2016's Cyber Security skills gap

 By Sarah Morgan

The growing IT skills gap and its implications for the global economy is a known issue throughout the industry. It’s the net result of an industry outpacing the supply of professionals needed to facilitate employer demand, effectively stifling growth. Cyber security is an area within IT where the demand for professionals continues to grow. This is due to greater number and publicity of cyber-attacks on all businesses. If not addressed, implications could be serious with attacks likely to continue to grow in frequency and severity.

ISACA are makers of major security courses like the Certified Cybersecurity Practitioner CSX, CISA, CISM and CRISC, and they’ve recently produced an infographic that has revealed some interesting and eye-opening statistics. These statistics have come from surveys conducted by ISACA themselves, as well as IBM’s 2015 Cost of Data Breach Study, UK House of Lords Digital Skills Committee and more. As providers of certifications to cyber security professionals, ISACA are using these statistics to help close the gap where the crucial IT security skills are most needed, as well as increase awareness about the skills shortages. Below, is a breakdown of each stat highlighted by ISACA and their individual and collective implications on the IT industry. Make sure you check out the ISACA infographic at the bottom of the post.

The costs of the cyber security skills gap

In 2014, $1 billion worth of personally identifiable information (PII) was stolen. This means there have been many more stolen since, through 2015 and beyond. As large as this figure is, more unidentifiable records that cannot be traced are highly likely to have been stolen too. This marks a huge amount of money stolen from businesses and economies. On top of this, there are the costs beyond money, like the breach of a customer’s privacy. This type of cost can mean stolen passwords, accounts, addresses, phone numbers or credit card details. These damages can cause loss of personal finance, credit card fraud or even identity fraud. Combined, this shows how cyber security threats are heavily draining businesses and individuals. 

Unfortunately, the severity of these financial implications appears to be increasing. It is estimated $150 million will be the average cost of a data breach by 2020. This is roughly £107 million. The 2015 average in the UK was £1.46 million, more than doubling the 2014 figure of £600,000.This staggering figure, as well as the soaring increase, shows the need to increase security in all businesses, now. Technology and hacking techniques are continuing to advance and if your security is not sufficient and updated, you could be left vulnerable. The huge figure, as well as it’s meteoric rise, forces business managers to take company-wide action, rather than dumping the burden entirely onto IT departments.

97% of security professionals surveyed in ISACA’s 2015 APT study believe advanced persistent threats (APTs) represent a credible threat to national security and economic stability. These opinions come from knowledgeable professionals within the security industry, which is reason enough to take notice of this imminent and serious threat to our businesses and economy. Many businesses ignorantly and naively settle for sub-par IT security systems, but every business is a potential target and if you are not prepared, the consequences could be crippling.

The regularity of cyber security breaches

In the same ISACA survey, professionals from 1 in 4 organisations have experienced an APT attack. This shows the regularity of cyber attacks, as well as how widespread they now are. It’s also worth mentioning that 3 in 4 organisations also believe they will be targeted in the near future, again reiterating how every business needs to be aware and prepared for cyber attacks.

1 in 2 believe the IT security department is unaware of all of the organisations Internet of Things (IOT) devices and 74% believe the likelihood of an organisation being hacked through IOT devices is high or medium. In our increasingly connected world, there are connectivity capabilities on a staggering amount of devices, in our business and personal lives. All of these devices have the potential to become avenues that hackers can target to infiltrate a business. It is important for everyone in the company to be aware of the potential security risks, especially the IT department.

Image courtesy of pat138241 at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The need for cyber security professionals

2 million will be the number of cyber security professionals the industry will be short of by 2019. Numbers are often bandied about to estimate the number of cyber security professionals needed in the cyber security sector, and it’s difficult to determine the exact demand in the UK. However, it’s clear that 2 million reflects the trend in the current cyber security jobs market and is a worrying size considering the severity of threats. In the EMEA region, stats from (ISC)² estimate there will be 1.2 million cyber security roles that are constrained by a lack of supply in the industry. 

