Facebook Friends with an Ex Not Just Bad, Bad For You

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A recent study led by psychologist Dr. Tara Marshall found that conitnuing to be Facebook friends with an ex after your break-up can be psychologically damaging. And here you thought “Facebook stalking” was just a fun term to throw around.

Dr. Marshall concludes that keeping tabs on an ex actually hinders the healing process after a break-up. In other words, it’s harder to move on when you constantly see the person you used to date smiling in your timeline.

Another Facebook landmine exists for those who are now in a stable relationship. Finding an ex and friending them can be upsetting to your current partner, even if it’s for nothing more than catching up.

Julie Kent has more at The Cleveland Leader.

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3 Reasons Google Remarketing is Great For Your Site

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Google Remarketing was recently updated to make it easier to set-up and easier to use. In case you aren’t familiar, Google Remarketing allows you to present users, who were previously on your site, with relevant ads as they continue browsing the web.

Marc Weisinger, of Search Engine Watch, has three key reasons you should be using one of the most powerful tools available to online marketers.

1. It’s Simple and Easy

Previously, implementing the remarketing code was a several step process. Now, you install one simple code in the footer of each page of your site and get on with your day. You can’t get much easier than one step.

2. The Possibilities are Endless

With the universal tag in place, you can use the Adwords interface to target specific groups. How specific? Well, that is up to you.

Want to target only those users who landed on a promotion page? Done.

Want to target only users who added a product to their cart, but didn’t end up buying? Done.

Plus, each new target group you set up gets the benefit of the cookies already stored by your universal tag.

3. Target Positive or Negative Audience

Before starting your next email marketing campaign, use the Adwords interface to target users who click through from your email to your site.

Alternatively, you can instead choose to exclude those users because, afterall, they sound pretty loyal and engaged already. That way, you don’t bombard them with your ads and are sure to instead target those users that may have seen your email but weren’t convinced right away.

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How to Format Your Blog For Success

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While your content quality is always important, it is always important to remember aesthetics when building up a blog. Adam Thompson from Search Engine Journal has a good rule for considering how your blog appears. “What’s on the inside only matters if the outside is attractive enough to keep viewers reading”.

This applies even when writing a blog post. Most internet users scan content instead of really delving in and reading. You need a quality title to intrigue readers, and good formatting to draw the readers to areas with the most important information. If you can do this well enough, your formatting may help grab your visitors and make them actually read.

We have a list of seven tips for formatting your blog, but beforehand, there are four requirements you need to meet.

  1. Have a high-quality theme – Make sure it is related to your brand, and if you choose a premium theme, you can have a designer customize it to match your brand.
  2. Use Great Titles – If your titles aren’t quality, visitors won’t bother to even skim the body text.
  3. Ensure you’re using social sharing buttons and widgets – Keep them relevant and easily accessible, but also remember not to clog the page.
  4. Follow SEO practices – Always make sure you meet the basic SEO best-practices such as static URLs, optimized page titles, meta descriptions, and image alt tags.
Now that we’ve covered those basic requirements, here are seven tips for successfully formatting your blog posts.
  1. Subheadlines – Breaking up your blog post with subheadlines help readers scan your post, and your subheadlines should give the reader a good idea what the post is about.
  2. Real Photos – Stock photos can always help add some good color and pizzaz, but if it isn’t adding anything unique to your post, then it shouldn’t be there. Your photos should be communicating something specific.
  3. Photo Captions – Captions help transform your pictures from basic aethetic touches to communcation of real ideas. Using captions well allows photos to be used to communicate specific information to the reader quickly.
  4. Custom Graphics – Sometimes charts or graphs may be the best way to quickly communicate information visually. While they require some extra time and money, custom graphics help clearly visualize data and spruce up your post.
  5. Pull Quotes – Pull quotes are an easy way to entice viewers to get intrigued in your post. If you use them right, your viewers will be intrigued by the quote and want more information or context.
  6. Use Color – Black text on a white background is old and boring. Add some color to liven up your page and engage viewers. It can be as simple as changing the colors of your Hx tags, or brightening up pull quotes. Don’t overdo it, and make your site neon, but use color to highlight information and attract readers.
  7. Bullet Point Lists – If your information is easily communicated in a list, always use bullet points or a numbered list. It makes it much easier for readers to scan for the interesting points, and still gain quite a bit of information.
If you can employ these tips in your blog, you will make viewers want to read, rather than trying to push them to the content. Coerce them to actually read by making it pleasant and engaging for them.

