Dear Google Apps admin,

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010.  After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser.  We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience.  We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

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Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

As you continue to create ads and learn about what works best for you, we are providing you with 5 tips to help you optimize your ads on Facebook! We encourage you to use them for continued success in 2010:

1. Pull reports about your ads. Reports show you detailed demographic information and provide insights about what kinds of users are interacting with your ads. They may also show likes and interests of users, and you may find new keywords you should be using to target users.
2. Remember to frequently visit your Ads Manager to make sure your bid is within the suggested bid range. The suggested bid range you see when creating your ads is based o n the bids that are currently winning the ad auction for the users you’ve chosen to target. This bid range will fluctuate over time as the pool of competing ads changes. You want to make sure that your bid is within the suggested bid range so it’s reaching the most relevant users.
3. Monitor your campaigns and budgets. It’s easy to forget how many campaigns you currently have running, and what budget you have selected for each of them. Visit your Ads Manager to check up on this so you maximize your spend! You have the ability to change your daily budget for any of your campaigns at any time.
4. Increase your conversion rate by choosing a clear and simple destination page. Make sure that the site you are advertising is easy to navigate and that it presents information clearly. If you are promoting a product or event, feature it prominently on your site so users are able to click on it right away.
5. Take notice of the ads that seem to be receiving more clicks or impressions than others. Simply changing your image or ad title will make the ad appear new to users. If you see impressions or clicks declining, refresh your ad more often to ensure that your ads don’t become stale.

The above simple techniques combined with our experience, your advertisements are sure to begin converting leads more efficiently and more frequently.  Contact AndPlus Design today for a free quote on Search Engine Marketing and expanding your efforts through Social Media!

As you are probably well aware, Facebook is growing rapidly every day. It started off as a networking tool for college students and now is one of the largest social media networking sites in the world. Businesses small and large are taking advantage of this accessible source to grow their business. Facebook has given businesses a chance to create a “page” for themselves which allows “fans” to support them.  Any individual that is currently using Facebook can choose to add any business to their profile. When this happens, they become a “fan” and that business will show up on their personal profile.  Every new activity the business creates will show up in the newsfeed on their home page.  This allows businesses to share any information to their supporters that they please. For example, company news, blogs, events, status updates, comments, answers, and photos.

As mentioned, Facebook is growing at an incredible speed.  Last year Facebook reported having over 350 million active users. Web presence is essential for businesses today.  Joining social media networking sites can help your company’s page rank on search engines. The more fans a business has on their page, the higher pagerank and awareness potential customers have about its website.  Be patient, though!  As fans do not join overnight.  A helpful suggestion is to start by asking friends and family to become fans first. By doing this, all of their networking friends will see that they became fans of your business and this may increase the chance of getting more fans. Your fans can also “suggest” your business to their friends, accelerating your business across the social networking world.

Facebook has updated the site a few times since it first launched.  Each change made it that much more user-friendly.  It is extremely easy to join and helps users along the way with helpful hints all over the site. When you join, Facebook offers step by step instructions to help complete your profile, page, any information and settings. Facebook provides so many additional features for businesses, but we’ve listed some of them here:

• Networking with an unlimited amount of fans
• View and create wall posts
• Status updates
• Photo and video uploads
• Notes
• Discussions
• Events
• Reviews
• Join networks
• Create Groups
• Display company information, including website(s)
• Appoint multiple administrators to increase the amount of content faster
• Post a Link
• Promote your business with special offers
• Suggest to Friends

While joining Facebook is free, the site also offers inexpensive ads that can be useful.  Small advertising boxes align the right side of each profile. Facebook allows you to target your marketing audience.  Whether you are promoting your company’s website, or something to do with your Facebook page, you are allowed to choose between the following filters:

• Location
• Keywords
• Age
• Education
• Relationship status
• Sex
• Workplace
• Languages
• Relationship Interests

With all the available capabilities, the question remains of why are there businesses that are not taking advantage of this free social media networking site? Joining Facebook can help your business gain more leads, which will eventually lead to growth in revenue.  Below is a simple list of benefits that every business can enjoy after creating a Facebook page.

