GEEKY LEANINGS
The digital world intrigues me, and I love tinkering with websites, WordPress, SEO, basic coding and digital marketing. I am not a coder, but have done some basic training classes in PHP, HTML and CSS. I wanted to know what is happening behind the browser screen so picked up a bit of coding along the way.
Now, I can manage a WordPress website, do on-page and off-page SEO, host a website, manage the back end to an extent, tinker with plugins, design and theme. Of course the data analytics that is at the heart of online success is also something that I keep at continuously. Google Search Console is a long time friend.
I have also delved into Facebook marketing, email marketing, creating landing pages and sales funnels.
I went through a stage of experimenting with every shiny new web, SEO and WordPress tool that came along, and ended up using a few. The ones that I really liked are Thrive Content Builder, Genesis Framework and AHREFs. The last one is a mega tool that helps you do everything related to SEO, digital marketing and more. I have tried my hand at doing digital marketing and SEO for my own websites and a few belonging to friends. It takes years to become good at SEO, so I can’t say that I am good, but I have been able to rank some sites for long tail keywords (alas with low search volumes).
As they say ‘Content is King’, and there is no doubt about that. Content is the foundation of any brand today. Whether you have an online store or are a giant offline brand, content will make or break you.
When it comes to a website, organic traffic is important for most brands. That is where making the website Google update proof becomes important. Hold on! Google Update Proof!! There is no such thing. Any website in the world can get hit by a Google update. So says, Fred, Florida 2, Panda and many more that happen every day.
However, it does help to have powerful, epic, original, keyword aligned content. That said, promoting and marketing content, and optimizing on-page and off-page SEO is equally important.
Content marketing is another vital focus area of digital marketing, and it will influence the online world for some time, especially video content. So, I have tried my hand with YouTube videos and promoting them. From Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords to Disavowing Backlinks, I have delved a bit into SEO, and will continue to do so. As far as coding goes, I am a beginner in HTML, and can make a rudimentary static website from scratch. I am able to work at a basic level with PHP and CSS. With practice I may be able to do more, but my needs are limited to knowing and using code snippets and understanding what is going on.
My love for art has made me pretty adept at Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, and I will always rely on Word and Excel to make life easier when I write or plan out things.
Gizmos and devices also excite me. I own a pretty cool drone, the Parrot Bebop 2. It has a range of 1.24 miles/2 kilometers (whoa!). I like playing FIFA 18 on my XBOX. Frankly I’d love to own the latest smartphones, smartwatches, 3-D printers, VR headsets, Kindle Fires, wearables, gaming consoles and the like, but money comes in the way. Being in the technology space for so many years, I have also developed an interest in all things tech.