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Over the past few months we have shown you how to install Facebook Timeline, explained all the latest Facebook Changes and highlighted some worrying Facebook security issues. Timeline was originally for developers only, then became public but only through opt in. Now, they’re forcing it on everyone. As of this week you don’t have a choice – make the change or get off Facebook (find out how to do that at the end of the post!)

Now that Facebook are thrusting their new Timeline profile structure on to all who haven’t already upgraded to it we thought it would be a good time to give a full rundown of what you can do with it, so you can have full control over your virtual story of your life.

We have covered how to customise your profile, how to manage your privacy settings, any new features that have been rolled out since our last post and how to delete your account. Because there’s so much info we’ve provided a helpful contents list to help you navigate to the right section!

If you’re looking to use Facebook as a marketing tool then you should come on our Social Media course. This 2-day workshop is perfect for learning how to use social media for marketing and can be booked as a package with SEO Training and Content Marketing Training. Call us on 01273 622272 to hear more about the course or to discuss your training requirements.

Read the rest of "The Complete Facebook Timeline Guide"

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Posted by Daniel Twigg in SEO Training, Social Media Training on February 3rd, 2012 | No Comments »

A happy workplace is a productive workplace, but in every business, large and small, but especially small, there will be the inevitable conflicts caused by a team of individuals working in close proximity to one another. The source of the conflicts might be petty arguments that are either professional or personal in nature, but petty arguments can quickly escalate into full blown feuds.

Feuds, which if left unresolved will damage the productivity of your business and cause it to haemorrhage money at an alarming rate.

As Spiderman knows, with power comes responsibility. As a manager it is your job to handle conflicts in your business and not just let them fester. However, with the right Management Training, you’ll be confident when handling arguments. Conflict Management Training is a specialised private course that gives you the right tools, techniques and theories to handle conflict and shows you how to use them in practical situations.

The following five tips are an essential guide in reaching an amicable resolution to any conflict which might rear its ugly head in the workplace:

What’s The Problem?

First things first, in this day and age you can’t just solve the problem by banging your employees’ heads together and ignoring the root problem which caused the conflict in the first place. It is essential that all parties involved know exactly what the issue causing the conflict is. Allow everyone to express their opinions, perspectives and thoughts and make sure everyone agrees that there’s a problem. Once the nature of the problem is established you can best identify how the problem can be resolved. Read the rest of "5 Tips to Overcome Work Place Conflicts in a Small Business"

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Posted by Guest Author in Leadership Training, Management Skills Training on January 27th, 2012 | No Comments »

Lean Six Sigma for knowledge workers and service processes

Do you work in a non-manufacturing group? If you are applying lean improvement methods but you don’t make goods then you probably supply a service or do “knowledge processing”. Lean thinking in these areas is often called “transactional lean”, “administrative lean”, and “lean for service”.

Non-manufacturing activities where lean methods have been used successfully include the following. You may well work in one of these areas:

• advertising
• entertainment
• financial services
• healthcare and hospitals
• hospitality and hotels
• insurance
• logistics and distribution
• marketing
• online services
• product design
• project management
• property sales
• travel and tourism
• public sector**

**the public sector (“state sector”) is 40% of the USA economy and about 50% of the UK and the EU economy.

Service industries are the largest part of Western economies

This is a table of percent of gross domestic product (GDP) Read the rest of "Lean Six Sigma for the Office and Service Industry"

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Posted by Andy Trainer in Six Sigma Training on January 20th, 2012 | No Comments »

Google have just announced that they are going to start showing author information in search results. This is great for author awareness and can help Google raise the rankings of pages written by authority figures. It is also great for SEO‘s who are worried that al the great content they are writing is getting ripped off or assigned to the wrong author!