• Ability to brand your company
• Showcase your work
• Get your business name out there
• Higher page rank on search engines
• Use your updates as free advertisement
• Use the events page to invite people
• Create a URL and post it on your website or email signature
• Its FREE! FREE! FREE!

If you are a business owner or are looking to expand your company’s outreach through social networking, joining Facebook is the perfect first-step. Other networking sites of note include LinkedIn and Twitter.  AndPlus Design will be blogging on other sites in the near future, but we hope this post has helped inform you a bit about the benefits of Facebook.   Become a Fan of AndPlus Design today!  Visit us at www.facebook.com/AndPlusDesign

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an interesting topic, one that takes years to understand. Nobody has a formula for SEO, even though some people promise to make you #1 on the results. Consulting firms will often have you believe that they are the best at getting you to the top of the results within search engines like Google, or Bing. These same firms will use gimmicky phrases and make claims and promises that are simply impossible to keep. The bottom line is, Google makes almost their entire revenues based on paid links and advertisements, giving site the ability to show up before organic results. What makes any company think they can outsmart Google engineers?

They can’t. And, if they do, it won’t be for long simply because, the way search engines serve results is constantly changing. In fact, big search engines like Google and Bing actually hide the way they serve results, because allowing people to see this formula would actually create a competitive advantage to firms who understand the formula. Since nobody knows the formula, other than those who are contractually bound to secrecy, your website’s success within search engine optimization is based upon one thing, and one thing only – its content.

To show up ranked highly in results organically, you need valuable content. There are other SEO white hat techniques which are supported by Google and other search engines, such as using “alt tags” on images and optimize your META Descriptions, but content is king!

There are times when your website has valuable content but is not being returned in search results.  One of our most recent clients, a restaurant review guide, had fantastic content – organized and community-driven. Despite this, the site was not showing up in search engine results.

We utilized some white hat techniques to make their site show up in the top 5 results organically for a set of 10 keywords. The first was to add descriptions to the images on each page. Search engines are “blind.” That is, they cannot see images, only read text.  So if there is relevant information being shown through images, it should be explained through the use of an “alt” tag.  Secondly, the website’s internal structure was incorrect. What looked visually appealing to the human eye was actually nightmarish and disorganized to a search engine spider. By reorganizing the code, we were able to give the relevant content and code to the spiders in a more organized fashion, without changing the website’s appearance.

Here’s the take-away. If you want to come up highly in search results, make sure your website has relevant content and brings value to the user’s experience. Do this and your website will shoot to the top of search engine results.

The next time you hire an SEO consultant, be sure you ask what they will do and why what they are doing is necessary. Consultants are used to answering questions such as these and understand the difference between white hat and black hat techniques. Ask which white hat techniques they are going to use, and if they are going to use any black hat techniques . . . and why.

DEFINITIONS
Search Engine Optimization – The process of rearranging a website’s code such that search engines understand the pages’ content more easily.

Organic Results – The results for a particular search which the search engine feels matches the search terms most appropriately

Paid Links – Websites which pay to have their links listed before (or on the side of) organic results.

Black Hat – Techniques that are meant to trick search engines into ranking a website highly.  These tricks are found and fixed, and often get your site banned altogether

White Hat – SEO techniques which are approved and encouraged to ensure your site is listed organically for relevant search terms.

Search Engine Spider – A computer program which crawls around the web reading all of the web pages they can, indexing the content so that it can be returned in organic results.

Girls, Inc.,

 Girls, Inc. contacted AndPlus Design to sponsor and attend the event.  Sean Mahoney, President, spoke about the sponsorship, saying “Supporting Girls, Inc. lies at the heart of what we’re trying to accomplish within the city.  Worcester has a very unique business culture – one that supports the community around it.  We hope to be a part of this culture for a long time.”

