Jess Stephens, Managing Director at TagPoints blew away the judges to win the Silicon Beach Training Startup Competition in Brighton, Tues 22nd April 2014.

Director Jess Stephens and Business Development Executive Josh Wallman celebrate

Competing against two other strong finalists in Sweta Chattopadhyay (Localfunded) and Jenni Macdonald (Precision Paraplanning), Jess gave a strong presentation highlighting the potential for TagPoints to grow which clearly impressed our judging panel; Darren Fell (Crunch), Caraline Brown (Midnight PR), Lisa Reynolds (Let Me Do That For You) & Mike Herd (Sussex Innovation Centre).

The judges were "blown away by the capability of the business and how fast it could scale" and while impressed by the other finalists, TagPoints were the clear winner on the day.

TagPoints now has the support of sponsors Silicon Beach Training, Crunch Accounting, Midnight PR and Clear Business Development to help grow the business and realise their ambitious plans.

We always look forward to the panel debates at BrightonSEO as the discussion is more open. It's even better when they involve ex-members of the Google Search Quality team (and a "former" spammer).

Moderated by theMediaFlow's Nichola Stott, this year's panel included Fili Wiese and Kaspar Szymanski, both ex-Google turned SEO Consultant, and Gareth Hoyle, representing LinkRisk.

Key Takeaways

• You cannot recover from a penalty with just a disavow file, you have to do link removal
• Google is using the disavow tool to crowdsource bad links/domains
• A bad link is any link "made for SEO"
• Link building is fine, as long as you build for traffic
• Google can tell if a link is getting clicked or not
• Negative SEO is far less common that it is talked about, it is usually a spam attack or result of miscommunication
• Sites hit by negative SEO are never clean to start with
• There are hundreds of reasons that your site might drop in Google, not always a penalty, so do discovery on your own site, don't look for answers on the internet
• Google focus on users, not SEOs/webmasters, so there is always going to be collateral damage
• You can't recover from a penalty and then delete your disavow file, Google keeps track of everything and will find out
• Second penalties are much harder to recover from that first ones

This tutorial is an extract from our popular 1-day Advanced Excel course. Lookup formulas are one of the most asked about topics so we decided to put together a short tutorial.

Lookup tables provide a way of producing numbers or text that cannot be calculated with a formula. For example they could look up a salesman's commission dependent on what has been sold (Example 1), or the amount of discount available to a customer based on the amount of goods ordered (Example 2).

Excel has two Lookup functions, Vertical and Horizontal.

VLOOKUP looks down the vertical column on the left side of the table until the appropriate comparison is found.

HLOOKUP looks across the horizontal row at the top of a column until the appropriate comparison is found.

Function Syntax

LOOKUP(lookup_value, table_array, col_index_num, range_lookup)

HLOOKUP(lookup_value, table_array, row_index_num, range_lookup)

Now you can test your knowledge of PRINCE2® with our interactive PRINCE2 Quiz!

Split into 11 bite-sized parts, this quiz tests your understanding of PRINCE2 2009 Themes and Processes.

Our PRINCE2 quiz is ideal for revision for your PRINCE2 Foundation and PRINCE2 Practitioner exams or for testing your knowledge before coming on a PRINCE2 course.

 To work through our PRINCE2 quiz, use the links below:

• PRINCE2 Quiz Part 1: PRINCE2 Revision
• PRINCE2 Quiz Part 2: Business Case Theme
• PRINCE2 Quiz Part 3: Organisation Theme
• PRINCE2 Quiz Part 4: Quality Theme
• PRINCE2 Quiz Part 5: Plans Theme
• PRINCE2 Quiz Part 6: Risk Theme
• PRINCE2 Quiz Part 7: Change Theme
• PRINCE2 Quiz Part 8: Progress Theme
• PRINCE2 Quiz Part 9: Starting up and Initiating a Project
• PRINCE2 Quiz Part 10: Directing a Project , Controlling a Stage and Managing Product Delivery
• PRINCE2 Quiz Part 11: Managing a Stage Boundary and Closing a Project

For comprehensive instructor-led PRINCE2 training, examination and certification, delegates should attend one of our public PRINCE2 Foundation training, PRINCE2 Practitioner training or the full qualification PRINCE2 Foundation and Practitioner in Brighton, UK. 

Head over to our PRINCE2 Resources page for more help with your PRINCE2 revision.

This PRINCE2 quiz is written by Silicon Beach Training and does not represent real PRINCE2 exam content.

Welcome to our PRINCE2® Quiz, which will test your knowledge of PRINCE2 Processes & Themes.

New SEO Course - Advanced SEO Training for Managers?. Get hands-on with Structured Data Markup & Semantic Search.

Have you ever wondered where Google gets the information for search results like these?

This is an example of Rich Snippets generated by Structured Data.

Structured data markup helps search engines understand the context of a webpage through the use of HTML tags.

You identify an item (ie. recipe) and its properties (ingredients, preptime, nutrition etc.).

See which items and properties BBC Good Food has used with Google's Structured Data Testing Tool.

You can also check the page source to see how they have actually marked up the page:

Read More

Get hands-on with Webmaster Tools on our brand new advanced SEO Strategy Training course- the most up to date course on the market.

Google Webmaster Tools is an incredible tool for running health checks, monitoring your site's progress or uncovering the source of a problem. It's also an essential SEO tool.

If you're not familiar with Webmaster Tools or you haven't been keeping up with the latest changes & additions then we are here to help.

Learn about every feature of Google WMT and find out how you can use it for quick and long term SEO wins.

If you want to get hands-on with Webmaster Tools then come down to Brighton for our 1-day SEO course which will give you hands-on experience using WMT for SEO. We are always updating our SEO courses with the latest trends and best practices. If you're more interested in the analytics side of Webmaster Tools then we also recommend our 1 day Google Analytics or Advanced Google Analytics course.

I've thrown in a lot of tips along the way based on our experiences at Silicon Beach so you will have some good ideas to use Webmaster Tools to improve your site's performance.

Let's start from the top...

We've updated this article for 2014 and turned it into a free downloadable Mobile Strategy eBook. Find out what your options are for mobile development and which platform is right for your business. Once you've decided, take a look at our Mobile Development courses and start learning an essential skill for 2014.

Last year we wrote about ‘the mobile future’. Well, that future has become the present. As a business owner, what are your options for entering the ever-growing mobile market? In the US, smartphones outnumber feature phones. In India, this year mobile web users will outnumber desktop web users. Not only is the mobile market growing but it’s becoming more profitable. Google recently added in-app subscriptions to the Play Store, PayPal is taking mobile to the high street and banks are getting in on the act led by Barclays Pingit.

 Fears of security have been swept aside as mobile users worldwide devour information & entertainment on the go.

The opportunities for marketing are huge. Last year the mobile market was estimated to be worth $25-50 billion by 2015, but as China’s app market is valued at $35 billion those early figures massively undersell the mobile market.

Download our eBook Now

Mobile at a Glance

Users can access content on their smartphone or tablet in two ways – via a browser or by downloading an app. You should be making sure that potential customers can access your content via one of these options:

• Browser – Websites (desktop, mobile & responsive) and Web Apps
• Application – Native Apps

So which one should you choose? Use our helpful guide to decide!

We run an Android App Workshop, teaching you how to design, develop and market apps for the two most popular mobile operating systems - with a combined market share of 82% between them!