There are many people still asking the question “what is a webinar”? So, we thought it an important post to discuss what webinars are, how to become involved in a webinar and how webinars work.
Webinars are a flexible, interactive and cost effective tool for communication, allowing people to conference or train together over the internet. Webinars are also used to market and sell products or services.
Some of the main advantages of webinars are they have the ability to reach a larger audience, costs are reduced and participants are able to digitally record the event to enable future playback.
Where does the term Webinar come from?
For those who are interested the term “webinar” was coined last century – 1998 in fact, when Eric R Korb used the term to brand the online meeting service he created for his company. The term webinar is short for “Web-based seminar”. There have since been varying versions of the term “webinar” and among those commonly used are online workshops, online seminars, live meeting and web conferencing.
Join a Webinar
Since 1998 webinars are more commonplace, with people feeling more at ease when being invited to attend one. All you need is a computer, internet access and a phone line for listening to any teleconference portions.
For those who have not yet received an invitation to attend a webinar, a good way to become familiar with one is to invite yourself! There are a lot of free webinars to be found on the internet. Often these are promotional webinars to market and sell products and if you do your research you can find one to join on a subject matter you enjoy. Once you’ve booked your place on the webinar, set yourself up with a coffee (or tea) have some pen and paper at hand and along with some good quality earphones – join in. Typically webinars are one-way from the speaker to the audience however some may include limited audience interaction.
Hosting a Webinar
If you want to host a webinar of your own, it is important to choose a company which can accommodate both your budget and your requirements.
Webinar hosts usually offer a variety of services such as programing, producing and delivering the webinar. There are also different formats e.g.: live webinar, pre-recorded webinar or your webinar host can fully produce, present and moderate the webinar. The latter is commonly used for people with limited public speaking experience.
If webinars sound like something you would like to do and if you are interested in having a webinar hosted, Keyword Intent are more than happy to discuss the best options with you.
Scott Huffman, Engineering Director, Google
Do you sometimes wonder why your website is indexed highly one day and almost nowhere to be found the next day? Or why Google has subtle changes one day to the next? Don’t worry, you are not alone and for the most part it will be a recently introduced Google algorithm change from Matt Cutts and his team at Google.
In most cases Google doesn’t announce a change to their algorithms and there is generally no prior warning, but it doesn’t take a good search engine optimization company long to undertake some speedy research in internet land to find out what changes have been made. Often followed by a large panic by their clients wondering what went wrong with their SEO plans. Depending on your relationship with your search engine optimization consultant, you should be advised of a Google algorithm change that will affect the indexing of your site – before your monthly report arrives in your inbox!
Why Google makes changes and improvements to algorithms
Google wants to have a search engine that works for users that allows them to find what they really want to find – the first time. Before Google makes algorithm changes they put in a huge investment into understanding what works for users. Every year Google will implement over 500 improvements to its search algorithms to make sure they achieve the best results for each user. Scott Huffman, Engineering Director at Google says “we really analyse each potential change very deeply to try and make sure that it’s the right thing for users”.
The process for changing algorithms
If Google sees a set of motivating searches that are not performing as well as Google would like, the engineers will then come up with an hypothesis about what signal or data can be changed in the algorithm.
A change or improvement to the algorithm may also start with a creative idea, but it always goes through a testing process. “All ideas are tested through rigorous scientific testing” says Amit Singal, Google Fellow.
After a change has been made to the algorithm the first test is with “Raters” who are external people trained to judge if one ranking is more relevant and of a higher quality than another. These results are laid out side by side on the screen for queries that the engineers’ experiment might be affecting.
Once this has been tested Google then uses what they call a “sandbox” which is where they send a small fraction of actual Google traffic to the sandbox and are then able to compute lots of different metrics. In 2010 Google ran over 20,000 different experiments. Amit Singal says “if scientific testing says this is a good idea for Google users, we will launch it on Google”.
The importance of an optimized website
Taking all of the above into consideration it’s not difficult to see why SEO companies have to work extremely hard to keep your site optimised and why SEO companies really need to be on the ball. With over 500 changes to the algorithms each year it shows how important a continued relationship with your SEO Company is!
There are many people still asking the question “what is a webinar”? So, we thought it an important post to discuss what webinars are, how to become involved in a webinar and how webinars work.