Is Google About To Ax Their Adwords Keyword Tool?

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Anyone keeping track should know that Google isn’t afraid to shutter a beloved service or tool at their whim. We’re all still mourning the loss of Google Reader, but Eric Siu from Entrepeneur says we should also be gearing up to lose the popular Google Adwords External Keyword Research Tool.

The free tool for Adwords is commonly used by site owners to dig up statistics on keyword search volume, estimated traffic volume, and average cost per click, but the most loved capability was the determining which specific keywords a site owner should targer with their future optimization strategies and PPC campaigns.

Google hasn’t announced anything yet, so there isn’t a confirmed shutdown date or any known information, but rumors suggest it could happen anytime. Google has implied the Adwords tool will be combined into a new program referred to as the Keyword Planner, but it won’t necessarily be the same.

The External Keyword Research Tool essentially contained an assortment of disjointed workflows which gave the site owner a little freedom as to how they use the tool, but the Keyword Planner has one explicit purpose – helping advertisers set up their new PPC ad groups and campaigns as quickly as possible. But, the Keyword Planner doesn’t include ad share statistics or local search trends.

If the External Keyword Research Tool is at all a part of your PPC or SEO campaigns, you should likely begin getting to know the Keyword Planner now. You’ll have to eventually.

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Bing Continues To Grow While Yahoo Deteriorates

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Bing has been regularly growing its market share over the past year, but don’t think it is at the expense of Google. In June, Bing’s share of all searches went up to 17.9 percent, but it was Yahoo who dropped to 11.4 percent, according to comScore. Yahoo lost exactly as much search as Bing gained, which may not have been what Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was hoping for when they signed the search deal with Microsoft.

Earlier this year, Mayer said, “One of the points of the alliance is that we collectively want to grow share rather than just trading share with each other. We need to see monetization working better because we know that it can and we’ve seen other competitors in the space illustrate how well it can work.”

Meanwhile, as Search Engine Watch reports, Google has held steady with exactly two-thirds of the market share, though it is down .1 percent from last year’s June share of 66.8 percent.

In 2012, Bing held 15.6 percent of the market, but they have been making regular gains, almost exclusively at the expense of smaller search engines. Yahoo on the other hand is at an all-time low, down from 13 percent last year.

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What Are You Forgetting In Your Social Media Campaign?

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Details can make or break a social media strategy. Little mistakes and small forgotten aspects can make your company look unprofessional and under-prepared. Listing all the ways I regularly see companies making small mistakes that still severely handicap their strategy would be practically endless, but Mashable had nine entrepreneurs share what they think is the one most important detail they see others routinely forgetting. You may have an otherwise strong social media strategy, but if you’re neglecting any of these, you are under performing.

  1. Link to Your Site – It is way to common to see small businesses creating great content and sharing them on their Facebook or other social pages, without any sort of link to the actual website anywhere readily available. Even if users like what you’re putting out, they can be turned off by searching for a link and simply give up. It should be easy for them to find out more about what you do.
  2. Retargeting – Many small businesses forget to retarget people based on their own social media campaigns using specific URLs in order to track specific leads around the web. If done right, this can be a highly effective marketing tactic, but it continues to go under-utilized. If you are retargeting, you can serve potential leads the ads that would make them most likely to convert, as well as collecting data to track exactly how effective your social media strategy actually is.
  3. Focus Your Social Media – Too many small businesses spread themselves thin across a barrage of social media sites. Focusing on a couple of the most popular sites like Facebook and Twitter makes a much larger impact than barely having a presence on all of them. You’ll find you’re better connecting with your audience and making more conversions without any more effort than you were already using on social media.
  4. Email is Still Important – Email may be the oldest “social” way to connect with customers one-on-one, but it is still the easiest method as well. Everyone checks their email, and statistics show that customers who receive emails are more likely to connect on other social sites.
  5. Don’t Forget About YouTube – If resources and skills allow, YouTube can be an incredible piece of your social media strategy. Videos that show your expertise cement your reputation and showcase your skills to potential customers, while entertaining videos draw a wide audience base that otherwise may not be interested in your service. YouTube content is one of the easiest to share across all platforms, but if you can’t invest in a quality video, you might consider putting your resources elsewhere.
  6. Keep the Original Content Coming – The big catchphrase now is “content is king” but for that content to do anything, it has to be valuable. If you create content that is worth viewer’s time, you can easily connect with a wide range of viewers and build your brand’s reputation.
  7. Run a Personal Blog – Running a personal blog humanizes your company and raises your value by highlighting the intelligent and skillful people working within your company. Everyone knows that companies are always trying to market their service, but they view personal blogs as a more honest way to assess the abilities of those actually running the company.
  8. Don’t Forget Facebook Targeting – Targeting software for Facebook admin pages allow select posts to only reach a specific demographic so that you can more narrowly market to their tastes without hurting the sensibilities of others. It’s easy to use (it’s one of the three icons beneath the text box), yet so many small businesses forget about it.
  9. Make Your Employees Into Advocates – Including your employees in your social media builds trust between your potential customers and your business and puts a face on your brand. If you use organic thoughts from your employees leveraged with your strategic direction, you can make your employees some of your biggest advocates.
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Parallax Design vs. SEO: How Design Affects Optimization

