Worth a Look

• This week we were reminded to choose our tweets with care. While many know employers and other entities can easily monitor Twitter, it may surprise some to see agencies acting on this information.  Surely, no one is more surprised than the man who was detained by Homeland Security for offensive tweets.
• Since Google+ started offering brand pages on their social network, small and medium businesses has been hesitant to join. This week the New York Times asks, Does Google+ Offer Businesses an Edge?Click the link for a great case study of a small company strategically using Circles and +1’s to leverage the unique strengths of Google+.
  

  Can Small and Medium Sized Business Get and Advantage with Google+?

• The “Mobile First” web design philosophy has been gaining momentum in recent years as more and more web traffic shifts to the mobile space. However this philosophy, which prioritizes the experience of mobile users, has led to the “web second” movement. Web second emphasizes the need to design non-mobile sites to take advantage of the capabilities of desktop browsing, instead of simply displaying a slightly modified mobile site to all users.

Trending Searches

Find out the search terms that have been trending on Google during the past week. Data was gathered using Google’s Insights for Search tool.

This week search traffic spiked with the announcement of this year’s Oscar nominees and tax season went into full swing with high amounts of “irs” related searches.

1. 1. oscar nominations 2012 (+1,200%)
2. 2. demi moore (+1,050%)
3. 3. irs refund (+250%)
4. 4. australian open (+100%)
5. 5. heidi klum (+100%)
6. 6. republican debate (+80%)
7. 7. super bowl 2012 (+80% )
8. 8. h&r block (+60%)
9. 9. irs (+60%)
10. 10. seal (+60%)

TNI Partner Spotlight

• We’re excited for the national exposure and attention that our partner Nawgan is receiving! Check out Nawgan in the Wall Street Journal.
• Non-profit partner Karla Smith Foundation was recently featured on the local news to tell their story and promote their upcoming Stigma and Suicide event. See their story on combatting mental illness stigma here.

Stay up to date on industry news and commentary, TNI happenings, and events with web experts. Sign up for The Impact Update today!

Image from: (CC) Magnet 4 Marketing dot Net/Flickr

New technology can’t replace the value of meeting face-to-face.

When making large capital purchases (particularly in the B2B space), businesses value meeting in person. Russell explained companies attend expos to answer two questions: “Are you for real?” and “Are you likeable?”

The modern Expo-Goer does his research.

Today, product information is readily available online through user reviews, case studies, and company blogs.  Tradeshow attendees come armed with facts and seek answers to very specific questions. Modern expo attendees are more selective and prepared, and therefore more qualified, than in the past.

Attendees feel safety in numbers, value limited interaction.

Technology has changed the modern tradeshow dynamic. Attendees react negatively to a hard-sell from the exhibitor. They prefer to limit interaction and find their information at the display or booth, usually via digital kiosks or demo stations.

Expo Industry revenues (purple), are expected to recover.

The Expo Economy is recovering.

The tradeshow business suffered from the recent recession like many other industries. However, attendance and revenue started bouncing back in late 2010, which can be seen in the data provided by Russell (above). Experts predict this industry to recover well in the coming years, possibly confirming Russell’s assertion that the expo industry will always be around, no matter how many times it is written off as “dead”.

Mobile sites and apps are crucial for event marketing.

While the event marketing business isn’t going away, it has needed to adapt to changing technologies and communication channels. Product and event content needs to be easily accessible on mobile devices, providing attendees with valuable company information from the expo floor.

Couldn’t make it to Las Vegas but want more information on Expo Economics and Online Event Integration?

Watch video of the entire TXCHANGE presentation here.

Ever wonder what search engines pick up on those pay per click programs? In no specific order, Google, Yahoo, Bing and Baidu fall in the category of the most widely used search engines in the world. From multipurpose search engines, to industry-specific ones, each of these search engines share an abundance of information to its users.

The table below shows two different types of platforms being used to utilize search engines and the percentage of people who use them.

The image above, from Net Market Share shows the desktop search engine share, representing the same information as the table. When looking at a chart versus numbers on a table makes you can see how big of a difference there truly is between Google and rest of the search engines.

