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How to Build an Effective E-Commerce Store

There’s no disputing the impact that e-commerce has had on the business world. With predictions that the e-commerce sector will soon surpass $2 trillion in sales, those that have taken advantage of this rapid growth have recognized its importance. Consumers now expect to be able to buy what they want, when they want, and have it delivered to their front door as quickly as possible. The brick and mortar stores were always going to struggle to adapt to that need, although even the slowest businesses are starting to catch on. If you’re in the process of building your first e-commerce store or have recently launched one and the results have been underwhelming, then here are some useful tips that may help.

How Not to Blow All Money on a Scam

Nothing beats the craft of self-proclaimed elites that have perfected the art of enticing innocent people into a world of empty promises. You will drool at the thought of making real money with games at your fingertips, and soon enough, you will have unlocked a world of seeming possibilities.

3 Types of Sensitive Data Your Company Probably Handles

Every business handles some type of sensitive data, whether they realize it or not. Sensitive data is defined as information that needs to be protected against unwarranted exposure. It is the business’s responsibility to safeguard and protect sensitive data. Here are three types of sensitive data your company probably handles, and how to keep it safe.

Customer Data

Image via Flickr by Ervins Strauhmanis

Customer data can be anything from credit card numbers to email addresses to passwords. This type of data is collected either during a sale or during an exchange where a customer signs up to use a service or product. Customer data also includes identifying information collected through a phone, email, or mail campaign.

There have been many well-covered customer data breaches over the last five years, from retailers to online systems. Each has been met with a harsh backlash from the customers whose data was compromised.

Intellectual Property

Intellectual property is anything that a company or business uses to create, make, or sell their product or service. Intellectual property includes trade secrets, proprietary computer code, private market research, designs, and files. This data is often kept on the cloud through a system such as Office 365. The loss of intellectual property can have a significant impact on a business’s revenues and their reputation.

In addition to the intellectual property held by a company for its own purposes, many companies also hold intellectual property for a business partner. An example of this is when a company is building one piece of a machine and has the design files stored for the entirety of the project. The loss of such files could break a non-disclosure agreement and harm a partner relationship.

Employee Data

A business with employees will store a plethora of sensitive data. That data includes employee’s addresses, banking information, Social Security number, family information, and salaries. Breaches of employee data security can open the door to identity theft for the employee and lawsuits for the employers. It is critical that employee data, as well as other types of sensitive data, are protected.

How to Keep Sensitive Data Safe

Keeping sensitive data safe is the responsibility of the business who holds it, and they can do so by implementing the appropriate safety protocols across their digital storage systems.

First, ensure any digital systems have data controls in place that will safeguard against any malicious attacks or attempts to hack the information. A combination of best practices and up-to-date security protocols need to be managed by competent security professionals on a consistent basis.

Second, regulate who has access to the information. By implementing user roles and permissions, a company can control who is granted access to sensitive data and ensure that those who have access are properly trained in its handling.

Third, keep a vigilant watch for risks and scan for breaches. Catching a hack early can often minimize the loss, and therefore the damages associated with the loss.

All businesses store some form of sensitive data, and understanding how to handle and safeguard that information is critical to reducing the risk of revenue loss and damage to the business’s reputation. By knowing where and how sensitive data is stored, a business can do their best to keep it secure.

What’s Important in Essay Writing?

There is no such student who has heard nothing about essay writing or has never been assigned to working on this task. Essay writing is one of the favorite academic assignments of professors in all educational establishments of any educational level. And there is a reason for that – essay writing develops skills for independent creative thinking and expressing your thoughts on paper. It is also a good way to check knowledge of a student in particular subjects, and student’s ability to research and prove their point. If it is the first time you are dealing with essay writing, we have some valuable information to share with you.

Important Aspects of Essay Writing

When just you start working on an essay example you should take into consideration some important aspects of writing.

Logic – make sure that you write something meaningful, that each word makes sense, and that all sentences are logically connected. Avoid jumping from one idea to another; your thoughts must be revealed in a consistent manner.

Structure – although essay writing is considered to be free writing, a paper structure is highly important here. An essay should consist of the introduction, body, and conclusion – all connected by the same topic.