 AndPlus Design appreciated the opportunity to sponsor the event and be involved in supporting such a fantastic organization doing so many great things.  We look forward to supporting them again in the future.

• Reduced site maintenance costs (changes are completed in-house)
• Immediate content publishing offers readers more frequent updates
• Increased website flexibility and scalability

Why use a CMS? Who knows your business better than you? Certainly not your web development
firm. Putting the responsibility of generating the actual text on your website on the people who know your business best – your employees – is a good business decision.

Your company hires outside help when the requirements of a project exceed capabilities
of your current workforce, why would the creation of your corporate website be any different? Your company should hire web developers for only those tasks which your team cannot accomplish alone (such as designing and developing your site’s framework). Updating and entering your company’s content can be easily accomplished with a CMS. It is for this reason that any and all web development
projects should include a content management system of some type, where businesses have 100% control over their content now and in the future.

WHAT’S AVAILABLE? Two general types of CMSs are available: Proprietary and Open Source. Examples of Proprietary CMS’s include: Expression Engine, DotNetNuke, and Microsoft’s Sharepoint.
Examples of Open Source CMS include Joomla!, Drupal, and WordPress. Chances are that you visit websites that use Open Source CMS every day (Wikipedia, CNN.com, New York Times, and even the Wall Street Journal). The obvious difference between the two types is cost. A proprietary CMS tends to come at a premium cost, while open source CMS is traditionally free – you only pay for customization. While there are other differences, the point is, a proprietary CMS is not always a better product. There is, and always will be, a debate raging over whether an open source or a proprietary system is “better.” Our opinion is that the answer is “whichever saves you money.”

OBTAINING SUPPORT The other issue lies with support. While Open Source CMS systems do not traditionally offer official paid support, the systems are well documented and widely accepted. Paid support can be a good option, but only if the support team in place is knowledgeable
about the system. A web design firm who hires engineers familiar with open source systems is actually quite comparable to paid support for a proprietary system. Many of the proprietary CMS systems
we see coming out of individual web firms are simply replicas of larger projects and rarely offer any innovative benefits. Why pay for a product that doesn’t offer any extra benefits over a product that is free?

A safe approach to supporting a CMS would be to leverage the work of thousands of open source developers and hire a select few to be on staff to fix critical errors and further customize and expand the system for clientele. With regular updates and immediate security-hole identification of open source developers, there’s little reason to spend extra money to work with the proprietary systems in small business. In fact, doing so actually limits your growth, as proprietary systems do not allow others to contribute security fixes and enhancements. Open Source CMS usage means you have thousands of software engineers working for you to ensure the success and reliability of your website!

Lastly, how long did you wait for your last website change? If it was too long, perhaps it’s time to explore the CMS options you have today. Ask your next development firm what CMS options they have and what benefits come with each available option.

At AndPlus Design, we have a solid group of people who have worked in marketing and software development for longer than we care to admit.  We have a set of tasks that we complete for each new search engine marketing client.  We’ve detailed a few of the major tasks that we complete below.

Google “Stuff”

The first thing we do is add your business to Google Maps.  Google Local is the best way to get your business on the internet, because Google is starting to lead its search results with items on a map that match the description.  For instance, do a search for “restaurants worcester, ma”.  What’s the result?  Please see the result we get:

Local results (And a client shout-out!)

As you can see, above the organic search results, you’ll find local results for restaurants in the Worcester, MA area.  This is a bit of a shameless plug, yes, but you’ll see that 8 months after Pagio, Inc. contacted AndPlus Design for SEO services, the site now comes up as the third most organic result for the search term.  They had great content, which is the first key to being found, but they were lacking in the optimization front, which we helped them fix.

