Jade Cloward’s BLOG

Facebook is one of the fastest growing social networking websites and is quickly becoming a powerful and cost effective portal, ideal for organisations to create that ‘brand connection’ in the Web2.0 world.

What are Facebook applications?

Most Facebook users today use 3rd party Facebook applications to add some fun and personality to their Facebook profile. Their purpose is to generate content that the user finds is relevant or of interest to them.

There is virtually an application for everything, ranging from a Facebook application that reminds a user when their favourite band is coming to town to a slide show of a collection of sentimental photos. The great thing about Facebook applications is that if it is to be added to a profile, the users listed as a individual’s ‘friends’ are sent an option of also using it. The application then circulates at such a rapid rate exposure is viral.

Facebook applications - Are the software programs that allow users to connect, interact and entertain themselves and their ‘friends’.

*Resource for article

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1) Site Speed… 2) Mobile… 3) Online Video… 4) Reputation Management Meets Real-Time Search… 5) Using Twitter to Network Locally… 6) Increased Awareness of Local… 7) Consolidation

Another year in the world of SEO has come to an end, and it’s time to put together your SEO strategy and to-do list for 2010. A new year means another chance to capture rankings, to try out new marketing strategies and to take advantage of the areas where the search engines are looking to expand and place new importance. Because, despite what some may think, SEO for small business is not becoming less important. It’s more important than ever.

With that in mind, here’s a look at the SEO trends to watch out for in 2010.

Site Speed—It was during last month’s PubCon Las Vegas show that Matt Cutts, the head of Web spam at Google, told the audience that site speed may be used as a new ranking factor for 2010. Google’s goal is to help its users to find information as quickly as possible. How quickly a site loads definitely fits into that.

With all the site speed chatter as of late — say no to panic. Do, however, take steps to decrease the load time of your site. The order of things on your page will affect its load time, so make sure you’re using proper HTML, and cleaning up your CSS and JavaScript so that users aren’t left waiting when they try to access your site. If you don’t know how fast your site is loading, tools lke WebPageTest or Pingdom Page Load offer easy ways to test it out. If you do need some help getting your site up to speed (no pun intended), there are number of free resources available to help.

• HTML Validation

• CSS

• Page Speed Firefox extension

• Closure (compiles JavaScript into compact, high performance code.)

Mobile—It’s been “the year for mobile” every year for the past five years and this year is no different. A recent Nieslen study found that there are now 56.9 million people looking for information on mobile Web sites (up 34 percent from last year). The push towards mobile has been heavily backed by the emergence of smartphones like the iPhone, Google Android and the popularity of Blackberry device. Combined, they mean that 2010 is the year where small businesses not only have to create a mobile presence, but where they have to create an optimized one, as well. Research says most consumers are not happy with the performance of mobile Web sites. Ignoring mobile means not only losing out on that initial transaction, but all future mobile transactions from that customer. That’s bad business. Can you really afford to do that?

Your first step to capitalizing on mobile is to find out how your site performs on small devices. Sites like BrowserCam (a paid service that offers a 24 hour/200 capture free trial) can give you an idea of how pages are loading, whether certain functionality is disabled, where it’s hanging up, etc. Once you’ve made sure it’s functional, take advantage of all Google’s new mobile services and free online coupons. If Google’s putting resources toward something, it’s probably a smart idea for SMB owners to follow suit.

Online Video—Last year YouTube became the second largest search engine. This year it continued its dominance, bringing in more than 11 billion streams in November, up 17 percent the previous year and even down just slightly from the month before. If you haven’t been playing with the love affair that is SMB owners and video, it’s time to start. Because your competition probably is. Also, with news that the bigger companies may be pulling back, it opens up a big door for SMBs to hop in there and use video to take back valuable search space with the help of Universal Search.

Reputation Management Meets Real-Time Search—When Google put real-time search updates into the SERPs they unleashed a potential online reputation problem of epic proportions. They essentially opened the floodgates to give angry customers immediate power in the search results. You no longer have a window to reach out to an angry tweeter to ask them to amend their update or tone down that blog post. Google is pulling from tweets, from blogs, from news, from articles and other Web content and throwing it immediately into your search results, often right above your own site. All of this means that you need to be even more vigilant about monitoring the conversation in an attempt to protect your brand.

For a small business owner, your best line of defense is to build a listening station that will help keep you abreast of conversations as they happen. Waiting 24 hours to be notified of a fire may be 24 hours too late.

What do you do?

• Use Twitter Search to track mentions of your name, your competitors’ names, important keywords, locations, etc.

• Use Comprehensive Google Alerts to track blogs and news sources talking about your brand.

• Use Social Mention or WhosTalkin to track anything the first two may have missed.

• Start work on owning your Google 10 to neutralize anything bad that may pop up.

Using Twitter to Network Locally—In 2009 small business owners got comfortable using social media. In 2010 it’s time to take the connections they’ve made online and learn to leverage them off. For many SMB owners that will mean looking to Twitter to network locally and then grabbing that conversion in the real world. For example, if you own a local catering business, you don’t just want to use Twitter to be helpful and build your company brand. You also want it to drive business into your physical locations so that you can benefit from those relationships.

That will mean using tools and information like tweet location, the Advanced Search features of Twitter itself or third party tools like Twitter Grader or Twellow. More and more we’re seeing the tools and apps designed to integrate into social media to help create virtual neighbors. Applications like FourSquare are just the beginning.