Essay content – it is impossible to write a winning essay without doing an in-depth topic analysis, searching for relevant information, or any data that you can use in the paper.

As a general rule, an essay is estimated based on the above criteria, with teacher’s close attention being also paid to grammatical, punctuation, and formatting errors that can be in your writing.

Paper Structure

Your introduction should contain background information related to the topic or some relevant questions addressed to the reader that can motivate him to think about the importance and topicality of your essay theme.

When working on the introduction, answer the following questions – they will help you build up a consistent intro:

Why is the topic I am writing about important?
What concepts should I include in my reflections on the topic?
Can I divide the topic into several sub-themes? If yes, what are they?
Is it necessary to give definitions of terms used in the subject of an essay?

Having answered these questions, you will be able to draft a catchy introduction and formulate main points for the essay body part.

Body

Body is the theoretical basis of the chosen topic. In this part, you should provide your arguments and their justification based on specific data. Body part should contain the main content of the essay. So writing the body is the most difficult stage. Therefore, sub-themes can be of great importance. They will help you divide the global theme into small areas to explore on separately.

Conclusion

Conclusion is a generalization and summing-up of all the information on the topic with an indication of scope. No additional explanations, refinements, or reinforcements should be here. It is recommended to use repetitions, illustrations, citations, and impressive statements in the concluding paragraph.

Although an essay has a three-part structure, all its parts should be logically connected and proper transition words and sentences should be provided to make the flow smooth.

What to Avoid in Essay Writing

DO NOT include in the essay information that does not support your opinion.
DO NOT write a personal biography or details of your life.
DO NOT be afraid to start from the beginning if the work that has already been written does not answer the question of an essay.
DO NOT use a common set of banal phrases and allegations.
DO NOT exaggerate.
DO NOT use simple sentences.
DO NOT use citations without the author’s name.

We hope that the above recommendations were useful for you. Follow each piece of advice and make sure to re-read the completed paper before its submission. Thus, you will eliminate any typos, grammatical, punctuation, or formatting errors and submit a quality piece. Even a small mistake can spoil an impression after reading even the most brilliant essay. Eliminate all the risks like this!

Personalized Game Experience is the Need of the Hour

How many times you have simply skipped through an ad, without even looking at it twice? We do it quite often, right? This is because, most of the time, we don’t find these ads relevant to us. It just doesn’t project what we want or need. Getting your message across is imperative for any digital medium to work. Personalization is the key to communicate your message across.

Seeing offers, promotions and the like that has nothing to do with their lifestyle or interest is annoying and doesn’t capture the attention of the consumer. Well, this is not limited just to the advertising field. This holds equally true to the games we have installed on our mobiles or downloaded on our PCs. Without it connecting with us on a personal level, it just doesn’t work.

As per a recent report by McKinsey, personalization can bring the acquisition costs down by 50% and increase revenue by 5 to 15% and also improve the efficiency of marketing by 10 to 30%. Personalization is definitely the winner here, but to manage it successfully there are a few things that need to be right.

Use of Data Based Intelligence

Getting insight on consumer behavior is not very difficult today. With the advancement in technology, one can get data on users via their online browsing patterns, social platforms and device usage. What needs to be done right is to navigate through this big data landscape and put it to effective use, in order to tap into audiences that are interested in the product. With multiple types of games available readily on the Play Store and for online play, it is important to know which player is really interested in your game.

For example, when players are targeted to play card games, then the expected behavior is rummy game download or perhaps any other game that is targeted at. Insights about the player can be at a broad level like the basic demographic information to something more specific like hobbies, special interest, buying intent or even historical behaviorial patterns. The more accurate you can get about your audience, the more personalized game experience can be provided to the player.

Automation

When on one hand understanding the user is at the core to improve your game application, it is also equally important to make it smooth and simple to use as well. Imagine a game, where you expect your user to jump from one tab to the other to make payments, open different levels or manage his account on the gaming app. Will your player really be interested in playing on such a platform? The audience today is smart and what is expected is a seamless gameplay experience. As much as the interface is automated, the lesser hiccups will be faced and the player can enjoy the game uninterrupted. If one thinks that game automation is only on the testing segment then it’s wrong. Automation works on customer service notifications and the representatives can dynamically get alerts and assist the player as soon as he faces a challenge.