The second of the google “stuff” we do includes generating a sitemap.  This sitemap identifies all the web pages involved in your website, then ranks them in accordance to their importance on your website as a whole.  For instance, the page that gives directions to your potential clients or patrons may not be as important (thanks to Google Maps and GPS devices) as the one which explains your menu, or what type of products you sell.  We would rank your home page most important, and the subpages different rankings under that.  Generating a Google sitemap is the next most important step in your search engine optimization tasks.

Code Review, Code Review, Code Review!

At AndPlus Design, our business was built around solid code.  We’re all engineers at heart, but are pretty great at design as well.  If you search the internet for what’s most important about Search Engine optimization, you’ll see that the consensus is that you have to have code which conforms to a particular standard.  When we finish our code, we always check the site for conformity against W3C standards.  The W3C is known as the authority of where the internet is going and what is known as “good code.”  The group has given us a valuable tool which allows us to validate our code against their standards.  The W3C HTML Validation service can be found here.  Here’s a quick list of our clients, we encourage you to validate their sites for yourself!

• Northeast Evidence Storage
• The Vitality Magazine

As you can see by the couple examples above (more can be found at our portfolio), our code is solid and it is always cross-browser capable.  That means we make sure all of our websites look the same in the four major browsers.

What makes *anyone* think that they can actually *outsmart* these engineers?

The answer is almost none of them can.  And those who do, are caught and these search engine corporations adapt to ensure they are not burnt in this way again.  This article is going to make some statements that may make you start thinking a bit differently about search engine optimization and Massachusetts SEO firms in general.  We’ll start slow.  Search Engine Optimization is not about driving traffic to your site.

Wait, what?

Search Engine Optimization is about optimizing your site underneath your website’s valuable content in order to give Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and others the ability to read and understand your website in the most efficient means possible.  Added traffic is most certainly a result of a properly optimized website, but again, SEO work is not about driving traffic to your site!  If SEO was about driving traffic to your site, there are many cheap ways of tricking visitors into visiting your site.  Would 100,000 visitors a day really matter if none of them were qualified leads?

The internet, and even cities like Worcester, has become clouded with those claiming that they have 5 step processes and sure-fire ways of making your website come up first in search engines.  How do they do this? Ask them point blank the following questions before engaging any SEO firm:

• Why does my website need to be optimized? We create pretty good content already!
• What exactly will you be changing on my site?
• What link exchange programs are you planning on engaging?  Are they considered Black Hat?
• Will you be putting my corporate information into any directories such as DMOZ, or Yahoo! ?
• What measurable goals will be set in order to know if what you did work?
• Will the work that you are completing affect my site’s pagerank?
• Should I set up a Pay Per Click campaign?

Technical Talk

Optimizing your site is key, because there are particular elements on your website which are visually helpful to your reader, but cannot be leveraged in search engines.  The most obvious of these elements are images.  Google and Yahoo send out computer programs called Spiders which read through a web page and collect certain information about the page.  This does include images, but they should be considered to be blind.  Since these Spiders cannot see the image, they rely on an tag inside code called alt (external link explaining ‘alt’ tags).  So, you may have a graph that explains how rain trends downward in the summer months but upward in the winter months, contrary to a popular opinion.  The image will mean nothing to search engines, despite its immeasureable benefit to your readers, unless the alt tag is leveraged.

Conclusion

Hopefully this article was helpful to you in making your decision for search engine optimization work.  We encourage any Worcester corporation or small business to contact us today to see how we may be able to help.

First Impressions are Everything

Have you ever met with a vendor or salesman and you just didn’t like him or her right away? It could be for a multitude of reasons. Maybe he or she didn’t look you in the eye, maybe the handshake was a “dead fish,” or maybe he just didn’t dress right to convey a professional image.

The truth is, it could be one or all of these reasons, but it cause the rest of the pitch to lose credibility. The same thing applies, if not more so, to websites. Think back to the last website you visited before this one. Did the site look like it was created in haste? Was the English grammatically correct? Was the site too busy? Did the site not allow your eyes to flow through the site reading the important information?

