Sep 18

Since I generally have an opinnion on most things, I figured I would share mine with you about Chrome. After using this browser for a couple of weeks now my overall opinion is “ok it’s not bad” .

I like that it was built from the ground up, if one tab isn’t working the entire browser doesn’t go to hell. You also have to really like the security features 

Continue reading »

Jun 24

Alright, so maybe I am late to this game, but I found a new feature on Google Maps - when searching for a place to rent a kayak in Wisconsin, I noticed this Continue reading »

Mar 03

Just thought I would share this - Since I use my iGoogle religiously, I thought I would share something very cool with all of you. You can now add your webmaster tools to your iGoogle page.

1. Visit Webmaster Tools and select any site that you’ve validated from the dashboard.
2. Click on the Tools section.
3. Click on Gadgets sub-section.
4. Click on the big “Add an iGoogle Webmaster Tools homepage” button.
5. Click the “Add to Google” button on the following confirm page to add the new tab to iGoogle.
6. Now you’re in iGoogle, where you should see your new Google Webmaster Tools tab with a number of Gadgets.

Enjoy!

Feb 26

You know them, you’ve seen them - run a search for Sony Electronics and you see the following result:

Sony Electronics

Welcome to the world of Sony: music, movies, TV, games and electronics.
www.sony.com/ - 93k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

Product Support

Drivers/Software

Search

Support

Create Repair Order

Accessories

Contact Support

of Sites

More results from sony.com »

 So you see your sitelinks included here are product support, create repair order, etc. According to Google these are automated. You can’t try to optimize for sitelinks. The reason for sitelinks - to help users navigate your site. These are links that Google sees as those links that you might find useful rather than clicking on the home page link and then trying to fumble around and try to find the accessories area.

Now this is generally speaking relevant to those very large sites, like Sony. Google says: “If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don’t think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them. “

Pretty straightforward - thanks Google!

Dec 29

How concerned are you about your landing page conversion rate? Hopefully your answer is a great deal.  What is the point of building a great site on first page of Google or Yahoo if your user clicks over, sees no call to action and clicks back to search for your competitors pages?  I was recently looking through Google’s analytics webmaster tools to dig in deeper and gain a better understanding of the breadth of the tools available. In their conversion university  is an area that describes the six steps to good conversion.  Most of these 6 steps are well known, especially if you have ever built any ecommerce type of website.  While I believe all these are essential, I especially like the 7th step, or the actual “test it” tip. You must test, test and test again. Test what works and more importantly what doesn’t is very important. Whether in paid either trying the old A/B split testing or a multivariate testing - be sure to test and make sure you applying those positives to your landing pages.  Happy Conversion and Happy Testing!