Even better, Google are replacing ‘rel=author’ and ‘rel=me’ tags and are instead automatically linking your Google+ profile to content you have written. All you have to do now is add the URLs of the sites you write for to your Google+ profile, and then when scanning those sites, Google will attribute any posts with your author name to you. Then when those posts appear in search results they will come with a ‘Written by’ box including a link to your G+ page. It should end up looking like this:

So why the need for this new change when Google first announced author tags last year? Read the rest of "How to Connect Content to Google+ Accounts for Authorship"

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Posted by Aaron Charlie in SEO Training, Social Media Training on January 13th, 2012 | 2 Comments »

In this guest post, Avery Petersen discusses the merits of a company logo as a background for mobile devices. The obvious advantage is brand recognition on employee mobiles, but what if you were able to get brand recognition on everyone’s mobile? The best way to do that these days is through mobile apps. Especially with the news that a staggering 1.2 billion apps were downloaded in the last week of December and predictions that 1 billion weekly downloads will be the norm in 2012. Creating a great app means a huge number of people using your content with word of mouth helping out a great deal. However, app development is a tricky business. That is why we provide a range of mobile development courses including iPhone App Training and Android App Training. Both courses teach delegates how to create and market apps and are prefect for businesses that want to take advantage of the mobile boom with an in-house mobile developer.

In advertising, the possibilities are endless. For as many places for people to be reached there are just as many ways to reach them, if not more. Every interaction a company or business owner has with the public is a possibility to advertise your company and brand. Therefore, more emphasis has been placed on utilizing your everyday human interactions to advertise. With so many people in the world, you want to reach as many as you can. This has sparked a trend to include a company’s brand or logo on mobile devices. Here are 5 reasons to make your logo mobile.

Effortless Advertising

Everywhere you go, everyone you meet can easily become a potential customer. If you are at the local coffee shop and have your company logo on your mobile phone or tablet, you are advertising during your morning coffee. It is that easy. Everyone who walks past you and sees you checking your phone or using your tablet will see the logo and spark curiosity and interest.

Examples of mobile logos

Word of Mouth Advertising

If you have customers who are satisfied with your products or services, they may want to help you advertise your company. With your mobile logo wallpaper you can send it to your customers to use on their phones. This is a great way to remind them of their great experiences with your company and allow them to share that with others. Read the rest of "5 Reasons to Make your Company Logo Mobile"

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Posted by Guest Author in Mobile Development Training on January 6th, 2012 | No Comments »

In the current financial market, looking for work can be a daunting experience and jobs may seem hard to come by. However, it is important to make sure you don’t just go for the first job that comes along. Due to proposed changes to employment law, new employees could be losing a high percentage of their job security. The tips in this guest post are useful for picking the right employer so that you don’t end up back on the job hunt. Of course you could up-skill while you are waiting to find the right employer, qualifications such as PRINCE2 Practitioner and PRINCE2 Foundation can make a big difference to your CV. 

A recent Gallup poll of more than 1 million workers across all industries shows that the number one reason people leave their job is due to a poor relationship with their immediate supervisor. Other factors include limited opportunities for professional growth, career advancement, along with overall cultural misalignment. It may be surprising that money is not the primary factor in employee resignations, but many people realize that there is much more to job satisfaction than salary alone.

For this reason, it is important to find out as much about a prospective employer as you can before accepting a job offer.  This article provides several strategies to help with due diligence.

Basic training

It is a fairly straightforward task to evaluate the economic conditions of a job offer: either the salary or benefits are acceptable to you or not. The harder decision comes from having to evaluate the “intangible benefits” of working for any given company. Even if the salary is well within your range (or higher than you expected) the grass might not be so green once you discover that the management style is highly rigid, that the overall culture is archly conservative, or that there is limited opportunity for upward mobility. Read the rest of "Tips for Evaluating a Prospective Employer"

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Posted by Guest Author in Human Resources Training on December 30th, 2011 | No Comments »

I have great admiration for my friend Sue Hadfield, she is a well respected assertiveness trainer. She is also the co-author of How to be Assertive in Any Situation and Bounce: Use the Power of Resilience to Live the Life You Want. Her most recent publication is Brilliant Positive Thinking. If you want to start the New Year with a positive attitude you should read this book.

