Look beyond basic listings
Of course it would naive to ignore the search engine completely but there are ways of appearing high on the listings without being at the mercy of changing algorithms. Many, if not all, search engines have sponsored listings and PPC (Pay Per Click) options where good performance can be achieved, at a cost.

In addition to this though, there are services like Google Places which often feed search results. These tend to be centred around locality and could certainly drive traffic should your business operate at a local level.

Social Media
The usual suspects (Facebook, Twittier and Linkedin) can be used to drive traffic to your site. Both Facebook and Linkedin have advertising streams so you can target specific users but you also have the opportunity to engage with customers who are already interested in your product or service. Actively engaging with potential and existing customers gives you the opportunity to offer tailored advice or put right any issues that would have otherwise gone unresolved. Also, don’t forget – their network can see what is going on and with each Facebook user having on average 130 friends, that’s a lot of exposure.

Blogging
Try to share your knowledge with your customers. You will know your industry more than most, so try to position yourself as an authoritative source on it and be the go to site for such information. Make it so people bookmark your page and if they don’t want your products or services now, there will come a time when they do. A well-written and relevant blog post will encourage sharing and a wider range of people will find you.

Traditional Marketing
Get offline! Traditional media still has a part to play. Letters, posters and flyers can push a large amount of traffic and if targeted correctly it ensure so that your marketing material gets under the noses of the correct people. It also allows you to reach non-techy people and they can get physically passed around and filed.

If you have any more ideas taht you would like to share please levae your comments below.

A magazine called .net is arguably the publication of choice for web developers and designers, and with me being a geek and all (well my friends describe me that way) I subscribe like many others. Buried towards the end of the issue I noticed a very interesting table which suggests that Google shouldn’t be the go to search engine when monitoring SEO:

Number of searches executed that resulted in a visit to a Website

Source

So as you can see, if your website appears on the result pages of either Bing or Yahoo, your site is statistically more likely to be visited. Admittedly these figures are from the US but I was surprised to see a difference of around 15% between Google and the other two mentioned, you just wouldn’t expect it – maybe it’s time we took a look at the other search engines, businesses owners certainly need to look at strategies that compliment search engines. I mean, don’t you think it’s a bit odd that businesses are totally dependent on a free service that they can’t control? Many businesses have apparently been affected by a recent Google update so it is wise not to put all your eggs in one basket…….afraid you’ll have to wait for the next post for advice on that!

Obviously Facebook will be at risk here but if you look past the features that, if we are being honest, appear in every social networking service known to man. Is Facebook really the main target here? Perhaps the most intriguing aspects or Google+ are the huddle and hang-out functionality. Huddle allows a sms free text conversation between groups of people and the hangout functionality enables a group of people to video chat at the same time. This will obviously be of great concern to Skype who not so long ago were acquired by Google’s biggest rivals Microsoft in a staggering $8.5m deal. The difference with Google+ is that it will allow people to stay in touch even if they don’t have cameras, microphones or a sufficient broadband connection available (on the move, developing countries etc.). If people can use one service in different scenarios it stands to reason that it will have a large uptake.

For what it’s worth, I think Google+ could take a big chunk out of Facebook’s market share, and if they were being honest they would love to do that as advertisers begin to dabble with advertising on social media sites. They just may do it to as it will have been engineered with the social aspect in mind, Facebook has had to adapt over the years and as a result, to my mind at least, is a clunky website with poor privacy handling – I bet they would do things differently given a clean slate. The problem with Google though, is that they are masters at generating hype but are prone to deliver products that are although technically brilliant are confusing to the average user (My view on Buzz). Time will tell and I can’t wait to see what happens….

Oh and wait until Google allows you to search real conversations (you heard it here first!).

Update (02/07011): With absolutely impeccible timing, Facebook and Skype have announced an interesting partnership that sort of undermines the whole article. Facebook will now allow video chat using skype, so now Google will be a bit miffed – keeping up?

Problems?