Native Captures Attention

The games that we grew up playing are always close to the heart. When such games take the shape of digital medium, then players connect to it instantly. The players are already familiar with the game and when they get to play it on their mobiles, they get glued to it in no time. There are puzzles, card games and board games that fall into this category. Players enjoy games like scrabble, ludo, and love to play rummy and other card games when it is available on apps and websites. These games are played from ages and loved by all. So, definitely when these games connect with the player instantly. There are games that are made on the popular movies as well. Once more, these games give a quick recollection of blockbusters and players download the games to play their version of the movie.

Apt Content is Quite Important

A combination of personalized and contextual content gives a good opportunity for brands to get creative with the kind of content they put in the game. This helps in getting a more targeted audience and hence the player retention and engagement is high. Games available in multiple languages along with a regional touch, do much better as compared to games available in only one language option. Another thing that’s extremely important in a game is the appropriate format and the source where it is available. India is predominantly an Android using nation and hence if the game is available for Android users, then it taps into a range of audience. However, having the game available for iOS, Android and Windows is the best solution. Of course, having seamless multi-device functionality allows the player to enjoy the game on the device of his choice.

Conclusion

There are over 2 billion gaming apps in India. Not all of them make it to the top of the chart. It is games with personalized experience, smooth gameplay and an engaging plot that players prefer.

All You Need To Know About Website Builders

Website builders are among the best ways for regular people to easily design as well as build their own sites without writing any code. There is no actual requirement of technical knowledge for the people, whether you are an entrepreneur or simply a hobbyist to create a website.

So, what exactly are website builders? Let’s look into it.

A website builder is a way to build your own website all by yourself. Gone is the time where you have to manually write HTML code to develop a website. Dreamweaver used to be the pioneer when it comes to building a website. But times have changed. People don’t have any inclination to learn how to code in order to build a website from scratch. Most of them don’t have enough money to hire a professional in order to do so. Current website builders now exist to fill this vast gap and provides the flexibility of code without writing any code. There are more about the freedom from building the website from scratch and they focus more on the bigger picture. They provide templates and allow you to customize them as per your requirements easily. In case you wish to add any basic details, then you can leave it there and you can continue to make changes later on. You are provided with the ability to change everything. All of this can be done online. You don’t have to download any website building software in order to make the website on your computer. You simply have to visit the website, log in, and manage your website from there. They can easily take care of all the related technical stuff such as hosting, domain name etc. in case you want them to. Control and convenience is the basic foundation of website builders. They allow you to easily get a fully functional site up and running without wasting any time. You can make a website within a few hours. Most of the website builders offer tutorial videos to help you in doing so.

The main value of website builders is to allow you to focus on function and design of the website. They tend to come in one of the two forms: generated, and drag and drop.

The Drag and Drop builders actually do as you say. You can easily position all the elements of the page wherever you want them to be and whichever style that you wish. A generated website will ask you a series of questions and then move on to building a website based on the answers that you provide. You can easily customize the results as well as add or remove different elements but most of them are a more structured experience. In the backend, these website builders also help you in SEO or search engine optimization which gives your website to get the best chance possible in order to rank well on search engines like Google. Most of them offer analytics which allows you to easily see how many people are actually visiting your website, what exactly they are doing and where they are mostly coming from.

Available Website Builders.

There are a plethora of website builders which are coming in the market and few of them are that good that you expect them to be. As the market tends to grow, most of them will offer better services. But the main question lies that what good website builders are currently present.

It actually depends on the wants and requirement of you. There isn’t any one-size-fits-all website builder. It can’t simply exist. There are too many different variables which are involved. However, there is a selection of best website builders which can meet your demands.

We wanted to provide you with an opinion on this particular question so we conducted in-depth research to find out the best website builders. The user experience tests are duly collated with different features, pricing, support and we have made a list of easiest website builders that you can use.

