Whether you are a web developer or a content manager, chances are you are aware of the surge of progressive web apps (PWA) in the market. PWAs brings the best of web-based services and local applications into one.
According to Google, PWAs are a reliable, fast and engaging way for users to interact with a brand or a service. Therefore it is safe to say that PWAs have its own benefits which allow you to approach your customers from a new and exciting perspective.
However, just like their web-based predecessors, PWAs fall into the category of SEO-dependent services. In this article, we have listed out the best practices for optimizing your PWAs for search engines.
Let us start with;
Why SEO matters:
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) determines your ranking in the app marketplace and therefore impacts the visibility of your app. Just like your website, PWAs fall under global SEO when it comes to marketplace ranking. Therefore the prevalent website SEO techniques can be a good starting point for your PWA. If you use the same set of rules you used on your website and digital content, the PWA you publish will not fall short of expectations.
Keyword research:
The words and phrases you implement in your PWA are just as important as those on your website. So make sure that you do adequate research into your niche’s trending keywords. Tools such as Semrush and Google’s Keyword Planner can help you discover useful and high-ranking words to use.
The thing about PWAs is that they are in the middle of the road when it comes to online and offline based services. They are just as much a part of the internet as they are a part of any local device which may be using them. In order for the end-user to find your PWA, SEO will have to be much in the same way as it is for web-based content.
Multimedia optimization:
The major benefit of using PWAs in your business is that they are very lightweight. According to research done by PWA Stats, progressive web apps take up only a fraction of space and bandwidth as opposed to their full-blown software counterparts.
Even so, your rankings can take a major hit if you don’t optimize your PWAs’ multimedia content accordingly. Any multimedia content that you embed in your PWA takes up precious bandwidth. With that, load times drop and people are less prone to use your app for extended periods of time.
In order to avoid that, you need to optimize your images and multimedia for optimal load times. You can do this through online editors or local software such as the Adobe software suite.
Content Interlacing and Localisation:
By definition, your PWA can and should link to your website and all related content. This is a step towards easily promoting your business, marketing new products and raising your global SEO ranking. Only last year, Forbes has redesigned their website as a PWA. Since then, they have enjoyed an increase of 100% in overall engagement rates.
Content interlacing is an important prospect of PWA reminiscent to site content interlinking. Don’t waste the opportunity to create a cohesive customer experience by failing to connect your main site to the PWA.
Many developers also overlook the importance of localizing their applications in different languages and regions. Professional service providers such as Pick Writers can help you with the translation of your PWA. You can easily find a professional translator who can help to localize your PWA for international markets and thereby improve your local SEO rankings.
SEO notifications:
Push notifications play a huge part in the appeal of progressive web apps. They notify the end-user of a new piece of information or a happening without being too obtrusive.
It’s good practice to include SEO optimized content into your push notifications by default. While they don’t affect your global SEO ranking as much as the UI and content, they still add up to it.
Make sure that you use this opportunity to maintain the cohesive image of your brand without deviating from what you did beforehand. Optimize your push notifications with keywords in mind in order to make the most of their presence.
Client-side feedback:
Software developers rarely need the end-users’ feedback to improve their back-end code. However, in terms of PWA optimization, the client-side feedback matters more than you think.
The customer experience of your clients is the epitome of your development cycle. If they don’t like what you created, no amount of polish and redesign will save the PWA.
Add feedback fields and contact options to your progressive web app to show some positive attitude towards your users. You may receive crucial information about grammar mistakes in your UI, bugs on certain devices and similar reports.
Long-form optimization (Conclusion)
Just like any other web-based service, PWAs require constant upkeep to function properly. The good side of PWA is that they update in real time which lessens the impact on your SEO ranking.
Client-side devices receive updates as you roll them out without any dependency on the bandwidth. This makes it easy to update and maintain your PWA across the board. Don’t be afraid to add new functionality and SEO optimization methods to your existing progressive web app.
The development of said application will only stop when you decide to do so. If you plan your SEO according to the existing content plan for your website, there is nothing to worry about.
About Author:
Kristin Savage has graduated from Columbia University where she was majoring in Germanic Languages. Besides English as her mother tongue she also speaks German and Dutch fluently. Currently Kristin is studying Spanish and planning to obtain her PhD in Applied Linguistics since she is interested in how to use her to some extent practical knowledge of language processes in everyday life.