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Any SEO professional who has been around for a couple design trends knows what its like to bump heads with designers about the design methods and usability. There are certain innovative design trends that can be wonders for usability, but are completely at odds with standard SEO practices. According to Janet Driscoll Miller, that doesn’t mean we have to throw out both, we just have to be creative with our solutions to integrate creative design.

Parallax design is the most popular trend that runs into this issue with usabilty and SEO. It has actually been around for a few years, but it has recently gained quite a bit of notoriety as designers have used it to animate pages in a way that scrolling makes the entire page change what is being shown. It’s really easier to show people than to describe.

The most commonly seen site with this design style is the Spotify front page which essentially moves layers as the viewer scrolls downwards.

Spotify Screenshot

 

What makes parallax design so popular is it basically allows the site to walk a visitor through a story by scrolling down the page. Google has even used the style for their big “How Search Works” site, where Google tried to explain how it works to the average internet user. It directs how visitors view the site, rather than letting visitors click around at will.

The big problem is that parallax designs are essentially extremely large one page websites, which is extremely difficult to optimize for many search terms. All of your keywords have to be concentrated onto one page, rather than spread out across many as Google is used to. On top of that, inbound links to your site all point to a single page, not specific content.

Another interesting problem is that parallax design doesn’t work on mobile phones of any kind. As mobile traffic rises, that means more and more people aren’t able to use pages in this style. It also means site owners have to basically create an entire separate mobile version of their site. Many companies already do this, as Google did for the “How Search Works” site. Until responsive design popped up, it was common practice to build a second mobile site.

None of this means we should immediately cut out parallax design. As stated before, parallax design is unparalleled at telling stories, and some site don’t have to rely heavily on SEO to drive traffic. There is also an approach which allows you to use parallax design and a multipage site, by creating accomying sub-pages, like Spotify did. The home page is a parallax design, but the links take you to content on separate, static pages. That creates a static URL for different content and allows keywords to be more spread out.

Deciding whether or not to hop on these trends all depends on what you intend to achieve with your site. If you intend to tell a story or direct visitors through your site in a linear fashion, parallax design is possibly the best answer.

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What are Dominant and Recessive Colors?

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Color Wheel

 

Have you ever seen the old “optical illusion” that makes one color appear to be two entirely different colors? If you’ll excuse the MS Paint quality image (is there a rule that all optical illusions have to have been designed before 1997?) the one below makes two spirals appear to be blue and green, when the stripes making the spirals are actually the same color. Its the same principle at play as when you look at a color in a design and it just doesn’t seem to work right. When placed next to specific hues, certain colors can take on the visual characteristics of their neighboring color. Making this even more tricky, the human eye perceives color in different ways depending on if it is in the background or foreground.

Optical Illusion

 

The specific colors that can take on other characteristics are referred to as recessive colors, while those who always look the same are called dominant colors. Many pure colors such as cyan maintain their hue even when mixed or paired with other colors. No matter what color is mixed with a dominant color, the original color will still remain at least partially visible.

Dominant colors also tend to “push through” the design, or powerfully assert themselves within the composition. While recessive colors easily fade into the background, it is hard to make a dominant color sit far in the background. Pure hues are naturally dominant, though primary colors are more dominant than the others, because red, blue, and yellow literally can’t be created by mixing other colors.

