August 2015 - Quick Response Digital Marketing

Understanding the Basics of SEO – Park City SEO

August 12, 2015August 12, 2015
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SEO is simply described as understanding the way search engines think and work. The purpose of SEO or search engine optimization isn’t to undermine or cheat search engines, but to communicate to them your intentions so they can recommend your website for relevant searches. Local SEO Park City companies make it their first priority to understand the ways of Google, Bing, and other popular search engines. Here are some things to consider when optimizing your site and other social properties.

The first thing you need to ask yourself is what are search engines looking for and what aren’t they? Search engines work by referring Internet users to websites and content that is the most relevant to what they are searching for. How then, does a search engine determine what is relevant? Search engines look at content, performance of a site, a site’s authority, as well as the user’s experience navigating a site. All of these things play into how well your site will appear in a search and are what search engines look for.

What is content?

Content is simply the text on a page, it also includes descriptions, titles, and other media.

What is performance?

Performance relating to search SEO, is how fast and well your site works. Does it perform accurately and efficiently?

What is Authority?

Search engines look at the content of your page and authority refers to how other authoritative sites refer and link back to your site and vice versa. Does your site provide good enough content to link to other authoritative sites as well?

What is User Experience and Navigation?

This can be easily explained if you think about your own experience when you visit a site. What are some of your first impressions when seeing a site? Some things you might think about are how the site looks. As you start browsing the site, you might question the ease at which you can find things. Does the site look safe? These are the same things search engines look for in a user’s experience and they ask the same questions.

Ok… now what are some things search engines skip over or things they overlook? Key word stuffing should be avoided and buying links that lead nowhere isn’t recommended. When you overuse keywords on your pages it actually harms you rather than help and is referred to as, ‘Keyword Stuffing’. You also want your users to have a good experience on your page. Having too many ads and placing content in awkward places will increase your bounce rate, which is not good. Knowing and tracing your bounce rate will help you determine how to keep it at reasonable rate.

SEO also extends onto any social sites you have, for example…Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Youtube etc. Keyword strategy is important to implement on social media sites and email as well. This is often called multi-channel optimization and will help your company’s brand. It’s also important to be consistent with your keywords and phrases within all platforms, don’t alternate or use different variations that will confuse search engines.

SEO goes far beyond what we’ve discussed, but following these few rules will help you site rank higher and increase search engine’s relevant results. Check your local listings for search engine optimization Park City Utah and you will be able to find local specialists who know how to better optimize your online marketing needs.

Technology and Hardware

A+ Certification Practice Test – Tips to Know About…

August 5, 2015February 6, 2019
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CompTIA’s A+ Practice Test Certification takes strong passwords very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that it falls under not one but two exam objectives. This is pretty rare and shows how seriously this is taken. There is a really good reason for this. Studies show that the most prevalent security breach relates to passwords. As in week passwords. Did you know that 28% of security breaches are password related and that the two most common passwords are password1 and 123456? So it clearly does make a lot of sense for CompTIA to make sure that anyone possessing the A+ Certification credential is well versed in this potential threat to system security.

The strong password issue is handled in the A+ 220-802 (Software) exam in Main Domain 2.0 Security. The two sub-objectives it falls under are 2.1 and 2.3:

2.1 “Apply and use common prevention methods”

2.3 “Implement security best practices to secure a workstation”

Under sub-objective 2.1 it shows as topic point “User authentication/strong passwords” and under sub-objective 2.1 it shows as topic point “Setting strong passwords”. Under either of both you are likely to get a question relating to strong passwords. When we say “strong password” we are not formulating an opinion but addressing a definition as per the A+ exam. However the definition is also widely accepted in the computer industry. So what are the elements of the definition of “strong passwords”?

They should be no less than 8 characters but no more than 15 (the longer the password the more secure it is but extremely long passwords will put too high a burden on support by users not remembering them). As you can see above it’s not a good idea to “password” or any easy number sequence such as 123456. Another common one is birthdate, really easy to crack in ways too many situations. You should also ban:

Any words you can find in the dictionary
Names to anyone close to you (spouse, kids, pets etc.)
Yours or any other license plate number
Any of the above spelled backwards or with either a leading or a trailing number

An important part of the strong password is diversity of characters. The best strong password will combine alphabetic characters (capitalized and lower case), numbers and special characters. Special characters are the symbols you find on your keyboard, such as $ * ^ # @ etc.

Examples of how to come up with a strong password that is easy to remember:

Use the first address you remember living at “Apartment was on 5061 State Street. Rent was $800 monthly.” You then turn that into a password by using the first digits of each word which would make your password: Awo5061ss.Rw$8m

This password fulfills all the requirements of a strong password: It is 15 characters long, includes capitalization and lower case as well as numbers and special characters. This would be considered a very strong password (being at the maximum of 15 characters) but could still be reasonable easy to remember.

You could apply this method to a variety of items and come up with strong passwords you won’t easily forget. Another maybe easier way to generate them is to use Diceware.

As important as strong passwords are to the A+ exam this is only a small part of it (the exam objectives document is 44 pages long!) so there is still a lot more to master. A good way to get an idea of what the exam is like is to use practice tests. CertBlaster offers a comprehensive package covering A+ Practice test in a bundle of both the A+ 220-801 (Hardware) and A+ 220-802 (Software) exams.