This article from Cameron Chapman of SmashingMagazine.com explains the theory behind the different color families, with examples & analysis of how these colors are used on different website designs. Summarized below, colors are categorized by Warm, Cool and Neutrals, with subcategories by specific colors. Not just for web designers, color theory can be used by clients to determine their own branding and message they aim to send through their online presence.

Warm Colors

Warm colors include red, orange, and yellow and variations of those three colors. These are the colors of fire, fall leaves, sunsets and sunrises, and are generally energizing, passionate and positive. Use warm colors in your designs to reflect passion, happiness, enthusiasm and energy.

Red

In design, red can be a powerful accent color. It can have an overwhelming effect if it’s used too much in designs, especially in its purest form. It’s a great color to use when power or passion want to be portrayed in the design. Red can be very versatile, though, with brighter versions being more energetic and darker shades being more powerful and elegant.

The true red accents stand out against the dark black background, and give a powerful and high-end feeling to the site.

Orange

Orange commands attention in design without being as overpowering as red. It’s often considered more friendly and inviting, and less in-your-face.

The bright orange box draws attention to its contents, even with the other bright red elements on the page.

Yellow

Bright yellow can lend a sense of happiness and cheerfulness. Softer yellows are commonly used as a gender-neutral color for babies (rather than blue or pink) and young children.

Light yellows also give a more calm feeling of happiness than bright yellows. Dark yellows and gold-hued yellows can sometimes look antique and be used in designs where a sense of permanence is desired.

The bright yellow header and graphics used throughout this site give a sense of energy and positivity.

Cool Colors

Cool colors include green, blue, and purple, are often more subdued than warm colors. They are the colors of night, of water, of nature, and are usually calming, relaxing and somewhat reserved. Use cool colors in your designs to give a sense of calm or professionalism.

Green

Green can have a balancing and harmonizing effect, and is very stable. It’s appropriate for designs related to wealth, stability, renewal and nature. Brighter greens are more energizing and vibrant, while olive greens are more representative of the natural world. Dark greens are the most stable and representative of affluence.

The extremely muted greens of this site give it a very down-to-earth and natural feeling.

Blue

The exact shade of blue you select will have a huge impact on how your designs are perceived. Light blues are often relaxed and calming. Bright blues can be energizing and refreshing. Dark blues are excellent for corporate sites or designs where strength and reliability are important.

The light, muted blue of this site gives a very relaxed and calm impression.

Purple

Dark purples can give a sense of wealth and luxury. Light purples are softer and are associated with spring and romance.

The dark shade used here evokes the royal heritage of purple, which is very appropriate for the Asprey luxury goods brand.

Neutrals

Neutral colors often serve as the backdrop in design. They’re commonly combined with brighter accent colors. But they can also be used on their own in designs, and can create very sophisticated layouts. The meanings and impressions of neutral colors are much more affected by the colors that surround them than are warm and cool colors.

Black

Black is commonly used in edgier designs, as well as in very elegant designs. It can be either conservative or modern, traditional or unconventional, depending on the colors it’s combined with. In design, black is commonly used for typography and other functional parts, because of it’s neutrality. Black can make it easier to convey a sense of sophistication and mystery in a design.

The strong black accents on this site add to the overall sophistication of the design.

White

In design, white is generally considered a neutral backdrop that lets other colors in a design have a larger voice. It can help to convey cleanliness and simplicity, though, and is popular in minimalist designs. White in designs can also portray either winter or summer, depending on the other design motifs and colors that surround it.

White backgrounds are very popular on minimalistic sites, and provide great contrast to black typography.

Gray

Gray is generally conservative and formal, but can also be modern. It’s commonly used in corporate designs, where formality and professionalism are key. It can be a very sophisticated color. In design, gray backgrounds are very common, as is gray typography.

The grayish-brown here lends a sense of responsibility and dependability.

Brown

Brown is commonly used as a background color. It’s also seen in wood textures and sometimes in stone textures. It helps bring a feeling of warmth and wholesomeness to designs. It’s sometimes used in its darkest forms as a replacement for black, either in backgrounds or typography.

The orangish-brown here gives a very earthy and dependable feeling.

Beige & Tan

Beige in design is generally used in backgrounds, and is commonly seen in backgrounds with a paper texture. It will take on the characteristics of colors around it, meaning it has little effect in itself on the final impression a design gives when used with other colors.

