Thursday 15 January 2015

SEO in a Nutshell




Thought I’d take five minutes out to re-look at what SEO is all about.  We talk about it all of the time but what does it REALLY mean.


SEO stands for “search engine optimisation.” It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines.


In a nutshell it means getting your website showing on the first pages of search results (and ideally number one).  Forget about being at the top of page two or page three.  Page one is where you need to be placed to really be beneficial.


Fundamentally, commercial organisations optimise their websites to attract new business. It’s as simple as that.  By optimising their websites for search engines, companies can ensure that people will be able to find them easily online.


Choosing your keywords you want to target is the first part of optimising your website for search engines. It’s also the most important thing of SEO and sometimes the hardest part.

So what determines what’s shown on the first page or search results?


Search engines all have their own ranking algorithms that are secret and not known publicly. However there are some techniques we can employ using those keyword phrases to optimise your website (or a particular page) to help that you show on the first page of search results.  


Here’s a useful SEO keyword checklist:


  • Make sure they are not goo generic - try to be as specific as possible.  For example, if you’re a hotel, you wouldn’t just target ‘hotel’ but perhaps add in the location name or if you’re a budget hotel, add ‘budget’ or ‘cheap’ in the mix.
  • Consider another phase – Instead of hotel, you may want consider an alternative for example ‘accommodation
  • Don’t have too many – Having too many keywords in your phrase can dilute they strength – aim for about 3 to 5
  • Make sure they are relevant to your business – the more closely the keywords relate to your website, the better they will perform.
  • Don’t use superfluous words such as ‘great’ ‘amazing’ etc.

Hope this helps!

Click here for more.

Tuesday 6 January 2015

Spin Up A Cloud BI System for Free



Gartner-rated business intelligence provider Yellowfin has made an agreement with Amazon Web Services enabling organisations to create their own cloud BI environment, for one year for free. The size options are limited but certainly enough for to get started.

Whether you just want to see for yourself how a best of breed BI tool works, run a proof of concept or even a small project. Read the user reviews here.

The Yellowfin platform includes reporting, analytics, collaboration, mapping and mobile features,100% web-based. 

Launch Yellowfin directly from the AWS marketplace and get started in minutes with your free trial that enables 3 users to create and share unlimited reports and dashboards for 12 months. Then upgrade at any time to scale up the system.

It’s really easy to set up, you follow these steps: http://wiki.yellowfin.com.au/display/USER71/Yellowfin+on+AWS

If you need a hand give us a call on 0800 652 4050.

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