According to WebsiteOptimization.com, you have as little as 50 milliseconds before a user generates his or her first impression of your website. There are some use cases on the site as well to show why this may be true. The next time you are on a website, consciously evaluate when your first impression is made about a site. I’m sure, as these “scientists” are, that you’ll find your first impression happens quicker than you’d realize.

Do you use templates in your business?

Do you use the standard Microsoft Word templates for your invoicing? If so, it may be time to customize these templates. That is why more professional accounting programs (like Quickbooks, Quicken, etc.) allow you to customize the look and feel of your invoices and correspondence with customers, so that your company conforms to standards, but stands out from the pile of many invoices that businesses receive.

Websites are similar. Free website templates may be appropriate for personal blogs, people who are sharing pictures with family members, and other organizations who may not do business through their websites. If you are relying on your website to drive revenue to your bottom line, it is important that you invest time and effort into customizing it to your needs.

How AndPlus Design can help you

AndPlus Design is now offering our “Free Web Design” promotion throughout the month of June. Click the link to be taken to the details of this offer, and be sure to contact us to get more specifics on your next free web design. First Impressions are everything, allow AndPlus Design to help make your next first impression a lasting, positive one.

This post will deal mostly with user interaction in real-time, and will go into the following details:

• What do users do when they get to your site?
• How long are they staying?
• What pages are most popular?
• From which pages are they leaving?

The second post will go into the following details:

• Which pages are top “Exit Pages”
• How do we get users to stay?
• Expanding our traffic source through Google Adwords

Part 1 – Introduction

Google Analytics is a great way to gain visibility into who is visiting your website, what they are doing when they get there, how long they are staying on your site, and what the first and last pages viewed were.

1. What do users do when they get to your site?Google analytics gives great insight into what users do when they get to your website. In your content link, Google Analytics will show you which pages are most popular, and give you a line-graph of traffic on a daily basis.
2. How long are they staying?Google Analytics allows you to see the length of time users spend on your site, on a particular page, and how it compares to the average for both across all users.This number is the number you want to be maximized. The higher this number, the more interested the user presumably is in your content. If we are seeing very low numbers on a particular page which is designed to convey a large amount of content, we know that this content is boring the user and the user is losing interest in the content before he or she reads the page. This page needs redesign.On the same token, if we have designed a signup process or a payment entry system, and we are seeing that the time being spent on the page is abnormally large on average, we may consider removing some of the input fields, or adding an extra step to the process, so the user feels that there is more direct interaction with the site, and not so much data entry.
3. What pages are most popular?In the content picture above, you will see that the pages are listed in order of popularity, and there is a percentage of total visits next to the page as well. You may find that a page that you didn’t think was important is actually very interesting to your clientbase.For instance, one of our clients found that one of the most popular pages on their site was the biography pages! Something that started so innocent as to give a “face” to the company ended up being visited a lot more than we had thought it would be.Gaining visibility into this piece of information caused us to put more emphasis on the bio’s page, and to add features to this page that would drive revenue for the company. A simple link below the biography page to show a person’s favorite product, as corny as it may be, kept users interested in the site, the products, and let us keep the traffic on the company’s site, which direct affected the sales numbers.
4. From which pages are they leaving? AndPlus Design feels that this may be one of the most important pieces of information that a user can gather from Google Analytics. “Exit Pages” are pages that are last viewed on the website before the user left, closed his or her browser, or went to another site. These “Exit Pages” can be created accidentally on a site (links to external sites, bad javascript tags, etc.), or they can be a result of bad or non-attention-keeping content.

Conclusion

Google Analytics allows you to study ways of always driving your users to stay on your site. The ultimate goal of having a website is to have users come to your site, find value in the content you are offering, and to drive revenue from their visit. With the few points of interested discussed in this post, you have a great start in gaining visibility into what users do when they visit your site.

For more information on hiring AndPlus Design to install Google Analytics on your website, contact AndPlus Design Now!