The beige header background and other accents on the site lend a refined and traditional feeling to the overall design.

Cream & Ivory

Ivory can lend a sense of elegance and calm to a site. When combined with earthy colors like peach or brown, it can take on an earthy quality. It can also be used to lighten darker colors, without the stark contrast of using white.

The grayish-cream background here is made warmer by the orangish-brown accents.

Advertising Age’s list explains the most tweeted brands from last week – featuring a mix of pop culture and current events. The original title of the article, “Do People Tweet About Brands More Out of Hate Than Love?” arises from the amount of tweets that people produced, from complaining about a social network, namely, Twitter, to the downfall of a major television network. Controversy, as always, sparks conversation.

1. Justin Bieber – The young Canadian R&B/pop singer is trending these days because his new song, “Never Let You Go,” was released for download on iTunes this week, as well as a duet with Sean Kingston, and an appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” He also had his birthday March 1st.
2. Olympics - The 2010 Winter Olympics from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada ended last Sunday. There was a flurry of Twitter activity around the gold medal hockey games for both men and women.
3. Jonas Brothers - Fans of the Jonas Brothers from both Europe and South America wanted the band to tour there, a fan of theirs died in the Chilean earthquake, and Joe Jonas and Demi Lovato’s new song “Make a Wave” premiered Radio Disney.
4. BBC - People are tweeting about The BBC Trusts’ decision to close DAB stations 6music, Asian Network and to cut back on program spending by as much as 25%. Kristian Digby, host of BBC daytime TV show “To Buy or Not To Buy,” was also found dead at his home.
5. Twitter - Twitter trended due to crossing the 10 Billion tweet mark, users experiencing frozen timelines, William Shatner playing the dad in a tv show based on the Twitter account @shitmydadsays, and a @mashable post about Twitter’s valuation.
6. Alice in Wonderland – Tim Burton’s eagerly anticipated movie, “Alice in Wonderland”, opens in cinemas worldwide March 4th and 5th; starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway.
7. Galpao 29 - A Brazilian band that appears to have sent Twitter direct messages with links as part of a flawed marketing strategy.
8. #BETmessedUpWhen – People explaining when the network BET stopped entertaining its viewers. This topic was originally started by @spokenreasons.
9. #MeWithoutYouIsLike – MeWithoutYou is actually a band, and people are misinterpreting it to mean something else.
10. Bad Girls Club - TV show on the Oxygen network (USA) that follows seven girls living in a house with crazy and wild personalities.

Source: Advertising Age, adage.com

Few things are as frustrating as not being able to find a web page you are looking for. You’re cruising along when all of a sudden you click a bad link, or your finger slips and you type ‘r’ instead of ‘t’, or you know you got it right and your page has inexplicably disappeared – hey, we’ve all been there. Yes, when that moment comes and you are met with the standard “Page Not Found” message it’s more than a little annoying.

But sometimes it’s not so bad. When a designer takes the time to create a custom 404 page it adds to the user experience. Sure, you’re still a little annoyed you haven’t found what you were looking for – but running into an error page that’s funny or creative or just plain great to look at lessens the blow a bit. You might even stick around and give it another go instead of bouncing right off the site.

We love well done custom 404 pages – here are 35 of our favorites for your inspiration!

This week Amit Singhal, who led development of real-time search at Google, gave us a little insight into how Google is ranking tweets as a part of their real-time search efforts.

Tweets are a main component of Google’s real-time search results, but up until now there was very little information available about the algorithm used to rank these microblog posts.  One factor of their ranking doesn’t really surprise those in the SEO industry, as it is similar to Google’s PageRank technology used for websites in traditional search. Basically, Google judges the value of a website by looking at it’s link structure – how many links on the web are pointing to the site, and the number of pages linking to those linkers. The same is true for their ranking of tweets, just replace the word ‘link’ in the previous sentence with the word ‘follower’. Of course, quality comes into play as well – the better the reputation of any given follower, the better your reputation is as well.

“You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone–then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers,” his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely, Singhal says.

