbers and it all made sense when it was placed into an excel sheet. But how on earth was a website that was built from data on an excel sheet supposed to appeal to a human being? That's the problem the search engines set out to fix. And you need to accommodate the changes they've made. Related: Here's What Really Matters for SEO in 2016 Specifically, you need to think about your website visitors at every stage of your web design and marketing process. And this can be done easily with a series of question and answer audits you can ask yourself as you're creating your marketing campaign. For instance, if you're designing a web page and you're wondering how to make it appear in the Google search results, you should start by asking what your customers are typing into the search engine. This sounds rudimentary, but think it through for a moment. Previously marketers would optimize for terms such as "snow tires" or "weight loss products". But search habits have become more semantic and people are no longer typing in general terms, but rather they're asking questions. Thus, the search term "snow tires" has evolved into, "what are the best snow tires for a 2008 Ford F150?" And it's the companies that are answering the questions for their customers that are starting to win in the search engine rankings. So, stop fretting over how many times you mention the keyword in the content you're writing on the page, and instead start asking yourself what your customers need help with. Embrace mobile. If you've been living under a rock for the last 10 years, you may be shocked to hear that most people use smart phones and that smart phone searches now account for a more search volume than desktop searches. However, if you've been living in the world with the rest of us, this isn't too surprising. So, if everyone is using mobile devices to browse the web, shouldn't you likewise be optimizing your site for mobile traffic? Last year, Google made waves in the SEO community by releasing a major algorithm update that specifically improved the search engine visibility of mobile optimized sites over their less optimized competitors. It was lovingly termed " mobilegeddon" by marketers. And while it wasn't the end of the world, it did cause quite a stir with digital marketers. Across the board, mobilegeddon caused the search results to shuffle about and it didn't just impact small businesses. In fact, over 40% of Fortune 500 websites weren't mobile optimized at the time of the update. Which is staggering when you think that this all just happened less than a year ago. So, some major brands took hits to their online presence. Related: SEO Is So Hard That Even Google Needs Help With It And what this taught everyone, painfully in some cases, was that we needed to start prioritizing the needs of mobile internet users. You see, mobile users don't have the same bandwidth as desktop users. They have data limits and often the speed of their internet is much lower than a desktop computer. So, if they're trying to interact with a page that has a lot of data and animations to load, it's going to take forever for them to actually see something on their mobile device. Which, as we've been discussing, is not ideal for user experience. So, instead of building a website that is dramatic from a visual standpoint, but requires the equivalent effort of a million hamsters running on wheels to power up a switchboard to manage all of the data and bytes your site is throwing at the visitor, you should probably go with a more "minimalist" approach. I recently sat down with Mitul Gandhi, an SEO expert and the co-founder of SEOClarity, a next-generation enterprise-level SEO platform. "The search engines are no longer kidding around when it comes to mobile optimization," says Mitul. "Google has released AMP Pages, their tool to allow web designers to quickly optimize their pages for mobile devices, and Apple is building their entire algorithm based on the actions of mobile users, based on their massive mobile phone market share." As Mitul mentioned, Google has recently released a product called AMP pages, which stands for accelerated mobile pages. This product is a great solution for website owners and marketers that don't have web design degrees but understand they need to make significant changes to their website in order to accommodate mobile users. Pay Attention To Your User Experience Metrics Once you've optimized your website content and the mobile experience, the next steps are heavily data driven. You should now begin understanding what is happening when visitors are coming to your site and how they are interacting with it. To do this, you can utilize robust tools like the one Mitul's group offers, or for those that don't have the budget, you can analyze your Google Analytics data, which is free to use. What you'll want to look for are signals that tell you if you're providing a positive user experience past mobile speed and onsite content. To do this, look at metrics like time on site, bounce rate, pages per visit, return visitor rates, and conversions. This data will give you insights as to whether your visitors are enjoying themselves once they are browsing your site. Once you identify problem pages or sections, work on optimizing those through A/B testing. The reason you want to do this is the search engines are now leveraging the data that is mined from people using their internet browsers. Wait... Google, Bing, and Apple are tracking what you're doing on your browser? Um, yes. Why else would they sink millions of dollars into a piece of software they give away for free. Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge (previously Internet Explorer), and Apple Safari are all spying on you and reporting data points back to their creators. Now, I can't pretend to know whether they're using this data for nefarious reasons (I can almost bet they are), but we do Blog9T know that they use this data to understand whether users are having a positive user experience on a website. And the metrics I just told you to measure, are the same ones these browsers are reporting back to the search engines. Don't Forget Social Media Finally, you'll want to ensure that you are not just giving lip service to the idea of social media. Regardless of how dry and boring your industry is, you need to be engaging on social media. We have dozens of B2B clients in some pretty dull industries that still actively participate on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And they're not using us because they think they're going to get a bunch of customers from Facebook. But they understand that the search engines are taking major cues from social media signals as to whether a site offers a positive user experience or not. After all, if you enjoy something online, what do you usually do? You talk about it. And where do a lot of people talk about things? On social media. So, it's only logical that if you're trying to measure whether a site is providing a great user experience, that there would also be a social footprint signaling this. So, make sure that you're sending links back to pages on your site when you are posting on social media. And don't just link back to your homepage, but link to product pages, your company information page, and your location pages. These are all places that should be getting signals from the social networks. And this is also why you should be blogging, as I've talked about ad nauseam in previous articles. Not only do blogs provide great content to your visitors (read: user experience) they also encourage social media sharing and interaction, which leads to social signals, which is what I've been talking about for the last few paragraphs! So, if you've been wondering how to get your website to rank well in the search engines and have been wondering what the secret sauce is, you can forget about some mystical equation that perfectly balances links, keyword density, and unicorn dust. It doesn't exist. And that's a good thing. Because search experience optimization is a much more common sense endeavor and anyone can figure it out with a little bit of time and effort.

