Metrics To Monitor When Running Display Campaign

Metrics To Monitor When Running Display Campaign

There are a number of metrics available to see if your Display campaign is successful or not. These include:

 

 

 

  • Impressions: An impression is counted each time your ad is shown on a Google partner website or on YouTube
  • Clicks: A click is counted every time someone clicks on your ad

 

  • Click-through Rate (CTR): CTR is the rate of how many people click on your ad after seeing it. It is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions. The CTR is a good indication of how relevant your ad is to your audience and how well your campaign is performing. CTR = Clicks/impressions.

 

  • Cost per Click (CPC): How much the click on your ad has cost you is the CPC
  • Viewable Cost Per thousand impressions (vCPM): On the Google Display Network you can choose to pay per click or viewable cost per thousand impressions – vCPM. The vCPM is the cost per thousand impressions for your keyword or ad.

 

  • Conversions: A conversion is any action that someone takes on your website that you deem valuable to your business. This can be a purchase, a download, filling in of a contact form, looking at a particular web page, viewing a video and/or calling you. You can track these conversions with “conversion tracking” where you set which actions are valuable to you and track these.

 

  • Conversion rate: The conversion rate is the average number of conversions per ad click, shown as a percentage. The rate is calculated by taking the number of conversions and dividing that by the number of clicks on the same period. Conversion rate = Conversions/clicks

 

  • View-through conversions: This is recorded when a user sees your ad in the display network but does not click it, yet later converts through another medium such as organic search, clicking on a search ad, going to your website directly or any other source.

 

  • Reach and Frequency report: Knowing how many people have seen your ad (reach) and how often (frequency) is your reach and frequency reporting. 

 

 

Be aware of the guidelines when manually creating ads for different size formats:

  • Upload the correct size dimension – you will not be guaranteed to be shown on the placement you prefer if the website owners do not allow for that size and style.
  • It is advised to always include one text ad for the GDN in your Ad group as many display partners do not allow image ads on their websites but do allow text ads. This way you make yourself more eligible to be shown on the GDN.
  • Do not exclude websites that only allow text ads.

 

Step By Step To Setting Up YouTube Channel

In this article, I will cover the process of setting up a YouTube channel, uploading a video to your channel, managing your video details, and measuring the success of your video with YouTube analytics. There are two types of YouTube channel depending on whether you are an individual content creator, or you plan to operate as a brand online.

1. Personal channels are populated with personal details and only have one administrator, usually the individual themselves.

2. Brand channels are run and managed by an advertiser or company by multiple users; crucially there are no personal details on this channel info.

 

On your YouTube channel, you can upload videos, create playlists to group your videos in a more logical manner, and customise the appearance of your channel. If you plan to advertise on YouTube, your channel will be visible for users to click through to, so bear this in mind when beginning to advertise on YouTube. Your YouTube channel should reflect your business, in a similar manner to your website.

 

It is also very important to ensure you keep your channel updated regularly, for example, any changes to your company branding, any hyperlinks to social media sites that need updating, or just changing the cover photo to reflect your latest campaign or initiative.

 

 

To create a Personal YouTube channel:

  1. Search for YouTube on a computer or using a mobile site.
  2. Try any action that requires a channel, such as uploading a video, posting a comment, or creating a playlist.
  3. If you don’t yet have a channel, you’ll see a prompt to create a channel.
  4. Check the details (automatically connected with your Google account name and photo) and confirm to create your new channel.

To create a YouTube channel for a brand you will begin with a personal channel that will then be deleted in the process of creating a Brand Channel:

  1. Sign in to YouTube on a computer or using the mobile site
  2. Go to your channel list
  3. Create & fill out the details of your brand account & verify you would like a personal account. Then click ‘Create a new channel’.
  4. Use the account switcher in the top right to switch to a personal account (the one that will become the brand account)
  5. Visit your account settings, and next to your profile picture click on ‘Advanced Settings’
  6. Select “Move channel to Brand Account”
  7. Select your new Brand channel and opt to delete the personal channel you are logged in as
  8. Select “Move Channel”
  9. Follow instructions on the screen to add channel managers

 

To get started on YouTube, you have to start uploading your content.

To upload a video, follow the below steps:
1. Sign into your Google account.
2. Click on ‘Upload’ at the top of the page.
3. Before you start uploading the video, you can choose the video privacy settings.
4. Select the video you’d like to upload from your computer. You can also create a video slideshow or import a video from Google Photos.
5. As the video is uploading you can edit both the basic information and the advanced settings of the video, and decide if you want to notify subscribers (if you uncheck this option no communication will be shared with your subscribers). Partners will also be able to adjust their monetization settings.
6. click Publish to finish uploading a public video to YouTube. If you set the video privacy setting to Private or Unlisted, just click ‘Done’ to finish the upload or click ‘Share’ to privately share your video. If you haven’t clicked ‘Publish’, your video won’t be viewable by other people. You can always publish your video at a later time in your Video Manager.

 

 

Next, add metadata to your videos:

  1. Video Title – provide a title that will encourage users to click on or watch the video
  2. Video Description – accurately describe the content of the video a user is about to watch
  3. Tags – add keywords to your video that can be found in YouTube search

 

Metadata enhances the discoverability of your videos and tells the system about your content. It is also the same metadata you will later rely on to effectively target your advertising, so it is a best practice among all content creators to complete this step.

 

You can use Video Manager to make changes to existing videos you have uploaded, including enhancing video quality, editing audio and changing descriptions. To access Video Manager, go to your YouTube Channel, click ‘Uploads’, and then select ‘Video Manager.

 

 

You can add video thumbnails to your videos through Video Manager. This feature lets viewers see a quick snapshot of your video as they are browsing YouTube. It’s important to add a thumbnail to your video that accurately represents the content – this is the viewer’s first impression of your content, it should invite them to watch and engage.

 

Action Point
PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on an individual and corporate level, I will be very glad to do that because I have trained several individuals and groups and they are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trained include the staff of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, and New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your trainingYou can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training.

I know you might agree with some of the points raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

 

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How To Add Topic Targeting To Campaigns

To add Topic targeting to your campaigns, begin in the same way you started adding targeting to your Ad groups.

 

 

1. First, choose the Topics tab below Audiences and Demographics.
2. Click the pencil icon to add targeting.
3. From the drop-down menu, select “Add topics”.
4. Choose as many topics and sub-topics as you like. Any topics and sub-topics you have added will appear in the “Selected” column.
5. Click Close and then Save.

 

 

With placement targeting, when we say placements we are referring to a website or specific video on YouTube.

We can also refer to automatic placements, where the system automatically displays your ad, or managed placements

where you manually select to display your ads.
Placement targeting involves choosing the website on the Display network, or YouTube video, where you want your ad to be shown. These can be websites that your customers visit and or YouTube content related to your product or services (managed placements).

You don’t need keywords for placement targeting and the system will only look at your managed placements when looking at which site to place your ad. You can target an entire site or specific pages on the site, similarly, you can target a list of specific YouTube videos.

 

To add placement targeting in the AdWords interface:
1. Click Placements from the left sidebar.
2. Click the + button.
3. From the drop-down menu, select “Add placements”.
4. Type in the name or URL of the placement where you’d like the ads in your ad group to show.
5. If you’d like to add multiple placements at once to your ad group, click the “Add multiple placements at once” link at the bottom of the box.
6.Click Close and then Save to add the placements to your ad group.

 

 

You can refine your campaign by combining contextual and audience targeting at the Ad group level. For example, if you sold a compact digital camera, you might want to target users that have an affinity for travel and who are visiting a popular travel photography blog to raise awareness of your product.

 

If you don’t add a targeting method to an ad group, the only restrictions to where your ads can show are by the campaign and account settings. This means your ads can run anywhere on the web, across the Display Network and YouTube, within your campaign and account settings and will result in not receiving a good ROI. So it is worth applying at least one of these targeting options, if not both, in some form.

 

Groupon combined both behavioural, contextual and location targeting and aligned their ads with their offer categories to show the most relevant ads to new potential customers.

This meant they had rich data about what their target audience liked, and they could place their ads in highly relevant placements, for example promoting family activities for parents or recipe-related ads for foodies.

 

 

Action Point
PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on an individual and corporate level, I will be very glad to do that because I have trained several individuals and groups and they are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trained include the staff of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, and New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your trainingYou can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training.

I know you might agree with some of the points raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

 

Fact Check Policy

CRMNIGERIA is committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it

 

     

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How To Create Video Discovery Ads

The steps are much the same for Video Discovery ads, until the point you choose your ad format.

 

 

 

For Video Discovery ads:

  • You must choose a thumbnail for your ad – think about how this will serve as the ‘teaser’ for your ad on the networks that you select.
  • You will write ad copy to accompany your thumbnails – this text follows the same guidelines for Google AdWords text ads.
  • When a user clicks on your Discovery ad, you can choose to bring them to either the video’s watch page on YouTube or your YouTube Channel page – you cannot direct users to an external website.

 

It’s very important to remember your companion banner when creating your video ads. A companion banner is a clickable thumbnail image that accompanies a TrueView in-stream ad. On a YouTube watch page, it appears next to the ad, in the top right corner (on a desktop computer).

 

You can choose from an auto-generated companion banner or upload your own.
The technical specifications for companion banners that must be adhered to are:
Dimensions: 300×60 pixels.
Maximum file size: 150KB.

 

 

Our third video ad format is the Bumper ad, a short, non-skippable format that is no longer than 6 seconds. You will have to have a video already edited to the required length. You will also have to bid on a CPM basis for these ads as they are not view or click-based.
Like you did before, sign in to AdWords and follow the below steps:

 

  • Click the campaigns tab and create a standard video campaign for your bumper ads.
  • Create your first adgroup and select the video you uploaded for this ad and select the Bumper Ads format.
  • Next, set your budget. “Bidding” will be set to Maximum CPM because of the bumper format.
  • Choose your basic initial settings – networks, locations you want to target, the language of your customers, and any advanced settings.
  • Click Save and continue.

 

3 brands; X-box, La Mer and SurveyMonkey used bumper ads for different forms of storytelling, from remarketing to simple storytelling. Great examples of using short-form content to achieve your goals effectively.

 

X-box: Launch day of the X-box game Halo Wars 2, they invested heavily in remarketing with bumper ads

 

La Mer: Used bumper ads to efficiently drive awareness of the brand’s new makeup suite, with a bumper ad for each product of the suite.

 

SurveyMonkey: Used bumper ads to highlight the value and ease of its tool by messaging the main components of its platform: “creating surveys, collecting answers, and analyzing results”.

Advanced advertisers may choose to run a universal app campaign to promote their app across the web – but the solution is not as advanced as you may think once you already have an app live within the Play store.’

Create a universal app ad in your video campaign:

1. Sign into your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
2. In the “Campaigns” tab, click +Campaign and select Universal App campaign.
3. Enter a campaign name. You might use a name that tells you this is an app installs campaign. The on-screen instructions will prompt you through the setup. The benefits of a Universal App Campaign is the wide variety and reach of this campaign which utilises a wide variety of creative assets.
4. Start by selecting the app you will be advertising from the drop-down menu, or “Add a new app” to enter a new one.
5. In the “Ads” section you can enter up to 4 individual lines of text, these will be rotated within your ads depending on the format being displayed
6. Upload your image assets, and be sure to remember:

 

 

  • You can include up to 20 image files with a max size of 150KB.
  • Landscape images are most relevant for native ad units while portrait orientation is most valuable for interstitial content, particularly on mobile.

 

7. You can also include up to 20 YouTube videos for use as ad creative – in addition to automatically generated videos
created by AdWords with assets from your app store listing
8. Choose any target locations or languages. Just note that AdWords won’t translate your ads so your text and creative will have to align with these settings
9. In “Campaign Optimization” choose to optimize for Installs (gathering new users) or In-app Actions (new users likely to undertake an action, such as a purchase or profile creation).
10.Set target bids and budget – projected install volume is available for Android apps when your Play and AdWords accounts are linked

  1. Click “Save and Continue” to launch your campaigns.

Note: Android app installs will automatically be tracked in Google Ads.
Do you really struggle to increase your subscribers? Learn How To Get Free YouTube Subscribers

 

 

Action Point
PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on an individual and corporate level, I will be very glad to do that because I have trained several individuals and groups and they are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trained include the staff of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, and New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your trainingYou can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training.