He’s quick to point out it is not a popularity contest, but it sure seems that way. Granted, judging number of followers may seem a good indicator of the level of clout one person has, but this model doesn’t take into account ‘tweet’ of originality. Say a small time reporter breaks a big story and tweets about it from their personal account, and then CNN tweets it from theirs – CNN will get the credit, while the reporter responsible for the news gets lost in the shuffle. Also, social media is a different ballgame than traditional websites, and using this rank method may not transfer well. If I place a link on my website to another page it is a very clear sign that I do, in fact, endorse that page – which may not be the case for all the people I follow. For example, I may follow competitors to keep track of my industry when I would never link to their site directly. Hopefully as real-time search develops Google will come up with a better way to deal with the Twitter account reputation factor.

Google has also developed a way to determine which tweets should show up for more common terms, such as celebrity names or current event keywords. The idea being to weed out spam and low quality tweeting from appearing in the results.  A common practice on twitter is to include  hashtags – basically the # sign following by the topic keyword. It’s a great way of keeping tweets about the same topic connected, and to get your tweet seen by those following the conversation. Unfortunately the practice that began as a useful organizational idea has been abused by spammers, and Google has determined it could be a red-flag marker of lower quality tweets.

Also, Google is scanning to find the “signal in the noise” to help sort through the tweets from different sources and viewpoints to determine the most up to the minute, relevant tweets for these popular terms.  They are essentially looking for a sudden influx of similar tweets, for example tweets that mention ‘hospital’ along with ‘Lady GaGa’,  and consider that evidence that the particular event mentioned is most relevant.

While real-time search encompasses many things and Google has intentions to continue refining their real-time results, Twitter updates are currently a major component. It’s nice to have the ranking factors those in SEM assumed were affecting tweet placement confirmed by the source.

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.

That’s what Google CEO Eric Schmidt said when responding to concerns raised about internet privacy and recent updates to the search engine.  The comment created a mini firestorm, with internet industry blogs and forums lighting up in discussion…  And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Over the last couple of weeks Google has made quite a few announcements that are rapidly changing the game for users and search marketers alike – and they are doing so pretty much under the radar.

The most noticeable change for the average user was Google’s inclusion of Real-time Search, currently in the form of “relevant” tweets.  You can read Google’s official announcement for the basics, the general idea being that users can now get an idea of what is happening right this second in regard to any given subject.  Seems like a good idea in theory, but check out this post from Rae Hoffman of Outspoken Media for a surprisingly scary look into how Google’s solution could go very very wrong.

The second change was the universal roll out of personalized search.  Until very recently, Google returned pretty much the same results for everyone. Meaning, if user A ran a query and user B ran the same query, they would get back the same results. This simply isn’t the case anymore. Again, I’ll point to Google’s official announcement of this to explain how it works. In a nutshell, Google now keeps track of your search history (for 180 days) and uses that to customize your results, whether you are logged in or not.  Sort of makes you view Eric Schmidt’s glib comment about internet privacy in a whole new light.

Now, personalized search results are not new. They were available previously as an opt-in service for those users with a Google account, this change makes personalized results the norm for every user, or, opt-out.  The problem with this is that the only mention of this change was a blog post, the one I pointed to above…that’s it. No space on the search pages announcing the change, no easily identifiable opt-out button, nothing.  A user would have to spot the ‘View Customizations’ link, or the ‘Web History’ link up at the top to realize that tracking is being used to customize – neither are particularly visible, and the average user won’t be that clued in. To me, and to many others in the industry blogging about these changes, it seems a little too ‘Big Brother’.

So what does all this mean for your SEO campaigns?

Rest assured, the ‘normal’ search results are dead.  For better or worse, the way Google handled this announcement ensures that very few users will opt-out of personalized results. However, the reality of the situation is that ‘normal’ results have been dying for a while now, and many of us saw these changes coming in one form or another.

The main strategies of your SEO campaigns won’t drastically change. At least in the beginning, there will still be tons of queries that return ‘normal’ results – until Google gathers enough data for users to personalize them.  Even when results are personalized, Google will still use their algorithm to rank those sites, and you’ll want to optimize so you have a chance of getting that top spot for any user.  First impressions are now more critical than ever, as the more a user clicks on your site from their results, the more likely it is you’ll jump to the top of that list.

There’s a lot of debate right now about whether these changes have Google moving down a dangerous path. In response to the privacy issue Mozilla’s Director of Community Development put up a blog post inviting users to switch to Bing.  It’s a big deal.  But it can be (and has been) argued that Google has a monopoly on the search industry, and as such I don’t see many users jumping ship because of these changes – especially when you consider the fact many won’t know about them.

