Take a look at Google.com , then Facebook, then flavour of the month Twitter.com. Are these sites attractive? Why are they so successful? – they’re useful.

Sure, it helps if people can actually read your information and navigate your site. But if you’re a small local business do yourself a favour next time you start working on your website – don’t do any work on the design unless it’s got a serious problem. If you’ve got to mess with the design don’t waste time, try black on white text with little tasteful graphics . Then use the rest of your budget to do changes to get customers in contact with you

How do most new visitors see your site? Do they see the fantastic new facade you blew half your budget on? No, they see you like this:

How most websites are seen

That’s right, the first place they see you is as a short snippet in a search results page or a link a friend sent them. Nothing about your attractive design gets them there.

They don’t even see the site when they make their decision to go to it. You can’t edit what the friend says with the link, but you can change what the snippet in the search results show.

Search engines try to give local results to searchers. No two users are going to get the same search results. If the search engine has definitive address data and local sites referring to your site, it will boost your rank locally. If you’re B2C this is critical. The search results pages replaced the yellow pages some time ago for most people.

With phones used for GPS and geo-targetting being used to serve up search results, it’s critical you show up in local searches.

It is also critical that what people see of you in those tiny search summaries grabs them more than the sites above and below you.

Here are some great ways to improve your sites “look” and local appeal:

• Make sure you own your Google Maps entry – it’s EASY do it here: Google Local
• Make your store locator / map on your site easy to get to.
• Even better – add the address and phone to the bottom of every single page and link it to your newfound Google Maps entry
• Check your snippets for search results and fix them either by editing your site or sitemap or webmaster tools
• Make a Facebook fan group even if your product isn’t that fun or sexy. Make it just to make sure someone else doesn’t do it for you later.
• If you have the time, search for yourself or your products and see what you find. A few posts to the right places may drive tons of interested customers your way.
• If you’re going to go for a full-on redesign make sure you don’t lose the pagerank you already have, use 301 redirects on the old pages

Today everyone is picking up on Matt Cutt’s story confirming Google does not use the keywords meta-tag in web ranking. Most people assumed they never used the Keywords tag for search rank, this confirms it. But one major point he makes is they DO use the Description tag in the search listings. So you should be sure that each individual page’s Description tag is unique, fits in a search result and has as much pull as it can.

Opera has always been one of my favourite browsers for its innovations but gets little recognition from web users. Opera had tabbed browsing, full page zoom and the “speed dial” feature before any of today’s major browsers. Basically, if you want to know what new features will be coming in the next version of your favourite brower, just check out Opera and you’ll likely find it there already.

The only reason that I hadn’t been using Opera exclusively is because in previous versions, it did not display some web pages correctly. It seems to be getting better with that. Also, the last time I looked, I was not impressed with its “widgets” (known as extensions in Firefox), but there seems to be a lot more widgets available now. Another thing I did not like was that it did not have an “ad block” feature. It was stated by someone at Opera that they would never include this feature. Opera has a content filter feature, but it’s a bit complicated to use. I finally was able to get it working but I’m not impressed with it.

In addition to adequately addressing the issues I had above, Opera also has some other cool features (a few of which, I have not seen in other browsers). I will mention a few of my favourites.

Arrange Tabs
You can arrange your tabs to be cascade, tile vertically or tile horizontally. This is extremely useful for comparing websites without have to switch back and forth between tabs. To do this, you just need to right-click on the tab bar and select “Arrange”.

Open Previously Closed Tabs
This can be accomplished by just going into your history and looking for the tab you closed but this can be tedious. Opera has a single button that shows your most recently closed tabs. It’s located on the far right of the tab bar.

Open In a Different Browser
If for some reason the page is not displaying correctly for you, you can right-click and select “Open With” and choose another browser that is installed on your computer.

Tab Preview
If you mouse over a tab, it will show a small screenshot of what’s in the tab. Very useful to quickly find the tab you are looking for.

Notes
There is a feature that lets you add quick notes. I’m not sure if I’d use this feature but for people to visit a lot of websites, they might want to leave some notes about certain sites.

Read To Me (Speak)
Opera has a feature where you can highlight the text and have it read the text to you.