Recessive colors, on the other hand, naturally fade into the background. They also easily take on the properties of any surrounding color. Recessive colors act as a neutral in a palette which help the more dominant colors maintain their emphasis and focal attention. As Carrie Cousins puts it, “recessive colors are the blurry or muted tones behind the focal point of an image or the pattern that appears behind something you’re supposed to be looking at.”

Cousins explored the relationships between dominant and recessive colors exhaustively at Design Shack. Not only does she delve into the scientific basis for why we perceive these colors the way we do, she also explains how these ideas can be adapted to design of all kinds, including web design.

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What Is The Key To Successful SEO? Social Media Integration

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What makes one SEO company successful and another fail? There could be a multitude of factors, but according to a recent study by Ascend2, chances are social integration is the key. Successful SEO companies integrate social media into their SEO plans and strategies far more than companies who report they are struggling.

Ascend2, a popular research agency, surveyed nearly 600 businesses and marketing professionals from around the world and asked the participants to rate their own companies’ SEO success. The survey then compared the answers from the 15 percent who rated their companies as “very successful” with SEO and the 18 percent who reported being “not successful.” This creates a relatively small sample size, but the findings are still interesting, and as Matt McGee from Search Engine Land suggests, would appear to hold up to larger samples.

By far the biggest difference between the companies is their use of social media within their SEO strategy. Their charts show that 38 percent of those reporting “very successful” with SEO are doing extensive social integration, while only two percent of the “not successful” companies say they are. On top of that, a full 50 percent of the “not successful” companies report doing no social media integration at all. Frighteningly, when looking at the results of all those surveyed, almost a quarter of the companies said they were not integrating social media into their SEO strategies.

Ascend2 Chart

The full report is available for free, though you do have to give your contact information. You would think at this point most SEO professionals would be aware of how important social media is to your SEO strategies. These results however show just how many companies are working with strategies that are behind the times and dragging their companies down.

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What Do Designers Need To Do Before iOS 7?

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iOS 7 Icon

There is a lot of talk going on about Apple’s new mobile operating system iOS 7, even though it is at least a couple months away from actually being unleashed on the public. Most of the discussion is centered around the new flatter aesthetics Apple has adopted, especially the new icons. But, there are quite a few other changes designers are concerned with, namely the actual app redesigns necessary to keep up to date with the update and how much influence iOS 7’s new UI should have on the redesigns.

Many believe that the Apple’s new style should be a heavy influence on the new app designs so that they will appear more native. But, other brands have put a ton of energy and resources into designing their own style and appearance and they don’t want to throw all of their independence and unique brand identity away. To make it even more confusing, there is a fair amount of confusion over how strict Apple’s iOS Human Interface Guidelines are.

This puts designers in a place where they aren’t sure what they are required to do to continue to be accepted by Apple’s app store, and what is simply suggested to keep in step with Apple’s style. Sam Jones from Web Designer Depot decided to tackle all the questions designers have during the transition period, and his article will give designers a good idea of where to go from here.

Jones also pulled quotes from Apple’s iOS 7 Transition Guide which help clear up exactly what Apple expects from their apps. If you want to know the exactly what apps must do, and what Apple suggests for moving forward, the information from the Transition Guide is about as clear as can be.

Things Apps Must Do

  • Update the app icon. In iOS 7 app icons are 120 x 120 pixels in high resolution, rather than the 114 px they’ve been using for the Retina capable iPhones.
  • Every app must update the launch image to unclude the status bar area, if the app doesn’t already do so.
  • All apps are also expected to support Retina displays and iPhone 5 dimensions in all artwork and designs

Things Apps Should Do

  • Apple would like all app content to be discernible through translucent UI elements such as bars and keyboards, as well as the transparent status bar. In iOS 7, view controllers use full-screen layout.
  • iOS 7’s bar button icons are lighter in weight and displayed in a new style, and as such they would like designers to redesign their own custom bar button icons.
  • Prepare for borderless buttons by moving away from supplying button background images and reassessing how to handle them within your layout.
  • Examine your app for hard-coded UI values—such as sizes and positions—and replace them with those you derive dynamically from system-provided values. Use Auto Layout to help your app respond when layout changes are required.
  • Examine your app for places where the metrics and style changes of UIKit controls and views affect the layout and appearance. For example, switches are wider, grouped tables are no longer inset, and progress views are thinner.
  • In iOS 7, users can adjust the text size within apps, and as such designers should move to adopt dynamic type, so that text responds appropriately.
  • Ensure your app doesn’t respond inappropriately to the new Control Center gesture or to a navigation controller’s swipe to go back gesture.
  • Keeping in line with Apple’s new flatter style, they would like designers to reassess their use of drop shadows, gradients, and bezels. Apple’s new aesthetic puts way less emphasis on visual effects that attempt to make UI elements look physical.
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If Your Site Goes Offline Will It Hurt Your Rankings?