Most Companies have ample opportunities to add banners throughout their sites. This can be a blessing and a curse. It does in fact give you a place to place information you want your customer to see, use, or call out. Sadly customers are being bombarded with information from all directions and they get banner blindness.

Banner n is not a new issue, it has been around as long as there has been web sites.  One of the reasons that people seem immune to the banners on your site could be that you expect them to “see” the banner as content for the site.  Recently I had a conversation with a client that wanted to put product information in the banner space on the side of the page. The reason was because they didn’t want to overwhelm the customer with information in the content area on the page and lose a sale.  (thankful, after many conversations we did NOT do this)

Many different researchers have concluded that the users eye will go to the content area of the page first even before they look at navigation.  No matter what colors, fonts or how large the banners are, customers equate banners as promotions and they get ignored.  Customers are tired of being burned with pop up banners that are unnecessarily distrating and not having the information they are interested in.

While this is a common issue that you can run into on your site, you should by no means discount banner ads all together. Well placed and  well worded banners will still attract the people you would like. Tips you should keep in mind:

1. Dont use the same banner on every page, this really will increase banner blindness.

2. Using links within your banners will give the banner the feel that the information is important.

3. Dont put content in the banner that is critical or and extension to the content on the page. (While you can use this area for complimentary information or for the logical next step you want a user to take, you dont want to have this be the only place for key info on the page)

4. Think about what the real goal of the banner is and design and distribute appropriately.

While we aren’t going to remove banner blindness anytime soon, there are ways to increase the usefulness of the banner location and how you display reasonable next steps for your customers.

The explosive growth of social networking sites in the past few years has led to quite a bit of clutter, and people are starting to notice. Whether you choose to go on a manual de-friending spree on Facebook, or use a tool like UnTweeps to ax followers on Twitter, you aren’t alone.

In his post Six Social Media Trends for 2010, David Armano says…

With groups, lists and niche networks becoming more popular, networks could begin to feel more “exclusive.” Not everyone can fit on someone’s newly created Twitter list and as networks begin to fill with noise, it’s likely that user behavior such as “hiding” the hyperactive updaters that appear in your Facebook news feed may become more common. Perhaps it’s not actually less social, but it might seem that way as we all come to terms with getting value out of our networks — while filtering out the clutter.

This makes sense, paring down your networks can allow you to get real value out of them. But now Sean Silverthorne at Bnet is asking what does this mean for all the companies flocking to social media as a marketing tactic?  Well, as so often is the case, if you’re doing it right it shouldn’t matter.

Yes, the fact that your target audience is paring down their network connections will undoubtedly make them harder to reach. Sending out a few intermittent tweets and counting on your customers to find and connect with you on their own just won’t cut it.  Social Media has become such a big trend that it may seem like the answer – or that easy button from the Staples commercials – when in reality it is simply just another tool in the toolbox. Companies who have success in the space realize this, and use the social media networks as tools to build up a loyal customer base – and actually continue to interact with them regularly. Which is why they make the grade the next time that particular customer goes to clean out his or her network. It’s about becoming a relevant resource and providing real value to your followers/customers.

Which is what quality online marketing teams have been telling their clients all along.

A few weeks ago Google Analytics became even more useful.  Instead of a measly 4 goals, webmasters are now allowed to track up to 20. It’s a given that you can probably think of more than 4 things you’d like people to do when they visit your site, now you can track and access that data without creating multiple profiles and switching back and forth. It’s welcome news to say the least.

There’s really no excuse for not having goal tracking set up within your analytics account. It’s essential to know how your SEO strategies are improving your site’s overall performance and your online marketing ROI. Setting up goals will allow you to judge this, not just by visits, but by the actions those visitors take.

Each profile in your account can have up to four “goal sets”, each of these sets can contain up to five goals.  In addition to the standard URL destination goal, analytics now has the option to track engagement goals – such as time on site and pages per visit.