One-click Add to Bookmark
Recently, someone had complained to me that after upgrading to Internet Explorer 8, the single-click “Add to Favorites” button was replaced with a “Add to Personal Toolbar” button. He was very upset about this because he was used to having that button. Opera still has this button, but you need to customize your tab bar to add it.

Opera Turbo
A new feature of Opera 10 that isn’t of much use to me but may be useful to someone else, is Opera Turbo. Opera Turbo speeds up browsing on a slow connection. It doesn’t display pages correctly but if you only care about the speed, then this may be something you’d be interested in.

Opera 10 Browser - A screenshot of me drafting this blog. (edit - left, preview screen - right)

Some of these features are available in Firefox via extensions but they are all built in as part of the Opera browser! And they are all nicely integrated into the interface so that they are not in the way but are easily accessible. Another thing I’ve also heard is that Opera is working on speeding up the execution of javascript. What that means (for those of you who aren’t programmers) is that certain pages that use a lot of (client-side) programming, will load faster.

If you’re interested in new innovative ideas for browsers that aren’t available in most other browsers, you should check out the Opera browser.

Sometimes we can get overly concerned with the SEO side of things and forget that the most important person visiting a website isn’t Googlebot – it’s the human you developed the site for.

Once in a while you may catch yourself disregarding all other factors while designing and structuring a website just to improve search rank. SEO tunnel-vision creeps in and you forget that the user experience is more important. If you cover basic indexability and content volume, you really can ignore quite a bit of SEO.

Yes there are times when you should be putting SEO forefront, say when actually doing SERP checks and adjusting content. If you’re targetting specific SERP competitors sure your landing pages are not intended for users but if you keep them in mind you’ll lower the bounce rate on those pages and get better logn term traction as opposed to a short term SERP fix.

The best site is the one that serves the needs of its users. Yes you need to follow the basic rules of SEO but they shouldn’t be #1 on your todo list. The basic best practices of SEO should be followed but they should be in the back of mind.

If every user coming from a search leaves your site immediately because you haven’t designed it with them in mind, you’re not going to have much success.  Remember to engage the user, keep the site refreshed for user and bot alike.

Also while unlikely, remember it is possible for a site with no pages in the SERPs to be a success! if your site is useful some good old word of mouth to the right forums and groups can get you more than enough traffic to have success.

With all the confusion about where to send your messages if you want to reach your communications target, we seem to be in the eye of a media transition.

Flipping from Facebook, to Linkedin, to Twitter the other day, it occurred to me that in olden times this was like getting to watch a television show.

In the 1950s, the last time we have a major transition in media usage, advertisers were trying to cope with the change from radio and print to television.

The big question: how to deal with TV?

The TV shows were usually run by sponsors which may surprise us today. Lux Video Theatre, Texaco Hour, and others — not to mention the soap operas that were owned by P&G and other soap companies.  Advertisers quickly discovered that documentaries about how your made your rubber boots was not interesting enough to attract and sustain attention.  But they tried.

On early TV, commercials were integrated right into the action. In a sitcom, the actors would gather to discuss something and you would find them continuing on into a Maxwell House commercial. And commercials would be up to two minutes long, which feels like a feature film when you watch one today. The actors poured over all the silly details of the products they were hawking.

Advertisers on TV used the same logic as they had used for radio. Use the content to attract attention and then provide your message. So what’s so different today? True, television migrated from sponsorship of shows to purchase of scattered announcements in many shows. But the use of media content as a lure to attract attention to their message remained.

All the techniques advertisers used are based on this. So what about the internet? Websites can give information in painful detail about a particular product or company.

Just like some of the early TV shows, early websites were documentaries. But who goes looking for information on product differentiation. Web 2.0 for advertisers saw a proliferation of action sites, sites with program content controlled by advertisers.

Initially these promotional sites were perishable relating to contests or issues.  Content was attractive because customers were given a chance to win something, or get something for free.  In other words there was a financial incentive.

So how do you drive traffic to your website? Make your site interesting, intriguing and entertaining.  That means the site has to continually change to be engaging.

So that brings us back to content asa one of the best ways of attracting attention to an existing site.

