Business News

Mon Nov 2

How to Develop an SEO Strategy

Written by: Ashley Bryan

When you are trying to get your webpage indexed and ranked you will need to develop an SEO strategy

that will help the process. You may not know where to get started, so we have covered off the basics here with should get you started on the path to success.

Create a list of Topics to Cover

While keywords are the core of SEO, they are no longer the first step towards organic growth. You should make a list of topics that are related to your niche. Begin with short terms and words that pertain to your product and service. Use a keyword tool to determine search volume and variations of them that are directly related to your business. These topics should be associated with pertinent keywords, but the blog posts do not need to be completed dedicated to those keywords. The reason is that the shorter keywords will have high competition and it will be hard to get them ranked on Google. You will need to narrow down your list to 10 or 15 short tail keywords that you deem are important and that your audience is searching for. These keywords are called “pillars” because they serve as the basic support for the larger groups of long tail keywords.

Based on Your Keywords, Create a List of Long Tail Keywords for Your Topics

This is the point where you begin to optimize your pages with targeted keywords. For all the identified pillars you will use a keyword tool to find several long tail keywords that drill down into each topic keyword. This is how a business will attract people that have a wide range of interests with many points for people who want to make a purchase. Subtopics can be plugged into a keyword research tool to find the right long tail keywords which will be used for a blog post topic. Collectively, a group of subtopics will form a “cluster”. Ten pillar topics will support a single cluster of anywhere from five to ten subtopics. The more specific the content is the more it meets the detailed needs of your niche audience and this leads to more likely conversions which converts traffic into leads. Google will crawl your website, identifying the value in it and when it identifies topics that answer specific queries, it ranks that content higher.

For Each Topic You Will Build a Separate Page

The pillar topics that you created in the first step will be used to create web pages and on each web page you will discuss that topic in a very detailed way. The pillar page can describe a topic in short sections used to introduce the topic and identify other subtopics at the same time. Those subtopics will be discussed in greater detail using blog posts. Your keyword list is going to determine the number of pillar pages that should be created. The number of topics that you used to create pillar pages should be directly related to the different services and products that you have in your business. This will make your business easier for your customers to find with keywords they use to search. Every web page that you create should have content that is targeted to your customers together with links to other pages on your site and pictures.

Create a Blog

Blogging is an effective way for anyone to engage the users of their website and to rank for specific keywords. Each blog post creates a new web page that offers a new chance for your website to rank with the search engines. If you do not already have a blog for your business, it is time to create one. This is how you are going to get into detail on subtopic that can get you ranked in Google. Blog posts should include long tail keywords, but do not “keyword stuff”. Web Quest SEO warns that Google will penalize you for that and drop you in rank. Once a blog post has been published, it should be linked back to the pillar page that matches that content topic using anchor text in the article somewhere. By connecting your blog post to your pillar page and your cluster you are letting Google know that the long tail keyword and the topic are directly related.

Develop Your Page’s Authority by Blogging Weekly

You do not need to write content that is directly related to a topic cluster. There is value when you write about topics that customers want to know more about so that your website is seen as an authority by Google. Google will then pay more attention to your domain once you start to add content on the primary topics. Weekly blogging should be directed to your audience and not a search engine. Aim to write about topics that your audience and prospects are searching for and use keywords that are directly relevant to your product and services. Not every topic is going to have heavy importance, but you will need to prioritize by making a list of web pages you want to create and rank. Your next step is to have a plan and schedule to build out your pages, while continually updating your list and working towards your business goals.

Have a Plan for Link Building?

The model for topic clusters will help you to move forward and get your content ranked higher after it has been created. Link building is the main objective for SEO and is also an important tool for search engines to rank your pages. Link-building is when you have inbound links (backlinks) on your website from other real estate on the web. If the originating website is high in authority, it has a more substantial effect on the web page it is linking to. You can utilize your blog to post articles that are related to recent news. This may assist you in getting a link to an influencer in your niche or even other bloggers working in that niche.

Adjust and Compress Media Before Uploading it to Your Site

As your blog / website grows you are going to have more videos, images and media hosted on it. These are assets that help to keep a visitor’s attention, but these files can be extremely large. The bigger the size of the file the harder it is for a browser to load your site. This means that page speed can suffer, and the speed of your page is an important factor when a search engine is crawling and indexing your site. Smaller file sizes load faster and help your site to rank higher.

Stay Informed on the Latest SEO Practices

Search engines are always changing their ranking methods. You should stay on top of the most current practices and trends. There are many resources on the internet that can help you to get the latest SEO news and read up on changes that can have an impact on your SEO strategy and that will affect your website.

If you have no idea what any of this means or are just learning and want to know more, it may be time to consult an SEO professional that has experience in all these tips and strategies. Ashley Bryan has a great deal of experience in ranking webpages just like yours and can help you to develop an effective strategy.