Satadeep Biswas
September 18, 2018
Personal or professional, communication is the secret of every successful relationship. While you can argue over the truth of this statement, you can’t deny the fact that in the absence of a clear communication channel, your project’s chances of success are minimal.
According to the findings of the Project Management Institute (PMI) – those with effective communication skills get more than 70% of their projects completed on time and within budget as compared to only 40-50% projects for those with poor communication skills. The PMI also suggests that if you are a project manager, it is necessary that you use a dedicated project management software or tool to encourage effective communication with all the parties involved in a project. This includes teams, clients, stakeholders, and anyone else who is associated with the project in one way or the other.
In this article, we will take this discussion forward by exploring the various factors that prove why effective communication is the foundation of successful project management. We have also compiled a list of methods that you can employ to improve communication in your workplace.
Let’s get started.
Reasons why efficient communication matters in an organization
Improved productivity: Effective communication implies that employees have all the information they need to complete their jobs. It ensures that no important information is missed or misinterpreted during the whole project management process. With all the important details at hand, employees approach their tasks with better focus and get them completed without wasting any time. In this way, effective communication makes employees more productive around work.
Greater clarity: Confusing guidelines and unclear instructions are the biggest productivity killers. In project management, it is important that employees, managers, and clients have a clear idea about the roles and responsibilities. This is where effective communications prove most helpful. With good communication, everyone gets clarity about what they need to do and how they should do it. This way, everyone knows what is expected of them and everything runs smoothly from start to finish.
Increased participation: When you’re a project manager, you want everyone on your team to participate and perform as productively as possible. But that’s not possible unless you start communicating with your team members. With effective communication, you will be able to increase engagement among employees without any additional efforts. Just let everyone participate in the discussion and they will get more enthusiastic about their workplace.
Easier problem-solving: Managing a project involves all sorts of challenges. In order to face these challenges, effective communication is necessary. It helps teams to identify and resolve potential issues while they are still dormant, thereby keeping everyone on track and allowing them to complete every task or project as a team.
Tips to ensure better communication in project management
Encourage interaction outside the office: This is certainly one of the best ways to get people to communicate and work together without conflicts. Project managers often expect each member of their team to spend most of their time working in their offices and delivering results. But it’s not the ideal approach. In a team, employees should be able to understand each other’s value and align their interests for the best results. To make it happen, project managers need to encourage their employees to interact outside the office premises. Planning an impromptu office trip or organizing some fun team building activities is a great way for everyone to be together outside of work.
Ask for honest feedback: Communication is not just about getting projects delivered, but it also focuses on improving the overall performance and productivity of the team. Asking employees to share constructive feedback on each other’s performance is one way to achieve it. Encouraging team members to communicate their thoughts provides them with the opportunity to identify key areas of improvement in their work process. It shows them ways to be better at their job and bring the best outcome with minimum effort.
Use a collaboration app or tool: Finding an online collaboration software or app is always a great way to encourage better communication in a workplace. A project management software or team collaboration tool offers businesses the opportunity to personalize their communication with advanced features and functionalities. Discussion boards, chats, announcements, reporting, etc are some of the advanced features through which a collaboration app or tool simplifies workplace communication.
Applozic is a communication suite for enterprises to simplify their team communication. It has all the required features and unlike 3rd party software products, Applozic can be hosted on your own servers for more control and security of data.
Conclusion
If teams are a crucial part of an organization, communication is the process that helps them to facilitate and attain maximum efficiency. Put the above tips into practice to maintain effective communication and create opportunities for everyone to be heard in the workplace.
If you liked this article, don’t forget to share it with your coworkers and clients. Help them learn why communication is the key to successful project management and how they can improve it.
About the author:
Vartika Kashyap is the Marketing Manager at ProofHub and has been one of the LinkedIn Top Voices in 2017. Her articles are inspired by office situations and work-related events. She likes to write about productivity, team building, work culture, leadership, entrepreneurship among others and contributing to a better workplace is what makes her click.
Satadeep Biswas
September 4, 2018
Understanding how different words are related based on the context they are used is an easy task for us humans. If we take an example of articles then we read a lot of articles related to different topics. In almost all the articles where an author is trying to teach you a new concept then the author will try to use the examples which are already known to you, to teach you any new concept. In a similar way computer also needs a way where they can learn about a topic and where they can understand how different words are related.
