Be Search Friendly
What is the point of having a great site if no one ever sees it? None of course!
Before creating your content do you keyword research, what terms your audience or users to your site are likely to search upon, and what keywords they will use. Build the structure of your content around your search engine optimisation with these keywords and keyphrases.
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The challenge was to increase Outline Skincare’s online presence to increase web traffic, generate sales and increase ROI, while actually driving down overall marketing spend.
Miromedia were recommended to Outline as specialists in search engine optimisation, pay-per-click, email broadcasting, link building, online PR, and social media
The solution was an online marketing strategy which included removing programming issues, managing and adding keyword strategies, content creation and restructure of page layout.
Benefits Since working with Outline when compared to the same previous year period, we have achieved:
And most importantly this was all achieved during a recession!
To download the Outline Case Study please click here.
The vi command in Linux provides the most basic of text editing capabilities from the command line. It is both useful and at the same time extremely clunky without the proper command knowledge. Most of my searching on the web has resulted in many pages assuming that if you know the vi command then you must also know how to use it… I Linux therefore I am, or some such.
However to someone that generally doesn’t need to use the editor that often it can be frustrating trying to make a single character change in a file only accessible via SSH without having to copy the file to a desktop machine, change and copy back. Luckily I have found the following command cheatsheet for the editor:
ctrl-F :Page down
ctrl-B :Page up
$ :Move cursor to end of line
^ :Move cursor to beginning of line
:1 :Move to first line of file
:$ :Move to last line of file
/ :Search for a character string
? :Reverse search for a character string
x :Delete the character at the cursor
dd :Delete the current line
p :Paste data that was cut with x or dd commands
u :Undo
a :Add text after cursor
i :Insert text before cursor
R :Replace text starting at the cursor
o :Insert a new line after the current
esc :Switch from Input mode to Command mode
:w :save without exiting
ZZ :Save and exit
:q! :Exit without saving
So far this small but concise list has proved extremely helpful, all of a sudden the linux vi editor has become a very handy tool to have.
Purchase of MySpace four years ago by Rupert Murdoch heralded a new dawn for social media and social networking. Suddenly these sites were big business. With a 330m price tag many scoffed, but critics were later silenced when a 670m advertising deal with Google for three years was agreed!
Soon however that deal will come to an end and with it more than half of MySpace’s entire revenue. But there are far more important concerns for MySpace and for British born Bebo. Bebo was purchased at a staggering 640m in March of last year by AOL. Those concerns are the decline of these once all dominant sites at the fickle hand of social media users.
The Losers
Surely such big sites can’t just head to obscurity and disappear? Don’t be so sure, British social networking site Friends Reunited enjoyed a 120m purchase from ITV four years ago and was recently valued at one sixth of the figure. The decision to swap from a paid model to a free one came way too late. Users have voted with their feet, the brand is damaged and they won’t be coming back.
Bebo’s traffic dropped 24% this year and now stands at 9 million. As original Beboers come of age they migrate to Facebook suggesting a digital coming of age, Bebo’s biggest problem is that new younger school kids aren’t replacing them below. By Hitwise’s estimates, Bebo’s unique users have fallen 18%, from 8.5 million in April 2008 to 7 million one year later, while Facebook has seen 63% growth to 23.5 million unique users.
Further problems are predicted for MySpace and Bebo, both sites are in comparison very expensive to run and a decline in traffic is hitting their cash flow hard. Add to this MySpace’s deal with Google which is about to end and Bebo’s financial backing in doubt following AOL’s disbanding from Time Warner.
The Winners
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are enjoying massive increased popularity however. Twitter for example, has seen a 4,000% increase in new users since the start of this year to 2.5 million unique users a month. Add to these 3rd party apps which add another half of this traffic leading to an even greater impact! Facebook now control 45% of all social media activity on the internet World wide.
Most interestingly it is those social networking sites that have refused to sell to large greedy corporations that have ultimately succeed. Twitter more recently refused a huge deal with Google to advertise on the site.
And while large companies scratch their heads wondering what happened, it seems to me obvious that the reason for the decline is the worst marketing sin of all: assuming your audience are mindless fools, incapable of resisting advertising messages. MySpace is advert saturated, Bebo is advert saturated, and Friend Reunited charged you to watch their adverts. We are savvy, we don’t like adverts, and if the site is advert saturated we leave.
Even facebook fell into the trap, changing its simple and appealing interface for a multi-paged and advert heavy profile. An exodus I’m sure would have taken place had Facebook not been the best of a bad bunch. This could still see the end of Facebook in the next few years?
Ric McHale
There has been a lot written about Google and the power that it wealds. Like it is some sort of all powerful monster squashing everything in its path!
Latest complaints currently revolve around its ‘Street Views’ application. In the U.K. there has been complaints about, among other things, a picture of someone throwing up at the side of the road.
In my opinion some people are missing the point. Google is always adding apps to their free service, in the hope that it will keep our custom, their unchallenged position as number one search engine has allowed them to pioneer new ideas (with the financial backing for experimentation). Google has become an endless source of information.
Who hasn’t Googled to find out some trivial info, or where to go to visit x, y or z. Google is great at thinking outside the box and their primary goal is to stay popular. So you can always expect more from this inventive company.
Julian Wilkins
It’s that sudden moment of realisation that the copy and paste you’ve just done has over written a newer version of a file and you don’t have a backup! All you want to do is cry out loud but when you’ve have no backup no one can hear you scream.
This happened to me recently (I know; you should always work with a backup but I was just making a quick change and thought it wouldn’t be a problem) and I copied over a CSS file that contained site specific styling and subsequently lost the formatting that had taken a fair while to put together. I’d like to point out that this happened on our development server so no live sites were affected but the situation could very well apply.
I was stunned into silence for at least 20 seconds before coming to terms with my heinous error and getting on the internet to try and retrieve a cached version of the file from one of the many browsers on my machine. This is something that I remember doing in the past and was hoping it would help me out again. However my browsers had other thoughts and were proving to be less than helpful:
IE7 seems to be deleting my session cache once I close the browser down. I had already deleted the Firfox cache whilst making the CSS changes that I copied over. I was going to look at Safari as a last resort so turned to Google Chrome. This proved to be my lifeline as a quick trawl through the search pages returned for: “cached css files chrome” gave me this: ChromeCacheView.
The small exe file runs up and interrogates the cached indexing history for the browser and displays a list of all the content you have viewed, including Filename, URL, Type etc. From this (large!) list of content I spotted the CSS file I was after and using F4 copied the file to a location on my desktop from where I could view its contents. Although it was an out of date copy it did provide me with the much needed complex styling I was after.
So, after taking some time to reinstate the changes lost, I was able to recreate the CSS and the website was back to the way it was without anyone noticing.
Of course for the eagle-eyed amongst you the lesson for today is: Think twice before copying over a file and never, ever do anything without a backup.
It is now possible to have the entire world in the palm of your hand and at the (iPod) touch of a button as Google have today launched Google Earth for iPhone and iPod Touch. The app is free and downloadable from the iTunes App Store. It contains all of the same functionality you would expect from Google Earth including, geo-located wiki articles, photos, 3D terrain modelling and so on.
