Digital Grog — Australia’s Tech, Gadgets & Digital Life Unfiltered

Digital Grog is Australia’s go‑to tech blog for sharp reviews, digital trends, AI tools, gadgets, cybersecurity updates, and practical how‑tos covering the latest in Aussie technology

Search

How Technology Is Changing The Horse Racing Industry

by Leave a Comment

race that horse giddy up

The horse racing industry has seen a range of technological advancements across the last decade. From high-speed photography to video sensors, there are lots of tech tools that are already widely used in horse races—and there are also new, innovative tools being launched to improve the future of horse racing.

Here are four ways in which technology is changing the horse racing industry.

Healing Technology

Advanced technology is now being used to heal injuries and monitor overall health. Modern equine MRI machines and X-ray machines can be used to effectively identify skeletal problems and lameness, and it is also possible to use 3D printing to create splits, prosthetics, and casts for horses who have been injured. This makes it much easier to heal race horse injuries.

Horses can also be fitted with an endoscope to monitor their health and breathing. Up until recently, vets would normally do breathing assessments using basic guesswork and general equine knowledge, so this is a big step forward!

Finally, it is possible to monitor a horse’s individual way of moving using a smart saddle. The saddle has a microchip inserted into it that can measure the stride and symmetry of the horse’s gait, so it is easier for trainers to create personalized programs to suit the horse’s needs.

Sports Science Technology

It seems like every year horses get stronger and faster—and this is partially due to innovative sports science. A new training method has emerged from Kingswood Stud, Berkshire, called “the Kurtsystems training method.” Young horses are attached to a large contraption with slack reins, as this helps to train their bodies for future racing. The machine does look pretty weird, but it is already showing positive results!

Another emerging technology comes from Sheikh Mohammed, who has installed artificial surface gallops and a sea walker in his stables. This has proven to have both strengthening and recuperative benefits.

Sports Betting Technology

Technology has also been used to improve sports betting for punters. Nowadays, people don’t have to travel to a casino or a betting operator to place bets; they can simply go online or download an app. Mobile technology has also advanced considerably, meaning that punters can get real-time updates on horse racing events that are currently happening. This means they can check the horse racing results whenever they want, wherever they want (and they can also place bets during the game).

Blockchain Technology

Finally, blockchain technology is having a big effect on the horse racing industry. The ledger technology can be used to secure cyptocurrency exchanges online, helping to keep personal data safe. Blockchain technology can also be used by trainers and owners to share information about their horses, which will make it easier for bookmakers to provide reasonable odds.

So, technology has changed the world of horse racing for both the horses and the fans who love to watch—and it is likely that future technological innovations will transform the industry even further.

Simple tips for driving traffic to your website

by 8 Comments

seo in sydney melbourne

Building a website was once a difficult thing to do and it usually required the involvement of a genuine expert. But that whole process has been greatly simplified in recent years with the arrival of platforms like WordPress, Wix and other similar template driven, out the box solutions.

They are great products that have made the creation of involved and complicated platforms possible for the average person. What is less easy though is driving traffic to the site once it has been created. Optimizing for search and ensuring that the desired traffic ends up where you want it to can be harder.

Slowly but surely, however, the right strategies for driving traffic are becoming known. So, if you have a website and you are looking to drive more traffic to it, here are some tips to help you along the way.

Find an expert

A lot of doing search engine optimisation and driving traffic can be done by the website owner, but the reality is that it is a specialist field and that from a strategic level it is a good idea to partner with a specialist in SEO Melbourne will have several competing agencies that you can choose between. Work with this partner to develop a strategy. Some of it might involve paid search, which they will probably look to manage, and some of it will fall on your shoulders. Remember to spell out your objective clearly to them and to develop a strategy together.

Quality versus quantity

In terms of driving an audience to your site make sure that you are not focussed solely on big numbers. Having a lot of traffic wins the vanity contest only. It really is not about numbers, instead, it is about what you do with the traffic that you get. In other words, if you run a pet grooming company in Melbourne, the only traffic that is relevant to you is based in Melbourne.