A quick search on the subject uncovers two main concerns that both users and developers have that may cause Google problems in the long run:

App overload

If the tools are made available for everyone to create apps, it is feared that there will be an influx of useless and poorly designed apps that haven’t gone through the rigorous testing processes that professional developers go through. In fact the cynical people amongst you may event think that this is a way for Google to increase the number of apps that they offer to look better in comparison charts with Apple.

The creation of poorly designed apps is a very real concern but I think that it is only problem when looking at one destination for the apps – the app stores. This technology will allow users to create useful apps that they only intend to be used by themselves, allowing them to maximise the devices they own. The app stores will have to rely on the rating systems and the wider community to help ensure the better apps are pushed to the user.

Scammers

If everyday users can create apps, that means more scammers and spammers can create apps. This is more an issue with Google’s laid-back acceptance of Apps rather than the tools themselves. As with everything online users will need to be vigilant and think before downloading and deciding on passwords and personal details submitted within it.

Possibilities

Despite these concerns, empowering more people to realise their ideas will encourage innovation. Solutions like this will close the digital divide and I think some of the concerns stem from the fact that it looks, on the surface, that developers will be out of a job. It is worth remembering that drag-and-drop solutions can only do so much and they will never satisfy everyone’s needs. Just like the surge of drag-and-drop website creators, for a professional looking and functionally rich product, a team of developers and designers will still be needed.

I have summarised some of her points below along with a number or other hints and tips that you may find useful.

Ordering

Perhaps the simplest thing you can do is to check that the order in which you load CSS and JavaScript is correct. Within the head you should load CSS files first and then the JavaScript files, this is because JavaScript files can be downloaded in parallel with the CSS files but JavaScript files come down in sequence.

Further Information

Compression

If you enable Gzip compression and a webserver knows this is available, the server notifies the client. You can compress many external resources, such as JavaScript files which have to be loaded each time a request is made by the browser. Using this compression will reduce the amount of data that needs to be loaded and so can increase load time of such elements by around 70%.

Further Information

Combination

Where possible combine your CSS and JavaScript files so that the browser reduces the number of resources it needs to load. For example if you have three JavaScript, try and combine them so that only one file needs to be downloaded and not three.

Further Information

Another combination technique is utilising Image Sprites. If a web page has, for sake of argument, 20 common images, then the browser has to request and load twenty separate image files. The idea behind an image sprite is that you put all of the images into one image file and then use CSS to display the relevant image – thus using only the one image file.

Further Information

Spread out downloads

You may be requesting resources (images, maps etc) from many different hostnames. Browsers only allow a maximum number of concurrent connections (should be 2 but newer browsers offer more) at any one time. If you are requesting more resources than this from one hostname, it will only download the maximum number allowed at any time and queue the rest. If you could spread these (evenly) over more hostnames then less will be queued as each hostname is allowed its concurrent downloads.

Further Information

Tidy Up

You should always do this but building sites in a clean and efficient way will undoubtedly improve load times. There are obviously a number of things you can check and these include:

• Specify image dimensions – take the guess work out of it for the browser
• Optimise and scale images – the browser won’t need to do any extra work
• Remove unused CSS and JavaScript – reduces the file size and allows the browser to find information quicker
• Use efficient CSS selectors – keep it simple and don’t over define
• Serve resources from consistent URL – eliminates duplicate downloads
• Avoid bad requests – removes wasteful requests.

Further Information

Tools

There are a couple of tools that you can utilise to analyse the performance of your site. If you are signed-up for Webmaster Tools you will see a link under ‘Labs’ with the title ‘Site performance’. This will give you information about how long your site takes to load and how that has changed over time. It will also tell you how quick it is to load compared to other sites on the web.

There is also an add-on for Firefox called Page Speed which is provided by Google. This tool will analyse your site and tells you what you are doing well and not so well. Most importantly it doesn’t only give you an overall score, it gives hints and tips that will rectify any problems.

Their demo shows the boot process — complete with the Tux Linux mascot. Wang used Android for browsing, receiving a text message, answering a phone call and playing music. The phone is set up with a dual-boot configuration and the video begins with the device running iPhone OS.

iPhone Dev Team – wikee.iphwn.org

Watch the YouTube video…

Before I get into the few points I would like to make I have a confession to make. Despite being a web-developer who likes playing with new technologies, I haven’t exactly taken to Social Networking, Facebook in particular. Even with this in mind I cannot see why anyone would stop using Facebook, Twitter or even services like StumbleUpon to use it.

