Is Your Site Mobile Friendly? Google Can Tell You According to one statistic, half of all local searches are performed on a mobile device. With more people accessing websites using their smartphones, making sure you website is readable on a phone is not something you can ignore. Load times, readability and images often render differently on a smaller screen. If a website is less functional when viewed on a phone versus a regular PC or laptop, many mobile users will simply leave a site. Now Google wants to help make sure your website is mobile friendly. Why Being Mobile Friendly Matters According to Google, 60% of users expect a mobile site to load in three seconds or less. How the GOMO Meter Works You go to the site, enter your URL, and the GoMoMeter will display what your site looks like on a mobile device. Here are a few general tips from Google for making sure your site functions well on a mobile phone: Keep loading times fastSimplify navigationBe “thumb friendly”Design for visibility To test your site’s mobile friendliness, visit GoMo.
The Difference In Keyword Research For SEO vs. PPC Often when I complete a keyword research project for a client, they ask me about keywords I may not have included, or they want to know what the relative competition on the keywords looks like. This happens often enough that I thought I would remind everyone that while research for SEO and PPC can go hand in hand, they’re actually very different. First, think about what your goals are with each medium. What are you trying to do, and what constitutes success in that area? Next, think about how the keywords will be used. Where, when, how often? Finally, consider what your margin for error is. What… Is Your Quest? In SEO, your goal should be to understand the keyword landscape of a topic. For PPC, your goal should be to find the keywords that you can bid on. You should focus on keywords that suggest a purchase (or goal completion), that represent a category area that is profitable for you, and that you can’t easily get ranked for in organic (most of the time – there are exceptions to this).
Ovetta Sampson - About How To Setup Google Authorship for Guest Posts Hopefully by now you’ve heard about Google Authorship and what it is. If not, here’s a brief overview. Authorship is the means by which you claim authorship over an individual blog post or pages you wrote on the internet. Until now, Google could read your name as being associated with a blog post, but there may be hundreds of potential people who have the same name as you. How can Google be sure that YOU were the author of that post? Enter Google Authorship. As I mentioned, it is the expressed, validated connection between a specific person (represented by their Google+ profile) and a piece of content. When the authorship connection is made, and when Google decides to show the authorship expression in the search results, your Google+ profile image will appear next to the search result. The presumed value of authorship markup today is that you will see an increased click through rate on your search result as compared to others that do not have authorship markup present. That’s it.
Everything Marketers Need to Research & Create Detailed Buyer Personas [Template] Finance Manager Margie. IT Ian. Landscaper Larry. Buyer personas (sometimes referred to as marketing personas) are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. "Okay, so personas are really important to my business. Ahh ... the million dollar question. Now for the even better news: We've put together an interview guide and a free template for creating buyer personas, so it's easy as pie to do your persona research and compile it all into a beautiful, presentable, palatable format. Download the free buyer persona template here. Before we dive into the buyer persona-creation process, let's pause to understand the impact having well-developed buyer personas can have on your business -- and specifically your marketing. Why Exactly Are Buyer Personas So Important to Your Business? Buyer personas help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better. What About "Negative" Personas? How Can Personas Be Used in Marketing? How to Create Buyer Personas 1) Customers
These 6 Corporations Control 90% Of The Media In America An Ex-Pixar Designer Creates Astounding Kids' Book On iPad E-books are already a fraught subject for many readers, writers, publishers and designers, but children's e-books are even more so. Is it rotting their minds? Is it as good as good ol' paper? Is it too interactive for their own good? Every page has some delightful, hidden feature embedded into it. Part of why the book works so well is its top-shelf creative pedigree: author William Joyce is also an accomplished illustrator and animator who's published New Yorker covers, won a bunch of Emmys, created character designs for some of Pixar's first animated classics, and worked on many others for Dreamworks and Disney. Designing interactive interfaces for kids is no mean feat, and the Moonbot team really made some great choices with "Morris Lessmore." In fact, the interface design is so subtle it wasn't until I was about six pages in that I realized that every page of the app has some delightful feature embedded into it that you have to find for yourself.
Dim Sum Warriors: Comic Book Snacks that Talk Back in Two Languages The other day, I was in Chinatown in New York City, eating dim sum with Yen Yen Woo and Colin Goh. They’re a married couple, transplants from Singapore. For reasons that’ll soon become clear, I couldn’t help imagining that those little Chinese snacks we were eating were…alive. Now, some Asian food items really are alive when you put them in your mouth—but that’s a different story. Here’s a taste of Goh and Woo’s creation, Dim Sum Warriors: “Their bravery and skill have inspired millions worldwide, while the mere mention of their names causes enemies to quiver like tofu.” Dim Sum Warriors is a comic book that started as an iPad app. Goh and Woo created Dim Sum Warriors partly for their daughter, Kai Yen Goh. “We felt especially because we were bringing up a daughter in America we wanted something that would represent her mixed-up cultural heritage,” says Goh. On an iPad, you can read Dim Sum Warriors in English or in Chinese. Nick Sousanis is a big fan of Dim Sum Warriors.
13 Must See Lead Generation Examples You Need…To Grow Your List | This weekend I was trying to find a post about good examples of lead capturing , but I couldn’t find anything useful…I saw the opportunity and this is the result. I spent all Sunday looking for websites that I believed did a good job at using an email list form and applied well known practices in marketing. On all of the examples I marked the persuasion tactics most commonly used that you can apply to your business or blog/website. A lot of the content on this post is easy to apply but I learned this weekend even some well known websites fail to use them. If you’re using a good email service provider integrating an email sign-up form should be a walk-in-the-park. Now I understand if your goal is NOT to capture people’s email and build a relationship with your list then these examples might not be useful for you. Social Triggers Viperchill Social Media Examiner Smart Passive Income SlideDeck I Will Teach You To Be Rich Kissmetrics DIYthemes Dan Zarrella Copyblogger Big Brand System
How Facebook Will Fix Its Like Button Problem You can't deny the success of Facebook's Like button. Its popularity quickly skyrocketed; it took less than a month for the button to appear on more than 100,000 websites. Now it is a standard method for endorsing something on the social web. But that's exactly the problem — the Like button is an endorsement. If you run across an interesting article and share it, it's seen as an implicit endorsement. The company did some internal research and found that users, especially younger ones, were afraid to "Like" because of the implied endorsement. Facebook's bet is that more people will click a button that says they've "Listened" to a song or "Watched" a video, rather than simply liking it. Called Gestures, these actions are the next step in integrating Facebook with every part of the web. It's Facebook's partners that will take this capability and turn it into applications that populate Facebook and their websites with these Gestures, though.