URL Destination Goal Tracking

This type of goal is used when you want to know how many visitors came to a specific page on your site.  Webmasters can use this method for something as simple as keeping track of how many people visited a blog page.  It can also be used to track form submissions or registrations by entering the ‘thank you’ or confirmation page as the URL goal. When you set up a URL destination goal you have a choice between 3 different ‘Goal Types’, also known as ‘match types’. The type of goal that is appropriate will vary based on how your website is built and the page you are interested in tracking. Here’s a basic breakdown to help you decide which type is best for your goal:
Exact Match – to use this type of goal the URL entered as your goal must match the URL shown in the reports exactly. For example, if you want to track the page www.mysite/contact-us_thank-you.html, you need to enter /contact-us_thank-you.html as your goal.
Head Match – use this type of goal when the URL is the same for this step of the goal, but is followed by unique session or user identifiers.  Enter the URL but leave out the unique values. For example, if you want to track www.mysite.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&id=528, but the ‘id’ changes for each user, just enter ‘//checkout.cgi?page=1′. This will cause the goal to be counted no matter what id number is assigned.
Regular Expression Match – use this type to match your URLs. This is useful when the url is dynamically generated and can vary between users. For example, if a user could be coming from one of many subdomains, and your URLs use session identifiers, use regular expressions to define the constant element of your URL. For instance, ‘page=1′ will match ’sports.mysite.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&id=002,’ and ‘football.mysite.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&language=fr&id=19.‘

Time on Site Goal Tracking

A new goal available in Analytics is the Time on Site goal. This allows webmasters to create goals based on how long users stay on their site using hours, minutes and/or seconds.  For example, if you notice that visitors tend to become customers if they spend more than 5 minutes on the site, it may be worth keeping data on those visits that last. In this case you would simply select ‘Time on Site’ as the Goal Type and select greater than 5 minutes as the goal. You can also track visits that last less than a determined length of time.

Pages per Visit Goal Tracking

The pages per visit goal allows webmasters to keep track of visits that browse through a specific number of pages. Also known as ‘depth of visit’, this information can be valuable when determining how engaging your site is. Options of ‘more than’, ‘equal to’ or ‘less than’ a number of visits are available so you can completely customize how you’d like to use this goal.

While the data for these engagement goals has been available in Analytics for quite some time it’s nice to be able to set them up as goals and gain the ability to analyze it further. Obviously this is just a basic overview – there are many way to customize and break down your goal data, such as using filters, funnels, advanced segments and custom reporting. Google Analytics is a wonderful (not to mention free!) tool, stay tuned to the Stone blog for more tips, tricks and updates on using the program wisely down the road.

image from here

While Rachel Kuptz, who really is a big deal (@girlydrinks) wrote this a while back, the advice she gives is sound and still accurate today. While we miss her here at Stone IG we do know the wisdom of her online marketing passion. This was original posted October 2008.  I’m posting it again today as a refresher…

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So you have a great website name, wonderful design, perhaps a blog, and a few pages of content – you’re ready to go! A quick glance at your analytics, however, shows that only a few people are reading your blog, and you’re pretty sure that the IP address that keeps on showing up is actually your mom.

On top of word of mouth promotion to your clients and building up content, creating a few pieces of link bait can bring in additional visitors as well as establish links to your site – something that, in the long run, will help with your site’s SEO.

While you’ll still have to do a little bit of promotion after creating any of these pieces, a quality piece of content will help you to get your website – or blog – to the place you want it to be traffic wise. And won’t your mom be so proud….

