Simply because they are the relative new ad on the block, there seems to be some confusion about how to implement and get the best ROI for Facebook ads. When it comes to Page Post Ads, you’re essentially getting the opportunity to put your message into users’ news feeds, whether they’ve liked your page or not.
To get a better idea of what is possible and how to use Facebook ads, check out the included infographic from Ampush, which comes via Marketing Land.
Like most designers and web design bloggers, I try to keep up to date with the latest tools and resources available, and I try to pass them along when I get the chance. One of the best places to find the latest and greatest tools, extensions, apps, and kits is Web Designer Depot’s monthly compilation for designers and developers. Most of them are free, and almost all of them can be of use in your workflow.
This month’s wrap up has everything from web apps, jQuery plygins and JavaScript resources to wireframing kits and coding resources. As always, there are also some awesome fonts, most of which you can get on a budget.
One of my favorite resources, though one of the least directly usable on this list, is a free ebook called The Productivity Manifesto, which is filled with tips on upping your productivity. All you have to do to get the ebook is sign up for the free newsletter.
If you’re looking for more practical tools, you’ll like WireKit, a set of Photoshop shape layers for iPhone apps, or the interactive usability checklist Userium that comes with categories for user experience, homepage, accessibility, navigation, and every other facet of site usability.
Those couple tools are just scratching the surface of what is offered at Web Designer Depot this month, and I highly advise you check out everything else they are showcasing this month. You’re bound to find at least one tool you like.
Google is always fighting to maintain diversity on their search engine results pages (SERPs). It has proven difficult over time to walk the line between offering searchers the content they want in easily browsable form, and keep the big established sites from completely dominating the results.
Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, recently used one of his YouTube videos to talk about how Google is managing this, and highlight an upcoming change that will hopefully keep you from getting pages full of essentially the same results. No one wants to see eight results from Yelp when they are looking for a restaurant review.
The change Google is making is aimed at making it harder for multiple results from the same domain name to rank for the same terms. Basically, once you’ve seen three or four results from a domain, even over the spread of a few results pages, it will become increasingly harder for any more pages from that domain to rank.
If you don’t quite get what this means, it is easier to understand in context. In the video, Matt walks us through the history of Google’s domain result diversity efforts. It also shows how Google tries to manage bringing you the best authoritative and reputable search results without allowing bigger brands to form monopolies on the results.
You can see the full breakdown of the domain diversity history at Search Engine Land or in Cutts’ video, but basically when Google started out there were no restrictions on the number of results per domain. It was quickly apparent that this system doesn’t work because you will get page upon page of results from the single highest ranked domain. Then came different forms of “host clustering” which prevented more than two results per domain to be shown in the search results, but this was easily worked around by spammers.
More recently, Google has used a sort of tiered system where the first SERPs for a term are as diverse as possible, allowing only a few results from the same domains, however as you progress into the later search result pages, more and more results were allowed from repeat domains. Now, Google is tightening the belt and making it harder for those repeat domains to even get onto the later SERPs.
Great content can do just about anything you want it to. You want to draw in more visitors? They’ll come for quality content. Need more conversions? Get some great content. In the best cases, it can go viral. But how do you know what great content is? How do you know what the public wants?
The internet is so insanely populated with content at this point that it is just getting harder and harder to stand out. There are many lists like this one, and they offer different opinions in different ways, but what makes one of those articles more attractive than all the others? It answers people’s needs.
That sounds so incredibly basic that many would say there’s no way it is the whole story, but in reality answering to people’s needs is much harder than you think. There are no guaranteed right answers, and the only way to truly know if you gave the public what they want it to get it out there, but you can get some hints beforehand, if you look in the right places.
Jason DeMers shared some ways you can find out what your target audience is looking for and create the content they need. If you want your content to stick out from the rest, you need to know how to understand your audience.
The public is often very open about their feelings and desires, you just have to go where they are voicing them. The internet offers many popular options, and it is easier than ever to keep tabs on what your target audience is thinking. There isn’t any excuse to ignore their needs.
In my opinion, you can never read too many opinions and advice columns on how to manage your PPC campaigns. Sure, some may turn out to be full of bad advice, but I believe every bit of information can either guide you to improving your own campaigns, or steer you away from looming mistakes. At the very least, it’s good to see what other people are doing in order to inspire you to come up with your own methods.
With that in mind, how could you avoid Chris Kent’s article at Search Engine Journal called ’10 Golden Rules of AdWords.’ It’s loaded with good information. Some of it is bordering on cliche, such as logging in to your account at least once a day and testing every conceivable movable piece. But, even these have been repeated for a reason. They are important and are a key to building a successful campaign.
My favorite pieces of advice are a suggestion of how to determine how much to bid for certain keywords. For many, this seems to be a guessing game, which is not good. Also, remember to link your PPC ads to the specific page your ad refers to. Don’t just leave traffic at your doorstep, invite them in and put them right where you want them. In other words, bypass your homepage and get users as close to a conversion as you can.
As Facebook establishes itself as an option to gain a piece of your advertising budget, you may find yourself wondering if can actually give you a solid ROI. Because it is a fairly new platform, some are still a bit skeptical about the realistic expectations they should have when they dump money into a Facebook ad.
iMediaConnection set out to investigate this matter and returned with an interesting case study about how Facebook advertising has worked for one specific company. Follow the link and watch the included video interviews with a car dealership’s marketing manager to hear about how they found success through Facebook advertising and parlay that into success with your own campaigns.
What does it mean to be Pantone’s Color of the Year? It seems like an arbitrary designation to many, but if you watch the design trends close enough, it is easy to see how emerald was chosen as this year’s favorite color.