Keeping this in mind, the following website builders are meant for people who don’t have any coding background. These website builders are certainly quite easy to use and provide good support as well as intuitive interfaces. However, they don’t provide a lot of backend control like their advanced brethren but in case you wish to make your website without any hassle than these are the best suited for you.

Wix

Wix is considered to be the best drag and drop and easy website builder present in the market. It offers extensive complete control over the look of your website. You can position any element like logo by simply dragging it and dropping at the place you want. In case you wish to add text, you can also do that with the same process. The interface can be quite overwhelming during the initial period, but once you get hold of it, then Wix is among the easiest website builders to use. For those who are new to designing of websites and wish to learn then it is the best available option. It offers you the freedom to learn basic principles of web design like what to put on the navigation bar, how to present the homepage etc. We have found that Wix has the complete combination of ease of use as well as customer support that is currently peerless. Whether it is novice or professional, one can easily use it. We think it is the best options for the people who are new to web design. It allows you to create simple websites.

GoDaddy

In our testing, it performed really well. It provides a much detailed and guided building experience and they do it by simply in a way which is easy to follow as well as intuitive. To get any small as well as polished website from scratch, there isn’t any website builder than GoDaddy. It provides domain registration along with hosting too.

Now, let’s move on to more advanced website builders.

Squarespace

It is a mysterious, suave and a bit pretentious website builder. It is among the most stylish platform at present and the backend is quite sophisticated to handle huge and high-demand website like online magazines. It is rightly renowned for the wide range of quality templates, all of which are completely optimized to work well on both mobile phones and desktops.

Shopify

It was launched in 2006 and it has seen an exponential rise in the recent years. As more people are getting into selling products on the internet, they require somewhere to sell them. That’s where Shopify made its mark. It is quite an effective e-commerce website builder which provide a great framework to set up an online store.

Limitations of Website Builders

Website builders aren’t as perfect as they seem. There are different weaknesses you should know along with their strengths. Websites are quite a serious business and you wouldn’t like to saddle yourself by choosing the wrong platform. Mentioned below are the potential drawbacks and limitations of website builders.

Customization Limits

Few website builders can be a bit restrictive when it comes down to customizing the website. It is the price which you have to pay for the convenience and the structure. Drag and drop builders like Wix strive to provide you with as much control as they can possibly offer, but they have their own limitations. For getting unique functionality and presentation, there is no alternative to HTML and CSS to create a website.

Shared Hosting

Your website needs a place to be stored in order to allow people to access it anytime and from anywhere. This is called hosting. Most of the website builders provide this, but in case your website is sharing different resources with other websites in the system then it is called shared hosting. It is not an issue for smaller websites but as they are scaled up then it can become a risk. Websites on shared hosting generally have the risk of slower loading speeds and even complete outage in case there is more number of people visiting the website than the maximum limit.

Lack of Backup

With the exception of IM Creator and Weebly, website builders often don’t allow you to back up your website. This makes it quite difficult to move the website from one platform to another. Website builders wish to keep their customers once they have got them and this is why they don’t allow them to take backup.

Most of you might never face these problems. There are small limitations but it is required to being clear about website websites to know their exact drawbacks. Most of the website builders offer freemium services or free trial which provides you the ample time to easily weigh them before spending any money.

Conclusion

Website development has undergone a massive transformation over the years. It is no longer restricted to web developers who use to have the monopoly on web designing. Website builders have offered the chance for everyone to build their online presence by making functional and stylish websites. You can easily push out any website in a matter of hours in case you really want to, however, we recommend that you take more time.

There is a wide range of excellent website builders, but we can’t say for sure which is the best website builder. It all depends on your actual requirements and needs. In case ease of use is most important to you then you can go ahead and sign up for a free trial of any website builder that you like such as Wix or GoDaddy. In case you wish to develop your technical knowledge while building a website then you should go forward to use Squarespace which is recommended by us. Just try them out.

