What Google Social Search Means For Companies
Google has just launched Google Social Search. Google Social Search is a new feature that will pull in relevant information from people within your online "social circle". Google is going to display this information within the organic search results under a new section called "Results from people in your social circle." For this to work the user needs to be logged into their Google account. Google will then use the Gmail address book, articles from your Google Reader subscriptions, data from...
What Balloon Boy Can Teach Us About Social Media
Still not convinced social media is a good way to spread the word? Let's take a look at this past Thursday 10/15/09 and the five hours that 'balloon boy' captivated the world. Balloon boy is a 6 year old from Colorado that was, at the time, believed to be trapped in a homemade hot air balloon floating out of control. Local authorities and the National Guard reacted quickly to the situation read balloon boy story here, but the world saw an even faster response from the Internet through social...
How To Make a CSS Sprite Rollover List Part 2
I know there have been many people anxiously waiting for Part 2 of How To Make a CSS Sprite Rollover List. Didn't read part 1 yet? Well before you learn how to make a CSS Sprite, why don't you head over to part 1 and learn Why Use CSS Sprites. View the working DEMO Now let's get to work. Follow these easy three instructions on producing a cross browser compatible list with a CSS sprite and rollover functionality! 1 Create your image First thing is first. Go ahead and create your CSS sprite...
Using Landing Pages to Maximize PPC Results
Linking your Google Adwords Pay Per Click ads to an effective landing page can help increase your ad rankings, increase traffic to your site and increase conversions on your site, but choosing the wrong landing page can cost you both rankings and money. Here are a few tips that will help keep your Adwords ROI high: Choose a Relevant Page Pay Per Click advertisements are ranked by a combination of their Google Adwords quality score and their bid price. Having a higher quality score will allow...
Google Sidewiki - Steps To Claim Your Site
Google recently launched a new product called SideWiki. Google's Sidewiki is a browser sidebar that allows users to add comments and information about a particular site. There has been some controversy about this new service already. Some of the issues brought up: The Sidewiki content is hosted on Google Taking comments /content from site owners and centralizing it Lack of comment filtering, open up for spam Some equate it to bathroom wall graffiti With that we want to talk about getting a...
New Google Keyword Tool
If you haven't seen or heard about it, Google has a BETA version of the new Keyword Tool out. It still contains its fundamental functionality, but added some new features, made some tweaks, and changed the layout a bit. Here is a brief list of the new features and changes I noticed right away. If you know of any other neat features with the new Keyword Tool, we'd love to hear about them. My personal favorite, the Google Keyword Tool now lets you download a selected keyword list. Before you...
Is Your Site Search Costing You Sales?
Recently we were attempting to establish why there were a proportionally large number of visitors leaving a site from the site search results page. In other words, a customer would search for a product and then leave without clicking on any of the products. We decided to install a sniffer to watch what keywords users were using when they performed a search. We not only wanted to find failed searches we also wanted some more in-depth intelligence on the customers and their intentions when they...
Why Use CSS Sprites Part 1
You’ve heard the term bouncing around the Internet, but still not sure what, why, or how to use CSS Sprites. I’m here to enlighten you on this neat little feature that is sure to help speed up your site. This is part 1 of a 2 part series blog. Part 2 will entail How To Use CSS Sprites. Why would I want to use a CSS sprite? CSS sprites reduce the total number of http requests, can reduce the total size of the images, and increase your pages load time. For example, if you build an...
Understanding Google Adwords Quality Score
We get questions all the time on how to improve Pay Per Click PPC campaigns. One issue that comes up a lot is related to how Google ranks Adwords ads. What we find is that small businesses as well as large businesses do not understand that Google Adwords has it's own algorithm that is entirely separate from their organic search algorithm. It used to be that which ever advertiser bid the most on a keyword would have their ad show up the highest. This is no longer the case. Google has now gone...
What ICANN's New gTLDs Mean for Search Engine Rankings
For the past several months there has been a lot of talk and speculation as to whether or not ICANN will be opening up their gTLD-global top-level domain extension -registration in late 2010. ICANN stands for 'Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' and is essentially the Internet's governing body, focusing specifically on domain registration. If ICANN's new gTLD program launches as planned, in late 2010 corporations, interest groups, cities and anyone else who has the financial...