0 notes

mctvcker · 6 years ago

Text

SEO Is Now 'Search Experience Optimization'

The last few years, search engines such as Google, Bing, and even Apple, have been upgrading their algorithms and machine learning processes to account for the end-user's experience. But, since their algorithms are built upon the work completed by automated crawling bots (pieces of software that manually scour the internet), it has always been difficult for them to truly simulate the actions of a flesh and blood user. And it's not feasible for them to create an algorithm that's based on the anecdotal feedback of an army of individual users that submit their findings. Instead the search engines have started to write logic that, to their best estimation, is what a user experience should be on a website. Some of the criteria they are now measuring are site speed, mobile optimization, site structure, content, and dozens of other signals that should give the algorithm an idea of whether or not search engine users are getting what they expect from a website. Related: Top 7 Things You Don't Know About SEO So, what does this mean for companies, marketers, and website owners when it comes to their SEO? Basically what I, and dozens of other SEO industry experts, have been writing about for years has now come to fruition. We've exited the era of search engine optimization (SEO), and have now entered the new age of search experience optimization (also... SEO). And this is great news for anyone that performs digital marketing correctly. It means that "gaming" the system has become less and less viable, and that groups who rely on black hat techniques are seeing their efforts become less effective. So, how should websites be optimized for the search engines now that user experience plays such a big role? Ask questions, provide answers. Previously, marketers used to obsess over ideas like keyword density, meta descriptions, and link profiles. They had everything down to percentages and numbers and it all made sense when it was placed into an excel sheet. But how on earth was a website that was built from data on an excel sheet supposed to appeal to a human being? That's the problem the search engines set out to fix. And you need to accommodate the changes they've made. Related: Here's What Really Matters for SEO in 2016 Specifically, you need to think about your website visitors at every stage of your web design and marketing process. And this can be done easily with a series of question and answer audits you can ask yourself as you're creating your marketing campaign. For instance, if you're designing a web page and you're wondering how to make it appear in the Google search results, you should start by asking what your customers are typing into the search engine. This sounds rudimentary, but think it through for a moment. Previously marketers would optimize for terms such as "snow tires" or "weight loss products". But search habits have become more semantic and people are no longer typing in general terms, but rather they're asking questions. Thus, the search term "snow tires" has evolved into, "what are the best snow tires for a 2008 Ford F150?" And it's the companies that are answering the questions for their customers that are starting to win in the search engine rankings. So, stop fretting over how many times you mention the keyword in the content you're writing on the page, and instead start asking yourself what your customers need help with. Embrace mobile. If you've been living under a rock for the last 10 years, you may be shocked to hear that most people use smart phones and that smart phone searches now account for a more search volume than desktop searches. However, if you've been living in the world with the rest of us, this isn't too surprising. So, if everyone is using mobile devices to browse the web, shouldn't you likewise be optimizing your site for mobile traffic? Last year, Google made waves in the SEO community by releasing a major algorithm update that specifically improved the search engine visibility of mobile optimized sites over their less optimized competitors. It was lovingly termed " mobilegeddon" by marketers. And while it wasn't the end of the world, it did cause quite a stir with digital marketers. Across the board, mobilegeddon caused the search results to shuffle about and it didn't just impact small businesses. In fact, over 40% of Fortune 500 websites weren't mobile optimized at the time of the update. Which is staggering when you think that this all just happened less than a year ago. So, some major brands took hits to their online presence. Related: SEO Is So Hard That Even Google Needs Help With It And what this taught everyone, painfully in some cases, was that we needed to start prioritizing the needs of mobile internet users. You see, mobile users don't have the same bandwidth as desktop users. They have data limits and often the speed of their internet is much lower than a desktop computer. So, if they're trying to interact with a page that has a lot of data and animations to load, it's going to take forever for them to actually see something on their mobile device. Which, as we've been discussing, is not ideal for user experience. So, instead of building a website that is dramatic from a visual standpoint, but requires the equivalent effort of a million hamsters running on wheels to power up a switchboard to manage all of the data and bytes your site is throwing at the visitor, you should probably go with a more "minimalist" approach. I recently sat down with Mitul Gandhi, an SEO expert and the co-founder of SEOClarity, a next-generation enterprise-level SEO platform. "The search engines are no longer kidding around when it comes to mobile optimization," says Mitul. "Google has released AMP Pages, their tool to allow web designers to quickly optimize their pages for mobile devices, and Apple is building their entire algorithm based on the actions of mobile users, based on their massive mobile phone market share." As Mitul mentioned, Google has recently released a product Blog9T called AMP pages, which stands for accelerated mobile pages. This product is a great solution for website owners and marketers that don't have web design degrees but understand they need to make significant changes to their website in order to accommodate mobile users. Pay Attention To Your User Experience Metrics Once you've optimized your website content and the mobile experience, the next steps are heavily data driven. You should now begin understanding what is happening when visitors are coming to your site and how they are interacting with it. To do this, you can utilize robust tools like the one Mitul's group offers, or for those that don't have the budget, you can analyze your Google Analytics data, which is free to use. What you'll want to look for are signals that tell you if you're providing a positive user experience past mobile speed and onsite content. To do this, look at metrics like time on site, bounce rate, pages per visit, return visitor rates, and conversions. This data will give you insights as to whether your visitors are enjoying themselves once they are browsing your site. Once you identify problem pages or sections, work on optimizing those through A/B testing. The reason you want to do this is the search engines are now leveraging the data that is mined from people using their internet browsers. Wait... Google, Bing, and Apple are tracking what you're doing on your browser? Um, yes. Why else would they sink millions of dollars into a piece of software they give away for free. Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge (previously Internet Explorer), and Apple Safari are all spying on you and reporting data points back to their creators. Now, I can't pretend to know whether they're using this data for nefarious reasons (I can almost bet they are), but we do know that they use this data to understand whether users are having a positive user experience on a website. And the metrics I just told you to measure, are the same ones these browsers are reporting back to the search engines. Don't Forget Social Media Finally, you'll want to ensure that you are not just giving lip service to the idea of social media. Regardless of how dry and boring your industry is, you need to be engaging on social media. We have dozens of B2B clients in some pretty dull industries that still actively participate on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And they're not using us because they think they're going to get a bunch of customers from Facebook. But they understand that the search engines are taking major cues from social media signals as to whether a site offers a positive user experience or not. After SEO Blog9T all, if you enjoy something online, what do you usually do? You talk about it. And where do a lot of people talk about things? On social media. So, it's only logical that if you're trying to measure whether a site is providing a great user experience, that there would also be a social footprint signaling this. So, make sure that you're sending links back to pages on your site when you are posting on social media. And don't just link back to your homepage, but link to product pages, your company information page, and your location pages. These are all places that should be getting signals from the social networks. And this is also why you should be blogging, as I've talked about ad nauseam in previous articles. Not only do blogs provide great content to your visitors (read: user experience) they also encourage social media sharing and interaction, which leads to social signals, which is what I've been talking about for the last few paragraphs! So, if you've been wondering how to get your website to rank well in the search engines and have been wondering what the secret sauce is, you can forget about some mystical equation that perfectly balances links, keyword density, and unicorn dust. It doesn't exist. And that's a good thing. Because search experience optimization is a much more common sense endeavor and anyone can figure it out with a little bit of time and effort.

