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This sentiment is shared by most of the watch groups

But there’s good news, too. While retail in the U.S. may have seen better times, there are still a lot of watch brands that rely on independent partners with physical locations

Machines may not be connected to the network until they have had the latest OS and application updates applied, anti-viral software installed and activated, firewall enabled, AND a strong passphrase enabled on all accounts.

Departments must establish, maintain, and effectively implement plans for emergency response, backup operations, and post-disaster recovery for organizational information systems to ensure the availability of critical information resources and continuity of operations in emergency situations.

Encrypted backups should be taken regularly, and all on/off site storage should be physically secure.

Clocks must be synchronized to two (2) internally hosted time servers

RedHat Linux

Encrypt all non-console administrative access. Use technologies such as SSH, VPN, or SSL/TLS (transport layer security) for web-based management and other non-console administrative access.

Logs must be available online (electronically) for three months, available on tape (or other removable media) for one year.

Establish a process to identify newly discovered security vulnerabilities (for example, subscribe to alert services freely available on the Internet). Update standards to address new vulnerability issues.

Remove inactive user accounts at least every 90 days.

However… almost every content piece, video, audio, text, graphical, interactive, or multimedia on every platform that went truly “viral,” nailed this final element: The Sinker.

Here’s the real secret: there is no one Sinker. The Sinker is different for different content consumers. The one memorable line, incredible takeaway, photo you’ll never forget, the way the piece made you feel… For someone else, that wasn’t The Sinker, it was ______________

Your job as creator isn’t to deliver only one of these potential hits, but to strike those chords again and again throughout your content, then remind the reader/viewer/listener at the end.

Even better than attempting to retrofit a struggling piece is applying that energy to a more-worthy, more-success-likely content candidate.

Tools like Buzzsumo and Text Optimizer can give you a good insight into questions people tend to ask around your topic:

Note that Search Console labels featured snippet positions as #1 (SEO used to call them position 0). So when you see #1 in Google Search Console, there’s nothing to do here. Focus on #2 and lower.

MyBlogU (disclaimer: I am the founder) is a great way to do that. Just post a new project in the " Brainstorm" section and ask members to contribute their thoughts.

1. Aim at answering each question concisely My own observation of answer boxes has led me to think that Google prefers to feature an answer which was given within one paragraph. An older study by AJ Ghergich cites that the average length of a paragraph snippet is 45 words (the maximum is 97 words), so let it be your guideline as to how long each answer should be in order to get featured. This doesn't mean your articles need to be one paragraph long. On the contrary, these days Google seems to give preference to long-form content (also known as " cornerstone content," which is obviously a better way to describe it because it's not just about length) that's broken into logical subsections and features attention-grabbing images.  Even if you don’t believe that cornerstone content receives any special treatment in SERPs, focusing on long articles will help you to cover more related questions within one piece (more on that below). All you need to do is to adjust your blogging style just a bit: Ask the question in your article (that may be a subheading)Immediately follow the question with a one-paragraph answerElaborate further in the article

2. Be factual and organize well Google loves numbers, steps and lists. We've seen this again and again: More often than not, answer boxes will list the actual ingredients, number of steps, time to cook, year and city of birth, etc. Use Google’s guide on writing meta descriptions to get a good idea what kind of summaries and answers they are looking to generate snippets (including featured snippets). Google loves well-structured, factual, and number-driven content. There's no specific markup to structure your content. Google seems to pick up <table>, <ol>, and <ul> well and doesn't need any other pointers. Using H2 and H3 subheadings will make your content easier to understand for both Google and your readers. 3. Make sure one article answers many related questions Google is very good at determining synonymic and closely related questions, so should be you. There's no point in creating a separate page answering each specific question. Creating one solid article addressing many related questions is a much smarter strategy if you aim at getting featured in answer boxes. This leads us to the next tactic: 4. Organize your questions properly To combine many closely related questions in one article, you need to organize your queries properly. This will also help you structure your content well. I have a multi-level keyword organization strategy that can be applied here as well: A generic keyword makes a section or a category of the blogA more specific search query becomes the title of the articleEven more specific queries determine the subheadings of the article and thus define its structureThere will be multiple queries that are so closely related that they will all go under a single subheading For example: Serpstat helps me a lot when it comes to both discovering an article idea and then breaking it into subtopics. Check out its " Questions" section. It will provide hundreds of questions containing your core term and then generate a tag cloud of other popular terms that come up in those questions:

5. Make sure to use eye-grabbing images

How about structured markup? Many people would suggest using Schema.org (simply because it's been a "thing" to recommend adding schema for anything and everything) but the aforementioned Ahrefs study shows that there's no correlation between featured results and structured markup.

This should make it easier for you to understand errors in Search Console reports and thus which items to prioritize over others

Further, generative AI is shown to be more useful as a co-pilot for senior employees that can sift through AI “hallucinations” — inaccurate information presented as fact — and take the output as an aid. Inexperienced employees, however, may not be discerning enough and need a path to develop this knowledge. The sentiment was echoed by Ted English, former CEO of TJX Companies and current executive chairman of Bob’s Discount Furniture, who told us leadership requires “a lot of instinct, experience, and knowledge. Some of it you can’t get from a machine. Technology reinforces and allows you to make a more confident decision.”

The first layer of the framework is intentionality. In this context, we mean that a company’s business model should be purposefully designed around AI capability, rather just applying AI to existing processes. Spencer Fung, president and CEO of Li & Fung, a global supply-chain and logistics company, gave us an analogy: “Companies acquiring AI without a new business model is like a company digitizing a horse and carriage — while the competition has created a digital automobile.”