It’s not surprising Google has a more widely used percentage rate than any of the other search engines in the list. According to Net Market Share Google, Baidu, Yahoo and Bing are the top four used search engines, but what about the other search engines? Where do they fit in? Behind Bing, lies Ask-Global, AOL-Global, Excite-Global and Lycos-Global; all search engines with a small usage percentage rate. Not many of you can say you have used the lower ranked search engines more than the higher ranked ones, can you?

Google has the largest search distribution, the largest ad network and the most efficient search feature, which makes them the leading search engine today. While it doesn’t offer all the shopping center features like other search engines, Google is fast, relevant and is most widely used search engine. Google has outstanding features that are used on a daily basis from thousands of Google’s daily users.

To learn about search engine rankings contact The Net Impact at www.thenetimpact.com

Let’s start this post with a minor clarification.  The relevance attribute or “rel” tag basically defines the relationship between the current document and a linked document.  For example, say I have two html pages, cookies.html and milk.html.  I decide to link the cookies.html page to the milk.html page, hence fulfilling the current document and linked document requirement.  When linking the cookies page to the milk page the code on the cookies page will traditionally look something like this in standard html:

<a href=/milk.html>Milk</a>

Milk is the word that displays to the web user.  Just as “href” is an attribute the same is true for the “rel” attribute.  Href tells “Milk” where to go when the user clicks on the link and Rel describes the relationship between milk and cookies, which we can all agree is pretty darn good.  With a “rel” tag, the same link may look like this:

<a rel=”friend” href=/milk.html>Milk</a>

This makes the assumption that Cookies and Milk are friends.  Why include a “rel” tag?  For one, it’s great for classifying content and styling links.  Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! will refer to rel tags to get more information about a link for search engine optimization or SEO.  Browsers support rel tags but do not use the attribute in any way.

Below is a list of different relevance tag values and what they do.  Each can impact SEO in its own way.

Almost twenty additional rel tag options exist, but the rel tags listed above will make the biggest impact on search engine optimization or SEO.

If you have more questions about relevance tags or search engine optimization, visit us at www.thenetimpact.com.

“Currently, Google Analytics does a great job analyzing past performance. Today we’re very excited to bring real time data to Google Analytics with the launch of Google Analytics Real-Time: a set of new reports that show what’s happening on your site as it happens,” says  John Jersin.  Google Analytics Blog

Let’s take a deeper look into the Real-Time tool.

Right Now

Right Now allows users to see the number of active visitors on site.  If there is more than one active user at a time, you can click on any of the active visitors to follow them.  At any time you can click out of following only that one visitor and view all visitors.  Right now also gives the user a closer look at who is a new visitor and who is a returning one.

Top Referrals

Top Referrals gives the user the opportunity to see where the visitor was browsing before they got to your page. Real-Time also enables user to click on the specific link to see the actual site.

Page Views

Real-Time allows the users to see the average time per minute and per second each visitor is on each page of the website.  This tool is a way to indicate whether a specific page has the information a visitor is looking for.  For example, if a visitor is on a page for a few seconds the page might not have appropriate content for that visitor but if the visitor is on a page for a few minutes then that would indicate it had the correct information they were looking to find.

Top Active Pages

Top active pages enables users to see what pages the active visitor is looking at, allowing the Real-Time user to follow the path they take throughout the website.  This can come in handy if the user wants to navigate the visitor to specific pages on the website.

Top Locations

Top Locations is an easy way to see where the visitors of the website are geographically located.

Google is not the first company to offer such data.  Woopra, Chartbeat and numerous other tools offer Real-Time but Google allows you to use it for free.

Real-Time is able to track the immediate impact to site traffic, making this great for social media.  For example, if a user posts a picture on their website and then tweets about it, Google Analytics Real-Time is able to track when traffic from the tweet stops driving visitors. The new version of Google Analytics was turned on for only a small number of people before to test it out in September of 2011. According to the Google Analytics blog, the full version of Google Analytics will be full force sometime January 2012.

Google Analytics provides tracking for anyone with a web presence, whether the user is an executive, marketing professional, content or a web developer.   It’s important for any person who has a website and wants it to succeed in the crazy world of the internet.  Google Analytics is a way to take control of your website and turn page views into profits.

Interested in Google Analytics? Contact The Net Impact.