 

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The Cost of Social Media Continues to Rise

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I’ve written before about the hidden cost of social media marketing. While Facebook, Twitter and the like are all free to use, their is the inherent cost of your time to keep your online presence where you want it.

Heather Clancy, of ZDNet, now reports that managing social media for small or midsize businesses often costs hundreds of dollars per month for tools or for outsourced manpower.

Clancy’s report is based on research done by Duct Tape Marketing, who’s creator, John Jantsch, attributes the findings to business owners’ realization that social media is “an essential element of the marketing mix.”

Despite spending nearly $1000 per month on social media, almost all responding business owners said their online presence has “somewhat helped” or “helped a great deal”.

It appears social media has joined the ranks of print, radio or TV ads. It’s a pay to play system, so you’d better be sure you’re getting your money’s worth.

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9 Tips For Better Website Design

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Effective visual communication is as much a part of web design as any other aspect. It is crucial in making a site look appealing, but it also does a much more important task. Effective presentation of information and functionality is an essential aspect of having a good site.

Think of it this way – if a site presents information effectively and has a user-friendly interface, it is still useless if the site is ugly or doesn’t match with the client’s brand image. Conversely, no one will wait to see a nice looking page if it takes forever to load or is a pain to navigate.

Remembering that, here are some simple and short tips to help you build a website with better visual communication.

  1. Don’t make users work – Make sure all your content is well organized and easy to get to. Visitors don’t like to waste their energy trying to find content. Your design should be a helpful conduit between the user and the information, not a hassle they have to work past.
  2. Don’t make them wait – Try to optimize your graphics so that they load quickly. No matter how fancy a feature of your site is, users will be unhappy if they have to wait for it to load.
  3. Make sure your navigation is usable and easy to find – This is similar to point one, in that users don’t like to be forced to work to navigate a site. They want to be able to travel anywhere on your site with just one or two clicks. Having a lot of content isn’t worth anything if users can’t get to it easily.
  4. Keep a consistent theme – Make sure every page looks like it belongs to the same site. you don’t want to confuse your visitors or make them think they accidently left the site.
  5. Remember the basic rules of design – No matter how much you like a design, keep in mind what the client and the audience wants. As much as you want to make sites that are fun to make, the designer is usually not the target audience.
  6. Be aware of emerging technology – There is a bit of conundrum with keeping up to date with the latest web technologies. They tend to make better looking sites and are more fun for designers to play with, but they also tend to not work well with older browsers. However, if you learn them now, you will be prepared to implement these technologies when they finally are made compatible with the wide range of browsers.
  7. Try to make your site as accessible as possible – You never know when visitors may have special needs or disabilities and you never want to make them feel left out. Make your site easy enough that children can operate it. You won’t ever have a customer complain because the site was too easy to use.
  8. The site was made for a purpose – Sites are made to sell products and services, showcase work, distribute news, and a number of other things, but few are made to simply look pleasing. You are trying to appeal to an audience, and your design is supposed to serve that purpose.
  9. Design is all about the user – Try to think like a user and not a designer. Keep it simple, appealing, and most of all, easily usable.

If you remember these rules, your visitors and clients should always be happy.

Spyros Thalassinos has even more great tips at Make Your Ideas Art.

 

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How 2 Factors Play a Role in Mobile Search Behavior

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We’ve talked quite a bit about the quickly growing use of mobile devices to search the web. The latest reports show between 10% to 20% of all traffic on the web, and some popular websites, claim that roughly a fourth of their traffic is coming from mobile devices, if you include tablets.

Of course, this all shows that ignoring mobile web use at this point is not a good decision. Those that are innovating in the field of mobile optimization will have a much brighter future than those that continue to resist the mobile shift. The sooner you optimize your site for mobile use, the better chances your company will do well in the future.

There are two factors that differentiate mobile devices from other traditional computing devices. They both are obvious, but both factors have undeniably huge effects on users’ web experiences. The first is portability. Since mobile users are accessing the web on the go, their current location and activities become important to what they are accessing online. The second factor is screen size. Mobile screens do seem to be getting larger, but they will never go anywhere near standard computer screen size. Take advantage of screen size limitations of mobile users, rather than fight it.