0 notes

itsmyrayeraye-blog · 6 years ago

Text

SEO Is Now 'Search Experience Optimization'

The last few years, search engines such as Google, Bing, and even Apple, have been upgrading their algorithms and machine learning processes to account for the end-user's experience. But, since their algorithms are built upon the work completed by automated crawling bots (pieces of software that manually scour the internet), it has always been difficult for them to truly simulate the actions of a flesh and blood user. And it's not feasible for them to create an algorithm that's based on the anecdotal feedback of an army of individual users that submit their findings. Instead the search engines have started to write logic that, to their best estimation, is what a user experience should be on a website. Some of the criteria they are now measuring are site speed, mobile optimization, site structure, content, and dozens of other signals that should give the algorithm an idea of whether or not search engine users are getting what they expect from a website. Related: Top 7 Things You Don't Know About SEO So, what does this mean for companies, marketers, and website owners when it comes to their SEO? Basically what I, and dozens of other SEO industry experts, have been writing about for years has now come to fruition. We've exited the era of search engine optimization (SEO), and have now entered the new age of search experience optimization (also... SEO). And this is great news for anyone that performs digital marketing correctly. It means that "gaming" the system has become less and less viable, and that groups who rely on black hat techniques are seeing their efforts become less effective. So, how should websites be optimized for the search engines now that user experience plays such a big role? Ask questions, provide answers. Previously, marketers used to obsess over ideas like keyword density, meta descriptions, and link profiles. They had everything down to percentages and numbers and it all made sense when it was placed into an excel sheet. But how on earth was a website that was built from data on an excel sheet supposed to appeal to a human being? That's the problem the search engines set out to fix. And you need to accommodate the changes they've made. Related: Here's What Really Matters for SEO in 2016 Specifically, you need to think about your website visitors at every stage of your web design and marketing process. And this can be done easily with a series of question and answer audits you can ask yourself as you're creating your marketing campaign. For instance, if you're designing a web page and you're wondering how to make it appear in the Google search results, you should start by asking what your customers are typing into the search engine. This sounds rudimentary, but think it through for a moment. Previously marketers would optimize for terms such as "snow tires" or "weight loss products". But search habits have become more semantic and people are no longer typing in general terms, but rather they're asking questions. Thus, the search term "snow tires" has evolved into, "what are the best snow tires for a 2008 Ford F150?" And it's the companies that are answering the questions for their customers that are starting to win in the search engine rankings. So, stop fretting over how many times you mention the keyword in the content you're writing on the page, and instead start asking yourself what your customers need help with. Embrace mobile. If you've been living under a rock for the last 10 years, you may be shocked to hear that most people use smart phones and that smart phone searches now account for a more search volume than desktop searches. However, if you've been living in the world with the rest of us, this isn't too surprising. So, if everyone is using mobile devices to browse the web, shouldn't SEO Blog9T you likewise be optimizing your site for mobile traffic? Last year, Google made waves in the SEO community by releasing a major algorithm update that specifically improved the search engine visibility of mobile optimized sites over their less optimized competitors. It was lovingly termed " mobilegeddon" by marketers. And while it wasn't the end of the world, it did cause quite a stir with digital marketers. Across the board, mobilegeddon caused the search results to shuffle about and it didn't just impact small businesses. In fact, over 40% of Fortune 500 websites weren't mobile optimized at the time of the update. Which is staggering when you think that this all just happened less than a year ago. So, some major brands took hits to their online presence. Related: SEO Is So Hard That Even Google Needs Help With It And what this taught everyone, painfully in some cases, was that we needed to start prioritizing the needs of mobile internet users. You see, mobile users don't have the same bandwidth as desktop users. They have data limits and often the speed of their internet is much lower than a desktop computer. So, if they're trying to interact with a page that has a lot of data and animations to load, it's going to take forever for them to actually see something on their mobile device. Which, as we've been discussing, is not ideal for user experience. So, instead of building a website that is dramatic from a visual standpoint, but requires