1. Top 10 Lists
   Whether it be a Top 7, Top 10, or Top 100, lists tend to be a fan favorite when it comes to earning back links. Lists can also earn you expertise status if packaged correctly and can be a start to a series to expand on in future blog posts. Take for instance Time’s list of 50 Best Websites in 2008 or Web Worker Daily’s list of 12 Free Tools for Online Collaboration. Make the list as silly or as serious as you want, but make it unique. Hair Salon? Top 10 Cuts for Fall. Law office? The Top 5 Craziest Lawsuits in History. Restaurant? Top 100 Things You Can Use a Fork for Other than Eating. Make it fun, make it unique, and make it interactive. A good discussion piece will bring in quality links for time to come.
2. Checklists
   A few minutes of keyword research shows that people regularly look for terms such as SEO Checklist or Travel Checklist. Create a quick checklist of items your clients and potential clients would find valuable, then PDF it or make an interactive html page that can easily be printed out. Examples of link worthy checklists include a travel agency that puts up a To Pack List and the magazine that puts up a wedding registry checklist.
3. Contest
   Any contest will bring in a few back links to your site, just make sure to make it something people want to enter. Have a product that you can give away? A service that you can offer for free? Heck, money always works, as do gift certificates. Just tie in the contest to your business somehow. You can also use the contest as a way to gather additional email address by allowing contest entrants to subscribe to your rss feed or newsletter sometime during registration. Check out these sites that increased readership just by having a contest.
4. Competition with another blogger
   Friends with another blogger in your industry? Suggest holding a competition, such as bloggers John Chow and Shoemoney did, that cross promotes both of your sites. Whether it be a competition to see who can write the most posts in a month, grow the most traffic, or even sell the most of a specific product, a friendly competition can earn you some links as well as promote your site to a target audience.
5. Calculators and Widgets
   Since web visitors are often in the research stage when they’re visiting your website, offering up a tool that allows them to answer questions on their own can draw in a variety of links to your site. A bank could put up a calculator that allows people to calculate interest or try something silly like this Web 2.0 URL generator. Visit Widget Box for already created widgets and calculators that might help to conjure up some ideas. Perhaps our developer could come up with a Top 10 List generator
6. Resource List
   Create a page on your site that lists out every quality resource you would recommend in your industry. Examples of resources could include free tools, magazines and blogs relevant to your industry, or case studies and white papers that would be valuable to clients. Check out Agency Tool’s Web Design Directory that lists out a plethora of web design resources, or this fun list of “National Days.”
7. Offer Something Free
   Free consultation, free fonts, free images – people like free. Whether you offer a free consultation, product/sample, or even a download of advice or tips, promote the free item as something unique and valuable that only you are offering. This online fax company offers up a free fax service for those who don’t (yet) need regular online faxing services and this software company offers up a free trial download of their quality control software. You can also offer up a free eBook, online tool, or even email address.
8. Review a product
   Review a product, brand, or website that is related to your industry then let those people know that you reviewed them. Have a grocery store? Review some of the latest foods out and give them a rating. Attend an industry conference or convention recently? Review the latest and greatest in new products or recap a speaker’s presentation. Become the CNET, PCMAG, or TechCrunch of your industry.
9. Capture a Round Up of News
   Do you have a list of websites or blogs related to your industry that you frequent on a daily or weekly basis? If so, your potential customers may be interested in learning about them. If you have a blog, a weekly or monthly round up of all the blogs or news articles in your industry that interested you can garner in quite a bit of attention. Check out YumSugar for a fun example of a round up of restaurant and food related posts.
10. Expose a Trend
    Have you noticed a new trend in your industry? Keep an eye out for clients that are asking for something out of the ordinary, products that are selling out quickly, or ideas that you think may take off eventually – trends do have to start somewhere. You can also pick out trends from industry publications that clients may not read or visit sites like Google Trends or Digg to discover items that people are talking about.

If you were to pick something to do to your web site, that would be helpful, then Keyword Optimization should be on your list. Looking at the keywords or keyword phrases on each page can help you to Optimize your site and get better search results. A good rule of thumb to follow is to optimize each page on your site with no more than two keywords or keyword phrases. If you find that your page information could use more than a primary and a secondary keyword phrase then take the time to evaluate the page. Are you trying to say too much for the this page? Is your message getting muddled in too many thoughts?

Keyword phrases can range from two to five words and for your primary phrase you should think in terms of what you could say about the page in a minute or less. (Sometimes known as your elevator speech) It should be a sample of the most frequently searched terms for a given page. Your secondary phrase is still used in search although not as often as your primary phrase.

Doing this one thing on each of your pages should help you get higher page rankings and give you a good opportunity to really look at your content for updates that may be needed. (Sadly we don’t do this enough) Something to keep in mind though is remembering that you should speak to your customers FIRST and search engines second. If you forget about your target audience it won’t be helpful and it won’t matter who finds you.

Social media can be a fantastic marketing medium to keep in touch frequently with your website audience and notify them in a timely fashion of important updates. But, how do you find the time? Here are some ideas to help.

