Some businesses have taken a swift response to adjust to these evolving marketplace demands. They have started redesigning their organization websites in mobile-friendly formats.  However, most of the businesses across the globe are lagging behind in this factor.

It is an almost inconceivable idea that to this day, companies do not to have mobile-optimized websites. Possibly, the decision-makers in these organizations are not aware of the negative impact this has on their bottom-line.

For more details on how unresponsiveness can do harm to your business see: 10 Small Business Website Errors That Drive Customers Away.

What is a responsive website?

Responsiveness goes beyond a website being accessible via handheld devices. It entails designing the site to display properly on smaller screens. It should also facilitate easy, convenient, and intuitive navigation.  This ensures that the visitors have a positive experience while using your website.

Surprising Statistics

It is no longer safe for businesses to assume that their potential clients will visit their website through the traditional laptop or desktop computer browser. In Australia alone, 75% of the population owns a mobile device. Moreover, 84% of this population is highly dependent on their phones for communication and entertainment.

Here is a glimpse of the statistics on mobile phone use from across the globe:

•  4 billion people in the world own mobile phones
• There are 1.08 billion smartphones spread across the globe
• Up to 50% of local searches are made using mobile devices
• 86% of mobile Internet users surf the internet while watching TV
• 50% of 175 million Twitter users use the Twitter Mobile App
• A third of 700 million Facebook users use Facebook Mobile
• In 2015, there were more Google searches via hand-held devices than that of desktop computers in 10 countries, with the US and Japan being among them.

What You Need To Know About Google Mobile Index

Over the recent past, Google launched a dedicated mobile index. It targets to go beyond penalizing sites that are not responsive.

The Google search algorithms have been rewarding sites that are mobile friendly. Such sites get a higher search engine ranking. Moreover, it has been penalizing the ones are not responsive by ranking lower in the mobile search.

While the traditional Google search index has been factoring in both the desktop and mobile-optimized websites, the new algorithm index is aimed at expanding responsiveness as a ranking signal. This will have a significant impact on SEO rankings.

The Google mobile index will become the primary index

It will have a global impact on all mobile searches in all languages. Besides looking at design elements, the mobile index will also consider the mobile page performance. As such, the Google Mobile Index will arguably be more important than its desktop counterpart and eventually, become the primary index.

The desktop index will be maintained, but…

Though Google is yet to reveal more details about these changes, the desktop index will continue to be maintained but will have less frequent refreshes.

The mobile first index will have different effects on the website and mobile app owners. The websites that are not responsive and do not have a mobile version will suffer the most. However, this does not mean that these sites will not be indexed at all. It just means that the search engine will not prioritize them in their rankings and thus will have poor SEO ranking.

For the websites with a separate mobile version, the mobile-friendly section will be indexed. The rest of the content will be crawled by the desktop version. Finally, if the site is responsive, the mobile index will not have a negative impact on the current rankings.  It is likely to improve the site’s rankings further.

Eric Gichuru

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The post Why Responsive Web Design is Important: Google Mobile Index appeared first on theLocco Magazine.

Is it safe to use the unsecured network?

The answer to this question is that, it is not completely safe to use these unsecured networks, however by taking the necessary precautions one can connect securely to an unknown network.

Though it is not possible to achieve absolute security, the goal of network security is to make is extremely difficult for one to get exposed to security threats. Currently, computers and other devices, such as PDAs and smart phones can access connect to unsecured Wi-Fi wireless networks in most of the public places such as airports, coffee shops, hotel lounge making it easier for hackers to access private information and data of unsuspecting internet users.

An un-secured network is a network that has no security protocols or has outdated security protocols. The risks one is exposed to when connecting to an unidentified unsecure network; be it wireless or cable include; malicious insertion, network imitations and threat from network scanners among others.

This simply means that by using these networks, users are leaking sensitive information to hackers with special tool to access it. Such information may include passwords of the sender, personal addresses of the sender and receiver, and other sensitive personal information such as bank accounts.

Exemplar

To further elaborate this situation, take an example when mailing a letter, one places the letter in the mailbox which the mailman later picks and delivers to the recipient.

A malicious attack in this case would involve an unauthorized individual who is not an employee of the post office, accessing or intercepting the letter before it could get picked up the mailman. As such, the attacker could do whatever he pleases with the contents of the letter; he could read the contents, change the content, and even destroy the letter. Similarly, this is what is likely to happen when one does not take precaution while using an unsecured network.

All hope is not lost

However, all hope is not lost, there are security measures one can take when using to an open and unsecure network. There are two instances: connecting to an unknown network using your own device and when using an unknown device.

Such tools that come in handy in these instances are Https & Https everywhere. Https encrypts sensitive data using SSL/TLS. Thus, when accessing websites enter https instead of http; this will encrypt and decrypts login information, user page requests and other web pages that are returned by the Web server thus protecting man-in-the-middle and eavesdropping attacks.

Https Everywhere is a slightly advanced Https technology that uses a whitelist of sites or rather major sites that we use to access other sites such as Google, Wikipedia and popular social networks by automatically activating inbuilt security of these sites.

Another effective method is the use of Virtual Private Network (VPN) which makes the unidentified networks function as a single logical unit thus making it possible to easily monitor, secure/encrypt this point. Moreover, users should always implement more secure practices when accessing such kind of networks.

Such practices include use of unique and strong passwords, use of two-step authentication where possible, keeping the firewall active, turning off file and printer sharing, visiting strictly secure sites, use secure web applications and finally limiting the time periods connected to the network.

When using an unknown device the above mentioned tools and security practices apply other than not using weak passwords and configuring firewalls.

A more secure solution is to use a flash disk or a USB external hard drive mounted with a bootable operating system such as Linux OS, which separates the web operations from operations of the device thus creating a secure environment for the user.

Eric Gichuru

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The post How to Connect Securely to an Unknown Network appeared first on theLocco Magazine.