the equivalent effort of a million hamsters running on wheels to power up a switchboard to manage all of the data and bytes your site is throwing at the visitor, you should probably go with a more "minimalist" approach. I recently sat down with Mitul Gandhi, an SEO expert and the co-founder of SEOClarity, a next-generation enterprise-level SEO platform. "The search engines are no longer kidding around when it comes to mobile optimization," says Mitul. "Google has released AMP Pages, their tool to allow web designers to quickly optimize their pages for mobile devices, and Apple is building their entire algorithm based on the actions of mobile users, based on their massive mobile phone market share." As Mitul mentioned, Google has recently released a product called AMP pages, which stands for accelerated mobile pages. This product is a great solution for website owners and marketers that don't have web design degrees but understand they need to make significant changes to their website in order to accommodate mobile users. Pay Attention To Your User Experience Metrics Once you've optimized your website content and the mobile experience, the next steps are heavily data driven. You Blog9T should now begin understanding what is happening when visitors are coming to your site and how they are interacting with it. To do this, you can utilize robust tools like the one Mitul's group offers, or for those that don't have the budget, you can analyze your Google Analytics data, which is free to use. What you'll want to look for are signals that tell you if you're providing a positive user experience past mobile speed and onsite content. To do this, look at metrics like time on site, bounce rate, pages per visit, return visitor rates, and conversions. This data will give you insights as to whether your visitors are enjoying themselves once they are browsing your site. Once you identify problem pages or sections, work on optimizing those through A/B testing. The reason you want to do this is the search engines are now leveraging the data that is mined from people using their internet browsers. Wait... Google, Bing, and Apple are tracking what you're doing on your browser? Um, yes. Why else would they sink millions of dollars into a piece of software they give away for free. Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge (previously Internet Explorer), and Apple Safari are all spying on you and reporting data points back to their creators. Now, I can't pretend to know whether they're using this data for nefarious reasons (I can almost bet they are), but we do know that they use this data to understand whether users are having a positive user experience on a website. And the metrics I just told you to measure, are the same ones these browsers are reporting back to the search engines. Don't Forget Social Media Finally, you'll want to ensure that you are not just giving lip service to the idea of social media. Regardless of how dry and boring your industry is, you need to be engaging on social media. We have dozens of B2B clients in some pretty dull industries that still actively participate on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And they're not using us because they think they're going to get a bunch of customers from Facebook. But they understand that the search engines are taking major cues from social media signals as to whether a site offers a positive user experience or not. After all, if you enjoy something online, what do you usually do? You talk about it. And where do a lot of people talk about things? On social media. So, it's only logical that if you're trying to measure whether a site is providing a great user experience, that there would also be a social footprint signaling this. So, make sure that you're sending links back to pages on your site when you are posting on social media. And don't just link back to your homepage, but link to product pages, your company information page, and your location pages. These are all places that should be getting signals from the social networks. And this is also why you should be blogging, as I've talked about ad nauseam in previous articles. Not only do blogs provide great content to your visitors (read: user experience) they also encourage social media sharing and interaction, which leads to social signals, which is what I've been talking about for the last few paragraphs! So, if you've been wondering how to get your website to rank well in the search engines and have been wondering what the secret sauce is, you can forget about some mystical equation that perfectly balances links, keyword density, and unicorn dust. It doesn't exist. And that's a good thing. Because search experience optimization is a much more common sense endeavor and anyone can figure it out with a little bit of time and effort.

0 notes

philipfloyd · 6 years ago

Text

cognitiveSEO Launches The Site Audit Tool That Fixes Your Site & Increases Your Ranks

One could say that we’ve become addicted to constant and never-ending self-improvement. But there’s a more important and more meaningful reason behind a continuous quest for self-improvement. It’s the very reason we get into the tech business in the first place: we see something in the environment that can be made better and we think we can provide a tool for that.