Next comes integration across all functions of the enterprise, with horizontal communication and AI as the enabling layer — in other words, getting rid of silos.

The real challenge, however, is implementation. Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion, has written that winning performance does not come from combining the best technology with the best people — but from the best process of combining. To achieve this, talent must be familiar with AI capabilities and know how best to utilize them.

However, AI is an evolving technology, and that necessitates a business add slack to the system to allow opportunity for learning.

Competitive advantage cannot be achieved without humans in the loop. Rushing to replace talent with AI is a huge mistake. Why? First, AI is copyable. What is not copyable is a unique business model, processes, and thoughtful integration of humans.

Second, AI is based on historical data that may not hold true in a volatile global business environment.

Third, AI is subject to hallucination and “drift,” where output is either fabricated by the AI or simply inaccurate.

By reading this, you’ll learn:  What an entity is and why it’s important. The history of semantic search. How to identify and use entities in the SERP. How to use entities to rank web content.

Examples of entities

Perhaps the best example of entities in the SERP is intent clusters. The more a topic is understood, the more these search features emerge

What is an entity? An entity is a uniquely identifiable object or thing characterized by its name(s), type(s), attributes, and relationships to other entities. An entity is only considered to exist when it exists in an entity catalog.  Entity catalogs assign a unique ID to each entity. My agency has programmatic solutions that use the unique ID associated with each entity (services, products, and brands are all included). If a word or phrase is not inside an existing catalog, it does not mean that the word or phrase is not an entity, but you can typically know whether something is an entity by its existence in the catalog.

concepts and ideas are entities

More could be said about schema, but suffice it to say schema is an incredible tool for SEOs looking to make page content clear to search engines.

That brings us to the current search system. Google went from 570 million entities and 18 billion facts to 800 billion facts and 8 billion entities in less than 10 years. As this number grows, entity search improves.

How to optimize for entities What follows are key considerations when optimizing entities for search: The inclusion of semantically related words on a page. Word and phrase frequency on a page. The organization of concepts on a page. Including unstructured data, semi-structured data, and structured data on a page. Subject-Predicate-Object Pairs (SPO). Web documents on a site that function as pages of a book. Organization of web documents on a website. Include concepts on a web document that are known features of entities.

We know this, so how can we optimize for it?  Your documents should contain as many search intent variations as possible. Your website should contain every search intent variation for your cluster. Clustering relies on three types of similarity:  Lexical similarity.  Semantic similarity. Click similarity.

Schema is one of my favorite ways of disambiguating content. You are linking entities in your blog to knowledge repositories. Balog says:  “[L]inking entities in unstructured text to a structured knowledge repository can greatly empower users in their information consumption activities.” 

(Remember, Google wants to understand the hierarchy of the content, which is why H1–H6 is important.)

Balog writes:  “We wish to help editors stay on top of changes by automatically identifying content (news articles, blog posts, etc.) that may imply modifications to the KB entries of a certain set of entities of interest (i.e., entities that a given editor is responsible for).” Anyone that improves knowledge bases, entity recognition, and crawlability of information will get Google’s love.  Changes made in the knowledge repository can be traced back to the document as the original source.  If you provide content that covers the topic and you add a level of depth that is rare or new, Google can identify if your document added that unique information. Eventually, this new information sustained over a period of time could lead to your website becoming an authority. This isn’t an authoritativeness based on domain rating but topical coverage, which I believe is far more valuable. With the entity approach to SEO, you aren’t limited to targeting keywords with search volume. All you need to do is to validate the head term (“fly fishing rods,” for example), and then you can focus on targeting search intent variations based on good ole fashion human thinking.

We begin with Wikipedia. For the example of fly fishing, we can see that, at a minimum, the following concepts should be covered on a fishing website: Fish species, history, origins, development, technological improvements, expansion, methods of fly fishing, casting, spey casting, fly fishing for trout, techniques for fly fishing, fishing in cold water, dry fly trout fishing, nymphing for trout, still water trout fishing, playing trout, releasing trout, saltwater fly fishing, tackle, artificial flies, and knots. The topics above came from the fly fishing Wikipedia page. While this page provides a great overview of topics, I like to add additional topic ideas that come from semantically related topics.  For the topic “fish,” we can add several additional topics, including etymology, evolution, anatomy and physiology, fish communication, fish diseases, conservation, and importance to humans.  Has anyone linked the anatomy of trout to the effectiveness of certain fishing techniques? Has a single fishing website covered all fish varieties while linking the types of fishing techniques, rods, and bait to each fish?  By now, you should be able to see how the topic expansion can grow. Keep this in mind when planning a content campaign. Don’t just rehash. Add value. Be unique. Use the algorithms mentioned in this article as your guide. Conclusion This article is part of a series of articles focused on entities. In the next article, I’ll dive deeper into the optimization efforts around entities and some entity-focused tools on the market.

A mini competitive audit of Bard vs Google’s favorite tacos

As for seeking Bardic inclusion, my first impression is that you’ll still be doing the same tasks: making your GBP as fully-filled out as possible, earning good reviews via good customer service, growing and optimizing your website on the basis of consumer research. You’ll notice that Bard’s recommendations for getting mentioned in its lists of favorites didn’t contain a single surprise or novel notion for how to create visibility for local businesses. In other words, I see nothing game-changing here, but I do see a ton of room for your own research if your business isn’t included and wants to be