3 Ways to Increase Customer Retention Through Your Marketing Strategy

Getting customers can be easy at times, but keeping them is another thing. However, in order to run a business, it’s key that you have consistent income as that’s one of the only ways that you can plan ahead, expand, and enjoy continued success. As great as getting new customers is, keeping old ones is just as essential. There are numerous ways that you can keep customers coming back time and time again, and many require an approach that centers on the customer and their needs. There are also ways that you can use your marketing strategy to help ensure customers stick around. On that note, you’re going to find three ways how you can increase customer retention through your marketing strategy below.

5 simple solution to edit PDF (How to edit PDF with ease)?

In case you’re always submitting or sharing PDF files via email or over the web finding the best solution to edit PDF and send a perfect document can be confusing with so many choices. PDF is a digital, portable yet short document format allowing anyone to send files others can read no matter the type of software, hardware or gadget used to view the document. To adapt photos and text to your PDF viewing device modification and editing might be needed, which isn’t that easy in PDF. However, the good news is it can be done. Windows to Mac users can modify graphics and texts in PDF format wherever they’re through a number of tools. Here are the best simple solutions to edit PDF.

How to Edit a PDF with PDFelement

While your default PDF tools might not be able to make changes in the PDF, you can do so with PDFelement. It is a lightweight, robust Adobe Acrobat Alternative. Whether you want to read, edit, annotate, create, convert, protect or OCR PDFs, PDFelement has it all. The app feels capable, stable and surprisingly easy to use. When we first reviewed PDFelement, we were delighted by how well it achieved a balance between cost, ease of use, and a comprehensive feature set. Now let’s see How to edit a pdf using PDFelement with ease.

Editing a PDF with PDFelement

Visit https://pdf.wondershare.com/ and download PDFelement in your computer.

Open the target PDF using PDFelement.
Start editing text and images on the PDF. Simply click Edit Text from the top menu and through double clicks on text to be changed begin replacing and typing what you want, including changing the color, sizes to font sizes.
Delete or add the text by going to Edit Text and select the text you need to remove. Use keyboard “Delete” or “Backspace” to do this. Clicking Add Text allows you to draw boxes using your mouse and adding the text.

PDFelement includes great features such as OCR (optical character recognition) allowing you to edit text in scanned or image-based PDFs and convert any type of PDF to various formats such as EPUB, Excel, Word, and Image to PPT. Other features include easy and quick annotation and editing of PDFs, signing contracts and filling forms easily and compatibility with MacOS and Windows.

PDFelement is free to download. Premium standard version costs a one-time $59.95， now it provides an exclusive 50% OFF discount for a limited time. If you want to look for the more advanced feature, please take a look at its’ Professional version (from $99.95). Find out more difference about standard version and professional version, click here.

How to Edit PDF Online (Sejda)

Online PDF editor software is a free tool allowing you to sign and edit PDF files on the web without incurring any cost. You can fill your PDF document or form and even add shapes, links, text, and images as desired, including annotating and editing existing links and text in PDF. Features are basic and useful if all you want is a simple PDF editing process.

Editing PDF Online

Go to Sejda website (or any PDF online editor site).
Upload the PDF you need to edit (or drag and drop it) into the website. One of the things you notice with online editing software such as Sejda is that uploads are done over encrypted connections in a private and safe process. After you’re through with editing, files are then deleted. They also come with desktop features allowing you to work on your documents on your PC. With cloud computing virtually inescapable, online PDF editing tools also include cloud compatibility features, such as Google Drive and Dropbox where you can pick your PDF documents from.
Ensure your PDF file has been uploaded.
On the top menu choose the addition or edit type you need to complete. Ensure you’ve selected the Text tool at the toolbar on the top.
Use mouse on the document to choose what to modify and edit as needed. The text that needs editing is what you click.
For existing text modification in Sejda, choose Text on the toolbar and hoover cursor on the text you want to modify.
Once done ensure all changes are saved and download the PDF as edited. Carry this out by clicking Apply Changes tab to ensure all the changes you’ve effected are applied. You can then go ahead and click Download to deliver the PDF with all the edits as you wanted them in your computer.

Sejda is free to use and good for short PDF modifications but doesn’t accept any PDF above 50MB. Sejda also deletes your edited PDFs after 5 hours. The features are also minimal with a basic content eraser and no OCR.