The growth of demand for cyber security professionals is 3x the growth of the overall IT jobs market. On top of this, when compared to the overall jobs market, that stat grows to 12x. Also, a study from US New and World Report states that demand for cyber security professionals is growing at a rate of 36.5% through to 2022. 

Looking slightly deeper in the cyber security jobs market, 64% of organisations believe just half or fewer of applicants for open security jobs are qualified. This highlights how the jobs market has become stagnant for employers due to the cyber security skills gap. At the bottom of this scale, many business are having to settle for candidates that aren’t good enough. A potential side effect is that professionals in the industry don’t have the skills to properly protect their business.

How can we develop more cyber security skills?

53% of organisations experience delays as long as 6 months to find qualified security candidates. This means it’s becoming more difficult, costly and time-consuming to find the right cyber security skills for employers to protect their business and assets. One avenue through which the skills gap can be closed is Apprenticeships. The UK government is heavily investing in cyber security, with Chancellor George Osbourne promising an extra £1.9 billion by 2020. Much of this investment will fund two new cyber security focused apprenticeships, the Cyber Security Professional and Cyber Security Analyst. Offered by Firebrand, these trailblazer apprenticeships are an excellent avenue to upskill staff, unrestricted by age limitations. 

89% of consumers believe it is important for organisations to have cyber security certified employees. Another side effect of cyber security gaining more attention, is consumers becoming more aware of its importance. Customers are recognising it’s vital for businesses to have certified cyber security professionals. By getting your security employees certified, not only will they learn and demonstrate more advanced skills, customers will recognise, value and appreciate the extra commitment to cyber security. This is another eye-opener to how important cyber security certifications are, and from a source you probably didn’t expect.

77% of women said that no teacher or careers advisor mentioned cyber security as a career – for men it’s 67%. The lack of women in IT has been a trend for much longer than the cyber security skills gap. It’s clear that the cause of this goes far deeper into society and change starts with giving children the opportunity and encouragement to get valuable IT skills at an early age. The 67% figure for men, shows the problem is not unique to women. The root of the issue is that IT security is not taught in the school curriculum. This causes children, and their teachers too, to be unaware that cyber security is a career choice – one with excellent prospects. 

What’s the solution?

The first step to help close the cyber security skills gap, is for government and business leaders to realise the dangers that the skills gap presents. Thankfully, this is starting to happen. Back in November 2015 Chancellor George Osbourne announced that the UK government was planning to invest £1.9 billion into cyber security. This type of commitment needs to continue, with business leaders and managers investing in cyber security training. This is important to give cyber security professionals the skills they need to properly protect businesses from cyber attacks. If these skills are in place throughout the UK, attacks will be prevented and the numbers reduced.

Also, the structure of education around cyber security needs to change. If the government were to introduce cyber security as part of the curriculum, it would encourage more children to choose cyber security careers. The government must continue to increase their investment into cyber security apprenticeships. This would encourage more young people and businesses to undertake apprenticeships, developing skills and successful cyber security careers. Finally, general awareness needs to increase around cyber security. This would help people take more steps to help prevent cyber attacks. These actions would change the culture of dusting cyber security under the carpet, and getting more skilled cyber security professionals into the industry to protect our businesses and economy.

About the Author:        

Sarah writes for Firebrand Training on a number of IT related topics. This includes exams, training, certification trends, project management, certification, careers advice and the industry itself. Sarah has 11 years of experience in the IT industry. 

comparison faceoff between LG 5 vs Samsung 7

LG G5 vs. Samsung Galaxy S7 | SpecOut

LG5 and Samsung S 7 compared and reviewed by features

5 kind of linking strategies that can effect your seo rankings

Among the the most crucial changes that might affect your website traffic is your linking strategy. At times we go overboard to get links and focus on the quantity , rather than quality.This affects your traffic and might change your SERP Again how do you judge quality of your links . There are 3 ways how you can do this
1) Is the industry you are targeting complimentary or it is your competitor ?
2) How many links does the website have ? Are the links merely buried in their links pages. A page has more than 100 links ..you can be assured the link will not  pass on the attributes of links

3) Relevance and authority : Links that are related to the same topic are given more weightage than random linking  to unrelated pages.Think of relevance of each link being evaluated by in the context of specific user search query .For example " for a search term " new cars at Arizona " if the publisher has received a link from Arizona chamber of commerce, the search engine derives  that  the fact that" the link is relevant and trustworthy as the site is about Arizona".Once you decide on the industry you are targeting,your focus on link building should be razor sharp on getting linksfrom within that industry.