So, if you have thousands of impressions on the site but they are coming from users in New York or London, then it is useless traffic. Local SEO Melbourne focussed strategy is what you need. It is not about carpet bombing it is about finding your niche.

Keep it fresh

Search engines like Google and others love fresh and regularly updated content. And they like original content. There is no value in cutting and pasting content from somebody else’s site onto yours.

You need to generate your own material. Google loves original content and it also pays close attention to when last your site was updated – signs of life are important if you want to receive the volumes of organic traffic that you need.

User experience

Google is all about making recommendations to its users that it thinks will bring the best value and the best experience. So, you need to make sure that your site is properly optimised for mobile and that it has a good load speed.

These are the types of metrics that are looked at before the search engines make their final recommendations.

Learn how a digital marketing agency could help your business by leaps and bounds

by Leave a Comment

Marketing is a particularly dynamic field and the traditional aspect of it has been replaced with digital marketing. Companies promote their services and products through various activities like social media campaigns, email marketing and the like.

social media 2019

A digital marketing agency is a professional entity that handles your online presence and markets your business online. Here is how a digital marketing company can help you expand your business.

Website Development

Driving relevant traffic to your website is crucial to improve leads and sales. A digital marketing agency can help you optimise your website for an increased number of visitors. Moreover, they can ensure that your website is mobile responsive as well.

A professional team would work on things like broken links, multiple redirects, optimised content and more. They also help you in incorporating the best content management system that helps you provide a user-friendly experience. With the attention span of visitors being 10 to 15 seconds, revamping your website is also a good idea. It should look attractive and be easy to navigate at the same time.

SEO and PPC

A digital marketing agency Adelaide helps you drive immense traffic to your website. SEO helps you in improving your rank in the search engines. These agencies help you put relevant content on your website infused with the right keywords to attract potential customers.

Another method of reaching customers is through pay per click i.e. PPC. Targeted ads are shown to users, and if they click on your ad and go to your website, you are charged a small amount for the click. Specialists create successful campaigns that can help you reach out to your target audience. They have years of experience in creating compelling campaigns that can help you generate more revenue.

Content Marketing

content marketing

Users are constantly looking for valuable information in terms of blogs, whitepapers, brochures, and podcasts. Valuable content can help you engage your audiences and connect with them. Taking assistance from a digital marketing agency can help you produce such pieces of content.

You can get your visitors to sign up with you in return for you providing them industry-relevant information. This will help you communicate with these visitors and convert them into clients. All you need to do is search for digital marketing Adelaide in Google and get connected with industry experts to help you with everything related to content.

Email Marketing

Email marketing can help you create a loyal customer base that benefits your business. When done in the right way, Email marketing can actually improve your brand awareness while keeping the customers coming back. Email marketing is trackable and can also be shared quickly.

According to studies, Email communication makes customers feel important and involved. They develop a close connection with the brand when relevant information and updates are shared with them from time to time. A digital marketing agency can help you build and automate Email marketing and increase conversion.

Social Media

The platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat and the like are widely being used more than ever before. Each of these platforms is known for a unique content type, marketing strategy, and active time frames. A digital marketing agency will help you maintain your online presence on these platforms and attract potential customers.

Moreover, the number of visitors, tags, subscribers, and followers can also be tracked. This gives you a fair idea of how much your social media endeavours are paying off. It should be noted that each platform has its own style of displaying content and connecting with the audience. Digital marketing agencies have social media experts in their team that focus on branding your business effectively.

Final Take

Thus, a professional digital marketing company can help you in the above-mentioned areas. The end result would be more visitors to your website, increased revenue and improved leads.

