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Go Social and be first not last !

Your website is the key to the success to your business and online rankings ?

WRONG !!

The key to the success of your business online and the online rankings are determined on how interactive and credible you are with the followers. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube are the places you need to aim as they are all ranked by Google Search. This helps you get known and also increase your ranking on Google.

So why do we need to be social ? Because you want to be first not last in your industry, the company people go to but to achieve this you need to interact with your audience and improve reach socially.

Why do we need YouTube ? YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world which is also owned by Google. If your not on YouTube you should be. Your videos create a face and presence for your business,.

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ – These social platforms are the ability to interact with the audience on a personal level by leaving replies, messages which create back links to your website (IF YOU POST CORRECTLY)..

If you want to be first not last, YOU need to get socially inclined by post on a regular basis and getting that face of the company on YouTube.

Content is the key to attract an online audience. You know your company so you know the content. Get out of the shadow’s of obscurity and go into the light of social presence.

For more information please feel free to get in touch https://hyper1digital.co.uk/contact-us/

Are you a social smart phone user?

Are you social smart and is your phone a smart phone ?

I remember getting my first mobile phone, I remember it having a single line LCD display and a very long antenna that you pulled out to make a call. This phone had no way of being a useful social media tool to me but now my phone is the most powerful tool I have.

In the modern day of technology the smart phone is the only tool you will have with you most of your day and night. This tool is powerful the ultimate weapon in your social arsenal. This tool has many many apps I call them business bullets, that you fire to get hits.

So why is the smart phone the ultimate weapon in business ?

Well I am glad you asked because I have many answers for you. Lets start with how we use our phones in the modern day. We take photos, we tweet and Facebook statuses, we even do live streaming to show our friends the wonderful night we are having normally drunk but we still do it.

Recently I attended a business networking event and my business cards did not turn up in time. Many people were handing out their cards to me and asking where were my business cards. To my response I said I was running an experiment not to use business cards for one whole networking event.

I did not tell them it wasn't intentional but I soon learnt that emailing that potential client and adding them straight on my social media they got more than a bit of card with my logo they got my attention, the interaction all clients want with their new provider.

Instantly after adding them on Facebook, LinkedIn and twitter their phones started to alert them that Hyper 1 Digital had liked their pages, their tweets and added them as friends.

This made me realise that the ultimate tool is my smart phone because if your phone is not smart you are working like a dummy on a dummy phone (applause).

Lets take twitter for example, most of us have over 100 followers on there (if you dont get some). You take out your phone take a photo of something important to your day and within seconds you tweet it to over 100 potential clients. You have also proven that you and your business are there to interact and show the main key to my success is personality and the personal touch.

I would like to challenge you all to take out your phones while reading this article and tweet a status or photo to @hyper110 and see how long it takes. BTW did I mention when you tweet to a person or group their followers will also get a glimpse of your awesome tweet.

For more information on social marketing and to obtain tips visitwww.hyper1digital.co.uk and sign up to our news letter

In House SEO

Our in house SEO team has been working hard on our own website this week and we are now on the 1st page of google for “Remote IT Support Barnsley” ,”Remote IT Support Doncaster” and “Remote IT Support Leeds”

10 Quick Tips About Seo

SEO and Your Website - 10 Quick Tips

Recently Hyper 1 Digital has been working with numerous clients building up their online presence and training them how to utilise their WordPress website to increase their SEO ranking. After doing this training I decided to write a little post with 10 tips you can do to help your SEO ranking.

1. Optimize Your Site / Page Around One Keyword or Topic

Your business may offer many services or products but your keywords need to be simple and aimed at the type of business, service or product range you have to offer. This will allow Google to pick up and clearly index your website to the correct keyword. Recently we have been working on our own keywords by utilising one of the main focuses of our business which we are now ranked on the 1st page of Google for "Remote IT Support Barnsley" and "Remote IT Support Doncaster".

2. Optimize Page Titles

A title tag is used by search engines to display a page in search results and can also be found at the top of your browser. Title tags tell search engines and searchers what the page is about. Since Google will only display between 50-60 characters in the title tag, you should keep title tags under 55 characters and try to drive people to click with compelling copy. You should also put keywords or topics towards the front of the title.

