Be Careful What You 'Like'

… as well as what links you share on Facebook. Your 'likes' and links may be used as endorsements for products, services and people without your knowledge. And believe it or not, you've agreed to this. Facebook calls this, “Sponsored Stories.” It works like this. A company (or individual – like a politician) pays Facebook to automatically promote their brand through Sponsored Stories. If you share a link that involves that company or its products/services, a Facebook algorithm (program) may post that as an endorsement for the company/product/service/person – even if that was not your intention. Likewise, clicking 'like' or commenting on someone else's post can be used as an endorsement as well. This might not sound so bad, until you find that your name, profile picture, location and other personal information can also be associated with your 'endorsement.' Also, the algorithm can not distinguish the difference between a joke, an endorsement, or a post that ridicules. I've shared links that were meant to ridicule a company, a service, a government decision or a politician. I certainly do not want that used as an endorsement from me! And, let's say a Facebook friend stays at a hotel and has a bad experience, then posts about it on Facebook. I click 'like' to agree with him – not to say I like the hotel. The algorithm only sees that as a like for the hotel and then uses my 'like' as an endorsement for the hotel – obviously not my intention. And this brings me back to, “you've agreed to all of this.” In Facebook's 4000-word 'terms of service,' down in the middle somewhere, there is a statement that says they can do this. By agreeing with the terms of service and creating your account, you've given them permission to use you, your likeness and your posts as advertisements and endorsements. Hmmmm – I think I stopped reading at 250 words.

One Day on the Internet

Companies are always giving statistics about the number of people that make purchases using the Internet and the number of people that research services and products before buying at brick and mortar stores. But, I thought I’d give you some truly amazing (and fun) numbers.

In one day on the Internet…
* 294 billion emails are sent. The USPS would take 2 years to handle all that mail.

* 4.7 billion minutes are spent on Facebook (what?!)

* 864,000 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube – that would take 98 years for one person to view, non-stop!

* 250 million photos are uploaded to Facebook, printed and stacked that would be taller than 80 Eiffel Towers (also stacked).

* 18.7 million hours of music are streamed on Pandora.

There’s even more at http://www.businessinsider.com/everything-that-happens-in-one-day-on-the-internet-2012-3

Royalty Free Images

When people need images to use for advertisements, blog posts, websites, etc., they usually search the web for something they like and download or copy it. What most people don't realize is that many of the images on the web are actually copyrighted. And these images can not be used without permission or until royalties are paid. I've even had clients who have received 'cease and desist' letters telling them they must remove images from their sites.

But, here's a site with royalty free images you can use in print and digital media.

Free Digital Photos - http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

Before You Buy a Kindle Fire

Amazon's announcement today of the color Kindle Fire was met with excitement by many. And when Jeff Bezos, president of Amazon.com, announced the price would be only $199, the buzz shot through the web in hours. But, is the Kindle Fire for you?

Before you buy a Fire, it's a good idea to realize the new color Kindle is a media tablet, not a productivity table. The Fire is designed to read books and magazines, watch movies and TV Programs, listen to music and audio books, play games, and search the Web*. The Fire also has an e-mail client that allows you to use the most common e-mail service.

But, the Kindle Fire is very limited in many ways. The internal storage on the device is only 8 Gbs. According to Amazon.com that is enough space for 80 apps plus 10 movies OR 800 songs OR 6000 books. But, you might find that storage space shrinks quickly when you mix movies, books/magazines, music and the extra apps you want. Amazon.com does offer free storage space on the Amazon Cloud for storing your Amazon media. Of course you must have a Wi-Fi connection for this, the Fire has no 3G connectivity. (It is unclear at this time whether Amazon will allow users to store their non-Amazon files on the Amazon Cloud).

Productivity on the Fire is limited. While you can read documents (Word, PDF and text) on the color Kindle, you can not create or edit these files. (To get the documents on the Kindle Fire, you must e-mail them to your Kindle account on the device). The Fire will not read spreadsheet or presentation files - like Excel and PowerPoint. And of course, when you download these documents, you are taking up the preciously limited 8 Gbs of storage space... forget some of those songs, movies and books you wanted to keep loaded.

Communications and creativity are also limited. The Kindle Fire does not include messaging, chat or video applications. And it is not a media creation device – it just does not have the applications or the hardware for this. And, although it is based on the Android operating system, it may not support many of the applications written for Android. This is because the device runs a branched, private version of Android created by Amazon.com.

And finally, the Kindle Fire has no expansion or transfer capabilities. There are no card slots, no USB ports, no connections for the computer. If you can't get it from the Amazon Cloud or e-mail it to yourself, you can't have it on your new Kindle.

So, is the Kindle Fire for you? Well, it is no iPad-killer. If you are looking for a productivity tablet, look at the iPad, the HP TouchPad or an Android 3.x tablet. But, the Fire is a great media tablet – it fills that niche very well. And I'm sure it will be successful for Amazon.com. (I'm still planning to buy one). If a media tablet is what you want, the Fire is a good choice.