I know you might agree with some of the points raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

 

Fact Check Policy

CRMNIGERIA is committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it

 

     

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Performing Advanced Targeting In Online Campaigns

Here are some of the facts that you need to know about Advanced Targeting in Online Campaign. Observation is an optional feature recommended for advanced advertisers.

 

 

 

  • Use observations to get reports on certain criteria without restricting the reach of your ad group. This means that observations won’t change who can see your ads, or where they can show, but they do allow you to monitor how ads are performing on your selected placements, topics, or audiences while your campaign is running.
  • As well as this, observations show you how additional criteria perform when they fall within the scope of your existing targeting. You can then use this data help you optimize your campaigns, such as making bid adjustments or to create new ad groups with targeting criteria based on your observations.
  • Use observations when you don’t want to narrow your targeting any further but you want to see how certain targeting might perform within the criteria already set.

You can add observations by using the “Edit all targeting” page. You can also add an observation as you would add a targeting method except you will select to add it as an observation as opposed to a targeting method.

To apply targeting options, follow the below steps in your AdWords account:

  • In the page menu on the left, click on a targeting method (Keywords, Audiences, Topics, or Placements).
  • Click the plus (if you have no targeting yet) or pencil button (if you already have targeting) to edit.
  • Click ‘Select an ad group’, then choose an ad group from the list that appears.
  • For observations, click the ‘Add observations’ dropdown.
  • Select a method from the dropdown.
  • Select the criteria you’d like to add and click Done.
  • At the bottom of the page, click Save.

You can exclude specific demographics, audiences, remarketing lists, keywords, topics or placements from your campaign targeting to further refine where your ads show.
You can manage targeting exclusions within AdWords by:

  • Navigating to which targeting method you wish to exclude and apply exclusions at the campaign or adgroup level, per targeting method.

To exclude by Demographics:

  • Click the Demographics tab.
  • Click Gender, Age, or Parental status to select a demographic targeting method.
  • Click + Targeting.
  • Under “Campaign exclusions,” click the Add campaign exclusions dropdown menu, and then click Demographics.
  • Under “Demographics,” select the checkboxes of the specific demographics you want to exclude:
  • Gender
  • Age
  • Parental status

To exclude by Keywords:

  • Add negative keywords at the ad group or campaign level by clicking the +Keywords button above either table.
  • Use the drop-down to select the ad group or campaign to that you’d like to add negative keywords to.
  • Add one negative keyword per line in the text field.
  • To add broad match negative keywords, you’ll need to add the synonyms, singular version, plural version, and other variations such as cup, glass and glasses
  • To add a negative phrase match keyword, surround the term with quotation marks—for example, “wine bottle”
  • To add a negative exact match keyword, surround the term with brackets—for example, [bottle opener]

To exclude Topics:

  • Click either the “Add ad group exclusions” or “Add campaign exclusions” drop-down menu and select “Topics.”
  • Type a term or phrase in the search box to find a topic to exclude or click each topic to see the sub-topics you can select. Click add » next to the topics and sub-topics you’d like to exclude.

To exclude Placements:

  • Click either the “Add ad group exclusions” or “Add campaign exclusions” drop-down menu and select “Placements”
  • Type a placement in the box, entering just one placement per line. You can exclude up to 10,000 placements per campaign.

 

You can control the categories of content on which you show and the audiences which that content is suitable for, within the campaign settings in Google Ads:

  1. Click the Settings tab.
  2. Under “Campaign settings,” click “Content exclusions”.
  3. In the new window, select the content exclusion that you want to apply to your ads. Note: Mature and unlabelled content is excluded from all campaigns by default.
  4. Click Save.

 

Action Point
PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on an individual and corporate level, I will be very glad to do that because I have trained several individuals and groups and they are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trained include the staff of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, and New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your trainingYou can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training.

I know you might agree with some of the points raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

 

Fact Check Policy

CRMNIGERIA is committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it

 

     

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How To Do Audience Targeting In Video Ads

In this article, I want to look at how to do Audience Targeting in Video Ads. I will be looking at targeting and bidding options and how we can use them to run the most efficient campaigns possible. In particular, we will look at:

 

 

1. On-Point Targeting
2. Right Person with Audience Targeting
3. Right Place with Contextual Targeting
4. Introducing Advanced Targeting
5. Refine further with Targeting Exclusions
6. Set up and Start Remarketing
7. Brilliant Bidding

Put very simply, targeting allows you to place your ad in front of the right people and on the right websites.
Targeting increases audience engagement by ensuring ads are displayed to the right users as often as possible. Accomplishing this reduces wasted spending on impressions or clicks and increases the likelihood campaigns will deliver a positive ROI.

 

You may choose to start your targeting strategy by using the Display Planner tool. This shows you the potential reach and cost of targeting ideas to help you plan your display and video campaigns.
It can be a good place to start when you begin running campaigns for the first time. You must be logged into Google Ads in order to use the Display Planner. See the link in the references below.
1. Navigate to the Display planner either via the link below or by clicking the wrench icon in Google Ads. Under ‘Planning’ click ‘Keyword Planner.
2. Here you have a number of options:

 

 

  • Search for targeting ideas using a website, phrase or category: This is the most widely used, as it gives you a multitude of targeting options based on the input of a broad sense of what type of targeting you are interested in.
  • Find top placements by location: This allows you to look at the top partner websites, YouTube channels, and videos by country.
  • Get inventory details for your targeting: This is useful if you know what targeting options you are going to go after, you can enter your targeting here and get a rough estimate of what volumes of impressions you have the opportunity to show for.
  • Get performance forecasts for your targeting: You can go one step further and input budgeting/CPV info to see what type of performance you can expect.

 

There are two distinct forms of targeting; Audience and Contextual. Think of it as the Who and the Where.

 

  1. 1. Audience: Who do you want to show your ad to?
  2. Contextual: Where do you want your ad to be shown?

Audience targeting allows you to be more accurate when choosing who sees your ads.
In marketing and advertising, your audience is a particular group of consumers within the predetermined target market, identified as the targets or recipients for a particular advertisement or message.

 

Using audience targeting in AdWords is a way of segmenting your website’s users and reaching users around the web-based on their behaviour online and the signal these actions send about their likes, interests and purchase patterns.

 

Audience targeting takes a number of forms:

  • Demographic targeting: Allows you to reach people who are likely to be within the age, gender, parental status and income that you choose.
  • Affinity Audiences: Lifestyle and interest profiles based on a user’s browsing behaviour.
  • In-Market audiences: Users who are more likely to be in-market to purchase a specific product or service based on their browsing behaviour.
  • Re-marketing: Target users who have previously visited your site, or provided their email address to you.
  • Similar Audiences: Create mirror audiences based on your remarketing lists or customer email lists.

 

Demographic targeting

  • You can set and adjust demographic targeting for age, gender, parental status and household income (if info is known).
  • “Unknown” in AdWords refers to people whose age, gender, parental status, or household income have not been identified.
  • You should not exclude “Unknown” age and genders from targeting as they often represent a large number of users. It is important to note that the system can only target if this information is known. It can know this if, for example, someone is using Chrome and is logged into their Google account while browsing, or if they’re signed into a YouTube account, where they have given this information. Otherwise, the system will do a “best guess” based on browsing behaviour. To exclude this segment is to significantly restrict your reach.
  • People mostly fall into the “unknown category” for display, however, this is much more accurate for YouTube, and as such, it is not advised for Display campaigns. Change the default settings which is to target all demographics.

 

Affinity Audiences

  • If you’re familiar with TV audiences, you’re already familiar with the concept of an affinity audience.
  • Affinity audiences are good for brand awareness. It is the broadest audience targeting available and reaches people in the beginning of their buying journey.
  • When using affinity audience targeting, you are targeting people who have shown an affinity for your product or service in their internet behaviour – based on the content they interact with, past purchases and websites they frequently visit. You have options such as Beauty Junkies or Outdoor Enthusiasts for example.
  • You can also create Custom Affinity audiences by blending interests together for a specific cross-section of users, such as Travel Buffs who are also interested in Health & Fitness, to advertise Hiking Holidays too.

 

In-market audiences

  • When a user transitions from being interested in a subject to actively beginning their buying journey, they become in-market.
  • In-market audiences are good for reaching people who are in the middle to end of their buying cycle.
  • A user is counted as part of an in-market audience for 7-days, up to the point they make a purchase or stop showing any signals of purchase intent.
  • As a result of targeting people who are already actively shopping or searching for your product or service in such a short period of time, it means that the reach can be smaller compared to an affinity audience, however, it is far more targeted and dynamic in how users are constantly joining and leaving this audience.

Action Point
PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on an individual and corporate level, I will be very glad to do that because I have trained several individuals and groups and they are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trained include the staff of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, and New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your trainingYou can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training.

I know you might agree with some of the points raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

 

Fact Check Policy

CRMNIGERIA is committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it

 

   

 

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Unknown Facts About On-Page Optimization

 

 

In the old days, many approached on-page optimization as simply keyword stuffing; that is, you mention the keywords you would like to rank for as many times within the content as possible. This made for a bad user and reading experience. These days on-page optimization includes smart keyword targeting, where keywords are mentioned in key elements while still providing a good user experience. This means that the reading experience needs to be good and also that your content satisfies what the user is actually looking for.

On-Page Optimization plays a significant role in the rankings process. Changes are made through a Content Management System, meaning a non-technical person should be able to do it. If you have a modern Content Management System like WordPress, it should be easy to target keywords in key elements. We’ll cover the key elements shortly but they include making images, headings, main body copy, meta description tags and title tags.

Time investment is split between up-front work and ongoing maintenance.

SEOptimer, Mozbar and SEO SiteCheckup are SEO tools that are all able to grab the important on-page elements from the HTML for a webpage. This is useful when we want to quickly review whether an existing page has been optimized or not. It also saves time in having to dig around in the source code.

 

Mozbar is a Chrome and Firefox extension created by Moz.com. It has more functionality in Chrome as do many other SEO browser extensions.

1) When installed, you can click the M icon in the top right of the browser so it is selected and turns blue (you can click it again to toggle it off when finished).
2) Then click the Page Analysis icon on the top left to inspect the most important on-page SEO elements.

 

Pre-click on-page optimization as the name suggests is optimizing for what’s visible to the user before they click on a result. This includes:

  • The title tag
  • The URL
  • The meta description

As you’d expect, part of this process involves encouraging the searcher to click on your listing, rather than the others.

Post-click on-page is everything the searcher sees after they click on a listing and when they visit your site. So this is what the visitor sees when they land on your webpage. It includes optimising keywords and the user intent of keywords into the main copy, headings, hyperlinks and images.

 

 

Before starting on-page optimization you need to decide what page you are optimizing and what keywords you wish to target. This requires keyword research and ideally prioritizing the keywords as we did in an earlier exercise. For the upcoming on-page optimization lessons, we’ll show examples of how you would optimize the snowboard sizing page.

 

Portent’s SERP Preview Tool is an excellent way of visually seeing what a Google search result would look like before you make the pre-click on-page optimization changes. This way you can make sure your snippets are the right length and that they look enticing for the user to click through.
Amazon is incredibly dominant in SEO and there are lots of reasons for this. They provide a great user experience on their site, have a big product range and have colossal domain authority. Although as we can see from the above slide, their title and meta description tags are a little on the long side and get truncated which isn’t ideal for click-throughs.

 

Aside from the main body copy, title tags are the single most important on-page element to get right. They are the first part of a listing a user sees after they make a search and search engines pay close attention to what words are provided which influences how well your web pages will rank.

 

Action Point
PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on an individual and corporate level, I will be very glad to do that because I have trained several individuals and groups and they are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trained include the staff of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, and New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your trainingYou can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training.

I know you might agree with some of the points raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

 

Fact Check Policy

CRMNAIJA is committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it

 

 

 

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When You Should Use The Search Console

This article talks about all that you need to know about how to use the Search Console. 

