25 Feb

Anti Spam Measures

  • Installed anti-spam measures on the online presence of a client.
  • Security Updates.
  • Housekeeping on the website, update filters for contact forms.
  • Interaction with Client’s Social Media Call to Action.
18 Feb

SEMRush Academy

SEMRushSEMRush has a number of courses and certificates on its SEMRush Academy. Focused on SEO and using its products they do give an interesting insight into how search engines index your website,  how to manage your website from an SEO point of view. I complete both the SEO Fundamentals and Technical SEO course and did both the exams. They are both quite good courses, I would have some misgivings about obvious answers to true or false questions, or hours of the same instructor speaking but overall it is beneficial. The tips particularly in the Technical SEO course, on what tools to use to emulate how a search engine sees your website is invaluable.

17 Feb

Website Metrics

Website metrics/analytics are essential for you to be aware and informed as to how your website is performing. There are a number of ways to glean how your website is performing, from the “free” services from the Big Internet companies such as Google Analytics, Bing Analytics and Yandex Metrica, paid metrics from a third party vendor, to self hosted metrics software like Piwik/Matomo, and log file analytics from Webalizer or awstats.

My advice is always to use a couple of these, most hosting packages provide a log file analyser as part of the service so you may as well have this configured, however you really need more deep analysis also provided in a graphical format which you can do comparisons etc. and Google Analytics is the monolith in this, if you are using Microsoft products/services a lot or Yandex then their Metrics could be a benefit, or if you even want to compare or proof the results found by the other metric provider.

Links

11 Feb

Election Coverage Online and TV Graphics

I must say I was impressed with both the data and graphics on both RTE TV and Website, in delivering, the 2020 Irish General Election Results. The data as counts go by was very good although I would like the transfers to perhaps be shaded in the color of the party person they come from.

There was a high bar set in the 2016 US Election by CNN by their graphics and drill down data, and using Microsoft surface. It is easier to get this binary nature of a US election to color code drill down regions than in a fractured multi-party system.

09 Feb

HupSpot Content Marketing Certified

A Yellow or Orange Storm warning from the Met Office over the weekend, the election results on in the background so I went through the course and renewed/retook, it had expired last year, I like the HubSpot courses but some of them are very video-heavy, some of it is quite intuitive.

06 Feb

Inbound Certified Renewed – HubSpot Academy

This was up for renewal, I started it a month ago going through videos, it is technically a new course to replace the one I did back in 2018 (which was the 2017 course), they seem to have divided the course into two now and I have started and pretty much finished the “Inbound Sales” by accident, however, I did complete the second part the “Inbound Marketing” course as well.
Anyways I did the exams for the Inbound and Inbound marketing and got the badges/certs, it seems to be more intuitive that when I first completed it, perhaps it is easier perhaps I am better.. I do like that it is 25 months, means they will diverge and give you a more spread out timeframe to renew all your certs in future and if i have time I will do the Inbound sales one since it is nigh complete.

05 Feb

Google Tag Manager Fundamentals

Continuing on with my MOOCs and within Google Analytics Academy, I went through the Google Tag Manager Fundamentals course. I have only used Tag Manager on a couple of projects, mostly to manage using a combination of different trackers from different metrics providers. So it was a real insight into the power of tag manager used dovetailing with Analytics and indeed Adwords. I do note that Analytics Academy has 3 more courses that I intend to do time allowing, including the pre-cursor to the 1st one I did the other day.

Google Tag Manager Fundamentals

04 Feb

Introduction to Google Data Studio

Another one down, I have produced reports over the years using a variety of tools from Spreadsheets, SQL*Calc, SQL*Plus, Php and MySql and Google Charts. Google Data Studio seems a nice way to produced reports (Perhaps it should be called Google Reports;) ) especially from .csv files I would think. Anyways as part of my Online resources / Courses trawl, I competed the Google Analytics Academy Introduction to Data Studio Course. I did like some of the lessons were clickable demos rather than videos, which can get a bit monotonous. I also think perhaps these Analytics Academy “courses” could be badges on one overall course like the Digital Garage cert.

Google Data Studio

03 Feb

Advanced Google Analytics (Google Analytics Academy)

I went through some of the online course videos and took the assignments on Google Analytics Academy, I really was doing the coursework to do the Analytics Individual Qualification which I need to renew. You do get a snazzy certificate. Google perhaps should have a one-stop shop for all their courses rather than having them spread over Digital Garage, Skills Shop ExceedLMS, and Analytics Academy.

Advanced Google Analytics

01 Feb

Google Ads Search Certification

I completed the Google Ads (formerly Adwords) Search Certification there. Again these are certs that have an expiry date, and a number of them have lapsed on me so I plan to work through them.

Google Ads Search Cert

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