The Near-Future Role of A SEO

by Leave a Comment

seo in perth sydney melbourne victoria australia

A SEO’s role is always changing and adapting ever since webmasters were optimizing sites in the mid-1990’s. With every technological change and every Google algorithm update, a SEO’s job changes little by little. In the near future, a SEO’s role will not become more specialized, but broader. SEO’s will need to widen their scope of skills in order to stay competitive. A SEO’s job will revolve around these three main roles:

1. Search Engine Compliance Officer

The Search Engine Compliance Officer’s primarily responsible will be overseeing and managing Search Engine compliance issues within an organization. This is the role that will be most important for corporations and enterprises to have. The job will be much similar to what it is now, knowing all of Google and Bing’s Webmaster guidelines, and making sure that all things on a site are compliant to those guidelines.

The Search Engine Compliance Officer would be the “first line of defense” against Search Engine penalties. Any new additions to the site must pass the SEO before being pushed live (new pages, new content, tools, categories, sections, tagging, etc), moreover, a SEO should also be present during any meetings of new additions to a site to make sure that that integration is being completed well within a Search Engine’s guidelines and best preferred practices.

The SEO will also need to make sure that all incoming backlinks are compliant with a Search Engine’s policies. SEOs will need to monitor and investigate:

· How the backlink was obtained to make sure that it was not purchased

· The anchor text of the link and comparing it to the anchor text breakdown of the entire link profile

· The “spamminess” of a link

· Whether a banner ad or sponsored link has been nofollowed

· The top level IP’s of links to make sure that they are not apart of a link farm or link scheme

How To Prepare Yourself:

· Read Google and Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines

· Read Google Webmaster Blog

· Become Proficient in Google Webmaster Tools

· Learn To Use Google Analytics

· Learn To Use Screaming Frog

· Stay Up To Date With On SEO Blogs, such as:

o Moz.com

o SearchEngineLand.com

o SERoundTable.com

· Learn To Use Link Monitoring Tools, like:

o Open Site Explorer

o MonitorBacklinks.com

o Majestic SEO

o Ahrefs

· Learn to Decipher The Site Speed Recommendations From Pingdom

2. Creative Director

Since Wil Reynold’s gave his amazing RCS presentation at Mozcon 2012, content marketing has been on every marketing/SEO department checklist. Developing great content has been and is the key to sustainable online growth. That will not soon change with the ongoing rise of social media, which are essentially content sharing networks.

SEOs will have to become more like Creative Directors – birthing an interesting and captivating idea, leading the communication for design and copy, and developing the ways for it to gain visibility. The SEO must guide teams with skills and experience related to graphic design, fine arts, motion graphics, content, social media, and development. It would be beneficial for any SEO to study up on and receive certification in any tools that designers, developers, and project manager’s use. The key is to not only be able to speak their language for optimal communication, but also be able to get hands-on in every project.

From the beginning of an idea to the point where it is generating a company traffic, mentions, and backlinks, a SEO has to be the point person, directing his or her creative vision to lead to content that will be a success online or off.

How To Prepare Yourself:

· Take Courses in the Adobe Creative Suite

· Study and Get Certified in Project Management

· Start Reading Any of These Books

· Brush Up on Advertising

· Learn to Use Social Media Tools, like:

o Sprout Social

o HootSuite

o Facebook Ads

· Ingratiate Yourself into Social Communities Like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Vine, etc To Learn What Is On the Cusp of Social Popularity

3. New Technology Optimizer

Technology is ever changing and there is always going to be a new channel to advertise through. At the moment, it is social and mobile. In the near future, it will probably be voice search especially with the growth of businesses like Wolfram Alpha, Viv, and of course, Siri. The goal of these three technologies is to serve you the best information, with the least amount of barriers. Even though search will be done through voice, there will still need to be a database, a place to pull information from, and that will still be web properties like websites or social pages that they can crawl and serve data.

A SEO is the near future will need to be able to optimize for all these channels. They will need to on the cusp of technology and know how to gain visibility through every new platform that arises – whether it is search engines, app stores, voice search, or even information or ads brought to you during your Google self-driving taxi ride.