1. Use your news; reformat the same topic as an informal blog post, informative article, discussion topic, tweet, FaceBook post, YouTube script, and website page.
2. Maintain a monthly publication calendar with reminders to give a little nudge where needed.
3. Keep it short and sweet to make it easier to update often; the frequency of publication is more important than the length.
4. Make it real. If you want to keep people’s attention, make it informative and timely.
5. Create simple templates for each type of update (blog, press release, tweet, article, podcast, etc) so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time.
6. Enlist your colleagues. It only takes 4 people for weekly updates.
7. Don’t forget to include Search Engine Friendly links back to your website on your top keyphrases so that new web visitors can find and connect with you.

Google has introduced Google Merchant Center, the new face for the Google Base.   It will enable e-commerce businesses to upload product feeds to Google which will make the individual products searchable via the Google Product Search that was once known as Froogle.

The new name definitely makes more sense to the average users.   Apart from changing the name, Google has also removed “beta” element of Google Base Logo that indicates Google Merchant Center to be a polished edition of Google Base.

The brand spanking new home page is also talking about the benefits of Google Merchant Center.

Bing has been very visible at SES and other conferences to promote their new search engine and it’s webmaster tools functions. Is this clip from SES’s You Tube Channel, Alessandro Catorcini and Rajesh Srivastav, both of Bing, discuss Bing’s search engine usability with John Mulligan, SEO-PR at SES San Jose 2009.

They also discuss Bing’s API which is open to everyone to use at  http://www.bing.com/developers.  Just simply register for their application ID tp begin using all of Bing’s products to call its API.

They also point out that Bing has features such as the outbound and backlink functionality not found  in other search engine webmaster tools.

Here is the video:

Yesterday’s New York Times had an interesting article that describes web users feelings about advertisers tracking their web usage.    The article details recent results from a joint survey by Penn and Cal Berkley.  The survey indicates that two thirds of Americans object to online tracking by advertisers-and that number goes up once they learn the different ways marketers are following their online movements.

The study’s authors hired a survey company to conduct interviews with 1000 adult internet users.  The interview, which last about 20 minutes, included questions like “Please tell me whether or not you want the web sites you visit to give you discounts that are tailored to your interests?  Overall tailored ads did not appeal to 66% of the respondents.

A full breakdown is shown below.

Recently, the European Commission threatened Britain with sanctions  for allowing an Internet service provider to use a new advertising technology to track the Web movements of customers.

In the United States, lawmakers in both houses held hearings last fall on targeted advertising. The topic may be technical, but it has become a hot political issue. Privacy advocates are telling Congress and the Federal Trade Commission that tracking of online activities by Web sites and advertisers has gone too far, and the lawmakers seem to be listening.  Although no legislation came out of the deliberations, one broadband operator, Charter Communications of St. Louis, dropped plans to conduct a test of behavioral advertising technology after receiving protests.

Marketers are arguing that advertising supports free online content. Major advertising trade groups proposed in July some measures that they hoped would fend off regulation, like a clear notice to consumers when they were being tracked.

The most important thing is to bring the public into the picture, which is not going on right now.  So how do you feel about being “tracked”, the government wants to know.

Google announced a change to its search infrastructure and is calling the change “Google Caffeine.” Implying faster web results, the objectives of the next generation of Google were revealed in a Google Webmaster Central Blog post last month.

Three words are very prominent in the post:

1. CRAWL

2. INDEX

3. RANK

Google wants to do these three things ”as quickly as possible.”

Caffeine is coming on the heels of Microsoft’s new Bing search engine which has a knack for reporting news very quickly.   Not to be outdone, Google has created Caffeine to bring more relevant results to the search rankings faster.

Not only does Google want to be quicker on the draw, Google wants to be more efficient.   A recent New York Times article on job opportunities in statistics mentioned a Googler who had worked on a new Google algorithm model that “increased the chances that the crawler would scan frequently updated web pages and make fewer trips to more static ones.”

For search engine optimization, Caffeine certainly places more emphasis on marketers to keep their content updated and fresh.

comScore, Inc. has released their monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the United States search marketplace. In August 2009, Americans conducted more than 13.9 billion core searches, with Google accounting for 64.6 percent search market share. Microsoft Sites grabbed 9.3 percent market share, a 0.4-percentage point gain versus July 2009.

Google led the U.S. core search market in August 2009 with 64.6 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! (19.3 percent), and Microsoft (9.3 percent). Ask Network captured 3.9 percent of the search market, followed by AOL LLC with 3.0 percent.