With between 15-20% of all searches on Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. coming from mobile users, how does that change search behavior?

Search Behavior Due to Location

Microsoft’s research has found that 30% of all mobile searches are related to their location, and 61% of searches end in a phone call. Like I said, a person’s locations and activities are clearly important to mobile user’s.

Of course, the recent changes to search engines have made great strides to customize search results based on user’s locations, but you should still make an effort to specify your business’s location on search engines using their web master settings.

The major search engines also look for location signals from the title and text present on a website. If you own a local business, make it easy for them to find these signals. Emphasize the location on the site so search engines prioritize your website in search results around your area.

Can you still take advantage of mobile users’ locations even if your business has more than one location? Of course!

If your business has multiple locations, you should be creating internal pages for your different locations, with a present hierarchy starting from the homepage so that search engines will notice the location specific pages too. You will still have to deal with standard issues such as speed, relevance, and backlinks, but taking advantage of location will help get individual pages ranked based on where your users may be.

Search Behavior Due to Screen Size

Screen size contstraints are a more physical limitation, but it strongly effects how people search and visit pages. The clearest difference between mobile and desktop search is the number of paid results and advertisments. On most search engines, there are far less paid ads on mobile because of the screen size. That means organic results on mobile are more important than on desktop.

Screen size also limits the number of results you recieve at any given moment. On a typical smartphone you can only see a few results at a time. Desktops give users a broad range of results immediately, but on mobile the top three results are key. Mobile users are not prone to research, and they rarely go past the first page of results, so it is important to get your page as high in the rankings as possible.

Search behavior on mobiles are certainly unique from their desktop counterparts, and mobile requires a similarly unique SEO strategy. Of course, desktop is still important, so the best way to approach the issue is by creating a seperate mobile site that is optimized for mobile user experience. The longer you wait to optimize, the more trouble you will have later.

For more, read Paras Chopra’s article at Search Engine Land.

 

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Use Social Media for Awareness, Not Sales

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Forrester Research Inc. recently researched the purchase paths of 77-thousand online shoppers to come to the conclusion that social media does not lead to direct sales. As Zach Stambor reports for Internet Retailer, “less than 1-percent of transactions for new and repeat customers can be traced back to social links.” 

Despite these findings, another Forrester survey found that, when asked, consumers claim that they do make purchases based on social media posts. Nearly half agreed that they find out about new products or brands through social media and 40-percent said social media posts are “a great way to discover sales.”

Essentially, this means that, despite the lack of direct sales associated with social media, it is still a valuable tool to raise awareness of your brand. Think about your own purchase path for products you’ve bought online. Does one email or social media post lead you to whip out your credit card? More than likely, you do some research and view mulitple marketing channels.

Forrester’s purchase path analysis found just that. One-third of shoppers take this multi-faceted approach for first time customers and it’s almost half of repeat buyers.

Perhaps the most telling statistic to come from the analysis is the role of email for repeat customers. Almost a third of that return business came from email. 13-percent went directly from email to sale and 17-percent read the email and clicked through to other marketing channels.

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6 Expected Web Design Trends for the Coming Year

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In a constantly changing industry, it can be difficult to predict trends for the future. For designers, this means heightened responsibility during transition periods. Designers have to be able to create client pleasing designs based on what has been popular this year, while also constantly learning new tricks to innovate for what is to come. Hopefully, these predictions can help you be prepared for some trends that should become popular within the next year.

