After signing a deal with Twitter last December to incorporate tweets in their real time search results, reports are emerging that Google has finally agreed to a deal with Facebook to include status updates from Pages. Facebook Pages are used by groups and businesses to promote their products and services, and according to ineedhits.com, there are currently over 3 million active Pages with more than 5.3 billion fans. The move to include Page updates in Google's real time search results further cements Facebook as an important search marketing tool, so setting up a Page for your business could be a wise choice.
If you are interested in or need help setting up a Facebook Page for your business, get in touch to see how we can help.
The New Year has arrived, and so has the time to update the copyright date on your website and/or blog. You may not consider this a priority, but from a branding point of view, it is important to show your customers that your site is up to date, and also makes your site appear more professional.
If you have a footer file (e.g. footer.php), which is attached to every page, updating your copyright date should be easy, as you’ll only have to change the date in this file and re-upload it. To make things even simpler, you could insert an automatic code into the file in place of the date: <?php echo date(‘Y’); ?> which takes the date from your server and thus will update itself every year, so you’ll only have to do it once (this can also be done with WordPress sites).
If you don’t have a footer file or a WordPress site and the date is in the code on every page of your site, you could search and replace the date to make the job quicker.
If you need assistance updating your copyright date, please contact us for details of our website update service.
Back in the 80's a classic film came out called '2010: The Year We Make Contact'. We suspect most of you will not be making contact with an alien intelligence this year, but you will likely want to regularly communicate with your clients and business associates.
Email newsletters are a fast and cost-effective way for businesses to keep their clients up-to-date and engaged. A recent US study has shown that two thirds of respondents said they were more likely to click on a link to a company's Web site via an email versus typing in the URL. Email campaigns work for a number of reasons:
Build relationships, loyalty and trust
Provide clients and potential customers with valuable links to your Web site, thus increasing traffic flow
Fast and effective way of communicating with clients
They can also help boost your rankings if you optimise your newsletters and put a copy on your website
A well-written eNewsletter can be a subtle and highly effective way to build credibility with your clients. Some quick initial tips:
Aim to create a relationship with your customers and encourage them to use your newsletter as a resource.
Try to avoid including third party adverts or continually pushing hard for the sale so your clients aren't put off.
Discuss relevant topics in each newsletter so your customer feels they are being kept in the loop on important information and company news.
Ensure you write unique, quality content that will benefit the audience. Provide information that saves them time by distilling information into practical advice.
A key selling point for eNewsletters is that they can be very cost-effective to send: you can email a newsletter to thousands of users at a fraction of the cost of printed mailings. With Avatar's email tool Rocket Mailing, you can create and send targeted, personalised email messages and measure the impact your newsletters are having on all your customers. We also provide a newsletter design and production service, should you require assistance with your email campaigns. Get in touch with Avatar for more eNewsletter tips or to get started.
If you're not using eNewsletters already, then why not evaluate if 2010 is the year you make contact with your clients.
The Avatar team will be heading off for a Christmas break at 3pm on Wednesday the 24th of December 2009. We'll be back on deck, refreshed, recharged and ready to tackle the New Year on Monday 11th January 2010.
If you have an urgent Avatar request during this time, please call our office message service for options. Our Contact details can be found here.
We would like to take this opprotunity to wish everyone a very Happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year!
Over the last few weeks, there has been lots of talk about Google’s suggestion that page load speed may become a ranking factor in 2010.
While nothing has been confirmed yet, recent comments from Google Software Engineer, Matt Cutts make it seem increasingly likely, so we thought we'd provide you with all the information you need in order to prepare for this new ranking factor.
Why is Google Interested in Page Load Speed?
Google wants searching to be fast and efficient and for users to have a good experience. Google believes it would be fairer for faster sites to be higher up in the search results, so Web pages with faster loading times would have higher rankings than slower ones.
According to Matt Cutts, page load time is already a factor in AdWords advertising searches. He also suggests there is a strong push from within Google to make speed a quality factor in their search ranking guidelines.
How Will Speed Affect Rankings?
There are over 200 other ranking factors that are taken into consideration by Google, so just how important is a quick load time going to be?
With so many ranking factors to be considered, Google will be concentrating on the extremes, for example a page that take 60 seconds to load, or a page that takes a split second. Web pages with an average load time may therefore not initially be affected, however, as faster sites will be given a boost, your rankings may be affected eventually if much faster sites are pushed higher than yours.
How Are Load Times Measured?
According to Google, load time data will come from information sent by users of your site who have installed the Google toolbar and opted for enhanced features. This means it is representative of a global average of real users, which they feel is better than using a spider to gather the data.
Google have already added a page speed report to their set of free Webmaster Tools, so you can obtain a summary of the following:
How long your Web page takes to load
A graphical history of your Web site's speed over the past few months
How your load time compares to other sites
What Causes Slow Load Times?
There are two main factors that influence your page load times:
Hosting: Your site's load time is impacted by the quality of your host's connectivity, so Web hosts with slow servers or insufficient server space to cope with demand, and offshore hosts, for example, may put you at a disadvantage.
Site Development: Poor site development including improper use of scripts, too many large images or media-heavy sites and invalid code can all slow down your page load times.
How Can You Maintain Your Google Rankings?
If you already have a Web site that loads reasonably quickly, don't assume it will remain in a high position and ignore it. Ongoing Web site optimisation and maintenance is a necessity in order to maintain your rankings over time.