One thing that is overlooked as a way to increase site traffic is telling people about a site. That means use of traditional advertising techniques – putting your website in all your materials and trumpeting it.

And use of traffic directors like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, MySpace, Youtube and their kindred to tell prospects why they should pay attention to you. Which should lead to why they should buy. But sites still need content in order to sustain interest and attention.

Too many sites have inactive News sections, blog sections with one or two entries, and other topical sections without updates. That’s like running the same commercial for years at a time. And site wearout can be quick if its value is just for reference or downloading manuals.

Some advertisers, like Evian’s baby skaters most recently, have gotten better attention worldwide by posting on YouTube than they get on traditional TV.   The skating babies is the latest in a series that included baby synchronized swimmers, break-dancers, etc.  But does it connect to water for consumers?  Or is the water message left in the babies’ diapers?

It all depends on how willing the advertiser is on taking a risk and whether the entertainment value of their video translates to awareness, persuasion value and sales.

Part of this transition period from television as the dominant medium means there is a lot of risk with hope of questionable reward for advertisers. Like before, content is king. Getting the content right means trusting communications professionals like never before.

We could take a lesson from the way the Motion Picture Industry stages the Oscars as a promotional event for their product. The award show format is just editorial content is to get the target to pay attention to the advertising message. Their product as a hero.

Actually the Motion Picture folks have done such a good job, the news media actually think the Oscars are news. Mind you, this is the same media who dedicated more than a week full time to cover Michael Jackson. They know hard news when the see it.  But duping the news media is a tried and true technique for all of us trying to get attention for our clients.

We can also take a lesson from media outlets who are rapidly transforming their businesses from printing and broadcasting to web.

While the media transition continues, the winners will be those who understand its transition and can think ahead to the kind of media world that will be, rather than the one that is.

Just like other media, there are many many choices on the Internet, many media buyers throw their hands up in the air , saying its too fragmented. But there is an opportunity – in that fragmentation it’s often very easy to find highly specialized sites and user groups that contain a very specific target, who are avid users and very interested in your products and services. On top of that the less-avid users or potential users are going to end up reading the reviews, comments , complaints and stories of these customers.

When they do a search before buying something the trusted reviewers pages are going to come up first (usually).

Sometimes it’s as easy as using the user and geographic targeting tools sites like Google and Facebook have, with their large userbase it’s fairly easy to get to your audience with the tools they provide you.

In more niche categories you’ll want to find out where the customers are congregating online. Usually a couple hours of legwork will give you a good idea of where people interested in a topic visit frequently, and you end up with a good shortlist of sites to buy ads on or participate on.

Pretend to be a user looking to buy or research your product, see where searches get you.

It comes down to – advertise where the customers are. Sure fine-tune it and try to get it exact as you can on demographics but really all that matters is finding what site(s) your customers are visiting.

My new career seems to be pointed toward Blog Pimping.  Why, you might ask?  Okay, pretend you did.

It is of no consequence to slave away churning out the regular blather that is a blog.  With no readers your blog is… meh.

So how to get them?

Well first, get past the usual blather and actually come up with something catchy and interesting.  Don’t afraid to be controversial, if they love you or hate you – no matter as long as they talk about you.  People have limited time and attention.  If it has no hook, it gets no look.

Tell people about it.  Forward links via eBlasts.  Share links on social networking sites – the usual suspects Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, plurk, MySpace, plaxo, MSN Spaces, Digg, StumbleUpon, YouTube
and so on.  Flickr “behind the photo” blog entries can be good.  Be a slut.  Give it to everyone.

Get other people to pimp out your blog for you – this is the genius behind stumbleupon – get someone to thumbs up and recommend your post.  It does wonders because you get cred.  Get people to comment and forward links to your blog on to others.

Ask for guest posts. Ideally you want someone who has more traffic than yourself. But experts in an area you write about are great.

Include links to higher traffic sites in your blog.  Troll other blogs that are more popular and provide comments that link back to your blog.  Or be one of the first few trackbacks.

How do you find these?  Google using the Google blog search (it is in the drop down “more” on the Google search page).

In fact, if you are thinking of doing a blog on a subject, find out who has done something like yours before you even write so you can respond or take a different slant to it.