How to edit a PDF on Windows (Acrobat)

Acrobat PDF editor tool that works for windows is provided by two versions. One is Acrobat Standard DC for Windows only, guaranteeing reliable creation, signing and editing of PDF files and available from $12.99 per month or $155.88 per year. You’re also required to annually commit to pay for the tool and team licenses are also available.

The second version for both Windows and Mac users is Acrobat Pro DC, assuring complete PDF features and much more and begins from $14.99 per month or $179.88 per year. You’re also required to make annual commitments and team licenses are also available.

PDF Editing on Windows (with Acrobat)

Begin by running Adobe Acrobat on your computer. Ensure that you’ve downloaded Adobe Acrobat on your desktop or laptop before you begin the PDF editing process.
Click Open from File and choose the PDF document from the dialogue box. Opening a file inside Acrobat allows you to begin fast and easy.
After opening your document choose Edit PDF from the toolbar. The Edit PDF tool for Acrobat is situated towards Tools option.

Edit text by placing cursor on the words you want to modify. Simply click either the image or text you need modified to continue. As you do this Acrobat guides you by showing the critical tools needed for this.
Use Format features from the toolbar on the right to edit the text. Right on the page you can edit or add text. Notice that paragraphs and lines will be reflowing automatically but it’s also possible to just drag and click resizing the elements.
Edit any image by positioning the cursor on it and use Objects features to change the image using options appearing under the text preferences. On the Objects list also are all selections you need to resize, move, replace or add images right within the page.
You can go ahead and edit the PDF document even further if you so desire. Simply click the Background tool, Watermark, Footers, and Headers or Link and continue.

Adobe Acrobat is a useful PDF editor but for more advanced modifications you must upgrade to more expensive versions, which include Acrobat DC Pro Perpetual available from $15 per month and $180 annually to $450.

How to Edit a PDF on a Mac (Preview)

Preview is a MacOS inbuilt tool allowing you to modify PDF easily and fast. You can use it to strikethrough or underline text, highlight, rotate pages, remove or add pages, add arrows, text and shapes, comments and notes to your PDF documents. A signature can also be added though in an elaborate process and not the most flexible.

Editing a PDF on a Mac (Preview)

In Mac, simply open the PDF document to modify and it’ll automatically appear in Preview.
Click the edit icon (pencil-like) to have markup tools opened, such as text selection and rectangular selection tools to draw and sketch text and signs, do color fills, select text styles, shape style, notes to borders.
The Preview tools can then be used to add needed text, highlight and underline text and even draw into the PDF.

To add text you must have a text box. Create one if you’ve not in Preview by selecting Tools, choosing Annotate and Text within the Preview menu.
As a result, watch for a small box that should appear in the middle of the page and inside is the word Text (in red). You can then move the text box through a simple drag and drop anywhere across the PDF, including resizing it to agree with the page layout. Add the text you want by simply typing in the text box.
Do change the color, size or font of text if you so desire by clicking A icon (slanted), located towards the toolbar’s options on the far right. As a result, more standard formatting choices will come up allowing you to modify and change text including how you’d like it justified, for instance, justified right.
In case you need to move any text box on the page, simply click it and drag to wherever you want it.

Preview is an inbuilt way of editing PDF in your Mac. However, the process of copying texts, setting up and using text boxes, check-marking in PDF to adding comments, notes and signatures is cumbersome and require lots of elaborate steps. It also doesn’t offer advanced editing options and other PDF editing tools are a better choice, especially if you want to make your PDFs more professional, edit heavy PDFs and modify fast.

How to edit a PDF in Word

Unlike Macs, Windows don’t have inbuilt tools for image extraction and PDF editing. You need third-party tools to modify PDFs in any Windows computer.

Editing PDF in Word

To edit PDF in Windows Office’s Word, you must first download the PDF software such as PDFelement or Acrobat.
Once the download is complete open the PDF viewer tool.
Go to File and click Open or equivalent in the software of choice and choose the PDF document you want to modify from the dialogue window that opens.
After opening the file go ahead and export the PDF using Export icon on the toolbar.
Choose Microsoft Word as the destination of the export and complete the exercise.
Do go ahead and open the exported document in Word and edit the text and images as required using Word features and options. Save the document once done.
On File Format select PDF clicking Save to convert it back to PDF.