 

 

Who Should now Use the Search Console ?

Anyone with a website! From generalist to specialist, from newbie to advanced, Search Console can help you.

  • A business owner who delegates.  Even if you don’t think you know how to use Search Console, you should be aware of it and become familiar with the basics. You might hire your webmaster or a marketing specialist to help you set up your website with Search Console. In that case, you can work with that person to ensure you have access and control to all of the reports for your website. In addition, it’s a good idea to learn all you can about how your site is performing in search results so you can make important business decisions about your site.

 

  • SEO specialist or marketer. As someone focused on online marketing, Search Console will help you monitor your website traffic, optimize your ranking, and make informed decisions about the appearance of your site’s search results. You can use the information in the Search Console to influence technical decisions for the website and do sophisticated marketing analysis in conjunction with other Google tools like Analytics, Google Trends, and AdWords.

 

  • Site Administrator. As a site admin, you care about the healthy operation of your site. Search Console lets you easily monitor and in some cases resolve server errors, site load issues, and security issues like hacking and malware. You can also use it to ensure any site maintenance or adjustments you make happen smoothly with respect to search performance.

 

  • Web Developer. If you are creating the actual markup and/or code for your site, Search Console helps you monitor and resolve common issues with markup, such as errors in structured data.

 

  • App Developer. If you own an app, you want to see how mobile users find your app using Google Search. Search Console can help you integrate your app seamlessly with the website world.

Google Search Console
1. Verify as site owner (when no other site owners exist). Follow Google’s site verification process by acting as site owner e.g. uploading an HTML file to your site.
2. Ask a colleague to be added (when a site owner already exists). Find out who is the site owner and ask them to grant you Google Search Console access to a website.

Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing offers a similar product to the Search Console called Bing Webmaster Tools. Follow a similar process to the above.
The following is text is borrowed from the Google Search Console help pages and you can find a link in the references below.

 

Verify your site ownership
What is verification?
Verification is the process of proving that you own the site or app that you claim to own. We need to confirm ownership because once you are verified for a site or app you have access to its private Google Search data, which can affect how Google Search crawls it.
Verification associates a specific user with a specific property. Every Search Console property requires at least one verified owner, though it can have more.

 

 

Note that you could add any site or app as a property to Search Console, but until you verify ownership of it (or an owner grants you rights on it) you can’t use it in Search Console. For example, you could add www.wikipedia.org as a property to your Search Console account, but you wouldn’t be able to access it until a Wikipedia developer helped you prove ownership (or a Wikipedia Search Console property owner added you as a user to the Search Console property).

 

Verify a website
1. Either add a new site (see link in references) or click Manage Property > Verify this property on the Search Console home page next to the existing property that you want to verify.
2. Choose one of the verification methods listed below and follow the instructions. Not all verification methods are available for all properties; the verification page will list which methods are available and recommended for your site.
Verification methods include (more detail in the link in the references section):

  • HTML file upload
  • Domain name provider
  • HTML tag
  • Google Analytics tracking code
  • Google tag manager container snippet
  • Google sites
  • Blogger

Multiple people can add and verify a site separately, using the same or different methods. If you use the same method, just be sure that you don’t overwrite any verification tokens of any other owners.

 

 

Crawlability optimization steps

  • Minimise site errors
  • Use redirect wisely
  • Create and submit to date XML sitemap
  • Minimise duplicate content
  • Check for indexed pages

 

Minimize site errors: Site and URL errors can restrict access to useful pages and if too frequent, can lower the overall trust of a domain. In Google Search Console, you can find Site and URL errors under Crawl à Crawl Errors. This example shows a very high number of Not Found URL errors, so further investigations need to be made so the appropriate fixes can be put in place.

 

 

Use redirects wisely: if a URL has changed, redirects can be used to take the user or search engine to the right place and preserve the page’s trust and reputation, while avoiding URL errors.
There are three main types of redirects:

 

 

  1. 301, “Moved Permanently”—recommended for SEO. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link juice (ranking power) to the redirected page. 301 refers to the HTTP status code for this type of redirect. In most instances, the 301 redirect is the best method for implementing redirects on a website.
  2. 302, “Found” or “Moved Temporarily“. Some of Google’s employees have indicated that there are cases where 301s and 302s may be treated similarly, but our evidence suggests that the safest way to ensure search engines and browsers of all kinds give full credit is to use a 301 when permanently redirecting URLs.
  3. Meta Refresh. Meta refreshes are a type of redirect executed on the page level rather than the server level. They are usually slower, and not a recommended SEO technique. They are most commonly associated with a five-second countdown with the text “If you are not redirected in five seconds, click here.” Meta refreshes do pass some link juice but are not recommended as an SEO tactic due to poor usability and the loss of link juice passed.

 

The most recommended redirect is the 301 redirect as this is thought to pass the most amount of reputation.

The majority of Content Management Systems (CMSs) allow non-technical people to implement redirects. WordPress is a popular CMS and the simplest way to create a redirect is by installing a redirect plugin. For some CMSs, you may need to get help from a technical person to help implement redirects.

 

 

1. Create your sitemap:
The most commonly used sitemap is the XML sitemap. This is designed for search engines, rather than people, and is one file that contains a collection or all of your web pages. While search engines predominately crawl web pages by following links from one web page to another, they also use XML sitemap for discovering pages. Most CMSs will automatically create an XML sitemap but you need to make sure this has been enabled.
If one exists, you can often find your XML sitemap at www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

 

What is a Search Console?

Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google Search results. You don’t have to sign up for Search Console for your site to be included in Google’s search results, but doing so can help you understand how Google views your site and optimize its performance in search results.

 

 

Why use Search Console?

Monitor your site’s performance in Google Search results:

  • Make sure that Google can access your content
  • Submit new content for crawling and remove content you don’t want to be shown in search results
  • Create and monitor the content that delivers visually engaging search results
  • Maintain your site with minimal disruption to search performance
  • Monitor and resolve malware or spam issues so your site stays clean
  • Discover how Google Search—and the world—sees your site:
  • Which queries caused your site to appear in search results?
  • Did some queries result in more traffic to your site than others?
  • Are your product prices, company contact info, or events highlighted in rich search results?
  • Which sites are linking to your website?
  • Is your mobile site performing well for visitors searching on mobile?

 

 

 

  1. Submit your sitemap to Google:

There are two different ways to make your sitemap available to Google:
1.Submit your XML sitemap via Google Search Console – https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/sitemap-list
2.Insert the following line anywhere in your robots.txt file, specifying the path to your sitemap: Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap_location.xml. Be very careful when making changes to the robots.txt file and always check with an expert if you are unsure as you can accidentally de-index useful pages.
Once you have submitted your XML sitemap to Google, you’ll be updated on how many of the submitted pages have been indexed. Your goal is to get all your useful pages indexed and aim for 95%+ of all pages. The example screenshot only has 12% of the submitted pages indexed which is not good and would need further investigation.

 

While a small amount of duplicate content is ok, search engines prefer unique content and may choose to not index content that it considers duplicate. Duplicate content can be identified through:
1.HTML improvements in Google Search Console where duplicate pages will be highlighted if they exist.
2. Copying an extract of text found (e.g. 10 words or so) in a web page and pasting it in quotes into a search engine. If multiple pages are shown in a search engine, this may be a sign of duplicate content. For each web page checked, you can repeat this process three times.

If you want to view what a webpage looked like the last time Google visited it and also when it happened, you can check Google’s cache of the page and this is the version stored in its index.

 

 

Action Point
PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on an individual and corporate level, I will be very glad to do that because I have trained several individuals and groups and they are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trained include the staff of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, and New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your trainingYou can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training.

I know you might agree with some of the points raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

 

Fact Check Policy

TECHMANIA is committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it

 

  

 

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How To Approach Writing Ads Effectively

Here is how you can approach writing ads in terms of driving clicks from searchers:

  • Relevant: Consider the need state of the searcher and how this can be addressed by your product. What do they want to hear about your product to make your product seem more appealing than the competition based on their need state?
  • Attractive: Include keywords in the ad copy to increase perceived relevance in order to drive higher click-through rates
  • Directional: Consider offers and always include a CTA to direct their action towards your business objectives (conversions) post-click

This is an example of good copy elements to drive action.

  1. Relevant to New York hotels – 500 hotels in New York NY
  2. Attractive to book – because you have the Best Price Guarantee
  3. CTA – the book is the first word of the meta description “Book your hotel in New York NY online”. That is telling you to take any action, to book.

 

  • A landing page is your website. You control this zone and should ensure its closely linked to your ads, keywords, and user intent with directional CTAs to drive towards business objectives
  • Good landing pages are related to what the searcher typed into Google, as well as the ad copy that they clicked. This increases the relevance of the search experience. If the relevance level is high, the searcher is more likely to engage with the page content
  • If you include CTAs, you can direct the searcher to take action on your website, this can be in the form of buying a product or filling out a contact form
  • You should take the entire search experience into account when choosing or designing landing pages for search campaigns

 

What are the considerations of a good landing page? Consider the search journey. To recap:

  • The user has a need
  • They look for solutions online
  • They click your ad as it’s closely aligned to their need
  • Next, they land on your website

The questions for landing pages are:

  1. Does your landing page deliver on the promise of the ad and resolve their need state?
  2. Is it aligned to the ad, i.e. relevant, attractive and directional?

 

For example, in the slide image, we can see a landing page that contains:

A.Product details to entice the searcher and quickly show how the product fits their needs
B.Details of how the product appeals to the searcher’s persona and motivations
C.A large clickable CTA to drive action
D.Appealing and aspirational imagery to quickly infer outcomes
The elements above can be distilled into what is known as conversion rate optimization. Conversion rate optimization is a process whereby pages are designed to drive as many valuable actions based on how people interact with the page and what they are likely to do. This includes device optimization where buttons are large on mobile-optimized sites so users can easily click them or use striking colours to highlight a particular area of the page (CTAs). It’s important to identify high-impact improvements and device considerations to drive better performance.

 

 

  • On mobile, the PPC ad is the first listing a searcher sees on the SERP
  • Searcher behaviour is different on mobile than on desktop devices. Mobile Navigation has to be simple and easy to manage with larger CTAs and readable font sizes for smaller screens
  • A further consideration is the type of traffic that mobile drives; if it is primarily researching traffic and not converting traffic (as is the case with many mobile websites), serving the right kind of content to give mobile searchers the information they require is the most effective way to drive value in your mobile traffic
  • AdWords takes into consideration how mobile-optimized your website is, i.e. is it responsive and designed with mobile in mind? This will ultimately affect your quality score for mobile traffic.

 

 

Action Point
PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on an individual and corporate level, I will be very glad to do that because I have trained several individuals and groups and they are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trained include the staff of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, and New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your trainingYou can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training.

I know you might agree with some of the points raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

 

Fact Check Policy

CRMNIGERIA is committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it

 

  

 

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Facts About Off-Page Optimization In SEO

 

 

 

 

At its heart, off-page optimization is about building backlinks to your website and this practice is also known as link building. We do this because the higher quality backlinks you have from relevant websites, the more reputable your website is seen in your industry by search engines.
This is often the part that SEOs find tricky at first but with persistence and researching your competitors, it’s one of the ways to really significantly improve your SEO progress. You may not be able to directly control how external websites link to your site but you can influence them by creating great content and/or contacting them.

 

Off-page optimization requires some upfront work but is a more ongoing and never-ending activity. If you are at the top of your industry and stop acquiring backlinks, you may find that your competitors continue to build them and overtake you.

 

 

Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO and Ahrefs are SEO tools that help when analysing both your own backlinks and competitors. They all offer a freemium model, which means you can get a free account and use some of the functionality for free.

 

 

  • A backlink is an incoming hyperlink from one web page to another website
  • One of your key goals as an SEO is to increase the number of backlinks to your site
  • The text within the backlink is called anchor text and some relevancy through the text is passed
  • A credible page with valuable content can earn dozens, hundreds and even thousands of backlinks

Not all backlinks are created evenly. Some will pass more ranking powers than others, which we will look

 

 

Search engines, especially Google, are getting very good at detecting whether a backlink should add to your website’s reputation or not. Here are three keys to look out for:

  • Topical backlinks that are relevant to your industry and are likely to bring in relevant referral traffic. So not only will you get an SEO boost but you’ll also get some great referral traffic.
  • High authority and reputable websites will pass high levels of reputation and we’ll soon discover how you can measure authority.
  • Authentic backlinks are earned on merit, rather than fake backlinks built purely for SEO. Search engines don’t like to be tricked and target sites building phoney links with a search engine penalty.