Emerald works great as a base color or as an accent, and it is an easy choice in a year when colors have gone slightly more natural and pastel. It is a favorite of many, and has always been a staple in fashion, beauty, and design. It was really only a matter of time until emerald had its moment in the sun.
Pantone’s emerald chosen as the color of the year is very specific, and very in line with the design trend of subdued light colors that still pack a lot of punch. Emerald 17-5641 is the lush blue-green that works wonders as a background and is a friendly complement to many colors without clashing.
“The most abundant hue in nature, the human eye sees more green than any other color in the spectrum,” said Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, following the announcement of the color of the year. “Symbolically, Emerald brings a sense of clarity, renewal and rejuvenation, which is so important in today’s complex world. This powerful and universally-appealing tone translates easily to both fashion and home interiors.”
Green has always been a popular color because it lacks many negative connotations. Greens are common and associated with health, and is a the second most common favorite color, following only blue. We are used to greens and they don’t have the aggressive or overly feminine associations harsh reds or soft yellows do.
Emerald specifically has many positive emotional associations such as soothing, relaxation, and harmony and there are almost no negative color meanings. The only bad connection that can be drawn is greed or death, which are normally more thought of with more sickly or saturated greens, not the comforting blue-green you’ll find in this type of emerald.
If you want to get inspired or hear some tips on how to use the color of the year, Designshack has created an entire page devoted to uses of the color in design and pop culture, as well as exploring the color’s meaning a little deeper.
Things go in and out of favor in SEO all the time, but some things seem to never change. While content creation is the new buzzword and link building is enduring a big face lift, on page optimization stands tall as a piece of tradition surviving on, much as it has for years. Of course, there have been some tweaks, but largely on page optimization remains as one of the easiest methods of site optimization to implement and understand.
On page optimization is also special in SEO in that we know fairly certainly the best ways to handle this type of optimization. Everything else may be up for some level of debate, but on page SEO can be distilled down to a simple checklist, such as the one CanuckSEO recently shared. This checklist works with any type of CMS or page editing method you want to use, all you have to do is make sure you follow through with every step, in order.
Most importantly, the key to good on page SEO is consistency and organization without resorting to using the same titles or headers for every page. Search engines have been able to tell when SEOs slack with their on page SEO, so don’t let yourself fall into that trap. Keeping your pages, images, and links well organized will benefit your work as much as it will help how the search engines see you.
Want to know if your company understands branding? Just ask if you have a brand bible. If you don’t, your business probably has some large flaws in their branding and their marketing.
Every brand, from the smallest startups to the giants you see on your drive to work, should have their “bible” establishing the guidelines and rules of maintaining their corporate image.
What is a Brand Bible?
A brand bible is a document shared throughout the company that lays out how the company achieves its personality and public voice across many individuals and different departments. It is, as Designshack explains, “the basis for all interactions on behalf of the company.”
These documents, which range from a few pages to a couple hundred depending on the size and needs of the company, cover every sort of public interaction. Brand bibles or books distinguish what types of marketing should be pursued or taken off the table, letterhead, logo usage, and even the specific colors that can be used for corporate design. This book is how every Facebook employee knows exactly what color blue is Facebook Blue.
Creating a Brand Bible
See, above all, a brand bible is about cohesion and consistency. From the first design or memo you send out, creating a brand bible is as easy as keeping notes on what fonts you use, how you lay out public documents, and how letterhead is arranged. Over time, if you keep good notes, putting together your brand bible will be as easy as arranging these notes into a document to share with your employees.
If you’ve waited to create these guidelines, it isn’t much more difficult. Start keeping notes. Set a standard. It may take longer to get established across the company, but it will speed up marketing and design. If you need more specific ideas on how to establish a brand book, Designshack has a few suggestions in their article.
There are more than a few lists of the most important rules to follow in SEO, and to their credit, they all largely say the same things. This is good for site owners and SEOs getting started, but what do you do when you’ve checked off every one of those standard entries? Is your site perfect? Does that mean there is nothing left to perfect? Of course not.
Your site’s SEO is always able to be improved upon, and some things left off the more popular lists can still hurt you terribly. Bill Slawski created his own list of SEO rules that features suggestions you might not have seen before if you stick with just the biggest websites available.
Slawski’s suggestions approach slightly more technical issues than many will give you, and many of them seem trivial until you understand how picky Google’s crawlers and indexers are. For example, site architecture doesn’t seem that important so long as it is organized in some ways, but in reality there are very specific ways you should have your site set up. Having more than one web address that search engine crawlers are able to visit your site from, for instance, can end up frustrating Google’s bots, and you may even end up with a message in your Google Webmaster Tools telling you to cut it out.
Another common site architecture mistake for commerce sites is creating different product pages for all manner of tiny variances. Some will create individual pages for different sizes and different colors, which only creates a mess for your visitors and Google’s crawlers alike. Keeping the architecture of your site as streamlined and efficient as it can be to fit your needs is always important, and unnecessary bulks of pages don’t attract the search engines.
On-site SEO is also a wide spread problem for many site owners, and that is never more obvious than when you see pages that don’t have unique titles. Titles are supposed to describe a page and explain what is featured on the page. Consider it the title for a book. Would you look for a book with no title? Would libraries be able to organize those books? In this case, searchers are wary of any site that doesn’t make every effort to tell them what they offer before they click onto the page, and search engines are the librarians unable to sort your mess without titles on your pages. Don’t upset the librarian.
Of course, even for Slawski, one of the most common problems is simply that people create sites that are too slow for our current standards. It may look nice, but visitors are impatient and won’t hesitate to hit the back button if your page isn’t loading quickly. This is even more true for mobile users who are on-the-go and don’t want to wait for their content. The slower your page loads, the more prospective visitors you’ve lost.
Those were some of Bill Slawski’s most important rules for SEO. What are the rules you always keep in mind while working on a site?