3. Utilize Proper Heading Tags

Heading tags should clearly tell the reader and search engines about the page’s topic. A search engine is able to identify the heading when it is tagged by bracketing text in <H1> within the page’s HTML (Note: If you have a CMS or COS like HubSpot or WordPress, this is usually coded in the background). Heading tags help tell a search engine the level of importance of the content by also using <H2> and <H3> tags. You can check your site’s current heading tags by viewing in HTML view.

In addition to what you should do with heading tags , you should also avoid a few things including:

Avoid using generic terms like “Home” or “Products”
Don’t put important information that would likely be your <H1> as an image.

4. Optimize Image Alt Text

While you should not hide your heading tag in an image, you should still give search engines more opportunities to link to your website by adding keywords in the image alt text and file name.

5. Grow Natural Links

Google continues to use natural, quality inbound links as a main ranking factor. In 2016, you should closely monitor inbound links to ensure that they are constantly growing and that the inbound links come from quality websites.

6. Increase Site Speed

Since 2011, Google has made it apparent that site speed matter in search rankings, and today, with a bigger emphasis on the user experience than ever before, site speed will continue to be a critical ranking factor. Users don’t like to wait, and we are becoming more and more accustomed to the fast load times, which means your site will be left in the dust when a user must wait. There are a few important things you can do to speed up site speed:

Test site speed using Google or a nice little tool we use called pingdom
Ensure your web server can handle you size of your company and website needs. Overloaded web servers can slow down load times.
You may also find that one of the following culprits is slowing down times:
- Embedded videos or media
- Using a lot of images
- Images that are not compressed to minimize pixels before uploading - We use tinypng.com or WPSmush if it is a WordPress based website.
- Clunky coding
- Using a lot of plugins

If you suspect any of the above are causing slow load times, you can find experts to help clean up your site or minimize the use of each.

7. HTTP vs. HTTPS: Why They Matter

With a big push to make the web world more secure, Google has began emphasizing the importance of utilizing HTTPS. While many websites have traditionally ran on a Hyper Text Transfer Protocal (HTTP), a Hyper Transfor Protocal Secure (HTTPS) ensures that a website is encrypted and cannot be hacked. With Google beginning to test the waters in using HTTPS as a ranking factor, it will be important to secure your website with HTTPS in 2016.

8. Mobile Search Implications

With nearly 40% of organic traffic coming from mobile devices in 2014, it should come as no surprise that mobile-friendly websites will rank better with Google. To ensure you are mobile optimized, you should be avoiding common mistakes described by Google including faulty redirects, mobile-only 404s, blocked media, and slow mobile load times.

9. Meta description tag

Meta Descriptions are the little bit of information under the title when you search google. This information is a brief sales pitch to get those visitors through the digital door. We recommend that you utilise your meta descriptions to match each page of your website. Include your keywords and always make it user friendly.

10. Social Media is Key !

Social Media is the key to increase your page views and increase your website ranking. Social media marketing is about interacting with your potential customers and exisiting customers. On every post we ALWAYS put a back link to our website if it is through Facebook, Twitter, Linked and Google+.

Although it may feel like Google is trying to make our jobs as inbound marketers more difficult, they ultimately want to provide the best user experience, which should be the goal of your website as well. If you’d like to discover how you could better optimize your website in 2016, request a marketing assessment from Hyper 1 Digital today.

Hyper 1 Digital – Hosted Desktop

Hosted Desktop is now live !

Hyper 1 Digital has been working hard on building our hosted desktop infrastructure to offer a complete business conituity solution for SME’s around the UK.

Our infrastructure is based on industry leading HP hardware and Microsoft’s leading Hyper-v hypervisor, fully replicated between multiple data centres around the UK.

We decided to build our infrastructure to allow scale ability, availability and best of cap costs to offer a competitive rate to our clients.

So why choose Hyper 1 Digital as your hosted desktop provider ?

24 /7 Support
24 /7 monitored Servers
Daily Backups
Hourly file backups
UK ISO 27001 Data Centres
Industry leading hardware
Capped Costs per user per month

For more information on our hosted desktop solution call us on 01226 610240 or message us

IT Tips 101 – Your Data

At Hyper 1 Digital we are passionate about IT and securing you data.

