Welcome to our Training Blog. Here you’ll find training news, articles, competitions and links to free training resources.
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Microblogging is a huge craze at the moment e.g. the million tidbits of information posted of Twitter each day. However, blogging using a platform such as WordPress is important too – primarily because it can add value by creating useful content, but for many other reasons too. Blogging is a cheap way to create a huge impact; if you haven’t yet joined the all-mighty Blogosphere, read these five reasons why you should!
Are you a budding photographer? Win free training and online exposure!
Whether you’re an aspiring photographer or have a photographer who works for your business, enter Silicon Beach Training’s photography competition to win a free training course. The winning entry will be announced on our blog, Twitter and Facebook as well as other social media platforms – an excellent way to generate online exposure and increase traffic to your website!
Photography competitions will run bi-monthly, and the theme this time is “My Home Town”. It’s up to you how you interpret this; it could be about people, architecture, landscape, culture etc.
To follow this competition head to Flickr or our Facebook page and hear about updates on our blog. We will also be announcing regular photography competitions and details of winners on Twitter so don’t forget to follow us @SBTtraining.
Read on to find out more about the free training prize, learn about the high profile photographers who will be judging the competition, and how you can enter.
Business blogs are fantastic marketing tools. Blogging provides you with a platform to share news, useful articles and how-to guides with your clients, adding a dynamic dimension to your website above and beyond the usual list of products or services.
The information on you blog can then be syndicated to your clients and prospects using social media networks for greater exposure (you can learn more about finding and communicating with your clients online on our Social Media course).
Regularly updated blog content will not only keep people coming back to your site, but provides you with an opportunity to prove your experience and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
Not all of us are born writers, and coming up with interesting blog content that people will want to read and bookmark regularly can sometimes be a real challenge.
Our blogging course is led by experienced blog copywriters, and by the end you’ll know how to write effectively for your audience, how to build up a bank of suitable material and be confident about the nuts and bolts of blogging like tags, links, categories and RSS feeds.
The 1-day course is just £225 + vat per delegate and runs on a regular basis here at our training centre in the heart of Brighton’s North Laines.
Location based services are not new, some, such as Loopt have been around since 2005 but 2010 is the year that they’re really taking off. Loopt has around 3 million users in the US (its not available anywhere else) but it differs greatly from the current trend in location based services, that of moving away from “always on” location to that of “checking in” at specific locations.
Foursquare and Gowalla are leading the charge of the ‘Geosocial‘ location based mobile services, with Foursquare having recently had 370k “check ins” in one day. With only 500k registered users the leader, Foursquare, is still relatively small compared to other, traditional, social networks (Facebook, with 400m users is by far the biggest social network but doesn’t yet have a Geosocial aspect) but it is growing fast.
Arguably 2010 will be the year of location based social and business networks, especially with services such as simpleGeo offering location infrastructure to startups. This lowers the barrier to entry significantly allowing start ups, such as stickybits, to provide geotagging in its unique offerings.
So is it all hype? From a business point of view are they worth engaging with like other social media?
Optimising for Multiple Keywords and Long-Tail Search Terms
At the recent BrightonSEO event, Peter Handley from Vertical Leap made an interesting point that it’s often easy to overlook. When optimising our websites for search engines many of us will focus on ranking highly for one search term. This has often been the technique of black hat SEO too, with the method of embedding as many repeated search terms in a website as possible, often at the expense of quality.
But professional SEO Peter Handley has a different perspective:
Why using multiple key phrases works
“You can increase the traffic of a website far more effectively by increasing the number of phrases driving traffic to a website and they are much more likely to convert as a result” – Peter Handley
Read on to discover why you should use long-tail keywords and how you can find out how popular certain keywords are.
To start with I have about twelve different passwords just for social media, about seven for different websites that I manage, three for different forums…you get the message I have a lot of passwords to remember!
It gets even worse if you are a business engaging in social media, you want to protect your passwords but also want employees to use your social accounts.
So how do I keep track of all these online passwords?
It seems there’s always a technology or service threatening to revolutionize the internet. Promising to change the way we access information and how we use it.
In the past it was “web 2.0″, “web 3.0″, “crowd sourcing”; the list goes on!
Recently, “Real Time Web” has entered the arena, it sounds great but in practice, few people have a clue what it is. Simply put it means web resources are published and consumed in real time.
Real Time Web
As as soon as “stuff” is published, a blog post or any other user generated content, it is syndicated around the web and indexed immediately. The most obvious example is google search including up to the second results from twitter. Social media is all about real time, streams of information created constantly and consumed almost instantly (find out more with out social media course). Broadcasting your location in foursquare is pretty useless if people only find out a few hours/days later! Real time web can be thought of as another paradigm of the social web experience.
For a while only the big boys, Google, Facebook and Twitter and others have made use of these real time data streams, with us peons only able to use RSS and ATOM to get our content out there. Recent developments by both Google and Wordpress have put this real time power at the disposal of every blogger and content creator on the web. If you are thinking of using Wordpress and need help check out our Wordpress Training and our Customising Wordpress Templates courses.
You’re probably thinking how does this differ from RSS and ATOM? Well it doesn’t, its an extension to both those protocols to allow for real time publishing, but how exactly have they done this?
What is PuSH or PUbSubHub?
The very definition of “Real Time Web” is to have content consumed in real time. PuSH or PSHB (many names and acronyms have been used in discussions but from here on out I’ll only use PuSH as it best describes what it does) is a protocol that allows RSS and ATOM feeds to change something that you need to ask for into something that is given to you. Read the rest of "Real Time Web and the PubSubHubBub"
We’ve discussed the importance of links in our post How Do I Get Links to My Site? but did you know that the majority of links you leave around the Internet will be nofollow? In other words, they’ll count for nothing when it comes to improving your search engine position in Google. If you want to discover more about search engine optimisation, check out our SEO Training and Social Media Training courses.
Whether it is submitting to a directory, buying links, reciprocal links or commenting on a blog it is useful to know whether a link to your website will be nofollow or not.
Read on to learn how you can spot nofollow links, and our list of “dofollow” websites and blogs that will help you move your way up through Google. Read the rest of "How can I get dofollow links?"
5 Top Tips for why your business should be blogging
Location based services are not new, some, such as 
Optimising for Multiple Keywords and Long-Tail Search Terms
Why should you find dofollow links?