4) No follow links : Although google recently claimed that the attribute of "Nofollow" links is no longer that relevant and important as compared to a couple of years ago. However when you use a No follow meta tag on a page, the search engine will still crawl the page and place it in its index. However all links ( both external and internal) on the page will be disabled from passing the link juice to other pages

 4) Anchor text : Desist from a link where the anchor text mentions" our links, click here to know more,read more, or check out the full post here. Be very specific on the anchor text to which you site is being linked to. The best policy is to use the title of your website or webpage as an anchor text The impact of anchor text is quite more powerful than you think.For example if you link to a page that has minimal search friendly ( flash site for example) The search engine will look for signals to know what the page is about.In such case inbound anchor text becomes the primary driver in determining the relevance of the page 

end of good times for swiss watches, as apple smartwatch is on a roll

In what could be a watershed in the history of wrist watch.. Smartwatches sales have surpasses traditional swiss watches with a sales of 8.1 million in Q4, 2015.. In contrast 7.9 milliom swiss watches were sold during the same period.As compared to Q4,2014, smartwatches have seen unprecedented e growth of 316% , wheras Swiss watches managed to ship a mere 1.9million.

In terms of marketshare ,Apple smartwatch rules this segment with over 63% marketshare and is far ahead of samsung with 16% share .Combined, Apple and Samsung make up 8 out of 10 smartwatches sold . Apple sold 2.6millio smartwatches in q2,2015 while samsung managed to sell 600,000 which means apple sales is 6 times ahead of its nearest rival.Across wearable technology, which icludes smartwatches, fitness trackers , Apple’s 3.6m Watch sales contributes only 0.8m and ranks 2nd behind market leader Fitbit, which sold 4.4m devices in Q2.2015

Biggest market for swiss watches

In terms of geographic breakup, Apple watches smartwatches sold the highest in North America with 7.4million units , while Asia Pacific contributed 6.7 million units, followed by western europe with 5.4million units.

swiss watches contribution by regions

Meanwhile About 1.2 billion watches are produced annually, according to the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry’s estimates ..At company level, three Swiss watch and luxury groups – Swatch Group, Richemont, and Rolex – are the clear world market leaders. Together the three groups account for an estimated 45% ofglobal swiss  watch sales.
 Rolex leads the market with a share of 13.59% followed nby Omega and IWC, with a marketshare of  9.82 and  7.23%. Rado and Breitling  with 5.6 and 8.08%

Microsoft reaches landmark deal with Xamarin

 By Sarah Morgan

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced their latest major business move - acquiring Xamarin, an industry leading mobile app development company. Having previously had a long-standing working relationship with Xamarin, this deal makes the next step in allowing Microsoft to make Xamarin their sole partners in mobile app development. Building on their cross-platform vision.

Image courtesy of Microsoft the Microsoft Blog

Who are Xamarin?

Xamarin’s mobile app specialities give developers the ability to code mobile apps in one language across iOS, Android, Windows and Mac devices. Its customers, totaling around 15,000, boast names like Coca Cola, the US Air Force, UK Parliament, Bosch Siemens and more. Plus, Xamarin have been at the forefront of mobile app development for some time, creating testing methods for developers in the cloud. Xamarin were named as one of the “9 startups that run the internet” by UK Business Insider in December 2015.

Why this makes sense for Microsoft

The primary aim for Microsoft in this deal is to advance its development of a cross-platform vision. Providing an outstanding and consistent experience across all of it devices, in unison with Windows 10. As Microsoft has previously worked closely with Xamarin, the deal is a natural progression for both parties, giving them both great potential for growth.