Many companies store their data locally but many fail to ensure their data is secure and regularly backed up.

Today I am going to cover how to secure your data and keep your business safe.

Your data is the key to your business and securing it against failure, corruption and deletion is a *MUST*. Ensuring your data is secured and backed up is a task in itself specially without professional help. At Hyper 1 Digital we manage data backups for companies that fail to do it themselves and advise on how to keep the data secure within a working environment.

Data security issues does not always come from external breaches but internal breaches. Take a look at the Sage their security breach came from their internal member of staff - BBC NEWS FEED

So how can we ensure our data is secure, backed up and easily restored.

Securing Your Data Within

Internal security is a must when it comes to company data. There may be users that only need a certain level of access or a department that has to be restricted such as HR folders and Accounts folders. Securing the data internally allows you to limit the access rights and to track last know user access by enabling permissions, logging and folder enumeration.

Lets take a look at folder permissions

What are folder permissions ?

Folder permissions is a security function to limit file and folder access to specified members of staff or groups. Setting folder permissions avoids members of staff accessing data they are forbidden to see, folder permissions can be allocated to user or on a group basis which consists of multiple users such as a department or a set group of people.

Allocating the level of permissions to your internal data is guaranteed to reduce the risk of internal breaches from members of staff intentionally or unintentionally. Permissions are the key to securing data but also centrally managing the data structure by restricting users creating folders anywhere in you data share.

Ensuring your data share is secure but tidy allows the support company or the dedicated member of staff to easily restore any files and folders.

What to stop and monitor internally

Internal Security is the first thing you need to action to avoid any data breaches and avoid data loss. So what can be stopped and monitored to ensure your data is secure.

What to stop ?

There is a wide range of areas we cover about restriction and what to stop but the main areas are

USB Drive access
Installing applications
Website access
Personal Email

The 4 bullet points ensure there will be no risk from users plugging virus infected USB drives into your company network, installing applications with hidden viruses or trojans, visiting infected websites and most of all access personal emails that could either be infected or phishing emails that ask for personal details.

What to monitor ?

Monitoring your network is the key to ensuring full data security. So what can we monitor, folder access and access attempts and website usage. Monitoring these two areas and ensuring staff are aware of the monitoring reduces the internal security breaches and attempts within the business.

External threats and how to secure your data

External threats are a constant worry for companies with sensitive data or data they require to ensure the business is fully operational. So how do we secure from the external threats ?

Firewall's

Lets start by ensuring your internet connection has a firewall with firewall restrictions in place to ensure only allowed traffic is passed through to your network. A firewall is not just a device that sits and restricts traffic but it can also stop attack attempts to take down your network.

Anti Virus

External threats come in many shapes and forms but mainly by a virus or trojan horse downloaded by the user. Normally this is at no fault of the user and can be blocked by an anti virus that will run regular scans on the computers and run real time protection that will run live scans on email, external drives and network access.

Backing up your data

Backing up your data can be achieved locally or by installing an application that will back up to a remote data centre. Both methods have their ups and downs but both ensure your data is backed up on a regular basis.

Local Backups

Normally achieved by using an external hard drive or tape device that requires user intervention to swap them over and take one of site. Local backups are cost effective in the long run but create risk if the schedule is missed.

Cloud Backups

Cloud backup solutions have now become the most commonly used method of backing up date. the cloud backup solution Hyper 1 Digital offer backs up to two locations amazon storage and rack space in London. This solutions is based on usage and is charged monthly. This solution ensures there is an offsite backup of your data but without any user intervention.

For more information on securing your data get in touch 01226 610240 or message us

Your website the online shop Part 2 – Facebook

Facebook and Your Business

Now we are on the second part of our blog series - Your Website The Online Shop.

Today we are going to be covering Facebook and how you can increase your reach through the largest social media platform with 1.71 billion users with 300 million users in Europe and 1.51 billion mobile users.

First lets recap why you need to create an online presence.