And, as the environment changes, so do we. The key is in that very word: “better” – not “good”, but “better”, which comes with the promise of continuous improvement.

This is why after creating the cognitiveSEO tool we have never really stopped working on new ideas. Sure, there was plenty of tinkering with the existing tool, in trying to give you the best analysis of off-page SEO issues, overlooking the quality of referring domains, your backlink profile, potentially broken links and so on. But a comprehensive SEO audit isn’t complete without looking at the on-site elements related to site architecture: the website pages, their loading time, the xml sitemap, meta tags and meta descriptions, content quality, etc. And this is how the cognitiveSEO Site Audit was born.

We’ve worked a lot (please read tremendously) to make this new Site Audit tool and give it all sorts of unique features.

What’s it all about?

In short, our brand new SEO website audit tool flags ALL possible OnPage SEO issues a site might have and provides recommendations on how to fix them. Putting it simply, the new tool allows you to improve your website’s onpage SEO performance, at the highest level of detail.

Therefore allow me to present you just some of the things our built-with-sweat Site Audit can do for you:

Find All Possible SEO Issues of Any Website and Get Recommendations on How to Fix Them

Use cognitiveSEO’s Site Audit to Get Improved SEO Results and Conversions

Improve User Experience by Correcting Site Architecture Problems

Cutting-Edge Technical Yet User Friendly Site Audits for Both Marketers and Professionals

Why cognitiveSEO Is the Only SEO Tool You’ll Ever Need

The addition of the Site Audit feature makes cognitiveSEO the only SEO software you’ll ever need.

What does this mean in terms of wins for you? At cognitiveSEO you now have everything SEO related all together: backlink analysis, technical SEO Audits, content audits, keywords research & rank tracking, content optimization, Google Penalty prevention and recovery, and much much more.

1. Find All Possible SEO Issues of Any Website and Get Recommendations on How to Fix Them

Although the title might be self explanatory, you need to know that the title is also very accurate.

Our website audit gives you a much wider array of SEO items to look at and can analyse issues of all types that might prevent you from reaching your best possible ranking.

Of course, off-page issues are highly important to work on at times, but they won’t target all the important search engines ranking factors. Here’s where the on-site factors step in. To make sure you’re not missing anything, you should be aware 24/7 of the offpage and onpage factors that influence your website’s performance.

The truth is, that with the ever-evolving search engines algorithms you need an efficient solution to keep your rankings safe. And cognitiveSEO does exactly that: it lets you know all the issues that might prevent your online business from getting the organic traffic and the high rankings you deserve.

Even more, cognitiveSEO’s technical SEO audit tool helps you detect all the weak points of your website before your users do, giving you a competitive advantage on the competitive market we are swimming in. Our SEO Audit Tool crawls all the pages it finds on your website, regardless of the size of your website, and provides a fully customized set of data easy to comprehend and visualize.

While knowing the exact problems your site encounters is great, just half of the job is done. But we take care at the other half as well, as we offer you precise recommendations on how to fix the error on your site so you can outrank your competitors and quickly increase your overall website performance. So, all you have to do is crawl your website with our SEO auditing tool. Pretty neat, right?

cognitiveSEO’s onpage analysis offers a set of unique features and numerous parameters that allows you to see what’s under the hood of your entire website and your SEO campaigns. Below are just some of the features that our comprehensive audit checklist contains.

✅ Duplicate Content & Duplicate Meta Tags

✅ Offpage & Onpage Ranking Factors

✅ Broken Internal & External links and Landing Pages

✅ Website Speed & Loading Time Issues

✅ AMP & Mobile Friendly Analysis

✅ HTTP Status Code Implementation Issues

✅ Incorrect Canonical Tags

✅ Website Architecture Issues

✅ Indexability Audit Reports

✅ Hreflang & International SEO Reports

✅ Linking Structure Problems

✅ Meta Descriptions, Title Tags & Content Issues

✅ Anchor text issues

✅ Social Media Issues

✅ Image Attributes Problems

✅ Malware Threats

✅ Unsecured Content Issues

✅ Google PageSpeed Integration

✅ XML Sitemap Issues

✅ Structured Data Problems

2. Use cognitiveSEO’s Site Audit to Get Improved SEO Results and Conversions

At the end of the day (or of the year) there are a lot of metrics we look at to measure our website’s success. But there is a particular one that is on everybody’s lips and which actually pays the bills: the conversion rate.

We are not going to talk about incredible tips and tricks on how to deliver overnight magic solutions for boosting your conversions. But about the tangible, actionable things that you ca do to improve you sales and conversions.

Performing a complete website audit will give you a deeper understanding of why your site is not generating the organic traffic you think it should or why your sales and conversions are not improving.

Let’s take for example the situation from the screenshot below. The analyzed website has pages that are really really difficult to reach. There are even pages you can reach after more than nine or ten clicks. In an era of instant data and solutions, having these type of pages could be a buzz killer…not to mention a conversion killer. One of those hard to reach pages could be an important one for you; one from which you would expect to generate conversions or any type of transaction.

Knowing what’s holding your conversions at a low rate is the first step for increasing them. Look for your website elements that could yield your biggest wins.

Once you run a complete website audit you will figure out that there is so little effort you can invest and the results could be so huge.