Microsoft has been working relentlessly on growing their presence in the mobile sector. This acquisition is a landmark moment that could see their mobile app development capabilities improve significantly. Already a market leader, the skills and abilities Xamarin add to Microsoft, have the potential to establish their mobile app dominance.

About the Author:        

Sarah writes for Firebrand Training on a number of IT related topics. This includes exams, training, certification trends, project management, certification, careers advice and the industry itself. Sarah has 11 years of experience in the IT industry. 

how search engines use historical and temporal link data for ranking

5 ways how search engines use historical and temporal data to determine SERP ranking

while we know that links are the basic bedrocks to ranking a site and count them as a vote for the site. This concept was actually based on " citation" where an established thesis was often cited during researching for another topic, which meant that the original thesis was a vote for further research.However how do search crawlers use these links as an information ?Know more below or click here

Index inclusion :Search engines need to decide what kind of information and pages to include in their index .They do this by discovering web pages by crawling the links, if the site has more links it crawls through those pages and this  process continues as the crawlers jumps from one link to another 

In short links are used to index most parts of the world wide web, by which  search spiders collect all the relevant information which is stored in its index .The second way how search engine discover webpages with links is through Xml site maps

However one caveat here is that " search engines" do not include links to webpages which it considers to be a low value  page.. They do this as  cluttering up their index with  low quality pages impacts the search results for the user.

Crawl Rate Frequency :The search spider crawls  a portion of the world wide web every day. How do  search engine decide which sites they need to visit, where to begin and where to end 

Google has publicly stated that page rank is an indicator in which order it starts to crawl . According to Google, it starts their crawl in reverse Page Rank order. So they visit the PR 10 sites,followed by PR 9 and so on and so forth. A page with higher page rank also gets crawled much faster and more deeper

Ranking :Everything being equal , the site with the highest number of backlinks will be ranked first 

Source independence : A link back from your own site to another site run by you is not an editorial vote for your site. A link from 3rd party independent site is seen as an " actual link" which  is a vote for your site.

Among the temporal factors used for ranking are 

1)When did the link first appear.

2)When did the link disappear or become a broken link

3)How long has the link been there: A link for a larger time is a ranking factor

4)How quickly was the link added : should be organic and gradual

5) The context of the page and links pointing towards them

6)Page Placement : links at the body content  as compared to a link page at the bottom is considered more powerful and impacts ranking

us states ranked by vc investments across saas start ups

California,New York and Massachusetts are among top 3 US states with the highest investment in SaaS  companies

With over $16 billion investment across Saas Companies, Calfornia VC investment exceeded vc investment of all US states combined by $6billion

US states Ranked  by   "SaaS" start up Venture Fund Deals

Caifornia VC firms have invested $16billion across saas start ups from 2011 to 2014. The VC deals in California was equal to all other US started combined. saas based VC firms invested a total of $11.7 billion,as compared to VC investment of $16billion in california. To read more click below

these are vc firms with highest exposure across the fintech sector

The list of VC investors which the highest exposure across Fintech sector

1. Google Ventures 
2. Intel Capital 
3. Citi Ventures 
4. Mastercard wordwide 
5. Funders Club 
6.  American Express Ventures
7.  Ebay 
8. Cyberrentagent ventures 
9. Renren
10. Credit Saison
11. Bitcon Shop 
12. SK Telecom Ventures
    
    
    These listings does not include conventional financial  investors like Banks, Insurance firms and other financial services companies.The list shows VC firms that have been traditionally active across the Tech and IT services, which have recently started to invest across Fintech recently

    Google Ventures, is no 1 most active across the Fintech industry with investment across 25 start ups, followed by Intel Capital  with morethan 10 investments into the space
    
    Fintech Companies have started to grow big time after the 2008  financial market crash as as policymakers  started to concentrated on making finance safer.However apart from the regulatory spotlight, Fintech companies have  started to revolutionized the financial services with innovative products and services across such areas as mobile payments, online transactions , peer to  peer lending payments, big data, using technology to change financial alternatives.
    