Let people know about your business - People want to know about you so why not let them know about your products or services
Increase your sales - Increase your sales by generating leads to your business and earn more money
Growth through the internet - Growth is about expansion and creating opportunities for others by increasing your sales revenue

Now we have had a brief recap lets talk Facebook and how to utilise the top social platform to create a wider reach.

Facebook gives you the option to build a page for your business where you can add products, services, photos, videos and other types of content. This page is the face of your business on Facebook so when you create the content or add your services and products think about the user that will be viewing it.

Clear Content - Make your content clear and straight to the point, make sure the user knows exactly what you offer.
Easy to read - Make your content easy to read to avoid confusion
Eye Catching - The most important get the user to view your content, make it eye catching with catchy subjects, images and videos

Facebook advertising for Free

Now we have covered the content and how the page should look lets look into how to publicise your business page with little cost.

Facebook offers a wide range of open groups that allow you to offer your services and create links to your Facebook page. These groups are a little gem to get noticed in areas without purchasing Facebook advertising.

Facebook Paid advertising

Paid advertising is a cost effective way to widen your reach within local, county and nationwide areas by selecting your area and the amount of money you would like to invest. Recently I set up a Facebook advert as test to prove to a local company that paying £894 for local advertising with little return is a bad investment specially when they are advertising the business alongside competitors.

So how did I test and prove their are alternate methods to investing in advertising to obtain a higher return.

I create a Facebook page and populated the page with the relevant content
I uploaded the images I wanted to post out on the advert
I created the advert with a budget of £15 over a 2 day period

After 2 days of the test advert launching we reached over 85,000 users in the local area and revived numerous message and obtain 2 jobs and 3 quotes all from a £15 investment. This investment also created increased traffic to the web page and eventually increased the web page ranking. I always recommend purchasing a few adverts when you launch your page to test your market and click response but it creates the wider reach within you local area.

User Interaction

The key to success on a Facebook page is to interact with your viewers and build discussions with them by answering questions and posting relevant content sometimes content that will get them to think about your page and the company.

For further advice on Facebook pages get in touch 01226 610240 or message us

Your website the online shop !

Today I have been working on those little niggles and trying to educate clients about their websites. This got me to write this blog post to help educate any website owner and business owner with and without an online presence.

Lets start with the modern day way of searching for a business. For many years business have put an advert in the local paper or business directory and hoped to get work. This method was suitable in the dark ages but now we have users searching social media, online directories and the most important of all search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Why have an online presence ?

This is the every day question I get asked by the old school business owner.

In the modern day of the search engine each business owner should have a website and be registered on Google and on online business directories. Having a website does not just show your services and pretty pictures but creates a wider reach of potential clients and contacts.

Lets work with an example of a recent client I have been working with. The client paid a local business directory £894 to advertise in their booklet but received very little for his money. As a test I paid £15 for facebook advertising and linked his recently built website to all top social media platforms.

After an hour of posting offers and creating the correct advertisement the client received two messages requesting quotes for a full bathroom installation.

This is a prime example why a business should have an online presence and be integrated into all top social media platforms.

How to increase your reach for potential sales ?

Increasing online presence is about increasing your reach to create sales conversions. Recently I tested numerous methods but the biggest reach I found was to increase my social interaction by posting on the top social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Linkedin. Following these posts I received a wider reach which converted into sales and numerous website creation projects.

Lets cover what you can do to increase your reach using social media.

Create and post to a Facebook business page
Create and post to a Linkedin business page
Tweet on Twitter
Create and post to a Google+ page

For more information on how to increase your online presence and create a wider reach drop us a call 01226 610240 or message us

Google Duo Final Review

Google Duo – The Final Review.

Over the past few days I have been testing with friends and family the new Google Duo app based on my HTC Desire 530.

Day 1 – I installed the application and invited my friends and family to join so I could test the nice little google app.

Day 2 – I have tested the app with a frind and the interface is smooth, easy to use and friendly on the eyes.

Day 3 – I have tested the app but this time with an IT Support client. The client found it very helpful as I could show them which key on the keyboard to press and which cables to look at.

Day 4 – After finally testing on a personal and professional level my conclusion to the Google App is that its interface is easy to use, the video quality is high standard and the signup is seamless.