After finally conceding to buy an iPhone (then instantly converting to an iPhone-a-phile) it has re-awoken my annoyance at unnecessarily bandwidth hungry websites and phat emails.
Outside of a 3G service area and cast into the bandwidth wildness, I’ve becoming painfully aware of the delays and download budget impact for simple emails with bloated banners, oversized signature images etc.
I’ve also had to discard several favourite sites either because of image bloat; poor mobile device adaption. The killer is that the iPhone does not support Flash so sites using it for sales promotion and particularly for navigation have lost me and presumably other iPhone visitors.
Just to give this some context a quick scan of high profile sites under my care reveals iPhone/iPods visitors range between 1.8 to 4.6% of all visitors over the Dec/Jan period!
iPhone website visitors are out there aplenty and presumably they like to buy stuff.
Make sure you are not missing out on them through poor mobile support in your phone & emails.
In the Succinct Update Dec 09 I wrote about the real costs of blogging.
This article from by Janine Popick, Vertical Response founder titled Start Blogging! 10 Reasons Why You Think Time Wasted Might Be Time Well Spent provides some balance.
I stumbled over an extraordinary example of poor SEO ethics recently that I’m ashamed to admit was undertaken by a well known Aussie SEO house.
No this is not about using some black hat SEO technique, this is blatant abuse of a client’s site by the SEO service provider for their own purposes. Read the rest of this entry »
Google has upgraded Analytics to V4 with a host of new features to enable even closer scrutiny of your website’s performance.
This industrial strength yet surprisingly free website metrics system can help you understand more about how your site is performing and give clues on how to improve it to ultimately make it a viable contributor to your business sales activities.
The upgrade includes:
• More sophisticated goal tracking
• Better table filtering
• More flexible reporting
• A threshold based alerting system
If you like many are struggling with keeping up with the barrage of communications from emails, blogs, Skype & MSN chats and many more new media sources then you will be grateful for Google’s Wave.
Google developers have been toiling away breathing life into this unifying platform and it is really looking like a winner on a number of levels.
Wave is a ’single inbox’ for emails, instant messages and all other forms of online communications, but it is so much more than that.
Integration
Wave combines individual internet communications from various channels while maintaining message context similar to discussion forums threads.
This approach enables participants to have multiple message discussions (online conversations ?) independent of the platform each individual is utilising.
Chat or IM conversations are digested into Wave and displayed in near real time, while slower communications such as emails are structured as and when they arrive into your Wave inbox.
I’m just reflecting momentarily about email being described as a slow communication…
Is email being too slow for some forms of communications..?
Quite apart from the highly functional merger of disparate internet communications there are two other key aspects where I see Wave further consolidating Google’s total online world domination.
Open source
Google are producing Wave as an open source product, which fundamentally means Wave is free.
Sure there may be some costs, but if you compare these with the licences costs say for example for an equivalently functional Microsoft server solution (even though I don’t think there is one yet) there will be no financial competition.
Extensibility
The other and probably strongest reason Wave will dominate stems from the strategy to include the ability for software developers to easily integrate Wave into their own solutions.
Many applications need an online communications/synchronisation capability and integration with Wave will fast-track the realisation of many concepts into viable solutions.
Consider the plethora of iPhone applications that have exploded into existence; these are only available to you & me because of the iPhone platform’s extensibility. These applications would have continued to exist only as agonizingly brilliant concepts but not commercially viable because of the costs and impossible logistics to establish the supporting infrastructure required.
A lateral albeit non-business application is the Sudoku game in the You Tube video below that illustrates real-time multiple participant interactivity…
Geeks everywhere already know about Wave. Google is generating peer group hype by using the same limited access marketing they did originally with GMail ie can only particulate in the beta Wave program if you’re invited…
When business gets their head around the opportunities Wave represents it will explode onto our desktops.
Google are trialling Local Listing Ads; another online advertising medium designed specifically for small local businesses.
Currently in beta testing in San Diego and San Francisco, these ads are positioned as “low budget, low maintenance, a flat monthly fee ad solution…” Read the rest of this entry »
Looking to increase sales? Even if your site is already generating leads or sales, there is scope to improve it further through campaigning i.e. short promotional activities designed to engage client interest.
In supermarkets we see these as ‘specials’; and we get bombarded with them in TV advertising, so consider using a campaigning strategy to promote your business via your website. Read the rest of this entry »
The power of urban myth is not something to be toyed with.
In a recent meeting a debate arose after I said that Google doesn’t use the keyword metatag. I was challenged on this point by someone confidently asserting that Google is indeed using the keyword metatag once again. He inferred that any suggestion that they weren’t was simply uninformed.
We agreed to disagree. The customer was confused. My creditability was compromised.
I blogged about the keyword metatag back in 2008. More recently even Google’s Matt Cutts once again debunked this urban myth, but the mighty keyword metatags’ magic powers will continue to persist…
My point is that there is so much SEO mis-information that the sheer mass generates its own pseudo-creditability much along the lines of …Oh yeah that must be true because I heard it the other day….
Metatag Basics
A metatag is a special place inside the web page HTML code that can store variables for example the Description meta tag which is used in SERPs
The keyword meta tag is one of a number of common HTML metatags, traditionally used to store a string of words that represent the content on that page.
Its use has persisted, particularly in Content Management Systems where editors are invited to add ‘search words’ etc that are then published into the keyword metatag by the CMS.
The keyword metatag was identified as being open to abuse around 2002, and no longer used by Google from that time and I suspect by many other search engines for the same reason.
My stock answer to nearly all website measurement queries is to recommend Google Analytics.
Its easy to install; gives great reports; can plot a sales funnel and so much more. Unbelievably its free!
What is even more unbelievable is the amazing array of Analytics tweaks and custom tracking ‘extensions’.
For example, Analytics doesn’t report a couple of key pieces of info ‘out of the box’ ie
• where do visitors go when they leave your site?
• what has been downloaded from my site?
To answer these questions you would normally add special Analytics scripts to every link etc Tedious!
Good Web Practices has a nifty script that dynamically captures site exits and PDF and other downloads in Analytics – well worth a look.