Let me begin with the concept of language, these amazing different languages we have. We use that to communicate with each other and share different ideas.
But how do we explain a language in a better way? Some time back I was reading this book “Sapiens”, where the author goes back and questions a lot of things and in that, his explanation of language was good:
We can connect a limited number of sounds and signs to produce an infinite number of sentences, each with a distinct meaning.
We can thereby ingest, store and communicate a prodigious amount of information about the surrounding world.
This is all possible because of languages. As he writes we can produce an infinite number of sentences, that means words will have different meanings based on the context used. So rather than having a fixed definition for each word, we’ll be defining them based on their context.
That’s the reason in programming we don’t use WordNet to find out the relationship between different words. WordNet is a library where you can get a collection of synonym sets for each word. Also, it contains hypernyms (‘is a’) relationships. It misses the nuance, for example, the word ‘good’ has a lot of synonym sets but the context is missing. One more problem with WordNet is that it requires human labor to create and update.
We need a way where we can compare the word similarity. To compare it we need to represent the words in the form of vectors. We can represent them in the form of discrete symbols. Representing them as one-hot vectors like:
hotel = [0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0]
So, the vector dimension will be equal to the total number of words in a vocabulary. Still, we can’t find the similarities between different words in this way as each word is represented differently and there is no way to compare. One way to fix that would be to use WordNet’s list of synonyms to get the similarity or what if we can add similarities in the vector itself?
The idea here is to create a dense vector for each word, chosen in such a way where it is similar to vectors of words that appear in similar context. Word2Vec is what we are going to use to create such a dense vector.
Word2Vec
Let’s say we are reading a book and our task is to learn how different words are related to each other. What we will do here is we’ll take a paragraph and we will go through each word. One word at a time, let’s call it a center word. Then we have nearby words, let’s say there are five words in one sentence and center word is the middle one then two words on the left side and two on the right are nearby words. These are also known as context words. Here we take two because we have a window of size two, it can be changed.
Here we will calculate the probability of a context word given a center word or vice versa. Based on this probability we will adjust the word vectors and try to maximize the probability. This way we will get word vectors through which we will know if any two words are similar.
Word2Vec was introduced in 2013 by Mikolov et al. at Google on efficient vector representations of words. This is the abstract of the paper:
We propose two novel model architectures for computing continuous vector representations of words from very large data sets. The quality of these representations is measured in a word similarity task, and the results are compared to the previously best performing techniques based on different types of neural networks. We observe large improvements in accuracy at much lower computational cost, i.e. it takes less than a day to learn high-quality word vectors from a 1.6 billion words data set. Furthermore, we show that these vectors provide state-of-the-art performance on our test set for measuring syntactic and semantic word similarities.
Model
Let’s go into the details. We are going to create a neural network with a single hidden layer. In input, we will pass one hot vector representing a word and in the output, we will get a probability of that word being near the center word. This is one of that neural network where the actual goal is not the output that we get, in this case, we are interested in learning from the weights of the hidden layer. Output layer is required to decrease the loss.
Figure 1: Skip-gram predicts surrounding words given the current word.
From figure 1 we can get a basic idea of different layers in the Skip-gram model. So, there were two architectures proposed: one is Skip-gram model and the other one is the Continuous Bag-of-Words model. In the case of CBOW, we predict the center word based on context words and in the case of Skip-gram, it’s opposite. Also, it’s called the bag-of-words model as the order of words in the history does not influence the projection. In this post, we will talk about Skip-gram model.
In mathematical terms, its goal is to maximize the average log probability. Let’s say if the number of training words is T then this is the representation of average log probability:
Hidden Layer
In the above neural network architecture, you can see we have three layers and in that, we already know about the input and output layer. Let’s discuss the hidden layer in above architecture.
Hidden layer in this neural network works as a look-up table. So, let’s say if we have a one-hot vector with 1000 rows as an input and the hidden layer contains 30 features which mean a matrix of 1000 rows and 30 columns. When we multiply them then the output will be the matrix row corresponding to the 1.
Also, the features in the hidden layer can be treated as hyper-parameters which you can tune it in your application. There is no restriction, so you can try different values.
The output from the hidden layer is what we call word vectors.
We update them based on the output layer’s result.
Open source projects
If you want to use some prebuilt tools to create word representation then Facebook’s fastText is one of them.
And this is Google’s implementation of Word2Vec where they used Google news data to train the model.