In theory you should be able to generate a good list of feeds in your expertise area, if your blog is to feed you expect to be watching for new posts all the time. Some higher profile industry specific aggregators can be good to get stories to cover.

Sometimes all you have is the title. Taking the opposite point of view gets traffic – if you’re the first to do it and you actually wrote something thoughtful. Title linkbait rules apply just like in everyday SEO. People will usually forgive a little title trickery if the articles are well written and on topic.

Keep pumping out the material.  An occasional “flash of adequacy” is not enough.  Keep flashing.  Not everything will be brilliant, but keep trying.  There is no sense pimping if you are not pumping.

Now if the blog is just to help your site’s SERPs, the adequacy may be adequate. A load of text somehow relevant will help, no matter how badly written.

Make sure your RSS feed works so readers will know when you are having that stroke of genius.  And create the tags people will be looking for including using them in the title of your post.  Getting in other people’s blogroll – can be a huge boost of interested readers.

Now, should I give up the day job and become a full fledged Blog Pimper?

Probably not.  Unless you are a Hilton (either one), Adrianna Huffington or Rob Scoble — keep the day job.

You may have noticed that Microsoft has included a new version of Internet Explorer (Internet Explorer 8 ) in one of its recent updates. Here’s what Microsoft as to say about some of the new features of IE8.

The question is, should you install it? Unless you are eagerly looking forward to the new features of this update, I would recommend that you not install it just yet. As it is still fairly new, it may contain some bugs.

Some people are noticing that it’s causing their computer to slow down or freeze. Some things you can do to help speed it up is to remove some of the features that may be causing it to slow down your computer, such as, InPrivate Filtering and SmartScreen Filtering.

By default, InPrivate Filtering analyzes the websites you visit and the content providers they use, but does not automatically block them. You can choose to allow or block any content provider that InPrivate Filtering identifies as receiving information about your browsing. Alternatively, you can have InPrivate Filtering automatically block any content provider, or you can turn off InPrivate Filtering.

To turn off InPrivate Filtering, follow these steps:

1. Open Internet Explorer by clicking the Start button , and then clicking Internet Explorer.
2. Click the Safety button, and then click InPrivate Filtering Settings.

   

3. To turn off InPrivate Filtering, click Off.
4. Click OK.

SmartScreen Filter helps to protect you in three ways:

• It operates in the background as you browse the web, analyzing webpages and determining if they have any characteristics that might be suspicious. If it finds suspicious webpages, SmartScreen will display a message giving you an opportunity to provide feedback and advising you to proceed with caution.
• SmartScreen Filter checks the sites you visit against an up-to-the-hour, dynamic list of reported phishing sites and malicious software sites. If it finds a match, SmartScreen Filter will show you a red warning notifying you that the site has been blocked for your safety.
• SmartScreen Filter also checks files downloaded from the web against the same dynamic list of reported malicious software sites. If it finds a match, SmartScreen Filter will show a red warning notifying you that the download has been blocked for your safety.

To disable SmartScreen Filtering, follow these steps:

• Open Internet Explorer 8.
• Click the Safety button, and then click SmartScreen Filter and Turn Off SmartScreen Filter.
• Select Turn off SmartScreen Filter and click on OK.
  Note: This is if it SmartScreen Filter is currently enabled.

Another thing you can do that may help is click the Compatibility View button, which will cause IE8 to show web sites has if it was an older version of IE.

If you have already installed IE8 with great regret, and none of the above help to make it work better for you, you have the option of uninstalling it and revert back to IE7 or install an alternate browser, such as, Firefox.

From the Microsoft Website [ Source ]

Note If you are not sure which version of Windows that you are running, or if you need help verifying that you are an administrator, click here to determine your environment ( http://support.microsoft.com/gp/admin ) .

