Week #10- Introduction to SEO- Ch. 9

This week I read the last chapter of Introduction to Search Engine Optimization, and it is titled Exploring SEO Certification. This is something that we had to do for this class. We had to get a Hubspot certification. You might have seen this on my previous blogs, one of them was about my certification on Hubspot. We had to take the class or course called inbound marketing. The whole thing was free, so if you have some free time and it would be helpful for your career you should go through the course and then at the end of it, you have to take a test that is about 60 questions long and you have to pass that to be certified. He thinks that the material and the things that you can learn on Hubspot are amazing. The videos that you have to watch aren't even that boring. I am not going to lie, this is not the field that I want to go into, I just need credits to graduate and I have taken other marketing classes before, so that's why I am in this class, but it is super important information that you learn for people who are going into the marketing field, I would strongly recommend taking this course, and its free so it doesn't get much better than that!

Week #10- Artificial Intelligence

I just randomly came across an article this week about Artificial Intelligence and we have been reading a book all about it, so I figured I would read this article and see what it had to say about it. Up until now I have really only thought about the good things that AI would offer the world, such as SIRI on our iPhones and self-driving cars, but this article shows some of the bad parts of it. The first down side that AI presents is that sometimes AI is programmed to do something dangerous and devastating. Things such as automatic weapons are AI systems that are programmed to kill. If these weapons get into the hands of someone who would be dangerous, they could cause a lot of problems for people. I'm not trying to get into the debate of gun control, but I am simply stating how AI could be a dangerous thing. The next point that the author of the article makes is that "AI is programmed to do something beneficial, but it develops a destructive method for achieving the goal". And it goes on to say that this might happen when we don't fully align the AI's goals with our own goals, and when they are very different.

Like I said before, up until this point, I have heard nothing but good things about AI (until I saw the movie Ex Machina, but then again it is a movie), but I have thought that AI has only been up to good things, and now that I think about all the ways that AI is in our daily lives, it is a little scary how quickly AI is becoming more and more real, and how much we actually need to watch out for things such as automatic weapons and even self-driving cars, they can be dangerous in a way. Machines do make mistakes, so we have to keep a close eye on things and not let it completely take over our lives.

Week #9- Introduction to SEO- Ch. 8

This week I am doing two blogs about Introduction to Search Engine Optimization to just finish out the book. It is about how to keep up with the changes. He says to keep up with the changes you have to keep looking at resources, even some that are out of date. He says that pretty much nothing with SEO is eternal or going to stay the same. The only thing that is eternal is quality content. He says that its very important to keep reading blog posts or attending webinars to keep up with the resources and the changes that are happening. He gives examples of a few that would be good to check out. Not keeping up with the changes can definitely hurt you in the long run. It will ultimately help you do your job better, by keeping up with the times. And that is the end of his chapter. It was super short, but straight to the point. Just keep up with the changes and keep reading materials and looking at videos and such.

Week #9- Introduction to SEO- Ch. 7

This week I came back to the Introduction to Search Engine Optimization book and I read chapter 7. I took a couple week off of it because I wanted to blog about a couple other things, but I am back to reading this book. This chapter is about exploring Google webmaster Tools and Search console. Many businesses and companies who are smaller use a service to help manage their sites. Some examples of companies that do that are GoDaddy or Google Sites or wordpress.com. In a lot of cases these companies will manage about 95% of the technical part so that the owner of the small business does not have to. And a lot of the time it is automated through a system called Content Management System. What they do is they help people, who are not very tech-savy, create a good website that will help out their business. But he goes on to say that it does not matter how a website is set up, they still sometimes need a doctor and that is where Webmaster Tools/ Search Console comes in. He gives a couple links to check out if you want to learn more about it. They are YouTube videos you can watch. He explains that there are a lot of articles and videos out there about Webmaster Tools/ Search Console, so if you would like more information about it, I would suggest trying to check some things out. And in the rest of the chapter he shows you how you can manage some of your websites through Google.

Week #8- Surfing the Tsunami- Ch. 8

This week I read the last chapter of the book Surfing the Tsunami, and it was about what we have to do next. In this chapter he talks about different places we can go to get more information about AI. He says there are books we can read. There are websites that we can go on and take courses about AI. There are a bunch of different options that he gives you to learn more about things that are going to be happening in the future. If I had the time to do all of these things, I would probably go on a few websites to try and learn more about AI and how it is going to potentially impact my life one day. But I just don't have the time right now and I don't have the drive to learn more about it at this moment. Maybe one day I will want to learn more about it and start to really dive into it, but not now.