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Wednesday, Google, Gmail, YouTube, and all the other similar services went unresponsive for roughly an hour in many parts of the United States. The problem was quickly resolved, but not before Twitter freaked out and the story reached many news outlets.

Now, Google’s head of Webspam used his Webmaster Chat to answer the big question that site owners who have gone through similar experiences have often wondered. If your site goes down temporarily, does it affect your rankings?

According to Cutts, having a site go offline shouldn’t negatively impact your rankings, so long as you fix the problem quickly. Obviously, Google wants to be directing searchers to sites that are working, so if a site has been offline for days, it makes sense for Google to replace it with a working relevant site. But, Google isn’t so quick to cut out an offline site.

Once Google notices your site is offline, they will attempt to notify those registered with Google Webmaster Tools that their site is unreachable. The messages generally say something along the lines of GoogleBot not being able to access the site.

Then, roughly 24 hours after Google has noticed your site isn’t working, they will come back to check the status of your site. This means that sites can be offline for roughly a full day or more before you can expect any negative affects from the search engines. However, if you’re site has been down for 48 hours or more, chances are Google is going to delist the site, at least temporarily.

Search Engine Land pointed out that there are also other tools available to monitor sites for you and alert webmasters if their site becomes unavailable. They suggest the free service Pingdom, though there are also plenty others to choose from.

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What Is Minimalism and Why Does It Matter to Design Right Now?

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Minimalism has been all the rage in web design lately. Flat design is currently one of the most popular design trends around, and it relies strongly on minimalist design principles. If done correctly, minimalism can achieve an experience that will stick in the minds of visitors for some time while doing away with all the sound and fury normally associated with the web.

Obviously, minimalist design techniques require sites that can be parsed down to just a few pages of information, but that has the added benefits of making your site automatically more friendly for mobile loading speeds and making your site easier to read. It can also cut your maintenance time down to a fraction of what is necessary for other larger sites. But, if you have a site that aims to comprehensively cover a topic or multiple topics, minimalism might not be right for your site.

One of the best aspects of great minimalist websites, and one of the biggest reasons flat design is taking off, is that every good minimalist site is built on a unique wireframe and a quality gridding system. When done right, that means your site will be easily made responsive, making the move to a mobile friendly site even easier than ever before.

Flat design is already beginning to branch out and apply more depth to sites that retain their minimalist principles, so it makes sense to get to know the ideas behind the broader style of design being co-opted for the new mobile-friendly internet. Mohammed Shakeri took the task of exploring how minimalism functions, some of its history (including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s famous “less is more”), and he even helps explain how to begin the transition to a minimalist website.

If you’ve been considering hopping on the latest trend to streamline sites, but haven’t been able to figure out what all the fuss is about, it’s never to late to find out. Or, as Frank Rossitano sings, “It’s never too late for now.”

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Taking The Step Beyond Google: Establishing Your Brand on Bing

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Bing LogoWhen companies take the leap to establishing their brand’s reputation online, the focus is always on taking advantage of every opportunity Google gives you to try to connect with potential consumers.

However, any SEO or online business who is only paying attention to Google isn’t completely controlling their online reputation. Online reputation management requires understanding a complex ecosystem of sites where users are able to connect with your brand, and those include other search engines, social media, local search platforms such as Yelp, and business accreditation sites like those for the Better Business Bureau.

Of course, taking control of the first page of Google is the best first step for a company hoping to take the reigns on their online brand, but it isn’t the only step. Google controls roughly two thirds of all search traffic, but that also means you’re missing out on a third of all of the marketplace.

The second most popular search engine is Bing, and they’ve been making notable gains lately, rising to 17.4 percent of the market share from 13 percent last year. Microsoft has been marketing Bing rather strongly and it is clear the search engine will only keep gaining ground for the near future. Once you’ve taken control of the first page of Google, George Fischer suggests trying to capitalize on the often forgotten market of Bing, and he explains how you can do so in his article for Search Engine Watch.

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