3. Improve User Experience by Correcting Site Architecture Problems

An excellent site architecture is mandatory for both search engines and for user experience. Why, you might ask.

If we think about the site architecture issues many websites encounter, we can understand how they can mess both search engine crawlers and the user’s experience.

Here are just a few examples:

3+ Clicks to reach any page – It’s known that pages that are 3 to 7 clicks away from the homepage are harder to reach while pages that are more than seven clicks away from the homepage may never be reached by a visitor that lands on the homepage. You should check that no important pages are too far aways from a click path point of view from the homepage. This way, both your visitor and the search engine could easily get to that page.

Internal anchor text bombing – Internal links are highly important; yet, if your landing page is not Wikipedia, having tons of internal links could do you more harm than good. Your best bet is to write internal anchor text for both visitors and engines.

The URLs are not search or user friendly – We’ve even conducted a study on this matter a while ago, finding out that the more concise and self explanatory the URL, the greater the chance to be higher up on ranks. Google loves shorter URLs but also your users. Really, as long as the length falls between 50 and 60 characters, you’re probably in a good spot. But as long as your URL looks something like this, http://www.example.com/product.aspx?ID=/c/YoZn1Z2v/46411526post=20908&action&IT=5f7d3d, you might want to reconsider your choices. Luckly, our Site Audit will let you know on any issues you might encounter with your URLs.

Dynamic URLs – If it’s even remotely possible, avoid them completely for your user and the search engine’s sake. Yet, knowing what URLs are dynamic can save you from lot of troubles.

With the flood of gigabytes and gigabytes of new information being created every second, search engines took on tremendous importance. Some even became so ever-present in our lives that we take their search results for granted, not wondering how they are produced or how the silent and irregular algorithmic update might influence them. So understanding why something is relevant, while something else is not, has become a separate mode of innovation and improvement in itself. It’s rank high in the search results or perish.

Our onpage SEO audit helps you diagnose all the SEO errors and problems with your site structure or website architecture so that you can deliver the best UX for your users. Our SEO checker also performs an in-depth competitor analysis so you can check what your competitors are doing and how can you beat them at their own game.

4. Cutting-Edge Technical Yet User Friendly Site Audits for both Marketers and Professionals

How do you recognize a good Site Audit tool? To be honest, there are many step by step guides on how to do that but one of them is by checking if it fits the needs of both marketers looking to improve the overall performance of a website and a skilled technical SEO who wants to dig deeper into the analysis.

cognitiveSEO’s powerful Site Audit offers you the exact customized data that fits your needs.

SEO audits are for both savvy, super technical SEO gurus and digital marketers or for content marketers coordinators. While speaking the language of all could be hard and why not, tricky, when it comes to SEO we need to understand that search engine optimization is a mean and not a purpose. Therefore, regardless of your job title, as long as you are part of the “online business team”, or you’re on the “improving your site” side, then you should take a sneak peak at a comprehensive website audit.

5. Why cognitiveSEO Is the Only SEO Tool You’ll Ever Need

By adding the new Site Audit onpage module, cognitiveSEO will be the only tool you’ll ever need, a complete toolset that will serve for all your SEO needs – both on and off page. Within the ever-growing tools landscape of SEO, it can be very comforting to be able to rely on a single provider for all your needs.

It’s not just comfort – relying on a single ecosystem means better integration, more efficiency and increased simplicity.

And if you don’t believe me yet, here is a short list of the features cognitiveSEO provides:

Technical SEO Website Audit

In-depth Backlink Analysis

Content Audit

SEO Visibility

Site Health Audit

Desktop, Mobile and Local Rank Tracking Tool

Keywords Research

Content Optimization

Social Visibility

Automated Digital Marketing Reports

Quick Backlink Checker

Shareable SEO Dashboard

Google Algorithm Changes

You need to know that the idea of having an all-in-one SEO analysis toolset started seven years ago from one man’s passion for SEO and digital marketing and his desire to find a cost-efficient solution that could meet all his professional requirements. Years have passed and cognitiveSEO has grown stronger each year, with lots of awesome users confirming the same need: an all-inclusive SEO software that would be reliable, accurate, affordable and would integrate anything an SEO Pro, webmaster or digital marketer would need.

We are proud to be standing here today, knowing that we’ve created something that both ourselves and our customers can use to improve their business.

With no hidden tricks and no shortcuts, but by using a powerful SEO software and the greatest tool of all: our brain.

The post cognitiveSEO Launches The Site Audit Tool That Fixes Your Site & Increases Your Ranks appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

from Marketing https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/20908/site-audit/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

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wjwilliams29 · 6 years ago

Text

cognitiveSEO Launches The Site Audit Tool That Fixes Your Site & Increases Your Ranks

And, as the environment changes, so do we. The key is in that very word: “better” – not “good”, but “better”, which comes with the promise of continuous improvement.

We’ve worked a lot (please read tremendously) to make this new Site Audit tool and give it all sorts of unique features.

What’s it all about?

Therefore allow me to present you just some of the things our built-with-sweat Site Audit can do for you:

Find All Possible SEO Issues of Any Website and Get Recommendations on How to Fix Them

Use cognitiveSEO’s Site Audit to Get Improved SEO Results and Conversions

Improve User Experience by Correcting Site Architecture Problems

Cutting-Edge Technical Yet User Friendly Site Audits for Both Marketers and Professionals

Why cognitiveSEO Is the Only SEO Tool You’ll Ever Need

The addition of the Site Audit feature makes cognitiveSEO the only SEO software you’ll ever need.

