It’s official. Facebook has entered the hashtag game. Any word or phrase with the “#” symbol before it will now be clickable. This extension will have far-reaching implications for advertising, branding, and content strategy. Here a few key reasons why your company should care about Facebook’s inclusion of hashtags: Advertising The introduction of hashtags will, in theory, benefit both the user and Facebook. For the user, it’s a great way to make content searchable on a large scale. For #Facebook, it’s a great way to … Continue reading →
What is Skeuomorphism? Skeuomorphism is an element of design or structure that serves little or no purpose in the artifact fashioned from the new material but was essential to the object made from the original material. 1 The smartphone presented us with a new medium to do many old things more efficiently and for this reason, Skeuomorphism has helped transition us into proficient digital operators. It elementally focuses on transitioning older ways of thinking and doing (i.e. calculators, calendars, phone books) with the use of … Continue reading →
The world of SEO is constantly evolving and SEO professionals need be technically minded, data-driven and receptive to new trends and ideas. While traditional marketing efforts dedicated to indexing, quality on-page content and link building are effective today, it’s important to stay ahead of the next trends in the pipeline. Below are five SEO trends that should be added to the traditional SEO audit. Local Search Is your target audience finding you on local search? If not, they should be. According to Ed Parsons, the … Continue reading →
Google is the king of the internet, most of us know this. By far they are the most important player in the internet’s most important activity: search. Google has made search such an integral part of the internet experience that you sometimes may find yourself ‘googling’ a website so you can click its link on the first page of results. We tend to think that’s the easier way. To keep their palace on top of the hill Google has always striven to innovate. In the earlier half … Continue reading →
Just how important is it to rank first? Studies show that the divide between first and second place can be huge. Specifically, a page that ranks first has a 53% click rate, while a page that rank second drops to just 15%. In today’s competitive market, it’s imperative to gain that extra advantage, particularly if you’re a small business. There’s no guarantee that you will catapult to the top, but if your ranking has been stuck in neutral give these approaches a try. Below are … Continue reading →
Google Search Guru Matt Cutts recently released a new video as part of his Webmaster Video series that helps to clarify ‘What should we expect in the next few months in terms of SEO for Google?” The video provides insight into a number of algorithm changes, penguin updates and Webmaster Tools improvements that are likely to be rolled out in the coming months. Here are 8 takeaways that Matt addressed in the video: 1. Penguin Updates Tentatively named Penguin 2.0, the latest version of Penguin … Continue reading →
We’ve referenced the semantic web several times in the past, and how its creation will forever alter our experience with the Internet. Within the past year, Google has made significant strides in making the future of search a thing of the present. Available as a mobile application for both the Android and iOS operating systems, “Google Now” operates as an intelligent personal assistant – predicting and delivering the information that it believes is relevant to your needs, interests and current condition. How It Works Google Now … Continue reading →
Has a website loading too fast ever annoyed you? What about too slow? Yea, slow is not good. Even worse, Google will downgrade slow sites. Not all hosting environments are the same. The low-end hosting providers tend to provide, well …. low-end quality, and potentially low-end performance. This might work fine for a simple, low traffic site. Since server virtualization became a big deal and drove server prices down, many hosting providers have begun to offer a type of service commonly called “VPS” — Virtual … Continue reading →
Whether you have an existing business or you’re building one from the ground up (literally or, in the case of an ecommerce site, figuratively), you have to construct your brand. In this week’s blog, we’re going to take a look at the pieces of branding that, when fully formed and assembled, result in a solid brand. Let’s start the blueprint for your brand with the foundation: your logo. This is going to be your symbol. This one insignia is meant to represent your entire company. … Continue reading →
Web design has come a long way in the twenty years since the first website was published. The ease of use that today’s users experience on sites like Google and Amazon.com necessarily resulted from the trials of the early days. While design techniques may come and go, one overarching goal of our efforts is increased usability. Here are a few ways to improve the readability of a web page. Split up the content. What Google did: Google isolated the most frequently-used part of the page … Continue reading →