PageRank

“PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank websites in their search engine results. PageRank was named after Larry Page, one of the founders of Google. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages.

 

According to Google, PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites. It is not the only algorithm used by Google to order search engine results, but it is the first algorithm that was used by the company, and it is the best-known.”

 

 

 

Action Point
PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on an individual and corporate level, I will be very glad to do that because I have trained several individuals and groups and they are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trained include the staff of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, and New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your trainingYou can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training.

I know you might agree with some of the points raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

 

Fact Check Policy

TECHMANIA  is committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it

 

  

 

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What You Need To Know About Search Engines

In this article, I will try as much as possible all that you need to know about search engines. So, whether you are a content writer or just an ordinary user, I will keep you abreast of all the information that you need to know. Just relax and make sure that you read this article to the very end.  Different search engines provide access to different audiences and user types e.g. Yahoo! users might be older or Bing users might use a specific type of mobile phone (e.g. Microsoft phones) as the default search engine is set to Bing.

 

This also varies in different locations, so your territorial targeting could influence which search engines to include in your media mix.

 

When you want your articles to rank, you need to think like your reader. You have to write with your audience in mind. You must write based on how you feel they will ask their question. Always start with your consumer and look at their consumer behaviour/purchase decision cycle. Here are some of what is going on in the mind of your readers when they are visiting the search engine page: 

 

#1 Identify a need or want

Before your audience visits a website, they already have a need. In order to ensure that your website comes up when your customers come to search engines to satisfy a need, you need to make sure that you always write your article as if you are trying to answer a question. It is very important. 

 

#2 Search for solutions

After your customers have identified a need, they will have to come online in order to look for a solution to their problem. Most times, when customers are looking for solutions. They will have to ask a question. The problem here is that most of the people that are using a search engine to look for the solution will never go beyond the first page in their search. That is why you have to ensure that your article dominates the first page on the search engine result page. Please note that immediately after your article presents itself, a prospect will try to establish contact with the organisation. 

 

#3 Evaluate Alternatives

Once you have identified organisations that can provide the services that you need, the next thing is to look at other ways that your issues can be resolved. Also, it is expected that your solution provider will provide you with multiple options for you to choose from. You now have to choose the one that seemed best for you. At this stage too, it is expected that they will tell you the pros and cons of all the options that they have presented to you. 

 

#4 Decide to purchase

after the options have been presented, you need to now choose the date that you are going to make a purchase. At this stage, the responsibility of following up on the prospect will now be handed over to the sales department of the organisation. It is the duty of the sales department to make the transaction happen at the end of the day. It is also at this stage that the organisation is supposed to reinforce some of the benefits that the prospect will derive from the transaction. 

 

#5 Purchase

After the prospect has made a commitment to purchase the product, he now has to move to the stage of actual purchase. at this stage, the organisation has to make sure that all products are delivered up to expectations. They have to make sure that the product is delivered at the right place and at the right time. Doing this will boost the trust that the customer will have in the organisation. 

#6 Post-purchase evaluation

After the customer might have purchased the product and used the product, he needs to do an evaluation. The evaluation will allow the customer to know whether the product has achieved its purpose or not. This will also allow both parties to make the necessary adjustments if the product has failed to achieve its goal in one way or the other. 

 

Also, Search behaviour features in stages 2-6 of the purchase cycle make it a highly effective channel to tie in with naturalized purchase decision-making.

 

In addition, PPC began in the early 2000s as search engines became popular and as user habits, technology and business developed online. New features have been added to enrich the advertising formats but ultimately paid search consists of keywords, landing pages, and ad copy, and this has never changed.

 

Over the years new features and more advanced targeting options have been added to develop the AdWords suite beyond paid search ads. Now advertisers can run display, video, shopping and email ads through one advertising platform.

 

Reasons to use paid search include:

  • Meet & align with business objectives: bringing active consumers to your site
  • Quick access to the market: you can appear in the search results after just a few hours
  • Mobile position #1: the PPC ad is the first search result users see on a mobile
  • Additional advertising features: target specific locations and add ad extensions
  • Tracking: link to Google Analytics and monitor spending, and ROI on KPIs
  • Easily updated special offers/time-sensitive promotions: changes to copy are almost instant
  • Leverage buyer/search intent: consumers are actively looking for your keywords/product
  • Compete in the marketplace: stay up to speed with your competitors
  • Fill gaps in organic optimization: quickly add keywords that don’t rank in the organic channel

 

Action Point
PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on an individual and corporate level, I will be very glad to do that because I have trained several individuals and groups and they are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trained include the staff of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, and New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your trainingYou can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training.

 

I know you might agree with some of the points raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

 

Fact Check Policy

CRMNIGERIA is committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it

 

  

 

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Understanding SEO Action Plan For Content Writing

Open Google Search Console (if you have access to it), and check the crawl errors report to see if you can see any site or URL errors. If there are URL errors, review what type of errors there are and whether they are for important web pages.

 

 

One of the most common types of errors is a “404 page not found”. This means that a URL used to exist but it doesn’t anymore. This could be that the page has been deleted or the URL has been changed. If the page has been deleted, sometimes it’s best to 301 redirect the old URL to the next most relevant page. Similarly, if a URL has been changed, the old URL should be 301 redirected to the new URL.

 

 

Soft 404 errors are strange because they often look like normal error pages, where a message says the page could not be found but rather than return a server response code of 404, they actually return a server response code of 200. A 200 response code tells search engines that everything is OK but in this case, it is contradicted by a page not being able to be found. The fix to this, it usually requires letting your web developer or technical person know and they can tweak the web server settings.

 

 

The best way to learn SEO is through practice and repetition. For this exercise, decide on a website that you wish to test out your on-page optimization skills on.  Pick 10 topics/landing pages to research, then decide on their best keywords and then outline the key on-page optimization elements. The reference URL below will take you to a Google spreadsheet where you can follow the on-page optimization template.

 

From there, you can:

  • Download the spreadsheet (File à Download as), or
  • Make a copy (File à Make a copy..) which requires you to be signed in to a Google account

 

You can use Open Site Explorer to benchmark your website against competitors. If you haven’t used a Moz product before, create a free community account:

 

You will now need to benchmark a website against three of its top competitors for key Moz metrics. You only need to enter the homepage URL of each site to record the homepage Page Authority, Domain Authority and Root Domain Links.

Review to see how far or close your website is from the competition and gauge how much extra work is required for off-page optimization success. The higher each metric is, the more likely it is to perform for off-page optimization.

 

By changing the Inbound Links filter, you get a better idea of how the whole domain is performing, specifically for backlinks that can pass PageRank.
What to do:

 

  • Setting the Target to “this root domain” ensures backlinks are reported for the whole domain and not just the URL (e.g. homepage URL) that you enter
  • Setting the Link Source to “only external” ensures that you only get backlink information and filters out internal links
  • Setting the Link Type to “only follow” ensures that you’ll only see backlinks that actually pass PageRank and filter out those that do not

Then, review the incoming link and highlight the top three backlinks that you feel offer the most value.
When deciding on the best ones, bear in mind the page authority of each but also consider how relevant the backlinks are to the industry and whether they felt authentic or not.

 

 

Action Point
PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on an individual and corporate level, I will be very glad to do that because I have trained several individuals and groups and they are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trained include the staff of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, and New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your trainingYou can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training.

I know you might agree with some of the points raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

 

Fact Check Policy

TECHMANIA is committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it

 

  

 

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Amazing Blogging Success Tips From Fili Wiese

This article talks about some amazing blogging success tips from SEO Expert, Search Brothers

#1 Attend SEO conferences

SEO is complex. Reducing it to just one piece of advice is challenging. If it were just this one SEO tip for beginners I will say attend as many industry conferences as possible and learn from the speakers’ expertise.

Picking and choosing between long-established and up-and-coming online marketing events aren’t easy either. Speaker line-up is a key criterion. Next to how prolific speakers are in terms of sharing with the community.

Some conferences such as SMX and BrightonSEO are safe bets. However, there are so many events at any given point in time. For a comprehensive overview, I recommend checking out Online Marketing Events.

 

If I may give a second piece of advice to SEO beginners, that would be to read as much as you can. Google Webmaster Central Blog and Search Engine Land are among my personal favorite sources to keep up to date.

 

#2 Site performance is almost everything

It’s neither recent nor surprising, yet true to be confirmed and reaffirmed on a regular basis: site performance is almost everything and even the best-optimized website will fail in a search unless the crawl budget is managed well.

 

On the first part, all that needs to be said is that all other factors are roughly equal Google always favours the faster website. Site performance is to be considered a business-critical top priority.
It also has a huge impact on crawl budget allocation and thereby on how much of the website can be crawled and how frequently. Which in turn is essential for success in Google Search and for conversion.

 

That ties in nicely into your first question, too. SEO beginners are well-advised to learn from site performance and technical SEO sessions delivered by expert speakers at international events.

 

Dan Taylor

Senior Consultant & Account Director at SALT.agency

#1 Don’t believe all the SEO tips you read

My main piece of advice would be to critique everything. If you read an article of a blog post explaining the advantages of X over Y, actively seek out the counter-argument for Y over X – regardless of who authored the piece and where it was published.

 

Whilst there is best practice, SEO is about the application of knowledge and expertise, and this is where most black hat/quick win techniques fall down as they can’t often be scaled to larger clients/larger clients won’t benefit from those techniques.

 

Just because something works for client A, it won’t necessarily work with client B or C, and this is where the application of knowledge, and knowing as many sides to an argument gives you the ability to be flexible and control discussions with various stakeholders. This makes you scalable and adaptable to multiple scenarios and challenges.

 

By being critical of everything, you can benefit your client(s) by learning how to apply SEO techniques to their business needs and tech stack and bring benefit in the long run and build a long-term relationship with the client.

#2  The importance of SEO business case

Explaining the business case of SEO, in my opinion, has become more prominent once again in recent months, especially when speaking to large and enterprise-level businesses.
There’s been a shift in the market over the past 12 months with more organizations taking SEO roles in-house, and the relationship with traditional full-service agencies changing.

 

The importance of being able to communicate the importance of SEO to a lot of non-technical stakeholders and being effectively able to show the added value of having an expert in the room is going to continue to be a trend in 2019 as the world faces a number of external uncertainties (US administration, Brexit, unrest in the EU), decision making processes on where to spend budget will be affected.

 

Action Point
PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on an individual and corporate level, I will be very glad to do that because I have trained several individuals and groups and they are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trained include the staff of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, and New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your trainingYou can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training.

 

I know you might agree with some of the points raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

 

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CRMNAIJA  is committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it

 

 

 

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Blogging Success Tips From Brent Custoras

This article highlights some amazing Blogging Success Tips from Brent Csutoras, a Digital Marketing Consultant at BrentCsutoras.com

#1 Learn some basic coding

In 2019 and beyond, every SEO has to start gaining some level of familiarity with coding. Even Google has recently started recommending more companies focus on technical SEO and that means HTTPS, APIs, Schema, Pagespeed, Mobile Friendly… all of which really require some level of coding experience to truly understand, direct, and implement.

 

Even if you are not the implementer, you need to be able to understand when things don’t work and how to make them work.

#2 Find content that works and make it better

Google, and other search engines, do not want all your content. In fact, they probably want about 5% to 10% of what we are giving them.

 

If you were to check your analytics, you would likely see that less than 10% of your content or products are responsible for about 100% of your traffic, sales, and conversions. Even if you have an e-commerce site, you are likely to see that your highest traffic and conversion pages are category pages and not individual products.

 

Focus on select, high-quality content, that assists a user through their education, conversion or buying process.