1. Find All Possible SEO Issues of Any Website and Get Recommendations on How to Fix Them

Although the title might be self explanatory, you need to know that the title is also very accurate.

Our website audit gives you a much wider array of SEO items to look at and can analyse issues of all types that might prevent you from reaching your best possible ranking.

✅ Duplicate Content & Duplicate Meta Tags

✅ Offpage & Onpage Ranking Factors

✅ Broken Internal & External links and Landing Pages

✅ Website Speed & Loading Time Issues

✅ AMP & Mobile Friendly Analysis

✅ HTTP Status Code Implementation Issues

✅ Incorrect Canonical Tags

✅ Website Architecture Issues

✅ Indexability Audit Reports

✅ Hreflang & International SEO Reports

✅ Linking Structure Problems

✅ Meta Descriptions, Title Tags & Content Issues

✅ Anchor text issues

✅ Social Media Issues

✅ Image Attributes Problems

✅ Malware Threats

✅ Unsecured Content Issues

✅ Google PageSpeed Integration

✅ XML Sitemap Issues

✅ Structured Data Problems

2. Use cognitiveSEO’s Site Audit to Get Improved SEO Results and Conversions

Knowing what’s holding your conversions at a low rate is the first step for increasing them. Look for your website elements that could yield your biggest wins.

Once you run a complete website audit you will figure out that there is so little effort you can invest and the results could be so huge.

3. Improve User Experience by Correcting Site Architecture Problems

An excellent site architecture is mandatory for both search engines and for user experience. Why, you might ask.

If we think about the site architecture issues many websites encounter, we can understand how they can mess both search engine crawlers and the user’s experience.

Here are just a few examples:

Dynamic URLs – If it’s even remotely possible, avoid them completely for your user and the search engine’s sake. Yet, knowing what URLs are dynamic can save you from lot of troubles.

4. Cutting-Edge Technical Yet User Friendly Site Audits for both Marketers and Professionals

cognitiveSEO’s powerful Site Audit offers you the exact customized data that fits your needs.

5. Why cognitiveSEO Is the Only SEO Tool You’ll Ever Need

It’s not just comfort – relying on a single ecosystem means better integration, more efficiency and increased simplicity.

And if you don’t believe me yet, here is a short list of the features cognitiveSEO provides:

Technical SEO Website Audit

In-depth Backlink Analysis

Content Audit

SEO Visibility

Site Health Audit

Desktop, Mobile and Local Rank Tracking Tool

Keywords Research

Content Optimization

Social Visibility

Automated Digital Marketing Reports

Quick Backlink Checker

Shareable SEO Dashboard

Google Algorithm Changes

We are proud to be standing here today, knowing that we’ve created something that both ourselves and our customers can use to improve their business.

With no hidden tricks and no shortcuts, but by using a powerful SEO software and the greatest tool of all: our brain.

The post cognitiveSEO Launches The Site Audit Tool That Fixes Your Site & Increases Your Ranks appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

0 notes

kivircikedebiyatii · 6 years ago

Text

SEO Is Now 'Search Experience Optimization'