    Goldman sachs estimate the worldwide fintech pie to be worth $4.7 trillion, with North America projected to reach $19.9 billion in 2017.
    According to  to  statista  around 29% investments across Fintech were in the banking &corporate finance space. Read about fintech start ups in Israel  more below after the click

  Apart from US, Israel is the next biggest and hottest market in the fintech ecosystem which has seen many start ups going on to become the leaders across fintech vertical Israel vased Actimize is the leader across the area of fraud prevention, FundTech in the area of transaction banking solutions, Retalix in the area of point-of-sale, Trusteer in the area of cybercrime prevention, Sapiens in the area of insuranc First, the fintech disrupters will cut costs and improve the quality of financial services. They are unburdened by regulators, legacy IT systems, branch networks—or the need to protect existing

top 10 private equity firms investing across financial services

private equity firms investing on finance start ups

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Private Equity | FindTheCompany

The list of  the top 10 PE firms across the fintech & financial sector with the highest fund size.Among the top 3 include  HML investments ,New York Life Partners and DB capital  

the highest paid top 3 chief information officers

Executives | FindTheCompany

The comparison chart shows the most highly paid chief information Officers( includes salaries and stocks and shares)

With over $40 million annual compensation,Walgreen's  Timothy J. Theriault , the  Global Chief Information Officer and Executive VP   of Walgreen Boots Alliance happens to be  he highest paid CIO  

The  second and  the  highest paid CIO ,with a total salary of $36 milllion happens to be Mr. Robert B. Carter , The CIO and Divisional Executive VP at Fedex . A veteran at at Fedex he has been in the company for the last 16 years as EVP - FedEx Information Services and CIO

Trent Taylor , the CIO at Hhgregg is at number 3 with annual compensation  of over  $12 million,Mr. Taylor has over 25 years of experience in the information technology field, including systems architecture, data center infrastructure, networking, applications and e-commerce.

list of ad networks acquired by google ventures

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So far Google has purchased 16 ad networks, which include online as well as mobile ad networks .Google's double click acquisition was the most expensive , followed by Admeld .

Google acquired  double click for  $3,100,000,000, while Admeld  was the  second most expensive advertising network  to be acquired by Google for  $400,000,000

Google's purchase of ad networks gives it enormous reach in display advertising . While AdSense network enables publishers to run relevant ads - including text, image,rich media and video ads

across their websites, The ad networks plays a different role .The ad networks  aggregates  a large number of ad networks (over 65 at last count, including more than half of the largest 20 networks in the US)  which competes in real time auction instead  of  using  historical data, or trying to negotiate prices upfront (usually at a discount). It chooses the highest value ad from these competing networks at each moment,

Google acquisition of ad networks integrated its  AdSense network to work with DoubleClick, Admeld , Invite media and other ad networks t help publishers  more precise metrics  which helps them to judge the effectiveness of their campaigns

5 tips to help you prepare for CEH exam success

 By Sarah Morgan

IT security breaches have regularly made news headlines over the past 12 to 18 months. These hacks can be extremely costly. TalkTalk’s security breach at the end of 2015 for example, is estimated to have cost them £35m, as well as the potential damage to their reputation. Businesses are now making their IT security a top priority to ensure they are protected from hackers. This means the demand for IT security professionals has soared and Ethical Hackers are among the most highly sought after.

The role of Ethical Hacker is one of the most exciting in IT currently with an average salary of £72,500 (according to itjobswatch.co.uk). Ethical Hackers are at the forefront of IT security and the top of their field. They work directly to stop malicious hackers, using many of the same techniques. But crucially, once they’ve spotted a gap in security, they close it to protect the business.

The biggest and most trusted certification for Ethical Hackers is EC-Council’s Certified Ethical hacker certification. As the title suggests, it proves you have the skills of an Ethical Hacker. In order to pass the CEH exam, you’ll need to prove skills in areas like malware threats, session hijacking, SQL infection and cryptography. This shows you can identify gaps in a business’s security and ensure they cannot be exploited.

To help you get your CEH certification and prove you have all the ethical hacking skills required, we’ve compiled 5 of the most useful tips to help you prepare for the tough CEH exam.