Functionality

The last thing a user wants to come across when browsing your site is the dreaded ‘Server Error.’ The average time a user spends on a website is minimal. Finding server errors will guarantee an even shorter visit.

What to look for:

Make sure your navigation is intuitive and functions properly. Navigation should lead users to the appropriate landing pages. Navigation should NOT contain broken links like those attached to buttons, PDFs, and jpegs.

It’s extremely important to test forms. Forms give your company or client valuable customer information and feedback. Make sure to fill forms out, document any bugs, and check that the form is submitting properly (i.e. check notification settings).

Next, test for search bar optimization. When a user types a query into the search bar it returns logical, accurate results. Before searching ask yourself what you expect to see before the results display. If the results display what you expected – good job! If the content returned makes no sense – you may need to fix the search function.

Functionality Testing Tools:

Link Checker – A Firefox add-on that will highlight all of the links on the current URL, check them, and then color coordinate them based on their functionality.

Multi Links – A Firefox add-on that uses a right click and drag technique that allows you to select multiple links and open them in new windows or tabs.

W3C Markup Validation Service – If you’re in web development, everyone should be using these tools. W3C is the “international community that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web.” There are several tools on this site including a HTML, CSS, link, RSS, and even a Mobile validation service. It’ll check your website and tell you exactly where in the coding your problems arise.

Styling Issues and Content

Different browsers display the same content differently. For example, Firefox won’t necessarily render images and text the same way as Internet Explorer, Google Chrome or Safari for Mac. To dig even deeper, check the browser’s version. Firefox 9.0.1 is the latest installment by Mozilla, but many businesses still use version 3.6. Make sure you test the browsers and their versions based on what your company or client wants. We typically list out specific browsers and browser versions in project proposals to clarify exactly what we will test and confirm that this is what the client wants us to test.

What to look for:

Consistency is the key. Take a look at the styling of website elements like pages, titles, button layouts, image layouts, etc. Make sure they render properly on every browser and through every page of the website. Again, it’s all about consistency.

Generally, each page should keep a general theme or style sheet. While each interior page may have its unique content and images, many page elements should remain consistent throughout the website to communicate to the user that they have not left the website.

Keep everything intuitive. The simpler the navigation the longer the user will browse. Make it as easy as possible for the user to find the information they want. When testing the site, remember that it’s your job to try to break it in any way possible. It’s better to suggest something than to assume that it’s ok the way it is. Be picky. Be specific.

Styling and Content Testing Tools:

W3C Markup Validation Service – In a perfect world, if the HTML is right, if the CSS are right, you won’t have any problems through the different browsers. This should be the go to before and after the site goes live.

YSlow – A Firefox add-on. Powered by yahoo, this tool gives suggestions on how to make your site load faster. No one wants to wait for your thousands of images to load. Find a way to combine them or get rid of the ones that aren’t

iMacros for Firefox – When you find a problem and need to explain to a developer or designer the exact process in which you found this issue, iMacros records every click that makes it easy to send to your co-worker.

FireShot – Simple screenshot capture and editor to make it easy for you to show and explain issues.
While it’s apparent I do most of my testing in the latest version of Firefox, there are similar tools out there that adhere to your choice of browser. Firefox tends to make it easier with a plethora of useful add-ons on hand.

To learn more about different techniques used for testing your website, please contact The Net Impact.

Google plus is the latest social media innovation for staying connected. Currently Google plus has 40 million users. Users spend their time connecting in multiple ways; Circles, Hangouts and Games. Google plus makes it easy to share your thoughts, links and photos. Video chat (hangouts) presents the ability for members to interact directly with businesses and vice versa. Take a look at these important considerations when using Google plus for business.

Setting up your Google Plus Business page

When setting up your Google plus business page, Google allows users to choose an accessible Gmail account. Google plus doesn’t currently allow for multiple accounts so you want to be sure everyone who will be using the account and monitoring the page has access to the e-mail account.

When it is time to setup your business page, follow the Google page wizard (similar to the Facebook wizard). It will help when setting up your profile. After selecting a category for your business page, you will then need to fill out all of the other pertinent information about your business. Next, you can customize your public profile. Since the default setting is public, you want to keep the information concise and descriptive.