*The browser on the Kindle Fire is not a true browser. The pages are rendered on Amazon's Cloud and sent to the device. This is supposed to make the browser very fast. But, there are security issues. It is not known how this will work for secure websites used for banking, to pay bills, etc.

Does Your Website Need a Makeover?

-Five signs that scream YES!

There is an old saying, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression!” And this saying is never more true that when it comes to your website. When your index page pops up, it better give a good impression or the visitor (and potential customer) will go somewhere else.

But how do you know when it's time to change the look and feel of your site? Here are five signs that it's time to make changes or even start over.

1) Dated Images
Do your images look old? Are there things in the background that indicate the image is not up to date? Have you changed images in the last year? Old images and poor images scream, “get me out of here!” Images and graphics are the first thing people notice when visiting a website. If your images/graphics are not grabbing attention, you are loosing business.

2) Non-Interesting Content
It's just a fact, most people don't like to read. And if your copy (the text on your pages) is not engaging, you'll loose the visitor's attention quickly. Copy should be short and to the point. The use of bullet points, lists and images should be used whenever possible.

To complicate the topic of content even more, it must be interesting to the human visitor as well as search friendly for 'bots. 'Bots are programs that scour the web for content. Search engines use them to find and categorize websites.

'Bots look for key words and phrases that are used when a human does a search. For example, Google keeps track of the word or phrase that is typed into their search field. This information is then 'connected' with the sites that are visited from the search results list. Using this information, Google's complicated algorithms figure out what people are really looking for when they enter a word or phrase. And this information is constantly changing.

What does this all mean to you? It means that if your content is outdated, 'bots may not be listing your site when people are searching for your product or service.

So, is your content interesting to the humans and the 'bots that visit your site?

3) Poor Navigation
Is it easy to find the information needed on your site? You might have a nice navigation bar on your site, but has it been updated lately? Using web/visitor statistics, you should be able to figure out which pages are getting visited the most. Are these pages the most prominent in your navigation system?

Also consider the 'modern' effect... does your navigation system use drop-downs or pop-ups? Web users expect the latest and coolest technology on the web. If your menus are 'old fashion' the visitor is liable to think you service or product is too.

4) Website Statistics
Is your website getting more visitors than it did six months or a year ago? Are visitors staying at your site, looking around, becoming shoppers and not just browsers? Is your site performing better on search engine rankings?

If the answer to any of these questions is not positive, it's time to make changes. (If your current web host does not provide some type of web statistics reporting system, it's time to change hosts!)

Review how visitors are using your site. Discover how most visitors are finding the site and what they're doing while at your site. Analyze the information provided by the web statistics report. If the numbers are not going up, if trends are not moving in a positive direction, it's time to make changes.

5) How Does Your Site Compare?
Look at your site, then look at other sites that do/sell the same thing you do – if you have some direct competitors, pay close attention to their sites. Does yours look as nice as theirs, better than theirs?

For this one, you might need a little help from your friends and family. We often like what we have and are even a little biased when it comes to comparing our stuff to our competitors. It is very important to get several opinions here! If those you ask say that your competitors have better sites than yours, your site is screaming for a makeover!

Search Engine Optimization

The acronym “SEO” refers to “search engine optimization” and is the process of increasing the rank or improving the visibility of a Website or Web page in search results such as those generated by Google, Yahoo and Bing. SEO refers to the 'free' search results generated by these services. There are also paid services (broadly refereed to as SEM – search engine marketing) that can be employed to place Websites above the free search results. (One of these services is the AdWords service offered by Google. But, paid services will be reserved for a different discussion).

SEO may be used as a stand-alone Internet marketing strategy or as a part of a larger marketing plan. Whichever strategy you decide to use, the SEO principles and (good) practices are the same.

Before we begin our discussion of good SEO practices, I should say a quick word about companies that guarantee top 10 ranking or top rankings for a given amount of time. These services are a SCAM! Search engines programmers go to a lot of trouble to make sure that their systems can not be fooled, tricked, manipulated, etc. to give one site a top ranking all the time. And (thinking logically) if there were a trick to guaranteeing a high ranking, everyone would use it. The result would be that no site could be guaranteed to be in the top 10!

So, can anything be done to increase search engine ranking? YES! But, it involves knowing something about how search engines work, how to code in HTML, and the 'art' of writing copy for your Web pages. Let's look at a few good practices that will improve the ranking of your Website or Web page. (By the way, I continue to say, “good practices,” because there are methods known as “black hat” practices that will work to increase your Website's rankings. But, if the search engines discover you are using these methods, your site will be black listed and will be completely removed from search results).

Step 1 – define your target audience.
Wow, this sounds too much like traditional marketing. But, like traditional marketing, there are so many competitors on the Web, you will never stand out to everyone in every search. Defining an audience will greatly help when working through the following steps.

Your target audience may be everyone in a geographical area or everyone planning to visit a geographical area (Disney World for example). Some things to think about when defining your target audience are: age, social standing, economic class, religious affiliation and race.

