Web Biz Strategy

Take the Google Local fast-track to SEO success

admin — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 04:31:32 +0000

In the second half of 2008, Google started including Google Local listings in their results when they believed that you were doing a commercial search (”pizza”) instead of a regular content search. This week they stepped it up, including Google Local results for just about any search you do. This is a game changer. Last year I [...]

Facebook, here’s an easy one: separate Friends from Fans

admin — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:21:00 +0000

Recently I’ve been trying to encourage Facebook to reverse their trend of constantly degrading the FB user experience, and my method has been to try to get people to chime in and offer up user experience improvement suggestions. Here’s an easy but crucial user experience improvement for Facebook to implement: separate out Friends from Fans in [...]

Why Google is giving away the farm to small businesses

admin — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:43:47 +0000

Today when I logged into my Gmail account, I was greeted with an invitation to try Video Chat, another service being rolled out by Google in their attempt to have users integrate Google into every aspect of their online experience. Google is certainly not the first company to try this. AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo have all [...]

Facebook needs a User Experience intervention

admin — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:45:40 +0000

Over the past few months, Facebook has done a major update to their site interface, followed by a few smaller changes. Many of these updates have been broadly panned, Facebook groups have sprung up against the changes, and articles have been written criticizing the choices made by Facebook. Why such a negative reaction? Poor User Experience. [...]

Let’s kick-start the user experience movement on Twitter with #goodux and #badux

admin — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 04:48:09 +0000

When you work in the web business, the concept of “user experience” comes up a lot. That makes sense since real people (web “users”) have to interact with web sites, and someone has to design the interface for those interactions. Good user experience means happy visitors and thereby happy shoppers, customers, volunteers, and leads. But user [...]

Twitter & Skittles: Thoughts on a Social Media Campaign

admin — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 02:39:08 +0000

Warning: if you don’t know what Twitter is, this post will make no sense whatsoever, so please start here. All others please proceed! This morning I went to Twitter.com and saw a lot of people asking about the www.Skittles.com homepage. I checked it out and found that Skittles had redirected all of their site traffic to [...]

Vinegar vs. Honey: How to keep your customers

admin — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 02:56:37 +0000

One of the hats that I wear is webmaster, I build and maintain web sites for clients. This involves site hosting, and I’ve hosted sites with a number of different hosting providers. Recently I’ve been consolidating, moving my various sites to MediaTemple and closing out my hosting accounts with other providers. Two days ago, I had [...]

What frustrates you about FAQ lists (Frequently Asked Questions), and how would you improve them?

admin — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 18:34:00 +0000

Today’s question comes from a LinkedIn user who wants to know about site FAQ page issues and solutions. Many people on the thread (read it here) complained about FAQ pages and some even recommended against them, but I disagree. FAQ’s exist for a reason: they’re a quick and easy way to get answers and access [...]

How do you get Google “site links” to appear with your site’s listing?

admin — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 05:01:07 +0000

Here’s a question that came in to LinkedIn regarding what Google calls “site links,” the links that can appear under a site listing which link directly to sub-pages and sub-sections of their sites. There were many good answers on the LinkedIn thread, and anyone with a free LinkedIn account can read them all here. Based on [...]

Is Getting Into the E-marketing Field Now Good Timing?

admin — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 03:04:47 +0000

Here’s a question that came in to LinkedIn about the climate for E-Marketers. The bottom line is that it’s tough for everybody and every industry right now, there’s just that much more competition from the newly-unemployed (ahem, “self-employed”), and that much less money to go around. Even so, there are opportunities, which I speak to [...]