Instagram had just been launched in late 2010 and wasn’t even a question I asked for five years if a business had one or not. Nowadays every business I talk to I’m always bringing up the big social media giants.

The last decade has been another decade of fast-path growth for the growing worldwide web. If you compare the fact that 20 years ago Telstra was only had just started offering ADSL broadband and it took 10 years to get most of the country connected to stable internet.

Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made a campaign promise in the 2007 election about building the NBN using fibre to the premises. At the time the NBN was debated to be an ‘overkill’ and compromises were made to save costs. The NBN was a very much debated topic among technology enthusiasts and by too many people in power not understanding the technology.

Regardless of your view on the NBN issue, we can tell you now that the NBN is already in the works of being eventually replaced by the growing 5G network. Although this won’t be something we will be seeing until the middle of the next decade on a mass-market scale.

Websites have very much changed across the web in the last decade, The cost of producing and maintaining a website has dropped thanks to the competition between web agencies that have popped up.

Websites are focused on social media marketing and referring social media visitors to your website or vice versa. This trend changed after FaceBook introduced FaceBook pixel which gives publishers and businesses the ability to retarget ads on social media.

Another noticeable change has been the number of website builders and their technologies. As mentioned before due to the advancements in developing responsive websites using automated user interfaces the cost of labour of creating a website has dramatically decreased.

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Web Design and Tech: The last decade and what has changed

Now understanding the importance of SEO for any website lets reverse engineer that information into basic principles of how you can improve your SEO.

1. How often you update your website will determine how often your website gets crawled. Posting new content on your site makes your website treated as an information site rather than a static business page that changes once in a blue moon.
2. Build content. Sounds simple enough but you need to put in the work to build content. It is much more difficult to rank a one-page website with very little content. Not impossible, but much more difficult.
3. Optimise your website tags. By creating meta tags descriptions and applying ‘Alt’ tags to your images you’re making it easier for search engines to search.
4. If you make your website as easy to access for search engines as possible they will give weight to your website. So it makes sense to make sure you have a sitemap.xml that has been submitted to search engines to help them.
5. Provide value to the person reading your content. Imagine you are someone who just had a tap explode and need a plumber’s assistance. You would typically Google your nearest plumber and you may click on a few pages to decide on one to call. All of the websites are very similar but you noticed one that had a detailed guide linked on the home page detailing how to turn off the water or tap manually and tips on preventing plumbing flooding in your home that may cause more damage. By providing tips to someone who may be having a crisis you will probably find you will be trusted, respected and have happier clients who are willing to come back to you.
6. Engage with your audience on social media. If you don’t have a social media page you will need to be on the well-known platforms. As much as we may not like it, not being with the times in the digital world you will struggle to keep up.

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Six SEO tips from an expert

What are Facebook Messenger Bots

Bots come from the term ‘robots’ so in short, they are software that interacts and reads the text and then sorts that information and replies with the chosen response.

For example, if someone asked “What are your opening hours?” the bot could reply with the operating hours.

The advantage of this is that your business can be open virtually 24/7 and be able to assist users with necessary enquiries and arrange callbacks or follow-ups to the companies to respond to for the next day.

What can Facebook Messenger Bots do

Facebook Messenger bots more specifically allow you to send announcements to your users, follow up automatically, allow your users to track their orders.

It’s also a cheap and virtually free way of providing support to your users without them having to sign up or enter their details. Since Facebook Messenger is a huge platform; users feel comfortable using it and are much more likely to respond to promotions and follow-ups than conventional email methods.

Why should you use bots for your business

• Most of the time it is free to get started with
• Allows your business to operate and answer questions 24/7
• It is a great platform to build rapport with your customers on
• Send promotional material or updates (with users consent and subject to guidelines)
• Send automated follow-ups and identify issues early

Best platforms to build FaceBook Messenger Bots

You can build FaceBook bots on a variety of platforms, but my personal favourite is ChatFuel. I found it was straightforward to use and one of the first messenger bot platforms of its kind. Although there are several premium features if you’re happy to pay the extra. The basic features alone should be enough for a business to get started using the messenger platform for their business and benefit significantly from the improved conversions.

Other bot-building platforms for messenger:

• ManyChat (Free to get started with premium plans available)
• ChatFuel (As mentioned above is our favourite and makes it easy to reuse previous blocks)
• Leadformly
• Sequel

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What Are Facebook Messenger Bots? How do you make them?

Understanding Social Media Optimisation, or SMO, is similar to SEO (search engine optimisation) except it relies on social media sites to pull in guests to web pages. It is recognized as a type of social media marketing, which is the promotion and publicizing of consumer services and items by means of social media sites.

Practically every internet user is familiar with social media sites these days, even on the off chance that they don’t go on MySpace or Twitter. Internet discussions, social and personal blogs, wikis, podcasts, instant messaging, picture sharing sites, social networking sites and social bookmarking sites are on the whole types of social media – and all can be utilized for SMO purposes.

Mainstream social networking sites used by e-commerce companies include Bebo, Facebook and MySpace. Less well known, however gaining interest, are ASmallWorld, Geni.com and Xing. Social network aggregators, for example, FriendFeed, are a useful SMM apparatus, as they bring the content of different social networking sites together, increasing your chances of optimization by the search engines.

Blogging is another mainstream social media instrument. Blogger, LiveJournal, Typepad, Xanga and WordPress are among the most mainstream. Small scale blogging is a simpler type of web log, quickly gaining interest. The best known is Twitter. It is practically de rigueur, these days, for companies to include Twitter among their social media marketing joins.

Social bookmarking sites like Delicious and StumbleUpon are another way to optimize your website. Additionally called social labeling, bookmarking enables internet users to share, manage and organize the bookmarks of web pages. Metadata labels might be added so users can check the reference is relevant to their needs before downloading the connection. Social news sites like Digg and Reddit do a similar thing, yet offer connects to news sites.

As well as all these there are video sharing sites (YouTube being the undeniable example); music and sound sharing pages, photography and craftsmanship sharing sites (Flickr, deviant Art and Photobucket being among the most famous) and livecasting on sites like Ustream. The latter enables users to do live video streaming of events, and is a useful instrument for e-commerce.

Understanding Social Media Optimisation takes place in one of two ways. The primary adds social media connects to the content. These might be RSS feeds, social news joins and interactive devices like user appraisals and surveying buttons. They may likewise incorporate images and video joins. The second method uses activities not related to the web content being promoted, and includes blogging, discussion groups and announcements of profiles.

Whereas SEO concentrates on search engine marketing, SMO concentrates on directing people to a site from other areas, relying on the way that numerous internet users – especially the youthful – use social networking sites significantly more than they use search engines. However, a side effect of SMO is improved search engine rankings, so it functions admirably alongside traditional SEO techniques.

Understanding Social Media Marketing is a vital instrument to the online business group, enabling companies to reach out to their customers recently. With enormous businesses and high street names now using the medium, little companies have gained credibility that search engine marketing alone couldn’t achieve.

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Understanding Social Media Optimisation