The target audience might be anyone looking for a service / product you provide. But wait, this one is very broad again. And the idea of finding a target audience is to remove the 'broad' aspect of marketing. At this point it is good to remember that each page of your Website can be set to target a different group. When going through these steps, it's a good idea to think of them with respect to each page of your site!

Step 2 – create a list of key words and phrases.
If you were looking for your product / service on the Web, what might you type into the search bar of Google? Ask a few of your employees or friends to give you a few words or phrases they might use. You might even look at the copy on competitor's sites for a little inspiration (especially if their sites are ranking high on searches).

Once you have a list, give that to your Web developer or SEO expert. They should have tools that allow them to research the phrases most often used by people searching for the services or products you are selling. Your expert should then work with you to incorporate your list with those they've found through their research.

Step 3 – meta tags, copy and other Web stuff
Based on the list you and your expert come up with in step 2, your Web developer can now create meta tags (HTML code) that will allow search engines to 'figure out' what your site is about. The words and phrases from the list should also be incorporated into the copy of your site. Search engines actually test the 'reality' of your meta tag words and phrases by comparing them to your copy. If the page copy does not contain any of the keywords or phrases used in the meta tags, it is tagged as suspicious and possibly fraudulent.

A good Web programmer will also know that other tags should have references to these keywords and phrases as well – title tags, link tags, image tags, etc. should have attributes or wording that relate to the page's target audience, keywords and phrases.

Using the methods discussed in these steps will greatly improve the chances that your page will score high in search engine rankings. But, here are a few things to remember...

+ It may take two or three months to begin ranking high – search engines index pages on a regular basis. They like to see the page show up in the same category several times in a row. This is to decrease the change of including fraudulent pages. So, give it time to work.

+ Most search engines use click frequency to help rank sites/pages. This is because it is assumed that if your page is often clicked when certain phrases are used, it must be relevant to the search.

+ The phrases visitors to search engines use to find services and products can change over time. It is a good idea to review the keywords and phrases you are using periodically – at lease once every year.

+ Narrowing your target audience may be the best way to increase your ranking in search engine results. Remember there are literally MILLIONS of sites out there and every site is trying to get everyone's attention!

+ Finally, for best results take an active part in the process of SEO. Insist that your Web developer designs and codes your site to be search engine friendly. If he/she can't explain the practices and principles listed here, they probably don't really know much about designing for SEO. They may be able to develop an awesome looking site. But if they don't know about search engine friendly practices, your site ranking (and maybe sales) will suffer.

What's on Your Home Page?

What do you have on your website's home page? (The home page is also known as the index page... it's normally the first page people see when they come to your site).

For the past 20 years, home pages have been used mainly as an advertising billboard. These billboards type home pages often have Flash animations (that are slower to load, not search engine friendly, and often ignored), a little info about the company (often ignored too) and some type of menu (maybe the only useful part of the home page). In the past, this was enough. But in these days of social networking and greater community awareness, your home page should be a whole lot more.

So what should a modern home page be? It should be a portal of information – and not necessarily information about your product/service! Think about including lifestyle information, 'green' information and educational information. Your home page should be a launching point to blogs, latest news features, forums and links to other sites related to your product/service.

Let's look at a few of these features:
'Blogs – a blog is a good place to talk about things affecting your industry. For example, if you sell electronics, use your blog to explain acronyms to your visitors. Explain things like HDMI, 1040dpi, etc. Discuss the hot topics in your industry. The idea here is to not focus on your business directly. Use the visitor's interest in your industry to generate interest in your site! (There is no harm in mentioning a product or service you offer that related to the 'blog topic. But remember, the 'blog is an informational tool, not an advertising billboard).

Latest News – this is the place to focus on your business and the products/services you offer... Getting a new product? Hype it up here. Hit a certain sales quota? Taught it here. Expanding to a new location? Highlight that here. If you are having a sale, this would be a good place to tell your visitor. Like 'blogs, your news articles should be rotated often.

Links to other sites – yes, this can actually help your business. (And a good web developer will know to set these links up to open in a new tab, so the visitor never actually leaves your site). For example, a site that is pet related might have links to sites that offer products to help keep track of pets or to directories that list lost pets. The idea here is to be useful to your visitors and earn their loyalty by showing you are concerned with more than taking their money.

Lifestyle and community information – does your business sponsor local events or do you participate in local events? Those should be posted – 5K's, non-profit benefit auction, fallen officer/firefighter benefits, recycling and community clean-up efforts, or any other community action your business is involved in should be shown on your home page.

The final thing to mention is any social networking site you may have a business presence with – Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn... A link to your page on these social networking sites should be included on your home page, along with a symbol representing the network.

There is another benefit to including these things on your home page - they are all good for boosting your site's rank with search engines! 'Blogs and news articles add related search terms to your home page. Links to related sites and social networks, are also good methods to boost search engine rankings.

It's time to move your home page into the present... make it work for you with today's internet user!

As always, comments and questions are welcome!