Fri Oct 30

AppDynamics Solves Visibility Gap Between Traditional Infrastructure and Cloud Environments

Written by: Hotwire Global

New Full Stack Observability Platform, Integration With Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer and Cloud Native Visualisation Features Provide Cross Domain Insights and Analytics of Business Performance in the Cloud

Sydney, Australia, October 30, 2020 - AppDynamics, a part of Cisco and the world’s #1 APM solution and full-stack, business centric observability platform, today released new capabilities designed to help IT teams build cloud native applications with confidence by connecting hybrid cloud application performance to business performance in real-time. Through a context-sensitive visualisation interface, correlated insights across domains and intelligent resource optimisation, enterprise IT leaders will be able to reduce noise and surface only the most business-critical information and insights across their unique hybrid environments.

“AppDynamics’ new portfolio of cloud native services is the only solution on the market to provide an easy to use performance monitoring platform that helps users tame the complexity of the cloud from the application all the way through to the network,” said Jeetu Patel, senior vice president and general manager, security & applications, Cisco. “By reducing noise and providing the context that matters most to cloud workflows, business leaders will be able to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives and improve their user experiences.”

Technologists are adopting cloud services faster than ever before in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic and the increased pressure it has placed on IT. While new cloud technologies have delivered flexibility and enabled innovation for businesses as they seek to deliver seamless customer and employee digital experiences, they have also led to more complex and distributed application architectures. This has created huge challenges for technologists in enterprise organisations who typically rely on many traditional IT systems to run their businesses but now operate in a hybrid cloud environment. As IT teams adopt more cloud native services to meet the digital demands of their users, the challenge to refactor applications and design new features at scale becomes increasingly challenging due to a lack of holistic visibility and business context across the multiple environments.

AppDynamics’ new portfolio of cloud capabilities closes that visibility gap and allows users to connect traditional systems with cloud native services, all in the context of business outcomes.

These new capabilities include:

Full Stack Observability Platform: A new data platform designed to increase visibility and seamlessly ingest data from multiple sources including AppDynamics agent-based data, open-source tools and agent-less services and correlate the data across domains.

Cloud Data Collector: An extensible architecture for capturing and automating data collection and correlating cloud services with application code, user experience and business impact to provide full stack, context rich observability. Starting with Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) monitoring and observability service, Amazon CloudWatch, and then expanding to incorporate additional public and private cloud environments.

Cloud Native Visualisation: A new visualisation interface that reduces the complexity of monitoring cloud-native applications with a context-sensitive, easy to understand, visual representation.

Intelligent Application Resourcing and Cost Optimisation: An integration with Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer will transform operations from reactive to proactive by optimising infrastructure resources and costs in hybrid cloud environments.

“As enterprises continue to migrate applications to the cloud at increasing speeds, the need to connect specific application information to critical cloud workflows is more important than ever,” said Dave McCann, Vice President of Migration, Marketplace & Control Services, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “We are delighted to be working with AppDynamics to provide application performance insights required to support customers’ workload migrations to the cloud, validate their successes, and connect cloud performance to business outcomes. Having AppDynamics available in AWS Marketplace makes it easier for our millions of AWS global customers to more easily discover, subscribe to, and provision AppDynamics into their accounts and have it consolidated into their AWS billing and payment experience.”

In the crowded HR technology market, a flawless customer experience is how businesses are staying competitive. Jobvite - known for its best-of-breed applicant tracking system (ATS) and recruiting software - understands the importance of investing in cloud technologies as a way to support the digital experiences they offer to customers.

“At Jobvite, balancing development speed, quality and innovation concurrently is a challenge and we can’t afford to fail on any of these fronts,” said Ron Teeter, chief architect, Jobvite. “With AppDynamics new cloud native capabilities businesses can detect more issues early in development and resolve them before they become customer-impacting. AppDynamics allows us to shift left and get our most important products to market faster, while still delivering them with the high-quality standards our customers expect and deserve.”

AppDynamics’ new cloud native capabilities are generally available today.

About Cisco

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in technology that powers the Internet. Cisco inspires new possibilities by reimagining your applications, securing your data, transforming your infrastructure, and empowering your teams for a global and inclusive future. Discover more on The Network and follow us on Twitter.

Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found at www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company.

About AppDynamics

AppDynamics, a part of Cisco, is the world’s #1 Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution and AIOps platform. AppDynamics is a full-stack, business centric observability platform that helps technologists prevent digital performance issues by monitoring cloud-native technologies and traditional infrastructure to understand exactly what drives user experiences and impacts the bottom line for businesses. Core products include: Business iQ, Experience Journey Map, and Cognition Engine.

AppDynamics has been recognised by Gartner as a leader in the APM market for more than eight years and was positioned highest in ‘ability to execute’ in Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant Report for APM. It received Glassdoor’s 2019 Best Places to Work Award and Fortune’s top 5 Best Places to Work in 2020 as part of Cisco.