Google recommends optimizing your business page and sharing links before beginning the promotion process. To further optimize your page, continually interact with other members on Google plus and keep the information you share up to date.

Optimize Profile

When it comes to optimizing your profile, it’s important to share links, photos and other information whenever you can. Google plus is designed for photo and content sharing, but when it comes to sharing you will want to select photos that will ignite conversations and increase viral spread of your content. When promoting your Google plus business page, you will want to link it to other pages to increase your ranking. Two places you might want to promote your page would be on your website and on your company blog. Having links on your blog and website will help increase your ranking in the Google plus algorithm which will help grow your fan base. As with any form of promotion you want to ensure that what you are doing is providing results!

How Google Plus Changes Search

Google plus changes search by improving Google intelligence. Google will soon be able to understand trends and how people interact within their circles. Google will be able to adjust rankings to reflect individual searchers interests based off of their Google plus accounts. Google is taking its improved search results quality and decreasing the amount of spammers by monitoring the behavior on the Google plus pages. This is changing how you they build the traffic based on the +1 button location. For example, the +1 button reflects the page where it sits. If you create a paid search campaign that directs searchers to several different pages, each +1 vote will be broken down by each individual page address. Since each +1 vote will be broken down by each page address it will affect quality score. Which means, every time a page is moved or the address is changed the +1 count will reset.

When it comes to click-through-rates, the Google plus button lets searchers know when other searchers have found a page they have viewed helpful. People are more inclined to click on pages with “good” reviews rather than a page with no reviews.

Direct Connect

When using a search engine, Google has added a “+” feature to make it easier to search for specifics on Google plus. By adding a “+” in front of a search, searchers will be taken directly to the appropriate Google plus page. Add the direct connect code to your company’s website in order to prove you are the “official page”. This can be done by clicking “connect your website” under the “Get started” tab on your Google plus business page. Google plus direct connect is determined by a direct connect algorithm which is influenced by promotion of Google plus within your site.

Interested in learning more about Social Media Marketing? The Net Impact can help!

Google Plus brand pages seem to be relatively similar to Facebook pages.  They allow businesses to get involved with their customers and potential customers in a more organic and social online environment.  But really, what sets them apart from each other?

Facebook pages allow organizations, businesses, celebrities and others to broadcast information to people who choose to connect to them.  Page owners can add or develop apps to further engage their fans and reach out to new ones.  Facebook pages allow you to post events, links, news, pictures, videos and more, but can Google Plus brand pages provide a more effective marketing platform than Facebook?

Like Facebook pages, Google Plus brand pages allow organizations to engage their audience and keep users up-to-date on happenings within their company.  Google Plus brand pages also allow users to share media and increase opportunities for page views.  However, a recent article suggests that Google Plus brand pages offer better search opportunities, more customization and better analytics.  Mashable.com actually lists 4 reasons they think Google Plus brand pages will strongly challenge Facebook’s pages.

Google Plus brand pages give businesses and brands the opportunity to connect with customers and fans. Customers can +1 their favorite Pages, add those pages to their circles and even utilize face to face interaction with businesses via the Hangout feature.

Through Facebook, users have the ability to “like” a page, providing the user with page updates and announcements on his or her news feed. Facebook users also have the ability to use a video chat feature but they can only chat with their Facebook friends versus being able to chat with businesses as well, like users can do in Google Plus.

Google is a major search engine.  Today, more people use the Internet than ever before, but not everyone has Facebook.  According to an article from Mashable.com, Google CEO Larry Page said, “Google Plus already has 10 million users who share 1 billion items every day, and Google’s +1 button gets 2.3 billion hits per day.”  It seems more people may have a good reason to start using Google Plus to market to their social circles. For example, businesses may experience better brand visibility if they have a Google plus brand page.

Facebook has the highest number of users between Facebook and Google Plus.  Will Google ever be able to reach the same number of users as Facebook? If Google can’t reach Facebook’s numbers, without question, Facebook will continue to be at the top of the social media ladder.

Do you need help with Social Media Marketing?  The Net Impact can help you out!