Regardless of whether Google makes load time a ranking factor in future, page load time is still an important metric to consider. If your Web site runs at a snail's pace, chances are you're already losing out in reduced user loyalty. Web users don't want to waste their time waiting for slow pages to load, so they will go elsewhere if your site is not performing well.
Tips To Help Improve Page Load Time
If you use Firefox, the Firebug plugin with the Google Page Speed add-on is an excellent tool for testing page load times.
If you use a different Web browser, free online services like the Web Page Analyser from WebSiteOptimization.com can also display similar data.
Sign up with a good host. Services like Network-Tools.com can be helpful in determining the quality of your host's network.
Employ a competent Web developer and ensure your code and scripts are well written.
Other techniques such as optimising the configuration of your web server or implementing caching, can achieve significant or incremental performance boosts that will improve your page load performance.
Aside from giving your site a little ranking boost, improving your page load times can enhance customer satisfaction, increase traffic and even increase your online revenue.
Google and Bing have announced that they will start indexing messages sent via microblogging service Twitter, instantly. While some posts from Twitter are already showing up in the search engines, deals struck with Twitter will allow all public feeds to be shown almost as soon as they have been written.
We are quietly impressed with this new development here at Avatar, imagine searching for information on the weather conditions at your favourite ski resort and finding fresh, up-to-the minute details from people who are there enjoying the day.
If you’re a Twitter user, here are a few tips to getting found in real-time searchers:
Make Use of Keywords - Use relevant keywords in your tweets. If the right keywords are used, then more than likely those keywords will appear in the resulting tweets from your followers.
Talk About Current Events - By simply mentioning timely events this will help to add you into any results for searches pertaining to that topic.
The More Followers the Better - The more people you have following you on a social network or blog the more people you will have sharing your information.
Get People Talking - Promote conversation on your blog or social network, try to start conversations that people are interested in. The more conversations you are engaged in the more feedback you are likely to get.
This is a new and emerging concept of social marketing which Avatar is following closely, so get in touch if you would like to discuss a social media marketing strategy for your organisation.
With the rising popularity of open source content management systems (CMS) in the Web industry over the last few years, we thought it might be interesting to see what’s hot in the CMS world.
Take a look at this CMS comparison graph to see how five popular CMS’ stack up in Google Trends, a tool that allows you to compare the world’s interest in certain topics by seeing how often they’ve been searched for in Google over time. You can see that WordPress and Joomla are way out ahead with Drupal a little lower in the results.
According to Alexa, an average of 4% of global Web users visit WordPress every day, whilst around 0.15% visit Joomla and 0.1% take a look at Drupal. In terms of rankings (on the day we looked) Alexa ranks WordPress at 18, Joomla at 514 and Drupal at 694. So that’s the three big players, how do the others fare? Not so great really in comparison. Alfresco attracts 0.004% of Web users world wide and had an Alexa ranking of 23,306. Lastly we look at Typo3, which attracts 0.004% of Web world and was ranked 33,208.
A report published earlier this month by CMS Wire also highlights that there is a big drop after WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. Interestingly, the report named Joomla as the most popular open source Web CMS. It appears the global CMS community loves the three open source CMS providers and the rest have a lot of catching up to do. Avatar offer WordPress and Joomla CMS options, so get in touch if you'd like to explore a suitable option for your site.
We’re suitably impressed here at Avatar with yellowBird’s 360 degree 3D video technology. It sets a very exciting precedent for online video, as it allows the viewer to peek beyond the frames and control the viewing direction. Check out the sample video here shot at a music concert, and you’ll understand why we think it’s worth blogging about.
Dutch company yellowBird is behind this exciting new viewing platform. Using technology utilised by Google Street View, scenes are shot with a camera using six divided lenses capturing 25 frames per second and then put together in video format. Footage can then be teamed with the actual audio from the scene, sound effects or music and the result is a viewing experience that allows you to feel like you are actually there, hovering above the action.
It’s just the beginning for this type of interactive video so it’ll be very interesting to see how this technology is utilised in the future.
When it comes to creating Web sites, companies can often be too close to the project to think like a customer, and identify what motivates them to visit a site and buy from it. Understanding how customers navigate your Web site and how they interpret the information they find there is an important part of your Web design process and something that is often overlooked, or a poorly planned afterthought
Web site user testing can provide important, unbiased insight into how customers really interact with your Web site, enabling you to understand their way of thinking, identify issues that you haven’t considered and discover the problems that can drive customers away from your site and off to your competitors
Avatar has previously used a useful Web site user testing service from UserTesting.com that provides a Flash video of a user talking through their experience as they browse your Web site, and includes a written summary explaining what they liked and disliked, and what would have caused them to leave, all for US $29. You can test any Web site, including reviewing two different sites at once. Take a look at their User Testing FAQ to find out more about the product
If you'd like assistance with user testing for your Web site,get in touch with Avatar to discuss a strategy to suit your requirements
After months of negotiations, Microsoft and Yahoo have finally unveiled a 10-year web search and online advertising partnership that will help them take on market leader Google.
Microsoft's new Bing search engine will power Yahoo search, and Yahoo will become the exclusive sales force for both companies' premium search advertising.
It is hoped that the deal, which should close in early 2010, will give the two partners the scale and resources to take on search giant Google. Watch this space...
Blog