Doug Cunnington

Founder of Niche Site Project

1. Adapt to the changes

Be flexible and adaptable. I’m cheating with this answer because I suggest that a person that’s new to a field like SEO should be willing to adapt to a changing landscape so that’ll apply to many areas.
SEO moves fast, and since a Google algorithm update can make traffic grow or nose dive, an SEO beginner should be ready to go with the flow and be eager to learn and test.

On a secondary level, an SEO beginner can make money in several ways. The options can be overwhelming once you develop a core set of skills. That said, you can adapt your skills of SEO to other areas.

 

For example, if you start with affiliate sites, you may discover that you prefer to help small, local businesses. So you can shift from one business model to another (affiliate marketing to local SEO), using your general SEO skills.

2. Keyword Golden Ratio

The Keyword Golden Ratio is the best way to find ultra-long-tail keywords that are under-served on the internet. The Keyword Golden Ratio is a keyword research concept I developed after combining ideas from some very smart people.

 

The idea is simple, but I made the formula accessible by making it simple and nearly foolproof.
It’s a data-driven way to find keywords that you can rank for in the top 25 results in Google, usually within hours after the page is indexed.

 

The ratio is this:
The number of Google results that have the keyword phrase in the title divided by the local monthly search volume, where the LMS is less than 250.

 

If the KGR is less than 0.25, then you should rank in the top 100 when your page is indexed.
You should still rank in the top 250 when the KGR is between 0.25 and 1. And it should be pretty fast.

 

It works for any industry or niche, and I get emails every week about people seeing success with the KGR.

 

Action Point
PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on an individual and corporate level, I will be very glad to do that because I have trained several individuals and groups and they are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trained include the staff of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, and New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your trainingYou can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training.

 

I know you might agree with some of the points raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

 

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TECHMANIA is committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it

 

  

 

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Amazing Blogging Success Tip From Elise Dopson

This article highlights some amazing blogging success tips from Freelance marketing writer, EliseDopson.co.uk

 

#1 Focus on quality content

My best advice would be to start creating awesome content. There are hundreds of ranking factors in Google’s algorithm and most SEO beginners head towards backlinks as their first step. But, that’s a problem because people are unlikely to link to a low-quality, SEO-poor website.

You need solid content to prove your expertise, build your authority, and give other publishers a reason to link to you. Do that by following Moz’s 10x framework and promoting your content like crazy. Make sure it gives a good user experience, has fast loading times, and is optimized for SEO. The backlinks will come naturally!

 

#2  Show your expertise

Google released an algorithm update (referred to as the “medic” update), and their guidelines had a huge focus on “E-A-T” content (which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
A great workaround for meeting that criteria, without investing in new content, is to update forgotten pages on your website–including author bio, about, contact and homepages. Give them a refresh with new, keyword-optimized content and you’ll soon be seen as more of an expert than a site that doesn’t.

Will O’Hara

SEO Director at MediaCom North

#1 Get your hands dirty

It’s very hard to pick just one thing – but if this is advice and not a skill I’d say that it’s important to do your own testing and research. There are plenty of people publishing findings online and they can certainly be a useful starter – but nothing beats getting your hands dirty and running tests yourself.
You may find something unusual you can discuss with the wider community (which is kind of a second piece of advice I’ve squeezed in there) which can also help further your understanding of the topic in question.

#2  Experiment with internal links

Internal linking – is not something I’ve learned or really re-learned, but it’s something that continues to surprise me. It can be so powerful if done right – especially if you have an established and trusted site.

 

Adding links to a page with few can see it rocket upwards for targeted phrases – so it’s often one of those killer tactics…both low friction and high impact. Linked back to point 1 – testing is key here, there’s never an exact way to do this and every site is different.

 

I’ve worked with a client where 5 internal links had the desired effect, and another where 10k seemed to do the trick.

 

 

 

Action Point
PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on an individual and corporate level, I will be very glad to do that because I have trained several individuals and groups and they are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trained include the staff of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, and New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your trainingYou can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training.

RElATED   Consecration. RCCG Sunday School Manual.

 

I know you might agree with some of the points raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

 

Fact Check Policy

CRMNIGERIA is committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it

 

  

 

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Blogging Success Tips from Tim Soulo

Here are some of the Blogging Success Tips from Tim Soulo, the Chief Marketing Officer at Ahrefs

#1 Don’t get caught in the “infinite learning” loop

The best piece of advice to an SEO beginner would be: “Pick a few keywords and try to rank for them.”
I see that a lot of people get caught in the “infinite learning” loop and try to find that “new hot SEO strategy” that will help them outrank their competitors.
While in fact, the basic principles of SEO could not be more straightforward:

Blogging Success Tips from Tim Soulo

  1. Pick a keyword/topic that has a nice search traffic potential
  2. Create a page that would address that topic in a way that would satisfy potential searchers
  3. Get other websites to link to that page.

 

That’s it!
But once you try to actually do it, you’ll find a lot of little things that you’ll need to learn and master before you’ll get your pages to the top of Google.

 

#2  Don’t rely on the search volume too much

My last “aha moment” was when I realized that the search volume of a single keyword isn’t really indicative of the total search traffic that you will get if you rank for it.

 

Think about it, when we do keyword research we look at search volumes of individual keywords, but when a page ranks at the top of Google, it doesn’t rank just for one single keyword – it will additionally rank for a ton of variations.

 

So these days I don’t rely on the search volume of keywords too much, I always study the top-ranking pages for my desired keywords and look at how much search traffic these pages are getting in total (from all the keywords that they rank for).

 

Robbie Richards

SEO Specialist, RobbieRichards.com

#1  Learn by doing and find a mentor

As a beginner in SEO, it’s easy to get bogged down by all the advice floating around online. You end up spending hours and hours reading, listening, and watching everything there is to know about SEO, instead of actually doing it.

 

I found myself in the same boat about 6 years ago when I got into SEO. It wasn’t until I bought a domain, set up a simple WordPress site, and start implementing that I began to quickly build my skillset.

 

Long story short, one of the best SEO tips I can give to a beginner is to set up a sandbox site and start applying as they learn to figure out for themselves what works and what doesn’t.

 

Another thing I strongly recommend is finding someone who has had a lot of success in SEO and asking them to be a mentor. This is something else that really helped me build confidence, and stay excited about what I was doing. Having an expert sound bound is invaluable when you are starting out.

 

#2 Work with existing assets

Always go back to the fundamentals. I’ve been able to generate some great results for clients recently just by going back and working on the “foundational” elements – internal linking, on-page etc.

 

On top of that, don’t jump straight into creating new content or building new links, always work with and leverage the assets you have on hand for the fastest gains.

 

One simple strategy is identifying all the existing content with decent rankings that with a simple relaunch could jump up several spots and generate an immediate uptick in traffic. I cover my process for this in great detail in this organic traffic guide.

 

Action Point
PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on an individual and corporate level, I will be very glad to do that because I have trained several individuals and groups and they are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trained include the staff of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, and New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your trainingYou can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training.

RElATED   Consecration. RCCG Sunday School Manual.

 

I know you might agree with some of the points raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

 

Fact Check Policy

CRMNIGERIA is committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it

 

 

 

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Blogging Success Tips From Steven van Vessum

 Here are some of the Blogging Success Tips from Steven van Vessum

VP of Community at ContentKing

#1 Be critical about everything

Be critical about everything you read and everything people say. Ask other SEOs to back up their SEO tips and claims with data and sources, or at the very least explain why they think something is true or false and what thought process they went through.

There’s a massive amount of information on SEO out there, but it’s hard to filter out the bad stuff.

 

#2 Google algo focused on search intent

The fact that several of the Google updates we’ve seen since August 1st are about changes to better match search results with user intent.

 

It makes total sense and aligns with what I’ve seen in the sites that I’m managing the SEO for and other SEO experts have confirmed seeing the same thing. Of course, I asked them to back it up with data 😉

 

Jimmy Rodriguez

Chief Operating Officer at 3dcart

#1 Focus on the right keywords

When we first started our SEO efforts we went after every keyword out there that had a decent search volume. What we found pretty quickly is that it wasn’t as much about the search volume as it is about intent.

 

We noticed that some keywords that would bring a ton of traffic, wouldn’t bring in a lot of business, while others didn’t bring in a lot of traffic, and were responsible for bringing in a lot of business. This made us realize that we needed to refocus our content campaign on “revenue keywords.” Just getting traffic wasn’t going to do, we needed to target keywords that have the highest potential of bringing revenue in order to see an ROI on our SEO efforts.

 

Many new websites make this mistake. So my advice would be to pinpoint the queries that are used by customers in your industry that are at the tail end of the shopping process and do this early on. This will give you the revenue boost necessary at the beginning stages so that you can use those gains to reinvest in a more aggressive content marketing/SEO campaign.

 

#2 Clean up your internal link profile

My last SEO “aha” moment was the influence your internal link profile has on your search engine rankings. Recently we decided to clean up our SEO top to bottom, and part of that effort was cleaning up our internal link profile.

 

What we did was finding a set of keywords for each page and didn’t deviate from the specified anchor text, to make sure we are consistent with the information that is pointing to that particular page. Within a few weeks of doing this, we found our rankings increasing for each of those pages, specifically for those target keywords. Normally internal linking is seen as a small factor, but it had a huge impact on our website rankings.

 

Andy Crestodina

Co-Founder / Chief Marketing Officer at Orbit Media Studios

1. Be the best among the best

If you haven’t created one of the top 10 best pieces of content on your topic, don’t expect to rank on page one.

 

You should believe in your content that much. Of course, making a great page is critical, but insufficient. You still need to do the SEO basics. Each of these aligns with a key search ranking factor.

 

  1. Validate that you have a chance for ranking for your target keyphrase (competition and authority)
  2. Use the target phrase and the semantically related phrases in the usual ways (keywords and relevance)
  3. Format the content so it’s scannable, visual and keeps visitors on the page after they click (user-interaction signals)

So yes, optimize your content for search, but don’t expect any results unless you’re ready to stand up and make the case that your page is better than all the others.
If you do that, the search engines are trying to help you. If you don’t do that, the search engines are trying to stop you.

 

2. Write less. Rewrite more.

Write less. Rewrite more. That was a revelation for me. After many years of creating new content, I finally realized that I had a lot of URLs that were credible, but the content was old. So I started rewriting old articles and the results have been great.

 

I watch to see which posts are declining in rank, which posts almost rank high and which posts have a lot of inbound links. Then I review them for quality. If any of these are less than amazing, I rewrite them. Then I watch the rank climb. Works like a charm.

 

I’m not the only one who has discovered this trick. Our annual blogger survey found that 38% of content creators are updating older articles. And those that do are twice as likely to report “strong results” from their blogs.

 

Action Point
PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on an individual and corporate level, I will be very glad to do that because I have trained several individuals and groups and they are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trained include the staff of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, and New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your trainingYou can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training.

RElATED   Consecration. RCCG Sunday School Manual.

 

I know you might agree with some of the points raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

 

Fact Check Policy

MYTECHMANIA  is committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it

 

  

 

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Electronic Payment Concepts: The Five Modes

 

In my previous articles, I talked about some of the factors to consider when you need to design e-commerce websites. In this article, I want to look at the five modes of electronic payment concepts. Follow me as we are going to be looking at that in this article.
 

 

What is an electronic payment?

Electronic payment facilitates payments over the internet. It allows the user who is located on one side of the internet to make payment to another user who is located on another part of the globe to make payment without having to visit the user’s office.
 

There are some benefits that are associated with electronic payments. Some of these benefits include:

#1 Improve security

With electronic payment and considering some of the modes that are adopted by some of the websites, it is very easy to make payments without compromising the security of your data. For instance, when you are using PayPal, you can actually make a payment with your email address without releasing your card information to third parties.
 

#2 Increase efficiency

Without the idea of using electronic payment, it would be seemingly difficult for e-commerce websites to function. Even, companies that are not online-based are embracing the use of electronic payment in order to increase payment options. The electronic payment provides an alternative for organizations to receive payments for products and services. It makes organizations more efficient.
 