Important You cannot uninstall Internet Explorer 8 if it is set as not removable. This occurs if you install Internet Explorer 8 before you install Service Pack 3 (SP3) for Windows XP. If this scenario applies to you, then you must uninstall SP3 before you can uninstall Internet Explorer 8. For more information about this issue, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
950719 ( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950719/ ) You cannot uninstall Internet Explorer 7 or Internet Explorer 8 after you install Windows XP Service Pack 3

Steps for Windows Vista or for Windows Server 2008

To uninstall Internet Explorer 8, follow these steps:

1. Close all programs.
2. Click Start, and then click Control Panel.
3. Click Uninstall a Program under the Programs category
4. In the Tasks pane, click View installed updates.
5. In the list of installed updates, double-click Windows Internet Explorer 8.
   Note If Windows Internet Explorer 8 does not appear in the list of installed updates, try the alternative steps for Windows Vista or for Windows Server 2008.
6. In the Uninstall an update dialog box, click Yes.
   Note If you are prompted for an administrator password or for confirmation, type the password, or click Continue.
7. Follow the instructions to uninstall Internet Explorer 8.
8. When the uninstall program is finished, restart your computer.

Steps for Windows XP or for Windows Server 2003

To uninstall Internet Explorer 8, follow these steps:

1. Close all programs.
2. Click Start, and then click Control Panel.
3. Click Add or Remove Programs.
4. In the list of currently installed programs, click Windows Internet Explorer 8, and then click Remove.Note If Windows Internet Explorer 8 does not appear in the list of installed updates, try the alternative steps for Windows XP or for Windows Server 2003.
5. Follow the instructions to uninstall Internet Explorer 8.
6. When the uninstall program is finished, restart your computer.

Operating System: Windows

Sometimes our clients asks us computer related questions. I will try to answer some of those questions here. One question is, ‘how can I take a screenshot of my website?’. Here’s a simple tip on how to take screenshots on any Windows computer, even if you don’t have Photoshop.

1. If you want to capture the entire screen, press the “Print Screen” button on the upper right corner of your keyboard. Mine says, “PrtSc”. If you want to capture only a specific window, click on the window to select it. Then press Alt+Print Screen. The Alt button can be found on either side of the space bar.
2. Open the Paint program. By default, it should be located in Start Menu > All Programs > Accessories.
3. In Paint, go to the Edit menu and select Paste.
4. If you are happy with your screenshot, go to step 9. If you want to crop your screenshot, select the crop tool and select the area you want to crop.
5. Go to the Edit menu and select Copy.
6. Go to the File menu and select New. It will ask if you want to save your changes. Select No.
7. Go to the Edit menu and select Paste.
8. If your selection is smaller than the page, you can resize the page by pointing your mouse on the bottom right corner of the canvas area and drag it to the size you want.
9. Select the File menu and select Save. Change the “Save As Type” drop down to JPEG.

How to Capture a Screenshot from Windows Media Player

To capture a screenshot from Windows Media Player, just follow the instructions above. The only thing to note is that you need to change the Video Acceleration setting.

To change the Video Acceleration setting, right-click on the top bar in Windows Media Player. That will bring up the popup menu shown below.

Select Tools > Options. Then, select the Performances tab. Slide the Video Acceleration setting to half way, if it isn’t there already. Decreasing the Video Acceleration will decrease the quality of your video playback. It may also cause occassional freezing during playback, so it is recommended that you change the setting back to Full once you are done making your screenshots.

This comes up all the time at work and home for me. Someone needs to send big files too large to email,  or a printer / webhost has given them an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) login that they have no idea what to do with. Many mail servers reject messages over 5 or 10 megabytes so it’s fairly commonplace to have to find a way around that limitation. The best way to send files is using the program Filezilla for FTP (and SFTP, a more secure file transfer protocol required by some sites). But in some offices you won’t be able to get Filezilla installed by the IT department. And in some places the firewall will block FTP.

To make it worse, FTP doesn’t work for uploading in IE or Windows Explorer 75% of the time, and Firefox doesn’t even support uploading (though you can add it to Firefox with FireFTP ). If you can’t get Filezilla working here are some places that are web-based and extremely easy to use to send files. They usuallly have no problem with firewalls.

If you need to send images or videos, Photobucket or Flickr are popular, you could even use Facebook if it’s small photos.

For big files Yousendit and Megaupload are good. There is a giant list here: File Hosting Services

One thing – if you’re sending really big files or vast numbers of files, FTP or SFTP is the only choice so it’s best to get on youtube and search for  “FileZilla Tutorial“