As long as significant numbers of the user community use IE 6 we need to ensure that what we develop will work with this outdated and proprietary browser. We’ve recently done some analysis among a cross section of our clients and found the following browser usage:

Browser                Users

IE 8.0                      30%
IE 7.0                      29%
firefox                     18%
IE 6.0                      11%
Safari Mac                9%

While IE 6 is down to 11%, that’s still too significant a user base to drop support. What will it take for users to finally upgrade? A major player dropping support.

Thankfully, Google has now announced that they are dropping support! Hopefully, this will finally rid us of the ghost of IE 6.

The Title Tag. Yes that’s right that little blue bar at the top of your browser. This is also the main headline served up in the search results.The best way to conceptualize this situation is to think of the Search Engines as having a checklist of criteria that your website must have to rank for a certain phrase. One of the first things that is taken into account is your URL or actual web address.

So if you are still building this out or plan to in the future make sure you get your keywords in there first. Next, when constructing your title tag, it is important to note that having a unique title tag for each of your pages is the best way for the engines to differentiate all of the pages within your site. If all of your pages were to have the same title tag you may miss out on getting your entire site indexed in the search engine results.

Finally, different search engines display a different number of characters in your browser as well as the search results. So understanding the intricacies of each will be beneficial to your specific strategy. To my knowledge this is the current breakdown of the different search engines and how they serve up Title Tags. Please note this is only “display characters”. I believe Google will read as many characters as you place in the title tag. However it is not best practice to cram this area with content.

So now that you know how different engines serve up title tags differently you should base your strategy accordingly. At eXclusive Concepts, we typically keep the tag at 75 characters and under. To better accommodate all 3 engines. But this is just the beginning. You must now determine what you are going to say in the title tag. This is a very crucial step. Do your research and find terms that you feel best describe what this page is about, while still using keywords that will bring you traffic. Google’s adwords keyword tool is a good way to get a rough approximation of search queries for a term. However you may need to do a little more research to determine competition on these keywords.

It is important to remember just because you have the term you want to rank for in the URL and the title tag this does not mean you are going to be ranked on the first page. It’s just one step closer to being optimized. Having a good gauge on your competition will be one of the best barometers of your ability to rank for a term. Some SEO firms may even have in-house programs that they use to determine competition levels; these can be most helpful when constructing a proper title tag as well as fully optimizing the foundation of a website.

By Joe Mesgleski
Jr. Web Marketer @ eXclusive Concepts, Inc.

Other companies with US employees on FaceBook:

—- 5,000+ Google’ers
—- 2,800+ IBM’ers
—- 1,000+ United Nations’ers
—- 5,000+ Apple’ers
—- 200 WSJ’ers
—- 500 FaceBook’ers
—- 280 CNN’ers
—- 260 FoxNews’ers

Want to advertise to these people, or other networks? Contact us.

This is important as individuals and companies alike pay more and more attention to the issue of reputation management. When someone Google’s you, what do they find?

Developing…

My take…

What are widgets?

In a sense, Widgets are Web 2.0 versions of the small software applications and shareware that we saw in the 90’s, only they are web based and they are much more useful. If you are an art enthusiast you could download a widget offered by one of our clients, for example, that shows you new masterpieces by famous artists every day.

There are widgets for everything. Frequent traveler? Get a widget that tracks fares for you in real-time. Looking to find local activity partners? Yep – a widget for that. If you’re a fan of celebrity gossip you can find a widget for that as well. Widgets are being created by everyone under the sun in order to address the very specific needs of niche audiences. Browse some for yourself here at Yahoo!.

What’s going on?

You may have heard FaceBook in the press recently. User activity and sign-ups have been going through the roof… primarily the result of one major event: FaceBook developed a platform that allows third-party developers to create widgets and share them with the FaceBook community. Google and Yahoo! both offer platforms for widgets, but what’s particularly interesting about FaceBook’s platform is that a good widget on FaceBook will quickly spread virally because of its tight integration with each user’s profile page and network of friends.

Why should you care?

Short answer: It’s a way to get more traffic, more visibility, and more links.

In the web world everyone talks about viral marketing. Want to get more traffic? Do viral marketing. Want to enhance SEO rankings? Do viral marketing. What’s unique about widgets specifically, and the platforms that are being developed to support them in particular (FaceBook, Yahoo!, Google) is that marketers will now have an easier time getting their cool new viral gimmicks into the hands of their customers.

Let the land-grab begin!

Here is the WashingtonPost article.

Google would give away FREE phones and subscriptions in exchange for pushing ads through the phone. In the article questions are raised as to whether people will be willing to listen to advertisements, but my guess is that Google will not ask us to listen to ads.

Rather, Google will begin the cellular phone advertising revolution in the US that we’ve all been waiting for by pushing ads into the cell phone rather than making us listen to commercials before our call is placed.

- They will probably push coupons to us when we walk past a store that advertises with them.
- They will probably push contextual ads to us based on the websites we browse on our phone

They will try to enhance the quality of our life by pushing relevant ads to us at the right time.

This will be interesting to follow.

There has been an outcry from webmasters begging Google to reverse course. For many, the supplemental label is a tip that problems exist and must be addressed.

In fact, Google is very open that Adwords customers are expected to meet quality guidelines. How well you meet them affects your “Quality Score.” As Google states:

“The AdWords system uses your Quality Score to define several important factors for your keywords when you first create your ads. These factors define how much you’ll pay for clicks…”

What are some of the quality guidelines?
• Link to the page on your site that provides the most useful and accurate information about the product or service in your ad.
• Ensure that your landing page is relevant to your keywords and your ad text.
• Try to provide information without requiring users to register. Or, provide a preview of what users will get by registering.
• In general, build pages that provide substantial and useful information to the end-user. If your ad does link to a page consisting of mostly ads or general search results (such as a directory or catalog page), provide additional information beyond what the user may have seen in your ad or on the page prior to clicking on your ad
• You should have unique content (should not be similar or nearly identical in appearance to another site). For more information, see our affiliate guidelines.

Until recently, these guidelines were aimed at the Adwords advertisers, but now they are applying them to sites that host Google ads (Adsense).

That’s good news for Google Adsense advertisers. If you need help developing or improving landing pages or websites to perform better give us a call at 781-810-9107