Aug-09 vs.
Core Search Entity           Jul-09        Aug-09          Jul-09
——————           ——        ——          ——
Total Core Search             100.0%        100.0%        N/A
—————–            —–          —–            —-
Google Sites                         64.7%            64.6%         -0.1
————                  —-           —-            —-
Yahoo! Sites                          19.3%          19.3%            0.0
————                  —-           —-             —
Microsoft Sites                      8.9%             9.3%             0.4
—————                —            —             —
Ask Network                          3.9%             3.9%            0.0
———–                    —            —             —
AOL LLC Network                3.1%           3.0%              -0.1
—————                —            —            —-

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and
cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and
user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five
search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

You can read the full release here.

Yahoo announced the launch of their new and improved search format yesterday, you can read the official release here.   These changes were no doubt sparked by the recent partnership with MSN and Bing.

The previous changes introduced by Yahoo included a new Yahoo! homepage, improved Yahoo! Mail, high-quality video calling in Yahoo! Messenger, and a suite of new Yahoo! Mobile experiences.

Here are some key features of the new Yahoo Search page design:

• Feature-Rich Experience – This is meant for having a quick access to search features such as Search Scan/SafeSearch that help the users protect you from viruses, spyware and spam. Hence, it will be easier for people to the research documents that they have created during searching.

• Search Assist Expansion – This new design of the page will help the visitors use query assistance that is available directly below the search box. It has also been given on the left-hand column for quick access lower on the page, even when the Search Assist layer is hidden. For further assistance, Yahoo has added Search Assist to the search box on every Yahoo! page in the U.S. with the launch of a new universal header.

• Intelligent Search Results – This feature allows the users to explore results from sites and narrow results using different types of SearchMonkey structured data. In the past few months, it has been seen that some more enhanced results for product, local, entertainment, reference, social, and tech sites have been displayed automatically. With this new search page design, Yahoo claims that they have made it easier for the users to experience rich results from an increasing number of sites.

The new Yahoo Search page design not only makes search easier but also has an improved Page load and Perceived load times with a better inline data URI Images.

See the video below for in-depth info on the features.

Courtesy Yahoo Search Blog

Google made historic news yesterday by declaring they do not use the meta keywords tag. Okay, I am being sarcastic.  Google hasn’t used the meta keywords tag for a long time and any “SEO” should know that.   So why did Google blog about this, on the record?  At least two reasons, (1) people continue to sue over it by claiming copyright infringement and people confuse the meta keywords with the meta description, which Google does recommend to use.

So there are official posts from Matt Cutts, the Google Blog and Search Engine Land trying to erase any confusion from people who are new to this space.

If you want to know which meta tags Google does pay attention to, see this FAQ. Plus, Google’s JohnMu tweeted that Google also does “not adhere to the “revisit-after” meta tag,” if you wanted to know.

Finally, here is a video if you don’t want to read any of this:

With big boosts from search and mobile, combined with continuing shifts in spending away from traditional ad channels by marketers, WPP’s GroupM, the largest buyer of media in the world, is projecting that global Internet spending will increase 11 percent next year to almost $65 billion and account for nearly 15 percent of all measured media.

More specifically, interactive media will represent nearly one of every five dollars spent by marketers on media in the U.S. next year, according to the report release yesterday.   GroupM predicts that interactive media, primarily online, will represent 17% of the U.S. advertising marketplace in 2010, up from 15.4% in 2009.

That makes interactive the third largest medium in the U.S., behind television’s 44.2% share, and magazine’s 18.4% share of 2010 advertising budgets.*  According to GroupM’s estimates, interactive media will overtake newspaper’s U.S. advertising share this year.   Newspapers, which had a 14.8% share of U.S. ad spending in 2008, will fall to a 13.6% share this year, and a 12.4% share next year. Interactive media had a 13.9% share in 2008.**

We have talked about the shift in advertising dollars from newspapers to the web in previous blog posts.  Even the most widely read newspaper in the US, USA Today, wrote about this trend last March.

You can see a Google Maps listing list of newspapers that have closed here. I think for the majority of the newspapers, although their online ad revenue has grown, it is too late to fix their core business models to make it through the era of real time, mashed up, and twitter size news.

*Courtesy of AdWeek
**Courtsey of GroupM Release