Editing PDF from Word might be popular but as you might have already figured out there’re better tools of doing this without actually moving from PDF to Word, which offer extra highly advanced features to modify your PDF texts and images and make your PDFs more professional.

White Hat SEO For Beginners: DIY Tips For Small Businesses

The technical and digital competence of SMEs is growing more rapidly in recent years and this contributes to increasing competition online, making it more difficult to enter the market. Nowadays every company needs to learn some kind of small business marketing in order to compete in these competitive markets. For many small and medium-sized companies, ranking, or positioning on search engines, becomes one of the fundamental parameters for successfully positioning online and this means above all using the right SEO tools.

Following these suggestions, even the smallest companies, which may not be able to immediately invest in professional SEO consultancy services, or in the assistance of a digital agency, will be able to start taking the first steps to position themselves on search engines, overcoming the difficulties that the use of the Google tools often poses to newbies.

1. Run the SEO audit of your website

To begin to understand in more detail what is hindering your success and start designing White Hat SEO plan, you can check the health of your website: the audit will show you all the errors and technical problems to be corrected and some important recommendations for improving positioning.

Google already provides all the tools that are necessary to perform this check: with Google Search Console we can verify the correctness of our web pages and single URLs, through the “View as Google” tab. Having a certain technical competence, in this case, remains essential, first of all, to register the website for the service, through a verification system that involves inserting a code into the HTML of our site or uploading a file via FTP.

How to get an immediate check on all the key elements to modify and implement in a simpler way? You can use, as an alternative to Google’s tools, an SEO tool, which through a clear and easy to understand dashboard, or by downloading a report in .pdf format, will allow you to proceed step by step to the correction and improvement of SEO performance.

2. Beat the competition through competitor research

The in-depth analysis of your main competitors will help to define the strengths and weaknesses, thus finding the winning strategies to increase the competitive advantage : as in any other market analysis, even under the White Hat SEO profile you must first know what are their competitors and how they are moving, collecting useful information to overcome them.

To fully exploit the potential of Google’s tools in competitive analysis, we should field a range of tools ranging from simple browser search (keyword by keyword) to AdWords, to Google Trends and Analytics. This would involve a study and a waste of energy really huge for those who are just starting out with SEO.

Also, in this case, an SEO tool can come to our rescue, which is able to organize the rankings of websites to discover organic and paid strategies, identifying the keywords is essential to find valuable information on traffic, budget invested and a number of clicks.

The study of competitors’ paid ads will make it possible to more effectively construct your list of keywords to be used, and also manage your investment in PPC campaigns.

3. Create your marketing plan for a successful strategy

Although online you can easily find rankings and lists on things to do to build an effective White Hat SEO strategy, only a truly customizable plan and a structured guide will allow you to follow all the steps in terms of SEO to improve the performance of your website.

Putting aside laborious Excel sheets to be compiled internally, the ideal tool allows you to build a list of activities to be carried out, including best practices and useful tips to follow, through a user-friendly interface.

We must also remember that from the content to the images, from internal and external links to metadata, from the desktop to the mobile interface, every element of the company website should be evaluated for an SEO improvement.

Finally, keyword tracking is a fundamental part of doing a good do-it-yourself SEO in a sustainable but successful way. Each update of search engine algorithms generates a change in the ranking of websites: Google rankings, for example, should be constantly monitored to track the performance of the site in search results and to make any changes in the White Hat SEO strategy.

4. Increase your visibility on social media

No White Hat SEO campaign excludes a social media strategy. On the contrary, combining a social management tool with SEO tools means increasing your resources to automatically plan and publish updates on your channels without having to move from the SEO platform and then analyze the performance, using the keywords that have already been included in the White Hat SEO strategy.

Doing do-it-yourself White Hat SEO is not impossible, but to start with you need to have the right tools!