#3 Improve customer convenience

In addition, electronic payment also goes a long way in improving customers’ convenience. Gone are those days when you would expect customers to visit your office before they can have access to your products and services. Electronic payment will allow customers to pay for products and services without leaving the convenience of their homes.
 

The five modes…

Here are the five modes of electronic payments…

#1 Electronic Fund Transfer

This is a computer and internet-based method to instruct financial institutions to transfer money from one account to another account. This is always done in a matter of minutes no matter the location of the recipient of such fund.
 

#2 Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)

Electronic Data Interchange is a set of standards for structuring the information that is to be electronically exchanged between and within businesses, organizations, government entities, and other groups.

An EDI message contains a string of data elements, each of which represents a singular fact, such as a price and product model number, and is separated by a delimiter.

#3 Internet Open Trading Protocol

This is an interoperable framework for Internet commerce that makes all electronic purchase transactions consistent for customers, merchants, and other involved parties, regardless of the payment system.
 

#4 Secure Electronic Transaction (SET)

This is a set of communication protocols for securing financial transactions over the internet. This uses Data Encryption Standard and RSA encryption mechanism to encrypt sensitive financial information during transmission.
 

#6 3-D Secure

This provides an additional layer of security during online credit and debit card transactions by authenticating a cardholder’s identity at the time of purchase.

This is adopted by Visa, Mastercard and Mastercard SecureCode, JCB international as JSecure and American Express as SafeKey.

 

 

Action Point
PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on an individual and corporate level, I will be very glad to do that because I have trained several individuals and groups and they are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trained include the staff of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, and New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your trainingYou can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training.

RElATED   Consecration. RCCG Sunday School Manual.

 

I know you might agree with some of the points raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

 

Fact Check Policy

CRMNIGERIA is committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it

 

  

 

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How Nigerian Scam Yahoo Yahoo Works

 

Before I start writing this article, here is a disclaimer. I am not writing this article to rubbish Nigeria as a country and I am not a Yahoo Boy and I will never in my wildest dream support their nefarious activities. I just wanted ordinary Nigerians and all my esteemed followers outside Nigeria to learn.

 

When we all understand how they work and think, we will be able to know how to stop them and not fall victim to their nefarious activities. Therefore, in this article, I will be talking about how the Nigerian Scam, also known as Yahoo Yahoo works. It is called a Nigerian Scam because it originated from Nigeria. The beauty of it is that it is not only Nigerian citizens that are adopting these methods of scamming people. Some other nations have embraced it. 

 

 

 

A Nigeria Scam is a form of advanced payment of money or money transfer. The scam is called Nigeria scam because it started in Nigeria but it can come from anywhere in the world. 

 

Using this scam, the scammer contacts you by sending an email and offering you a share in a large sum of money. They might say that they want to transfer the money which was trapped during a civil war to your bank account.

 

They may also cite various reasons such as massive inheritance problems, government restrictions, or taxes in the scammer country among other reasons. 
The scammer now asked you to pay money or give them your bank details to help them transfer the money. Here is a typical example:

 

From: Mr Wong Du

Seoul, South Korea. 

I will introduce myself. I am Mr Wong Du a banker working in a bank in South Korea. Until now, I am the Account Officer to most of South Korea government accounts and I have since discovered that most of the account is a dormant account with a lot of money in the account. On further interrogation, I found out that one particular account belongs to the former president of South Korean from 1963-1979 and this particular account has a deposit of $48million with no next of kin. 

My proposal is that since I am an account officer and the money of the account is dormant and there is no next of kin obviously the account owner the former president of South Korea has died a long time ago, that you should provide an account for the money to be transferred. 

The money that is floating in the bank right now is $48million and this is what I want to transfer to your account for our mutual benefits. 

Please if this is okay by you I will advise that you contact me through my direct email address. 

Please this transaction should be kept confidential. For your assistance as the account owner, we shall share the money on an equal basis. 

Your reply will be appreciated. 

Thank you.

Wong Du.

 

Action Point
PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on an individual and corporate level, I will be very glad to do that because I have trained several individuals and groups and they are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trained include staff of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, and New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your training. You can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training. 

I know you might agree with some of the points that I have raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

 

Fact Check Policy

CRMNAIJA is committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it.

 

     
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Network Communications Protocols For Cyber Security: The Facts

Simply having a wired or wireless physical connection between end devices is not enough to enable communication. For communication to occur, devices must know “how” to communicate. Communication, whether face-to-face or over a network, is governed by rules called protocols. These protocols are specific to the type of communication method occurring.

 

For example, consider two people communicating face-to-face. Prior to communicating, they must agree on how to communicate. If the communication is using voice, they must first agree on the language. Next, when they have a message to share, they must be able to format that message in a way that is understandable. For example, if someone uses the English language, but has poor sentence structure, the message can easily be misunderstood.

Similarly, network protocols specify many features of network communication, as shown in the figure.

The figure is a star diagram that has protocols as the central word and the branches are characteristics of protocols. These characteristics include message encoding, message formatting and encapsulation, message size, message timing, and message delivery options.

Network Protocols

Network protocols provide the means for computers to communicate on networks. Network protocols dictate the message encoding, formatting, encapsulation, size, timing, and delivery options. Networking protocols define a common format and set of rules for exchanging messages between devices. Some common networking protocols are Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), and Internet Protocol (IP). As a cybersecurity analyst, you must be very familiar with the structure of protocol data and how the protocols function in network communications.
Note: IP in this course refers to both the IPv4 and IPv6 protocols. IPv6 is the most recent version of IP and will eventually replace the more common IPv4.
The router on the left is connected to a computer. The router on the right is connected to a server. A message below the computer reads: I will send this message across the network using an IPv4 header. A message below the attached router reads: I can forward this message because I understand the IPv4 header. A message below the server reads: I can accept this message because I understand IPv4.

The TCP/IP Protocol Suite

Today, the TCP/IP protocol suite includes many protocols and continues to evolve to support new services. Some of the more popular ones are shown in the figure.
The figure shows the TCP/IP layers and associated protocols. At the application layer: DNS is a name system protocol; DHCPv4, DHCPv6, and SLAAC are host config protocols; SMTP, POP3, and IMAP are email protocols; FTP, SFTP, and TFTP are file transfer protocols; and HTTP, HTTPS, and REST are web and web service protocols.
At the transport layer: TCP is a connection-oriented protocol and UDP is a connectionless protocol. At the internet layer: IPv4, IPv6, and NAT are Internet protocols; ICMPv4, ICMPv6, and ICMPv6 ND are messaging protocols; and OSPF, EIGRP, and BGP are routing protocols. At the network access layer: ARP is an address resolution protocol; and Ethernet and WLAN are data link protocols. Text at the bottom reads: TCP/IP is the protocol suite used by the internet and the networks of today.
TCP/IP has two important aspects for vendors and manufacturers: Open standard protocol suite – This means it is freely available to the public and can be used by any vendor on their hardware or in their software. Standards-based protocol suite – This means it has been endorsed by the networking industry and approved by a standards organization. This ensures that products from different manufacturers can interoperate successfully
Click each button for a brief description of protocols at each layer.
Application Layer
Transport layer
Internet Layer
Network Access Layer
Application Layer
Name System
  • DNS – Domain Name System. Translates domain names such as cisco.com, into IP addresses.

Host Config

  • DHCPv4 – Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol for IPv4. A DHCPv4 server dynamically assigns IPv4 addressing information to DHCPv4 clients at start-up and allows the addresses to be re-used when no longer needed.
  • DHCPv6 – Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol for IPv6. DHCPv6 is similar to DHCPv4. A DHCPv6 server dynamically assigns IPv6 addressing information to DHCPv6 clients at start-up.
  • SLAAC – Stateless Address Autoconfiguration. A method that allows a device to obtain its IPv6 addressing information without using a DHCPv6 server.

Email

  • SMTP – Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. Enables clients to send email to a mail server and enables servers to send email to other servers.
  • POP3 – Post Office Protocol version 3. Enables clients to retrieve email from a mail server and download the email to the client’s local mail application.
  • IMAP – Internet Message Access Protocol. Enables clients to access email stored on a mail server as well as maintaining email on the server.

File Transfer

  • FTP – File Transfer Protocol. Sets the rules that enable a user on one host to access and transfer files to and from another host over a network. FTP is a reliable, connection-oriented, and acknowledged file delivery protocol.
  • SFTP – SSH File Transfer Protocol. As an extension to Secure Shell (SSH) protocol, SFTP can be used to establish a secure file transfer session in which the file transfer is encrypted. SSH is a method for secure remote login that is typically used for accessing the command line of a device.
  • TFTP – Trivial File Transfer Protocol. A simple, connectionless file transfer protocol with best-effort, unacknowledged file delivery. It uses less overhead than FTP.

Web and Web Service

  • HTTP – Hypertext Transfer Protocol. A set of rules for exchanging text, graphic images, sound, video, and other multimedia files on the World Wide Web.
  • HTTPS – HTTP Secure. A secure form of HTTP that encrypts the data that is exchanged over the World Wide Web.
  • REST – Representational State Transfer. A web service that uses application programming interfaces (APIs) and HTTP requests to create web applications.

Message Formatting and Encapsulation

When a message is sent from source to destination, it must use a specific format or structure. Message formats depend on the type of message and the channel that is used to deliver the message.
Analogy
A common example of requiring the correct format in human communications is when sending a letter. Click Play in the figure to view an animation of formatting and encapsulating a letter.
An envelope has the address of the sender and receiver, each located at the proper place on the envelope. If the destination address and formatting are not correct, the letter is not delivered.
The process of placing one message format (the letter) inside another message format (the envelope) is called encapsulation. De-encapsulation occurs when the process is reversed by the recipient and the letter is removed from the envelope.

The animation shows an envelope with a stamp, a sender of 4085 SE Pine Street, Ocala, Florida 34471 and a recipient at 1400 Main Street, Canton, Ohio 44203. The envelope opens and shows a letter: dear Jane, I just returned from my trip. I thought you might like to see my pictures. John. A breakout table appears with the following headings: Recipient (destination) location address, sender (source) location address, salutation (start of message indicator), recipient (destination) identifier, the content of letter (encapsulated data) sender (source) identifier, end of frame (end of message indicator).

The next row has an envelope addressing under the first 2 sections, then encapsulated letter under the next 4 sections. The 1400 Main Street Canton, Ohio 44203 goes in a new row under the recipient (destination) and envelope addressing sections. The 4085 SE Pine Street Ocala, Florida 34471 goes under the sender (source) and envelope addressing sections.

The dear goes under the salutation (start of message indicator) and encapsulated letter sections. Jane goes under the recipient (destination) identifier and encapsulated letter sections. The words I just returned from my trip. I thought you might like to see my pictures. Goes under the content of the letter (encapsulated data) and encapsulated letter sections. The word John goes under the sender (source) identifier and encapsulated letter sections. The stamp on the letter goes under the end of the frame (end of message indicator) section.

Message Size

Another rule of communication is message size.
Analogy
Click Play in the figure to view an animation of message size in face-to-face communications.
When people communicate with each other, the messages that they send are usually broken into smaller parts or sentences. These sentences are limited in size to what the receiving person can process at one time, as shown in the figure. It also makes it easier for the receiver to read and comprehend.

Message Timing

Message timing is also very important in network communications. Message timing includes the following:

  • Flow Control – This is the process of managing the rate of data transmission. Flow control defines how much information can be sent and the speed at which it can be delivered. For example, if one person speaks too quickly, it may be difficult for the receiver to hear and understand the message. In network communication, there are network protocols used by the source and destination devices to negotiate and manage the flow of information.
  • Response Timeout – If a person asks a question and does not hear a response within an acceptable amount of time, the person assumes that no answer is coming and reacts accordingly. The person may repeat the question or instead, may go on with the conversation. Hosts on the network use network protocols that specify how long to wait for responses and what action to take if a response timeout occurs.
  • Access method – This determines when someone can send a message. Click Play in the figure to see an animation of two people talking at the same time, then a “collision of information” occurs, and it is necessary for the two to back off and start again. Likewise, when a device wants to transmit on a wireless LAN, it is necessary for the WLAN network interface card (NIC) to determine whether the wireless medium is available.
The animation shows a woman and a man speaking at the same time. The woman says What time is the movie? and the man says When are we meeting for dinner?. Because they spoke simultaneously, neither understood the other and they both say Sorry? I did not understand you.