 Worth a Look

• “Black Friday” may always be the largest shopping holiday of the year, but the channels in which consumers shop is ever-changing. IBM is reporting that this Black Friday, online sales were up 24.3% over last year. This surge in e-commerce activity was paralleled with a rise in mobile commerce, with mobile sales up 9.8% annually.
• Pinterest, the image bookmarking and display site has experienced enormous growth this year as a social network. This represents a great opportunity for businesses to create easily shareable content that will resonate in this growing network. To help ensure your image content is creating the desired conversions, Search Engine Journal has some SEO strategies for Pinterest.
  

  Are your images easy to "pin"?

• Of course, when speaking of holiday shopping and e-commerce it is impossible to ignore the “Cyber Monday” phenomenon. Last year online sales on the Monday following Thanksgiving reached over $1 billion in revenue. This week The New York Times covers Cyber Monday’s history and significance to e-commerce retailers. The ubiquity of Cyber Monday can be seen in the many deals today from TNI partners, including RideMakerz, Artistic Sensations, Jenny Present and Myself Belts.

Trending Searches

Find out the search terms that have been trending on Google during the past week. Data was gathered using Google’s Insights for Search tool.

Last week there was a major spike in search traffic regarding the holidays and more specifically, holiday shopping. ‘Tis the season!

1. 1. thanksgiving (+400%)
2. 2. turkey (+300%)
3. 3. black friday deals (+250%)
4. 4. black friday (+200%)
5. 5. thanksgiving 2011 (+200%)
6. 6. black friday 2011 (+160%)
7. 7. best buy (+100%)
8. 8. black friday ads (+60%)
9. 9. walmart (+60%)
10. 10. macys (+50%)

 TNI Partner Spotlight

• Congratulations to Jenny Present for being featured in People Magazine’s Holiday 2011 Gift Guide!
• See photos from non-profit partner Karla Smith Foundation’s 2011 Dinner Auction, which The Net Impact Team had the pleasure of attending!

Stay up to date on industry news and commentary, TNI happenings, and events with web experts. Sign up for The Impact Update today!

What is Amazon Silk?

Amazon’s Silk Browser is a new kind of web browser that uses dynamic split browsing.  The idea of a split browser is to aid the process of loading a webpage.  Silk is designed to decrease the amount of time it takes to load content on a page by tapping into Amazon’s EC2 cloud.  Split browsing is not necessarily a new concept, here’s a video to explain why Amazon chose split browsing:

Amazon Silk video from Kindle YouTube Channel

Silk is vastly different from other browsers.  It references past user searches to predict what the user is going to click.  It stores preloaded pages in the cloud ready to deliver those pages to the device faster.  Silk preloads pages based upon customer search, traffic patterns and device preference.

Amazon Silk comes with pre-loaded bookmarks but as the user browses more, Silk will better recognize the sites that have been viewed the most and keep those as the new bookmarks.

The 8 GB Kindle Fire also has a color touch screen with a fast dual-core processor.  Still allowing Kindle owners to share libraries, read emails, share Word and PDF documents and more.

What do all these features mean for web developers?

Web Developers will need to add Amazon Silk to the list of web browsers they typically test.  The $199 Kindle Fire price point and enhanced feature functionality suggest that this tablet and its associated browser could become a popular tool for web browsers.

Mobile developers will need to make sure that they submit their current versions of all apps to the Amazon marketplace for Android so they’re available for the Kindle Fire users.  It’s easy to submit any new apps or existing apps using the Amazon Appstore Developer Portal.  All applications must be optimized to run on a 7” screen.

What contributions might the Kindle Fire make to web marketing?

Since Kindle Fire runs on Android, it can finally put Android on the tablet map. The Kindle Fire also includes a Cloud drive, MP3 downloads, Kindle e-books and movie/ TV show downloads, but what does this mean for the Android?  The lower price point may hinder willingness to drop $400 or more on a tablet of another brand.

The Kindle Fire provides its own marketplace to download applications; it will be interesting to see what that will do for the Android marketplace and how consumers and developers react.  They might have dug themselves a huge hole because Kindle Fire won’t use the same application market.

What about the competition?

Microsoft might need to change their tablet strategy based on how well the Kindle Fire can perform.  Microsoft is promising all kinds of functionality on tablets but if the Kindle Fire succeeds with all its simplistic elements Microsoft might not need create a more intense software program but a more simple approach to the new technologies.

Interested in creating an app for your company? Learn more at The Net Impact