5 technologies redefining football as a sport

When it comes to sports, there is none that can rival the popularity and fan following of football, globally. While for the most part, the sport has stayed true to its traditional roots, technology has played a crucial role in the modernization of football. In fact, technology is playing such a huge part in making football what it is today that it has given rise to an autonomous IT sector of its own.

We’ll skip the over the obvious new technologies such as the smartphone which has, of course, bolstered the availability of online betting. IF this is something you want to get involved with but aren’t how to start we’d recommend checking out FootyAccumulators for things like the latest BTTS tips as well as football watch previews.

Let us take a few minutes to discuss some of the conventional and new-age technologies that are currently being applied in the field of football.

Big Data and Analytics
Considering the vast history and the way the sport is played, there is a humongous amount of data that is collected and used to gain insights. Furthermore, this data isn’t simple statistical data that can be represented with tables and charts. Data collected from sports and games includes multiple formats like videos, images, social media posts etc. Considering its unstructured format and vastness, this data can be classified as Big Data. As most of us already know, Big Data cannot be processed, stored and analyzed using traditional technologies. For this reason, Big Data and Analytics using the Hadoop ecosystem is utilized in such cases.

To understand this better, let us take the instance of ‘Match Insights,’ a tool designed and developed by the Germans to devise strategies in the 2014 World Cup. This tool derived data from decades of recorded history and helped Germany destroy its competition in the international tournament. Similar algorithms were utilized by several teams including Germany, Russia, and France in the 2018 FIFA World Cup. This is one of the most well-known applications of Big Data and analytics in sports.

Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Visualization

This is one of the oldest technologies being applied to almost all sports. Charts, graphs, and heatmaps are used extensively not only to derive important insights but also to satisfy the viewership. To understand the difference made by data visualization, let’s take the example of number of players from each country registered per team at FIFA right now.

Player Nationality Data from FIFA 2018 in Tabular & Heatmap Format

Visualization of data not only makes the dataset more appealing to look at, but it also makes it easier to understand and derive insights from. When it comes to data visualization in FIFA, tools like IBM Cognos, Tableau, and QlikView are predominantly used.

Internet of Things (IoT)
We have already covered analysis and representation of data in the above two sections. Now let us look at how this data can be collected in real-time.

Until a decade ago, collection of data in real-time was a very difficult task. But, with the advent of Internet of Things, data collection is as easy as slapping on a wristband on all the players. These smart wearables and devices track real-time data like heartrate, speed, stress etc. and store everything on a central data warehouse for further processing. The hugely marketed technologies — virtual-assisted referee (VAR), goal-line tracking (GLT) and player performance insights — are all based on IoT.

Cloud Computing
With data collection, analysis and representation out of the way, let us now look at how this data can be stored. The most logical and convenient data storage solution that current technologies offer is cloud computing.

As you might already know, cloud computing allows remote storage of data. Additionally, most of today’s cloud solutions provide an integrated environment that can assist in almost all solutions —analysis and reporting included. Additionally, cloud storage solutions are elastic so there will never be a need to get rid of old data to make room for newer one. This will vastly increase the accuracy and clarity of historical analyses. Finally, cloud solutions offer remote access to data over a variety of devices. All of this makes cloud an ideal choice for storage and warehousing of sports data.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning
A few years ago, a lot of the FIFA hype was around Paul, the octopus, who could predict the winners of each match. The organic creature had a very high success rate of 85 percent, but we are moving into a digital world now and divination isn’t really a part of it.

And, tragic as it may seem, Paul is dead. But, making up for the loss of this football mascot isn’t as difficult as it may seem. In fact, the world cup after Paul’s death, a group of data analysts from Google designed a machine learning algorithm that derived historical insights and predicted the outcomes of each match. This system had a success rate which was three percent more than our eight-tentacled diviner.

In a similar manner, several machine learning and AI algorithms were prepared this year to predict the outcomes of the matches in the 2018 FIFA World Cup. You can find hundreds of them online on websites like Kaggle.

These are just five of the popular technologies that are changing football as we know it. Each of them makes the sport better than ever before for both fans and players alike.