How To Prepare Yourself:

· Research and Read the Latest News in Technology

· Learn About Viv AI Through this article and this article

· Stay Up To Date On What Google is Working on

In conclusion, things are not getting more specialized for SEOs, they are getting a bit broader. A SEO in the near future will need to be a jack-of-all-trades, in a sense. Moreover, a SEO in the near future will need to know how any why a search engines ranks a site and make sure that companies are compliant with those guidelines, be creative that can not only come up with an idea, but work with teams to execute and find success, and lastly will stay up to date with all technologies and be able to optimize for every platform.

3 Adwords Mistakes Every Advertiser Makes

by 2 Comments

Adwords. A double-edged “advertising software” opening doors and frustrating DIY marketers with its endless updates, changes and idiosyncrasies. Business owners frequently abandon self-started online ventures for a myriad of reasons; time doesn’t run freely, and the attention Adwords demands from would-be success stories seems like an entire department in itself. The failure to run a thriving campaign is not a short-coming of the system, but a disconnect between business owners who underestimate nimble subtleties of Google’s answer to old-school billboards.

How do you avoid falling into these same traps, as you traverse the shady world of “pay-per-click”, display and re-marketing? Learn from the following three mistakes, save a bucket load of stress and increase ROI.

google adwords quality score

Know Your Competition

Advertisers commonly rely on an underwhelming WOW factor or quick gimmicks to attract online customers. It’s easier to incentivise than run an on-going analysis of your competitors and while it isn’t politically correct to refer to your competitors as your enemy, the philosophies of Sun Tzu are relevant outside the lecture theatre. Draw up a database of top performing text ads refined to your top five keywords – what commonalities are leading them to trump you and replace your business in the 1,2,3 stakes? Don’t plagiarise, but draw inspiration from their tactics. Remember, landing pages form an integral part of a good formula. Keep it relevant.

Are You Irrelevant?

Click through rate; the bread and butter of the Adwords campaign and the most basic measure of relevancy health. A high CTR is symptomatic of a well targeted text ad; if your numbers are floundering, you need to review the conversation you’re trying to have with potential customers or clients. Make sure your ad includes top performing keywords within your niche, land visitors on targeted pages and don’t drown the ad in too many keywords – after all, you want to seduce audiences, not chase them away with money-grabbing.

The Mysteries of Ad-Writing

You’ll see a variety of styles and phraseologies on the internet, bribing, targeting or presenting as oblivious – a kind of just-the-facts gimmick that works for some verticals. Striking a balance between fresh, brief content and tried best practices to appease Google is fraught with difficulties. Again, your competitors serve as a reasonable indication as to what works and what doesn’t in a specific area of your vertical. Integrate the best ideas into a reviewed strategy and don’t forget to include a call to action beyond the typical Call Now. Instead, feature cheap or free shipping rates, a company guarantee or a specialist success rate. The goal of ad text is to draw people in and convert their interest into possible sales or contracts.

Of course, these are common mistakes of every advertiser. If you fail, accept that failure and move past those expectations; instead of shutting down your Adwords account, review current campaign setup and be honest about the conversion DNA of keywords, text ads, landing pages and site information. A little soul-searching will reveal a way forward or at least a route past your previous obstacles.

This post was written by Jessica Hannah, who is a member of the team at Search Factory, an online marketing agency based in Brisbane, Australia.

Bing ads to charge Australians more

by Leave a Comment

Bing ads is showing Australians more love by  specifically targeting Australians now, by increasing their prices due to GST component now introduced. Starting in July, you’ll be able to manage your advertising spend and billing in Australian dollars for bing ads

advertising with bing ads

Bing ads in Australia –Changes

If you have a Bing ads account  and use bing ads to advertise rather than google adwords , starting 1 August 2013, the amount you pay for search ad clicks for your accounts —which use a payment method with an Australian billing address—will increase by the applicable amount of Australian GST.

However, for the month of July 2013, they plan to give a reprieve as they will be no increase in the amount you pay for search ad clicks.

Typical Yahoo BIng Advertisement

Advertise in Yahoo!7 and Bing Search results

Advertise your business in the search results on Yahoo!7, Bing and other popular premium sites. Put your business in front of potential customers when they search for what you sell.
Get started for as little as $25 per month.
View Demo | Learn More  |  Sign up