During the time period in which she wrote her latest book, however, her capacity for positive thinking  was tested to it’s limits. Until she told me her story I used to think of the profound words of wisdom from Big Brothers’ Josie ”Whenever I feel a bit low, I think about that woman who got her face ripped off by a chimpanzee “. Now I just think of Sue! She is brilliant, always smiling, brimming with ideas for her next project, I can’t think of anyone better to write a great positive thinking book.

I asked Sue for a few words about her book, she sent me this, suggesting we cut it by half and edit it to have more emphasis on positive thinking, but I think it’s just perfect as it is.

Thinking Positively

Brilliant Positive Thinking by Sue Hadfield

It takes four and a half hours to fly from Luxor to Gatwick. In April this year I spent the whole of the flight wondering if I would be totally blind by the time I stepped off the plane.

A week previously, with my husband, Greg, we had booked into a luxury resort hotel, on an island in the Nile, near Luxor. Holidaying without our children for the past ten years had meant that we could dispense with package holidays and be more independent: Greek island hopping, driving around Sicily, touring Libya, visiting New Delhi, Eastern Europe and America.

But this holiday was different: I’d just finished writing a book and we had decided on a relaxing holiday for a change.  Earlier in the year we’d been burgled and my laptop was stolen. It contained the first half of the book (and no, it wasn’t backed up). Writing for me means no reading for pleasure and so I intended to lie in the sun, swim in the pool and catch up on my reading.

On the first night (after being delighted by the island, our apartment, the choice of restaurants and infinity pools) I sat in front of the bathroom mirror and started to apply my makeup. I closed my right eye and drew on the eyeliner, then I closed my left eye and my reflection vanished. There was a diagonal line across my vision – the top third of the room I could see – the rest was a wall of grey.

The young hotel doctor was reassuring and gave me eye drops – saying it was probably eye strain but to come back if it didn’t improve. It didn’t. We googled the symptoms and diagnosed a detached retina. He took us to ‘the eye doctor’ in Luxor. We found ourselves in a pot holed, back street, climbing three flights of outside steps to a Spartan room containing a wooden bench, an old Egyptian woman, an eye chart and some basic equipment. The eye doctor took one look at my eye and said that the retina was detached, that we must get to Cairo immediately for an operation but that we mustn’t fly because of the pressure. Read the rest of "Thinking Positively – The Way to Start the New Year"

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Posted by Heather Buckley in Assertiveness Training on December 23rd, 2011 | No Comments »

If you’re new to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation – there’s your first definition!) then you’ve probably come across a number of terms that mean nothing to you! Many of these are general web terms used by SEOs but some are new terms devised by the SEO world.

Why not come down to Brighton for a comprehensive SEO course? By the end of the course you should be familiar with all these terms and more! If you can’t get to Brighton or want to tailor the course to your requirements then please call us on 01273 622272 to discuss private and in-company courses.

We’ve tried to include any recent terms that have appeared over the past year to make this the most up to date list and have also left out multiple phrases for the same term.

Algorithm

This is what search engines use to determine search results.

Alt Tags

Alt tags are used to provide more information about an image to a search engine than a Title, File Name and Caption. The Alt tag  is used by search engine robots to determine the content of an image. Alt tags appear as follows:

<img src=”http://www.siliconbeachtraining.co.uk/images/fp-Android-training.jpg” alt=”Android training” width=”90″ height=”90″ />

Image optimisation is an important but often overlooked part of SEO. Learn how to optimise your images.

Anchor Text

Anchor Text determines the visible text of a link on the page (the bit that is usually underline). Anchor Text plays two roles – it tells search engines which keywords to attribute to the landing page of the link. Good SEO practice would mean the anchor text, referring site and landing page had keywords in common.

Example:

<a href=”http://www.siliconbeachtraining.co.uk/mobile-development-training/android-training/”>Android App Development Courses</a> Read the rest of "SEO Terms – Complete Search Engine Optimisation Glossary"

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Posted by Craig Charley in SEO Training on December 9th, 2011 | No Comments »