1. Get familiar with the exam

It’s important to get familiar with the exam before attempting it. EC-Council’s CEH website can help you do this. It has CEH FAQs, a breakdown of the exam format and duration, plus an extensive background of the CEH certification and regulations. I’d also recommend using the website for reference during your studies, or if you have any queries about the exam. If you still want more information, take a look at our previous post on CEH v9 FAQs.

Due to the sensitivity of the knowledge the CEH is teaching you, probably the most crucial part of the website to take note of is the eligibility criteria. There is a concise summary in the CEH FAQs, but you can find a full explanation of the criteria here. Be aware that if you don’t already meet the training requirements, you’ll have to complete an application form to ensure you’re eligible to sit the CEH exam.

Image courtesy of EC-Council

And as a very basic tip, but a point definitely worth mentioning, make sure you know which version of CEH you’re studying for. EC-Council recently updated the CEH curriculum to version 9. The Version 8 curriculum and exam are however, still around. 

Make sure you know which exam you’re sitting and don't mix up the curriculum you need to study. I’d recommend sitting Version 9 if you can. This has the most up to date content, featuring new attack vectors, a greater focus on cloud computing, mobile and Windows 10 as well as new tools and the latest techniques to use.

2. Use a study guide

EC-Council offer a series of study guides for their CEH exam. These are on five different topics within ethical hacking, which includes “Attack Phases”, “Linux, Macintosh & Mobile Systems”, “Secure Network Infrastructures”, “Threats & Defense Mechanisms” and “Web Applications & Data Servers”. As they’re official from EC-Council, you know you can trust the information. Each book covers its topic thoroughly, giving you plenty of knowledge to tackle it in the exam. 

The aim of splitting EC-Council’s study guides into five is to allow you to take a more in-depth look at each section. From this, you can build your understanding of how a hacker works in each area and how to build countermeasures specific to each area. Take a look at these books here. 

A concise alternative is the CEHv9: Certified Ethical Hacker Version 9 Study Guide. It follows the digestible, but very informative style that readers found useful in the version 8 study guide, for the new curriculum. Written by IT security expert Sean-Philip Oriyano, it goes into depth on each exam topic, with clear division of each topic making it easy to follow.

Some of its useful components, are the review questions and exam essentials at the end of each chapter. The questions solidify your reading by making you think it through properly, and the exam essentials point out what you’ll need to know for CEH exam success.

You can find it here on Amazon – ISBN - 978-1119252245

3. Take an official CEH course

Sitting an official CEH course will put you in the best possible position for the exam, following a method proven to help people gain as much knowledge and skills as possible. If you choose an official classroom based CEH course, you’ll benefit from a qualified expert instructor. You’ll have access to the instructor’s expert knowledge when you have questions. Whilst you're also with other students who’ll be in the same situation, asking similar questions and boosting your motivation.

Official courses  give you access to official curriculum,practice materials and an instructor authorised by EC-Council to deliver the training. This means you’ll be studying exactly what EC-Council intends you to, giving you the highest quality teaching and the best possible chance to pass. An official course is also the best way for you to get hands-on and reinforce crucial exam knowledge. You’ll get real-world ethical hacking experience applicable to the role. 

Ethical Hacking requires you to follow a code of conduct, making it impossible to do this in a safe environment in your own time.

4. Test yourself with practice questions

The best way to assess your readiness for the CEH exam is to try a practice test. You’ll get immediate feedback and it’ll help you make the connection between your studies and the end goal of gaining knowledge and skills and passing the exam, relating your knowledge to specially designed questions.

Skillset offer CEH practice tests in 52 different skill areas. From Cryptanalytic Attacks to Computer Viruses to Session Hijacking, this incredible detail means you can study CEH comprehensively. Also, each topic has a series of more advanced levels allowing you to test the depth of your knowledge for each topic area.

There is also a practice test on the EC-Council website. As it comes straight from the creators of the CEH exam you know the questions will be useful and could be a basis from which to build your revision, and assess your readiness for the CEH exam. I wouldn’t use this resource too early in your studies, but as a check to see whether your knowledge is well-rounded enough for the exam.