  1. Responsive Web Design – At this point, this prediction is more of a foregone conclusion, as new kinds of mobile and desktop devices are constantly being released into the market. Each device has a unique screen size, proportion, and resolution. To create specific websites for each device would cost you a fortune in time and money, and responsive web designs eliminate all of these problems by responding to the size of the device accessing the page. Designers won’t need too make new layouts for different devices, when a single layout will work smoothly with all devices.
  2. Designed Typography – There have never been more fonts and variations for designers to work with than there is today, and choosing what typography to use is always an important decision. In the next year, it seems this will only become more important  and typography may finally cement its place as an essential part of design. Typography is the foundation of any website, and it is time it received recognition.
  3. Vertical Scrolling – Optimizing websites will continue to lead to crucial decisions for layouts. Many websites are still using vertical and horizontal scrolling, but through the next year vertical scrolling will become dominant. Vertical scrolling is convenient and easy. It also allows implementation of vertically scrolling buttons and header menus. All of these features combined make for user friendly navigation across your entire website.
  4. Big Buttons – More and more sites keep optimizing for “touch and tap” on mobile devices, which means buttons are getting bigger. Originally, these large buttons were being used to try to streamline pages and make them more visually pleasing, but they also make using pages on mobile devices infinitely easier. The only drawback is these large buttons require more graphics, which slow down sites. Hopefully designers can find ways around this, or this prediction may never come to full fruition.
  5. Branding Will Take a Hike – All business want their brand to be recognizable, and the year ahead of us seems more likely to focus on designing the brand, rather than trying to build a website based on the newest trends. Designers will choose things that complement the brand rather than choosing features that seem popular at the moment. It will become more important for designers to focus on translating a webpage business through the webpage and represent the brand’s image.
  6. Parallax Scrolling Will Rise – Parallax scrolling has been around for some time now, but it has mainly been used in video games  This year, it seems likely to finally transition to the web. This feature allows designers to control the depth of design objects on the webpage being designed.

While these are only predictions, many of these seem undeniably likely to come true. By studying what looks likely to become popular, you can be on the cutting edge of web design, rather than always playing catch up.

For examples of these predictions, check out Ali Qayyum’s article at Smashing Hub.

 

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Google Survey Reveals What Mobile Users Want

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Want to know what features and capabilities consumers are wanting from mobile websites? Google has released the results of a recent survey and, while the findings aren’t anything earth shattering, they also included data that could be beneficial to you.

The results have reaffirmed that smartphone users want sites to be optimized for their smaller screen, and they will leave those that aren’t, but Google also took the time to collect data on what users want in their experiences with mobile sites. Google used two independent research firms to survey over 1,000 adults in the US, who were also involved in focus groups and required to keep journals of their mobile activites throughout the third quarter of this year.

So what are users wanting from mobile sites? According to Google, users expect websites to load in less than five seconds. They also want mobile websites to allow them to act immediately. Seventy-six percent of smartphone owners want to use their phones to get locations for businesses and sixty-one percent like businesses to allow customers to contact them at the time.

Most want information available within a few clicks, with buttons large enough for their fingers. Other widely desired features were conveniently placed search bars, “click to call” buttons, unidirectional scrolling (up-down or left-right), and interestingly many desire the ability to go to the full non-mobile site. Google even gathered data on what users are looking for in sites for specific industries. Greg Sterling at Marketing Land has a break-down for these individual industries, if you’re interested.

Most of these findings are inline with what you would expect, but they also show how the expectations of mobile users are quickly getting higher. If you don’t raise your own standards to meet those of your customers, your business will not fare well in the future.

 

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Social Media: From Private to Public?

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Facebook, Twitter and, perhaps to a lesser extent, other social media platforms have become a public forum where ideas, opinions and news are exchanged. Peter M. Gunn, of Huffington Post, argues that because social media is a essentially a public service, it’s time to take it out of the private sector and into the public one.

Social media companies have, without a doubt, changed the way we communicate. But then, fire stations changed the way we fought fire and they began as private entities. There’s actually a good argument that your privacy would be better protected by a government run social media site than it is on Facebook. For example, when is the last time the Post Office ‘shared’ your personal information with another company? Now, when is the last time Facebook ‘shared’ your email address, demographic stats or browsing habits?

Also, Facebook and Twitter can’t protect First Amendment rights. Thanks to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which says law enforcement can gain access to electronic documents with only a subpoena, they can’t protect Fourth Amendment rights, either.

Perhaps, rather than the broad step of government run socia media, stricter regulations on existing social media could be put into place. Considering the deep pockets of the existing companies, however, and their current investment in lobbying, that seems unlikely to occur.

Certainly, there could exist a public-owned social media alternative that protects your freedoms, while the privately-owned alternatives continue to thrive. Case in point, the US Post Office doesn’t run FedEx or UPS out of business. It comes down to how much protection you want for your online communication.

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