It shows status updates but so do Twitter and Facebook. You can share links, but loads of other sites do that, it ties into Gmail but I don’t want it to (I haven’t got an account) and perhaps most annoying of all, the sharing of sites seems to revolve around images and video. Now I’m going to let you into a little secret, and I will whisper it, some people actually like to read and learn on the Internet.

With all this in mind I just think, above all else, they are just too late. They have tried and failed before with Orkut so why will this work? If anyone wants to leave a comment feel-free but why not just send me a Wave about it?

As web developers we focus a lot on accessibility and usability. This story made me realise, that as web technologies have progressed (explosion of video, music sharing etc.), accessibility has struggled to keep up with it. Sites like YouTube effectively offer content that is predominately inaccessible by deaf users and that is obviously a major problem (I must point out that they have used captions for a while but users have to physically add them).

From our technical vantage point this is also an interesting development as processing speed will undoubtedly be an issue, it will be very interesting to see how quick and ultimately how usable it is. As with all accessibility measures that are put in place it also helps a much wider audience. Consider a user who doesn’t have access to sound or can’t hear it – mobile users in a crowded public place for example.

The solution was devised by a Google employee who is deaf himself. I think that acts as a reminder that it is usually possible to make things accessible and no amount of excuses or barriers will change that!

Update 25/11/09:

Thinking back to my dissertation, one of the major problems with video on the web was that of indexing and searching. Extracting content from video has always been difficult due to the amount of information stored in every frame. This technology could help this process as it enables speech in the video to be extracted and stored without taking up a lot of room. This means it is then searchable. Watch this space.

Google – Launched 2001

The beauty of Google is the simplicity of its design and the understanding that users want access to information quickly and easily. The design is very simple but deliberate, although recognisable, this example shows that simple changes, such as fonts can make all the difference to your design.

FaceBook – Launched 2004

FaceBook or Thefacebook is one of the successes of recent times. What we can learn though is that it is important to have a clear target audience in mind. Thefacebook was designed to connect people at colleges but it has taken over work places, schools and social settings. Meet your core user’s needs and then expand!

MySpace – Launched 2003

MySpace may have fallen behind FaceBook in recent times but I think this one is very interesting. The design looks very corporate but they must have realised that this design wouldn’t appeal to the people who were using the site. If a web designer mis-judges the users of a site it is important to change tact and keep them interested.

Twitter – Launched 2006

Few sites have polarised opinion like Twitter has. That is a whole new debate for another time but this image clearly shows what its original intent was…..”What are you doing?”

BBC news – Launched 1997

Finally I have included the BBC website. This design was way back in 1997 and it reminds us what we often forget. When we are thinking about just when to cut the gradient off, whether the icons are understandable or should we use rounded corners or not, as that is so last year, always remember this…content is king!

There you have it. If you want to see more read the article or use the Wayback Machine and if you find any good ones, let us know.

After the recent focus on “real-time” search it is important to point out that this is not it, but you tell Google where your profiles are and they do the rest. It shows posts, updates or reviews that people in your “Social Circle” have made that are relevant to your search and shows them alongside usual listings.

It appears that the idea behind it is that the opinions or views of those that you network with will be more relevant to you as they should, in theory, have similar things in common. This idea does raise a few of issues though:

• It assumes that everyone in your immediate social circle have things in common and their contacts too. In reality users of social networking sites often add contacts/friends to increase their numbers or for political reasons. For those of you who are here from my LinkedIn profile I value you all
• Related to the above point it does not seem to take into account that you will communicate with some contacts more than others. By definition the opinions and posts of these people should be ranked higher than the others
• Some people may not be comfortable with their posts being made publicly searchable or they may not want other people to be aware of their contacts.

Saying that it is an interesting development and we need companies like Google to keep pushing the boundaries and to explore new avenues and I see this as a welcome addition. Oh and it’s only a matter of time before we get that real-time search.