MeasureUp have an ethical hacker practice lab that allows you to work on your skills in areas like footprintting and reconnaissance, scanning networks, sniffers and device enumeration. Lasting 20 hours, the lab contains plenty of material that will help prepare you for the real-world as well as the exam. You can access this here. 

5. Get involved in a forum

Using a forum is a great way to connect with many like-minded people who are currently studying for the same certification or who have sat it in the past. You’ll learn from their queries and experiences helping you get ideas for your own studies. However, bear in mind that not everyone is an expert.

TechExams has one of the largest CEH forums, with people that have passed and those who have found barriers and difficulties whilst studying. Here, you’ll be able to find help and information regarding what skill areas you should concentrate on to gain the most from the certification. Not only will this help you pass the exam, it’ll help you focus on the most useful topic areas to help you on the job in the future.


The key to passing any exam is investing time and hard work into your preparation. For your Certified Ethical Hacker exam, and certification as a whole, investing your time and efforts into these five tips will give you the best possible chance of achieving your EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker certification. Proving your skills as a very capable ethical hacker. 

Best of luck in your studies.

About the Author:        

Sarah writes for Firebrand Training on a number of IT related topics. This includes exams, training, certification trends, project management, certification, careers advice and the industry itself. Sarah has 11 years of experience in the IT industry. 

google's most expensive acquisition in united kingdom

LIST OF STARTUPS BOUGHT BY GOOGLE IN UNITED KINGDOM;

 Out of 8 start ups acquired by Google, the biggest  acquisition in UK or for that matter in Europe was  of  DEEP MIND technologies.
DeepMind technologies, a London-based artificial intelligence firm which specialises in machine learning, advanced algorithms and systems neuroscience was aquired by Google Ventures, the VC group of Google..  Google paid  a hefty amount of  £400m ($650m) for  acquisition of DeepMind

Deep minds  has created a neural network that  might be able  to access an external memory like a conventional Turing machine, resulting in a computer that appears to possibly mimic the short-term memory of the human brain.Deep Mind Technologies plans to develops technologies for e-commerce and games, and plans to  develop computers that think like humans.

Deepmind recent made headlines when it announced  that its alphaGo program had successfully beaten  a human professional 

The two-year-old artificial intelligence startup was founded by former child chess prodigy and neuroscientist Demis Hassabis alongside Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman.

5 tips on how to make your content management system friendly for seo

5  Ways to ensuring SEO benefits while deciding your content management system

While looking to publish a website many webmasters might wonder if the selection of CMS plays a role in seo and how to ensure that " you fine tune your CMS to make it SEO friendly
The truth is that CMS  does play a huge role in seo. The top 3 CMS  happens to be Jhoomla,Drupal and Wordpress, out of which wordpress has the largest marketshare
Lets take a look on the the basic things you need to keep in mind while deciding the CMS and how to ensure your CMS functionality plays a big role in ensure your search visibility

TITLE TAG CUSTOMIZATION : A search engine friendly CMS has to ensure that each title tags are customised based on the url not only at a page level but also enable rules for particular webpages Sites that run on blogger and wordpress often use the date as a url. xyz.wordpress/post/21-02-2016 . This is seo unfriendly and should be avoided. Replace the date in the url with the post title . The biggest issues CMS faces is not to customise the title tags with the url or the theme of the post

 For example if you have a site on cameras ..and your url is .www.a1cameras4 you.com , and your CMS only allows you to create the title , where the tag always has to start with your domain name followed by a colon, followed by the article you post, Your on the brink of seo disaster

Lets see the example below. In the above site , a post on the top 10 cameras has a url which is a1cameras4you.com/top-10/cameras If your CMS allows you only to create your title which starts with your website name for example in the above post ( the  title shows A 1 cameras for you  repeats for every ul and post , then you  are treading dangerously .You should be able to customize each url with customized title and meta tags

PAGINATION CONTROLS :Pagination can be the bane of website search rankings so controlling it with inclusion of more items per page and  more contextually relevant anchor text  is recommended .Instead of next or previous page at the bottom of   you can use titles like "more eCommerce news", or latest trends on online marketing" 