Week #8- Hubspot Certification

This week I finished my Hubspot Inbound Certification. Honestly, I learned a lot from it. I didn't think I was going to retain any information from it. Not to be mean or anything, but in most classes that are not for my major, I usually don't remember too many things from the class, but this one I think will stick with me for a while. I don't know if I will ever have to use it or if I will get a job because of it, just because it doesn't really pertain to my major or field. But it was a good experience and I think it will be useful for many people who are in the marketing field. And the test was actually decently hard, like if you didn't pay attention to any of the videos, it would be very hard to complete the test and pass it. But luckily I passed the test on the first try.

Week #7- Surfing the Tsunami- Ch. 7

This week I also read Surfing the Tsunmai Chapter 7 and it is about Getting to Know AI. In this chapter he introduces some people who have a lot to do with AI. He just gives brief over views of a bunch of these people who have a lot to do with AI. He also includes videos of the people and different websites to help us learn more about it. He also does an interview with a person who is big into AI and he says a big part of learning more about it is that we have to read books and articles about it, but also person-to-person contact is important for learning more about it. Just in case you have questions its easy to ask them right in person. Or if you have really specific questions and they answer them and you need more clarifying, then they can offer that to you. So being in person really helps to understand different things.

Week #7- Introduction to SEO- Ch. 6

Last week I didn't write a blog post on this chapter because I found that writing a blog post about a movie I watched would be better. But this week I read chapter 6 of Introduction to Search Engine Optimization, and it was about analyzing how things are going and how you can measure the performance of your SEO efforts. He gives you a website about how to check your SEO. You do it by typing in a keyword and seeing if your website pops up, and you can see what number it is at.

He also says that you should hunt for duplicate content. You never want to have multiple pages on your site with the same content. It is a pretty common thing. Pages may be forgotten, duplicated, or material might have been paraphrased. Sitliner.com is a good website to use to see if you have duplicate content. It shows if you have duplicate content on your website and it gives you a way to look back at your content and see if any of it is necessary or redundant.

Week #6- Surfing the Tsunami- Ch. 6

This week I read Chapter 6 of Surfing the Tsunami, and it was about the last way that we should respond to AI and the last way is to adept. This means that can get directly involved with developing AI, by learning coding and how to work with related data. Although this sounds nice to be able to do, its not something that I would have interest in at all. I don't really want to know how to code things at all. I understand that this is an important part, but if I wanted to know how to code I would be a computer science major, but no thanks. I think the first two steps are super important and, in my own opinion, I think those two are really important, but we don't need to code. I mean maybe in the future we will have to know how to do those things to be able to use a computer, which is fine, but up until then I don't think I want to learn that stuff. There are a bunch of videos of this kind of stuff on YouTube that you can watch if you are interested in this stuff.

Week #6- Ex Machina- AI

This week for a different class, I had to watch Ex Machina and it was all about AI. It was actually a really good movie. I didn't think I would like it very much, but it gave me a better idea of what AI actually is. In this movie, it shows a guy that builds a robot, actually many robots, that are very human like. When they don't have clothes on they definitely look like robots and not human, but when they had clothes on, you wouldn't even have been able to tell that they were robots. The robot, Ava, had human level intelligence and human level emotions, which was honestly kind of scary because she is clearly not human.

*SPOILER ALERT*

She and the student, Caleb, who is working with the guy who created Ava, have some real romantic emotions for one another. Caleb eventually finds out that the creator of robots, Nathan, has a bunch of other ones in his bedroom and its actually super creepy to see them, but he tries to take control of this guys house. Nathan's house was so technologically advanced that you can't go anywhere without a key card and so Caleb's plan was to take over the system and make it so that Ava and himself could leave the house. So in the Ava ends up killing Nathan and one of the other robots and she left the house because she got Nathans key card. So I'm not too sure how this movie makes me feel about AI because on one hand, they can help out humans a lot and help do good things for humans and on the other hand, they can be harmful and want to kill you, haha. But of course, it is just a movie, so I do think that AI is helpful for humans and it could really help us in the long run.