Unicast, Multicast, and Broadcast

A message can be delivered in different ways. Sometimes, a person wants to communicate information to a single individual. At other times, the person may need to send information to a group of people at the same time, or even to all people in the same area.
Hosts on a network use similar delivery options to communicate. These methods of communication are called unicast, multicast, and broadcast.
Unicast
Multicast
Broadcast
A one-to-one delivery option is referred to as a unicast, meaning there is only a single destination for the message.
This animation consists of three hosts and a printer connected to a switch and router. The animation illustrates the host with IP address 172.16.4.1 sending a unicast packet to IP address 172.16.4.253. When the switch receives the frame, it forwards it out to the printer with IP address 172.16.4.253.

The Benefits of Using a Layered Model

You cannot actually watch real packets travel across a real network the way you can watch the components of a car being put together on an assembly line. so, it helps to have a way of thinking about a network so that you can imagine what is happening. A model is useful in these situations.
Complex concepts such as how a network operates can be difficult to explain and understand. For this reason, a layered model is used to modularize the operations of a network into manageable layers.
These are the benefits of using a layered model to describe network protocols and operations:
  • Assisting in protocol design because protocols that operate at a specific layer have defined information that they act upon and a defined interface to the layers above and below
  • Fostering competition because products from different vendors can work together
  • Preventing technology or capability changes in one layer from affecting other layers above and below
  • Providing a common language to describe networking functions and capabilities

As shown in the figure, there are two-layered models that are used to describe network operations:

  • Open System Interconnection (OSI) Reference Model
  • TCP/IP Reference Model
At the top of the image are two LANs connected via a WAN with the text: A networking model is only a representation of a network operation. The model is not the actual network. Underneath are the OSI and TCP/IP model layers and protocols. The seven layers of the OSI model from top to bottom and their associated protocols are application, presentation, session (protocols at the top three layers are HTTP, DNS, DHCP, and FTP), transport (TCP and UDP), network (IPv4, IPv6, ICMPv4, and ICMPv6), data link, and physical (protocols at the bottom two layers are Ethernet, WLAN, SONET, and SDH). The four layers of the TCP/IP model from top to bottom and their associated protocols are: application (HTTP, DNS, DHCP, and FTP), transport (TCP and UDP), Internet (IPv4, IPv6, ICMPv4, and ICMPv6), and network access (Ethernet, WLAN, SONET, and SDH).

The OSI Reference Model

The OSI reference model provides an extensive list of functions and services that can occur at each layer. This type of model provides consistency within all types of network protocols and services by describing what must be done at a particular layer, but not prescribing how it should be accomplished.
It also describes the interaction of each layer with the layers directly above and below.
The TCP/IP protocols discussed in this course are structured around both the OSI and TCP/IP models. The table shows details about each layer of the OSI model. The functionality of each layer and the relationship between layers will become more evident throughout this course as the protocols are discussed in more detail.
OSI Model Layer Description
7 – Application The application layer contains protocols used for process-to-process communications.
6 – Presentation The presentation layer provides for common representation of the data transferred between application layer services.
5 – Session The session layer provides services to the presentation layer to organize its dialogue and to manage data exchange.
4 – Transport The transport layer defines services to segment, transfer, and reassemble the data for individual communications between the end devices.
3 – Network The network layer provides services to exchange the individual pieces of data over the network between identified end devices.
2 – Data Link The data link layer protocols describe methods for exchanging data frames between devices over a common media
1 – Physical The physical layer protocols describe the mechanical, electrical, functional, and procedural means to activate, maintain, and de-activate physical connections for a bit transmission to and from a network device.
Note: Whereas the TCP/IP model layers are referred to only by name, the seven OSI model layers are more often referred to by number rather than by name. For instance, the physical layer is referred to as Layer 1 of the OSI model, the data link layer is Layer 2, and so on.

The TCP/IP Protocol Model

The TCP/IP protocol model for internetwork communications was created in the early 1970s and is sometimes referred to as the internet model. This type of model closely matches the structure of a particular protocol suite. The TCP/IP model is a protocol model because it describes the functions that occur at each layer of protocols within the TCP/IP suite. TCP/IP is also used as a reference model. The table shows details about each layer of the OSI model.
TCP/IP Model Layer Description
4 – Application Represents data to the user, plus encoding and dialog control.
3 – Transport Supports communication between various devices across diverse networks.
2 – Internet Determines the best path through the network.
1 – Network Access Controls the hardware devices and media that make up the network.
The definitions of the standard and the TCP/IP protocols are discussed in a public forum and defined in a publicly available set of IETF request for comment (RFC) documents. An RFC is authored by networking engineers and sent to other IETF members for comments.

Facts About Network Communication Process

Networks of Many Sizes

 

First and foremost, networks come in all sizes. They range from simple networks that consist of two computers to networks connecting millions of devices. Simple home networks let you share resources, such as printers, documents, pictures, and music, among a few local end devices. In this article, I want to discuss some facts about a network communication process.

Small office and home office (SOHO) networks allow people to work from home or a remote office. Many self-employed workers use these types of networks to advertise and sell products, order supplies and communicate with customers.
Businesses and large organizations use networks to provide consolidation, storage, and access to information on network servers. Networks provide email, instant messaging, and collaboration among employees. Many organizations use their network’s connection to the internet to provide products and services to customers.
The internet is the largest network in existence. In fact, the term internet means a “network of networks”. It is a collection of interconnected private and public networks.
In small businesses and homes, many computers function as both servers and clients on the network. This type of network is called a peer-to-peer network.

Small Home Networks

Small home networks connect a few computers to each other and to the internet.

Client-Server Communications

All computers that are connected to a network and that participate directly in network communication are classified as hosts. Hosts are also called end devices, endpoints, or nodes. Much of the interaction between end devices is client-server traffic. For example, when you access a web page on the internet, your web browser (the client) is accessing a server. When you send an email message, your email client will connect to an email server.

 

Servers are simply computers with specialized software. This software enables servers to provide information to other end devices on the network. A server can be single-purpose, providing only one service, such as web pages. A server can be multipurpose, providing a variety of services such as web pages, email, and file transfers.

 

Client computers have software installed, such as web browsers, email clients, and file transfers applications. This software enables them to request and display the information obtained from the server. A single computer can also run multiple types of client software. For example, a user can check email and view a web page while listening to the internet radio.

  • File Server – The file server stores corporate and user files in a central location.
  • Web Server – The web server runs web server software that allows many computers to access web pages.
  • Email Server – The email server runs email server software that enables emails to be sent and received.
The figure shows a switch with wired computers connected to it. The top computer is a file client and to the right of it is the file server. Besides the file, the client is number one. The associated words are as follows: The File Server stores corporate and user files in a central location. The client devices access these files with client software such as windows explorer. There are also a computer labelled web client and a web server.
The number 2 beside the web client has the following words: The Web Server runs webserver software and clients use their browser software, such as Windows Internet Explorer, to access web pages on the server. There is an email client computer and an email server. The email client has the number 3 beside it with the following words: The Email Server runs email server software and clients use their mail client software, such as Microsoft Outlook, to access email on the server.

Typical Sessions

A typical network user at school, at home, or in the office, will normally use some type of computing device to establish many connections with network servers. Those servers could be located in the same room or around the world. Let’s look at a few typical network communication sessions.

Student

Terry is a high school student whose school has recently started a “bring your own device” (BYOD) program. Students are encouraged to use their cell phones or other devices such as tablets or laptops to access learning resources. Terry has just been given an assignment in language arts class to research the effects of World War I on the literature and art of the time. She enters the search terms she has chosen into a search engine app that she has opened on her cell phone.

 

Terry has connected her phone to the school Wi-Fi network. Her search is submitted from her phone to the school network wirelessly. Before her search can be sent, the data must be addressed so that it can find its way back to Terry. Her search terms are then represented as a string of binary data that has been encoded into radio waves. Her search string is then converted to electrical signals that travel on the school’s wired network until they reach the place at which the school’s network connects to the Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) network. A combination of technologies takes Terry’s search to the search engine website.

 

For example, Terry’s data flow with the data of thousands of other users along with a fibre-optic network that connects Terry’s ISP with several other ISPs, including the ISP that is used by the search engine company. Eventually, Terry’s search string enters the search engine company’s website and is processed by its powerful servers. The results are then encoded and addressed to Terry’s school and her device.
All of these transitions and connections happen in a fraction of a second, and Terry has started on her path to learning about her subject.

Gamer

Michelle loves computer games. She has a powerful gaming console that she uses to play games against other players, watch movies, and play music. Michelle connects her game console directly to her network with a copper network cable.

Michelle’s network, like many home networks, connects to an ISP using a router and a cable modem. These devices allow Michelle’s home network to connect to a cable TV network that belongs to Michelle’s ISP. The cable wires for Michelle’s neighbourhood all connect to a central point on a telephone pole and then connect to a fibre-optic network. This fibre-optic network connects many neighbourhoods that are served by Michelle’s ISP.

All those fibre-optic cables connect to telecommunications services that provide access to high-capacity connections. These connections allow thousands of users in homes, government offices, and businesses to connect to internet destinations around the world.

Michelle has connected her game console to a company that hosts a very popular online game. Michelle is registered with the company, and its servers keep track of Michelle’s scores, experiences, and game assets. Michelle’s actions in her game become data that is sent to the gamer network. Michelle’s moves are broken up into groups of binary data that each consists of a string of zeros and ones. Information that identifies Michelle, the game she is playing, and Michelle’s network location are added to the game data. The pieces of data that represent Michelle’s gameplay are sent at high speed to the game provider’s network. The results are returned to Michelle in the form of graphics and sounds.

All of this happens so quickly that Michelle can compete with hundreds of other gamers in real-time.

Surgeon

Dr Ismael Awad is an oncologist who performs surgery on cancer patients. He frequently needs to consult with radiologists and other specialists on patient cases. The hospital that Dr Awad works for subscribes to a special service called a cloud. The cloud allows medical data, including patient x-rays and MRIs to be stored in a central location that is accessed over the internet. In this way, the hospital does not need to manage paper patient records and X-ray films.

When a patient has an X-ray taken, the image is digitized as computer data. The X-ray is then prepared by hospital computers to be sent to the medical cloud service. Because security is very important when working with medical data, the hospital uses network services that encrypt the image data and patient information. This encrypted data cannot be intercepted and read as it travels across the internet to the cloud service provider’s data centres. The data is addressed so that it can be routed to the cloud provider’s data centre to reach the correct services that provide storage and retrieval of high-resolution digital images.

 

Dr. Awad and the patient’s care team can connect to this special service, meet with other doctors in audio conferences and discuss patient records to decide on the best treatment that can be provided to the patient. Dr Awad can work with specialists from diverse locations to view the medical images and other patient data and discuss the case.

 

All of this interaction is digital and takes place using networked services that are provided by the medical cloud service.

Tracing the Path

We tend to think about the data networks we use in our daily lives as we think about driving a car. We do not really care what happens in the engine as long as the car takes us where we want to go. However, just like a car’s mechanic knows the details of how a car operates, cybersecurity analysts need to have a deep understanding of how networks operate.
When we connect to a website to read social media or shop, we seldom care about how our data gets to the website and how data from the website gets to us. We are not aware of the many technologies that enable us to use the internet. A combination of copper and fibre-optic cables that go over land and under the ocean carry data traffic. High-speed wireless and satellite technologies are also used. These connections connect telecommunications facilities and internet service providers (ISP) that are distributed throughout the world, as shown in the figure.
These global Tier 1 and Tier 2 ISPs connect portions of the internet together, usually through an Internet Exchange Point (IXP). Larger networks will connect to Tier 2 networks through a Point of Presence (PoP), which is usually a location in the building where physical connections to the ISP are made. The Tier 3 ISPs connect homes and businesses to the internet.
Because of different relationships between ISPs and telecommunications companies, traffic from a computer to an internet server can take many paths. The traffic of a user in one country can take a very indirect path to reach its destination. The traffic might first travel from the local ISP to a facility that has connections to many other ISPs. A user’s internet traffic can go many hundreds of miles in one direction only to be routed in a completely different direction to reach its destination. Some of the traffic can take certain routes to reach the destination, and then take completely different routes to return.