 301 FUNCTIONALITY: Many CMS lack this critical feature which plays an very crucial role in redirection of content when necessary.. Using 301 permanent redirection tells the search crawlers to treat a non www version and www version as the same url, therefore informing the crawlers to pass on the benefits and link juice to the same url. 301 redirection is used when you have a new domain or have a newer version and wish to pass on the search benefits to the new one, thereby helping to preserve the search benefits of the the older version.This also helps dodging from keyword cannibalization

IMAGE HANDLING :mage Handling and alt attributes:: alt attribute are a must have feature , which is used as an anchor text when you use an image link.( However remember on terms of search preference text links are more advisable than image links.) However if you are using it, ensure that the CMS have this alt tag functionality when helps search engines understand " the relevance the content of your image . Images in CMS navigational elements should preferably use CSS image replacement rather than merely al tag attributes

STATIC CATCHING OPTIONS :Static Catching options is a must for the CMS you are considering for your website: Many CMS currently offer caching options which makes perfect sense if a page receives consistently higher traffic from social or news portals. A bulk CMS often make extraneous database connections which may increase load and and overwhelm the server if caching is not in place.. This might affect and lessem your potential inbound links.

MULTILEVEL CATEGORIZATION STRUCTURE:.If your CMS does not allow you to nest subcategories into categories , subcategories to internal categories, rethink your CMS options. This limited functionality of the CMS will not allow you to use your site structure and internal hierarchical linking structure.

 META NO INDEX FOR LOW VALUE PAGES : even if you use rel= NoFollow for your internal pages , other sites might still link to you, or some low value pages might rank ahead of the pages you intend to optimize for . Check if your CMS allows to you use NoIndex  for those pages which have a low value, like about us, contact us or FAQ's 

This  iis a better way to handle these low value pages which you do not intend to show up in the SERPs

Britain's top 10 best seller consumer electronics products in Amazon

Amazon's Kindle  Fire Stick, and Kindle Fire ( 7inch display with 8gb) along with Kindle paperwhite  6 inches, high resolution are among the higest selling products at UK Amazon.E

The Kindlle Fire TV stick has been UK's Amazon's best seller since the past 256 days, while The Kindle Fire has been the second most sought after gadget at number 2 for 184 days. Kindle stick overall has been the highest selling consumer electronic items online since the last 8 months on Amazon
The kindle stick allows Tens of thousands of TV episodes and movies, from Amazon Video, Netflix, BBC iPlayer and more, plus games, music and apps. 8 GB of storage and 1 GB of memory, plus a dual-core processor for fast streaming and smooth performance. 
However its not all good news for Tablet manufacturers SA new report published by IDC shows that worldwide tablet shipments have shrunk for the first time since 2010.

why should you stop commenting on blogs

Many site owners use Spam tactics by creating bots that crawls around the web looking for open forums and blogs  where its easy to add comment  and get a backlink to their website , which leaves behind automated comments bordering on spam, which are most of the times, not related to the content of the site in question
The great majority of these sites are deleted  by the  rel=NoFollow  tag or by the blogs software content management systems. however the spammers do not care as they operate on a huge scale

Reason number 2 why you should avoid comments across blogs and forums is most of the times, the comments do not have any relevance to the topic. If you do have to comment ,ensure you stick on the context and relevance, this way. For Example sites like quora and a  the seo forum  like webmastertools, has user generated content which is editorially very sound.While blog and forum site owners might use rel=NoFollow tag, as we saw in the previous post, Search engines can decide the quality of the post and the site which is linked too, while the no follow tag might be used, it only stops passing of the link juice to the page linked to and not the indexing

Link Farms  and Number of links: due to the nature of the blogs and forums, just anyone can leave behind a comment, irrespective of relevance or being topical. Over a number of time Forums and Blogs  acquire a huge number of links, with search engines viewing the links as not relevant or even ignoring  the links .Worse a webmaster that has many related sites , might ask a link back in exchange for 10 other sites he owns.  This way all links are interlinked and your site might be a part of the "link farms" which google penalises very heavily