The last few years, search engines such as Google, Bing, and even Apple, have been upgrading their algorithms and machine learning processes to account for the end-user's experience. But, since their algorithms are built upon the work completed by automated crawling bots (pieces of software that manually scour the internet), it has always been difficult for them to truly simulate the actions of a flesh and blood user. And it's not feasible for them to create an algorithm that's based on the anecdotal feedback of an army of individual users that submit their findings. Instead the search engines have started to write logic that, to their best estimation, is what a user experience should be on a website. Some of the criteria they are now measuring are site speed, mobile optimization, site structure, content, and dozens of other signals that should give the algorithm an idea of whether or not search engine users are getting what they expect from a website. Related: Top 7 Things You Don't Know About SEO So, what does this mean for companies, marketers, and website owners when it comes to their SEO? Basically what I, and dozens of other SEO industry experts, have been writing about for years has now come to fruition. We've exited the era of search engine optimization (SEO), and have now entered the new age of search experience optimization (also... SEO). And this is great news for anyone that performs digital marketing correctly. It means that "gaming" the system has become less and less viable, and that groups who rely on black hat techniques are seeing their efforts become less effective. So, how should websites be optimized for the search engines now that user experience plays such a big role? Ask questions, provide answers. Previously, marketers used to obsess over ideas like keyword density, meta descriptions, and link profiles. They had everything down to percentages and numbers and it all made sense when it was placed into an excel sheet. But how on earth was a website that was built from data on an excel sheet supposed to appeal to a human being? That's the problem the search engines set out to fix. And you need to accommodate the changes they've made. Related: Here's What Really Matters for SEO in 2016 Specifically, you need to think about your website visitors at every stage of your web design and marketing process. And this can be done easily with a series of question and answer audits you can ask yourself as you're creating your marketing campaign. For instance, if you're designing a web page and you're wondering how to make it appear in the Google search results, you should start by asking what your customers are typing into the search engine. This sounds rudimentary, but think it through for a moment. Previously marketers would optimize for terms such as "snow tires" or "weight loss products". But search habits have become more semantic and people are no longer typing in general terms, but rather they're asking questions. Thus, the search term "snow tires" has evolved into, "what are the best snow tires for a 2008 Ford F150?" And it's the companies that are answering the questions for their customers that are starting to win in the search engine rankings. So, stop fretting over how many times you mention the keyword in the content you're writing on the page, and instead start asking yourself what your customers need help with. Embrace mobile. If you've been living under a rock for the last 10 years, you may be shocked to hear that most people use smart phones and that smart phone searches now account for a more search volume than desktop SEO Blog9T searches. However, if you've been living in the world with the rest of us, this isn't too surprising. So, if everyone is using mobile devices to browse the web, shouldn't you likewise be optimizing your site for mobile traffic? Last year, Google made waves in the SEO community by releasing a major algorithm update that specifically improved the search engine visibility of mobile optimized sites over their less optimized competitors. It was lovingly termed " mobilegeddon" by marketers. And while it wasn't the end of the world, it did cause quite a stir with digital marketers. Across the board, mobilegeddon caused the search results to shuffle about and it didn't just impact small businesses. In fact, over 40% of Fortune 500 websites weren't mobile optimized at the time of the update. Which is staggering when you think that this all just happened less than a year ago. So, some major brands took hits to their online presence. Related: SEO Is So Hard That Even Google Needs Help With It And what this taught everyone, painfully in some cases, was that we needed to start prioritizing the needs of mobile internet users. You see, mobile users don't have the same bandwidth as desktop users. They have data limits and often the speed of their internet is much lower than a desktop computer. So, if they're trying to interact with a page that has a lot of data and animations to load, it's going to take forever for them to actually see something on their mobile device. Which, as we've been discussing, is not ideal for user experience. So, instead of building a website that is dramatic from a visual standpoint, but requires the equivalent effort of a million hamsters running on wheels to power up a switchboard to manage all of the data and bytes your site is throwing at the visitor, you should probably go with a more "minimalist" approach. I blog9t SEO recently sat down with Mitul Gandhi, an SEO expert and the co-founder of SEOClarity, a next-generation enterprise-level SEO platform. "The search engines are no longer kidding around when it comes to mobile optimization," says Mitul. "Google has released AMP Pages, their tool to allow web designers to quickly optimize their pages for mobile devices, and Apple is building their entire algorithm based on the actions of mobile users, based on their massive mobile phone market share." As Mitul mentioned, Google has recently released a product called AMP pages, which stands for accelerated mobile pages. This product is a great solution for website owners and marketers that don't have web design degrees but understand they need to make significant changes to their website in order to accommodate mobile users. Pay Attention To Your User Experience Metrics Once you've optimized your website content and the mobile experience, the next steps are heavily data driven. You should now begin understanding what is happening when visitors are coming to your site and how they are interacting with it. To do this, you can utilize robust tools like the one Mitul's group offers, or for those that don't have the budget, you can analyze your Google Analytics data, which is free to use. What you'll want to look for are signals that tell you if you're providing a positive user experience past mobile speed and onsite content. To do this, look at metrics like time on site, bounce rate, pages per visit, return visitor rates, and conversions. This data will give you insights as to whether your visitors are enjoying themselves once they are browsing your site. Once you identify problem pages or sections, work on optimizing those through A/B testing. The reason you want to do this is the search engines are now leveraging the data that is mined from people using their internet browsers. Wait... Google, Bing, and Apple are tracking what you're doing on your browser? Um, yes. Why else would they sink millions of dollars into a piece of software they give away for free. Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge (previously Internet Explorer), and Apple Safari are all spying on you and reporting data points back to their creators. Now, I can't pretend to know whether they're using this data for nefarious reasons (I can almost bet they are), but we do know that they use this data to understand whether users are having a positive user experience on a website. And the metrics I just told you to measure, are the same ones these browsers are reporting back to the search engines. Don't Forget Social Media Finally, you'll want to ensure that you are not just giving lip service to the idea of social media. Regardless of how dry and boring your industry is, you need to be engaging on social media. We have dozens of B2B clients in some pretty dull industries that still actively participate on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And they're not using us because they think they're going to get a bunch of customers from Facebook. But they understand that the search engines are taking major cues from social media signals as to whether a site offers a positive user experience or not. After all, if you enjoy something online, what do you usually do? You talk about it. And where do a lot of people talk about things? On social media. So, it's only logical that if you're trying to measure whether a site is providing a great user experience, that there would also be a social footprint signaling this. So, make sure that you're sending links back to pages on your site when you are posting on social media. And don't just link back to your homepage, but link to product pages, your company information page, and your location pages. These are all places that should be getting signals from the social networks. And this is also why you should be blogging, as I've talked about ad nauseam in previous articles. Not only do blogs provide great content to your visitors (read: user experience) they also encourage social media sharing and interaction, which leads to social signals, which is what I've been talking about for the last few paragraphs! So, if you've been wondering how to get your website to rank well in the search engines and have been wondering what the secret sauce is, you can forget about some mystical equation that perfectly balances links, keyword density, and unicorn dust. It doesn't exist. And that's a good thing. Because search experience optimization is a much more common sense endeavor and anyone can figure it out with a little bit of time and effort.

0 notes