 

Cybersecurity analysts must be able to determine the origin of traffic that enters the network and the destination of traffic that leaves it. Understanding the path that network traffic takes is essential to this.

Action Point
PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on an individual and corporate level, I will be very glad to do that because I have trainned several individuals and groups and they are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trainned include staff of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, and New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your training. You can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training. 

I know you might agree with some of the points that I have raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

 

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Data Encapsulation In Networking: Highlighting The Facts

Knowing the OSI reference model and the TCP/IP protocol model will come in handy when you learn about how data is encapsulated as it moves across a network. It is not as simple as a physical letter being sent through the mail system. In this article, I will be talking about some of the facts that you need to know about data encapsulation in Networking. 

 

In theory, a single communication, such as a video or an email message with many large attachments, could be sent across a network from a source to a destination as one massive, uninterrupted stream of bits.
However, this would create problems for other devices needing to use the same communication channels or links.
These large streams of data would result in significant delays. Further, if any link in the interconnected network infrastructure failed during the transmission, the complete message would be lost and would have to be retransmitted in full.

 

A better approach is to divide the data into smaller, more manageable pieces to send over the network. Segmentation is the process of dividing a stream of data into smaller units for transmissions over the network. Segmentation is necessary because data networks use the TCP/IP protocol suite to send data in individual IP packets. Each packet is sent separately, similar to sending a long letter as a series of individual postcards. Packets containing segments for the same destination can be sent over different paths.

This leads to segmenting messages having two primary benefits:

  • Increases speed – Because a large data stream is segmented into packets, large amounts of data can be sent over the network without tying up a communications link. This allows many different conversations to be interleaved on the network called multiplexing.
  • Increases efficiency – If a single segment fails to reach its destination due to a failure in the network or network congestion, only that segment needs to be retransmitted instead of resending the entire data stream.

 

The animation shows a small LAN with two hosts and a server. When the Segmentation button is pressed a large message from the first host is broken up into smaller messages that are sent across the network to the server. Then the Multiplexing button is pressed messages from both hosts are sent onto the network one after the other to the server.

Sequencing

The challenge to using segmentation and multiplexing to transmit messages across a network is the level of complexity that is added to the process. Imagine if you had to send a 100-page letter, but each envelope could only hold one page. Therefore, 100 envelopes would be required, and each envelope would need to be addressed individually. It is possible that the 100-page letter in 100 different envelopes arrives out-of-order. Consequently, the information in the envelope would need to include a sequence number to ensure that the receiver could reassemble the pages in the proper order.

 

In network communications, each segment of the message must go through a similar process to ensure that it gets to the correct destination and can be reassembled into the content of the original message, as shown in the figure. TCP is responsible for sequencing the individual segments.
The figure shows two computers sending messages on a network to a server. Each message has been divided up into multiple pieces shown as yellow and orange envelopes, some are interleaved and numbered. The text reads: Multiple pieces are labelled for easy direction and re-assembly. Labelling provides for ordering and assembling the pieces when they arrive.

Protocol Data Units

As application data is passed down the protocol stack on its way to being transmitted across the network media, various protocol information is added at each level. This is known as the encapsulation process.
Note: Although the UDP PDU is called a datagram, IP packets are sometimes also referred to as IP datagrams.
The form that a piece of data takes at any layer is called a protocol data unit (PDU). During encapsulation, each succeeding layer encapsulates the PDU that it receives from the layer above in accordance with the protocol being used. At each stage of the process, a PDU has a different name to reflect its new functions. Although there is no universal naming convention for PDUs, in this course, the PDUs are named according to the protocols of the TCP/IP suite. The PDUs for each form of data is shown in the figure.

That data is passed down the stack and encapsulated into a new PDU at each layer. At the top, the email data is divided into smaller chunks of data. Below that, a transport header is added in front of the chunk of data and it becomes a segment. Below that, a network header is added in front of the transport header and it becomes a packet. Below that, a frame header is added in front of the network header and a frame trailer is added behind the data and it becomes a frame (medium dependent).

The frame is shown as a stream of bits prior to being received by a router that is connected to the cloud. Text at the bottom reads: Data – The general term for the PDU used at the application layer; Segment – Transport layer PDU; Packet – Network layer PDU; Frame – Data Link layer PDU; Bits – Physical layer PDU used when physically transmitting data over the medium. Note: If the Transport header is TCP, then it is a segment. If the Transport header is UDP then it is a datagram.

Three Addresses

Network protocols require that addresses be used for network communication. Addressing is used by the client to send requests and other data to a server. The server uses the client’s address to return the requested data to the client that requested it.

 

The OSI transport, network, and data link layers all use addressing in some form. The transport layer uses protocol addresses in the form of port numbers to identify network applications that should handle client and server data. The network layer specifies addresses that identify the networks that clients and servers are attached to and the clients and servers themselves. Finally, the data link layer specifies the devices on the local LAN that should handle data frames. All three addresses are required for client-server communication, as shown in the figure.

 

The figure shows two columns. In each column are the 7 layers of the OSI model (application presentation session transport network data link physical). There is an arrow (line with arrows on each end) that goes between the transport box in the left column to the transport layer box in the right column and the words protocol address. There is an arrow between the two boxes labelled network and the words network host address. There is an arrow between the two data link boxes and the words physical address. There is an arrow going between the two physical boxes with the following bits as electrical or radio-frequency signals 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 1.

Encapsulation Example

When messages are being sent on a network, the encapsulation process works from top to bottom. At each layer, the upper layer information is considered data within the encapsulated protocol. For example, the TCP segment is considered data within the IP packet.
You saw this animation previously in this module. This time, click Play and focus on the encapsulation process as a web server sends a web page to a web client.

The animation shows a small network with a Web Server and a Web Client. There’s is a graphic that shows the components that make up a message. An Ethernet Frame, an IP Packet, a TCP segment, and the user data. The animation begins with the webserver preparing the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) page as data to be sent. The application protocol HTTP header is added (prepended) to the front of the HTML data.

The header contains various information, including the HTTP version the server is using and a status code indicating it has information for the web client. The HTTP application layer protocol delivers the HTML-formatted web page data to the TCP transport layer. The transport layer protocol prepends additional information to the HTTP data to manage the exchange of information between the web server and web client. The IP information is prepended to the TCP information. IP assigns the appropriate source and destination IP addresses. This information is known as an IP packet. The Ethernet protocol prepends and adds to the end (appends) information to the IP packet to create a data link frame. The frame is then converted into a string of binary bits that are sent along the network path to the web client.

De-encapsulation Example

This process is reversed at the receiving host and is known as de-encapsulation. De-encapsulation is the process used by a receiving device to remove one or more of the protocol headers. The data is de-encapsulated as it moves up the stack toward the end-user application.
You saw this animation previously in this module. This time, click Play and focus on the de-encapsulation process.
The animation shows a small network with a Server and a Client. The client receives a string of binary bits from the server. The client takes the binary string of bits and converts it into an Ethernet frame. The Frame contains the Ethernet header, the IP packet, the TCP segment, and the data. Each protocol header is processed and then removed in the opposite order it was added. The Ethernet information is processed and removed, followed by the IP protocol information, the TCP information, and finally the HTTP information. The HTML web page information is then passed on to the web browser software of the client

 

Understanding Ethernet Encapsulation In Networking

Ethernet Encapsulation

Ethernet and wireless LANs (WLANs) are the two most commonly deployed LAN technologies. Unlike wireless, Ethernet uses wired communications, including twisted pair, fibre-optic links, and coaxial cables. In this article, we are going to talk about ethernet encapsulation in networking. 

 

Ethernet operates in the data link layer and the physical layer. It is a family of networking technologies defined in the IEEE 802.2 and 802.3 standards. Ethernet supports the following data bandwidths:

  • 10 Mbps
  • 100 Mbps
  • 1000 Mbps (1 Gbps)
  • 10,000 Mbps (10 Gbps)
  • 40,000 Mbps (40 Gbps)
  • 100,000 Mbps (100 Gbps)

As shown in the figure, Ethernet standards define both the Layer 2 protocols and the Layer 1 technologies.

Ethernet and the OSI Modes

Ethernet Frame Fields

The minimum Ethernet frame size is 64 bytes and the maximum is 1518 bytes. This includes all bytes from the destination MAC address field through the frame check sequence (FCS) field. The preamble field is not included when describing the size of the frame.

Any frame less than 64 bytes in length is considered a “collision fragment” or “runt frame” and is automatically discarded by receiving stations. Frames with more than 1500 bytes of data are considered “jumbo” or “baby giant frames”.

If the size of a transmitted frame is less than the minimum, or greater than the maximum, the receiving device drops the frame. Dropped frames are likely to be the result of collisions or other unwanted signals. They are considered invalid. However, the Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet interfaces of some Cisco Catalyst switches can be configured to support larger jumbo frames.

The diagram shows the fields of an Ethernet frame. From left to right the fields and their lengths are Preamble and SFD, 8 bytes; destination MAC address, 6 bytes; source MAC address, 6 bytes; type/length, 2 bytes; data, 46 – 1500 bytes; and F C S, 4 bytes. Excluding the first field, the total number of bytes in the remaining fields is between 64 – 1518 bytes.

 

Ethernet Frame Fields

 
Field Description
Preamble and Start Frame Delimiter Fields The Preamble (7 bytes) and Start Frame Delimiter (SFD), also called the Start of Frame (1 byte), fields are used for synchronization between the sending and receiving devices. These first eight bytes of the frame are used to get the attention of the receiving nodes. Essentially, the first few bytes tell the receivers to get ready to receive a new frame.
Destination MAC Address Field This 6-byte field is the identifier for the intended recipient. As you will recall, this address is used by Layer 2 to assist devices in determining if a frame is addressed to them. The address in the frame is compared to the MAC address in the device. If there is a match, the device accepts the frame. Can be a unicast, multicast or broadcast address.
Source MAC Address Field This 6-byte field identifies the originating NIC or interface of the frame. A source MAC address can only be a unicast address.
Type / Length This 2-byte field identifies the upper layer protocol encapsulated in the Ethernet frame. Common values are, in hexadecimal, 0x800 for IPv4, 0x86DD for IPv6 and 0x806 for ARP.
Note: You may also see this field referred to as EtherType, Type, or Length.
Data Field This field (46 – 1500 bytes) contains the encapsulated data from a higher layer, which is a generic Layer 3 PDU, or more commonly, an IPv4 packet. All frames must be at least 64 bytes long. If a small packet is encapsulated, additional bits called a pad are used to increase the size of the frame to this minimum size.
Frame Check Sequence Field The Frame Check Sequence (FCS) field (4 bytes) is used to detect errors in a frame. It uses a cyclic redundancy check (CRC). The sending device includes the results of a CRC in the FCS field of the frame. The receiving device receives the frame and generates a CRC to look for errors. If the calculations match, no error occurred. Calculations that do not match are an indication that the data has changed; therefore, the frame is dropped. A change in the data could be the result of a disruption of the electrical signals that represent the bits.

MAC Address Format

The figure is three columns showing the decimal and hexadecimal equivalents of select 4-bit binary numbers. From left to right, the column headings are decimal, binary, and hexadecimal. Each column has 16 rows below the header.

Decimal and Binary Equivalents of 0 to F Hexadecimal

An Ethernet MAC address is a 48-bit binary value expressed as 12 hexadecimal digits (4 bits per hexadecimal digit). Hexadecimal digits use the numbers 0 to 9 and the letters A to F. The figure shows the equivalent decimal and hexadecimal values for binary 0000 to 1111. Hexadecimal is commonly used to represent binary data. IPv6 addresses are another example of hexadecimal addressing.

 

Figure 1 shows a table with Decimal values between 0 and 15 with the Binary and Hexadecimal equivalents. This table demonstrates why Hexadecimal has letters A through F along with numbers 0 through 9. Figure 2 shows that a MAC address can be represented with dashes, colons or periods.
 

Action Point
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