Increased Awareness of Local—Tried and true SEO is more important now than ever before. If you haven’t tied up all your local listings and profiles, it is beyond time to do that. The search engines, especially Google, are looking at the consistency and completeness of your local listings in order to rank you for relevant queries. That’s a huge ranking factor that is 100 percent in your control. Take advantage of it! Corner the four corners of local search, go through the process of claiming all your local listings, dominate Yelp, manage your customer reviews, get quality citations and do everything you can to build the authority of your site on the Web.

Consolidation—Another trend we’re going to see with SMB owners this year is a move towards consolidating Web properties in order to make the ‘whole’ stronger. For example, a lot of small business owners have blogs that are currently located on Blogspot or Wordpress.com.  I think we’re going to see a lot of people start to move these on-site in order to build link equity and build a site that, overall, is stronger. When you have a blog located on a separate domain it means you’re trying to build links, authority and a community on multiple sites. You’re splitting your efforts. With Google changing things at whim and social media sites challenging our privacy, it’s going to strengthen the sites that you do have complete control over. There are plenty of free Wordpress guides onsetting up Wordpress and how to optimize it.

That’s my take. What SEO trends do you expect to see in 2010?

Resource:

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1- Don’t target keywords target markets – Keywords come and go and search behavior and user intent is whimsical this is why you should target markets instead of keywords. Since no two people think or search alike, you have to play the law of averages in your favor by finding the most trafficked and relevant keyword clusters to funnel traffic to your pages. This means targeting groups of keywords then finding which ones gain traction first.

There are pivotal keywords that act as a semantic thread that run throughout the theme of your website, so, by finding, consolidating and unifying those pages with internal links (the only links you have 100% control over); by the time you need to acquire links for ranking factor from other sites, you are miles ahead of your competition.

These 5 simple SEO solutions for common SEO mistakes can save you time to market and countless hours of frustration trying to reverse engineer competitors, simple keywords or rankings.

2- Consolidate the focus and intent of your pages – Don’t try to target too many keywords with one page; you are better off by using a new page to target a new keyword to use “exact match” naming conventions, title tag prominence and on page consistency.

In other words, if you are going after the key phrase “internet marketing services” and your website has other related posts on marketing, the first thing would be to title the page Internet-Marketing-Services.html , aspx, cfm, .php or whatever programming platform you are using.

Then use internet marketing services in the H1 tag, once in a link (even as an on page anchor #) and feature the keyword in the first paragraph preferably closer to the beginning of the sentence.

Then if you have any other occurrences of the keyword on other pages, link them to the page that will act as the preferred landing page.

Even bolding the keywords when they appear or using them in block quotes (bulleted lists) can also increase the relevance signal for the keyword on a granular level as far as taxonomy for search engine spiders is concerned. SEO is about the layers of overlapping signals that reinforce relevance simultaneously.

The mistake would be trying to make that page rank for web marketing services, online marketing service and all manner of related phrases from using off page link building tactics. If you are targeting other unique keywords, then create unique content-rich pages for each to provide a tip of the iceberg for search engines.

Every competitive keyword should have a relevant landing page (close to the root folder) to serve as the apex of the hierarchy for that keyword.

You can also use a singular, plural format service/services and alternate in the meta description to lock in additional keywords based on similar search phrases.

However, they will not engage until you have topically aligned the page in question with (a) enough links internally or (b) enough deep links from other sites to allow it to stem into other keyword variations.

3- Don’t Disproportionately Rely on Your Home Page for Rankings - Spread links evenly throughout a site using deep links. Deep links implies linking to a specific page with a specific keyword related to the target phrase.

This way when someone searches for yellow widgets, they don’t end up on your blue widgets page or at the home page (which will just cause confusion) or antagonize the user since there is no indicator of relevance.

The more focused your pages, the easier it is to cross the tipping point to gain a ranking for that exact match phrase. Don’t let your site suffer from theme diffusion from not having multiple unique landing pages.

4- Don’t ignore the Long Tail – Ranking for one word root phrases is nice, yet, you cannot afford to neglect the long tail phrases (key phrases using three of more words or local or regional references) while having enough flexibility to appear for the long-tail phrases which are typically closer to conversion as well. Someone typing in “buy a car” vs. “black 2009 ford mustang in new jersey” represent two different types of consumers. In this case, the latter is closer to conversion.

5- Traffic Must Convert of SEO is a Moot Point – Getting traffic is only the beginning, yes, increasing traffic is the gist of search engine optimization, but start with a goal in mind. Don’t look past visitors as numbers on an analytics dashboard, they are people with needs and are there for a reason.

So often people want SEO when the call to action, value proposition and graphic appeal of the page leaves much to be desired. If you have a destination page optimized for a specific keyword, then do your best to make that page emanate relevance for the main phrase as well as have a singular conversion objective for consumers to carry out (not multiple conversion points overlapping leaving them confused).

–> Reference

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Upcoming Flash CS5 will allow you to publish iPhone Apps.Today at Adobe MAX, Adobe announced that the upcoming Flash CS5 will allow you to build and export Flash Content as an iPhone App. This is not the same as Flash coming to the iPhone, it just means that instead of writing apps in Objective-C, folks can use ActionScript 3. Designers everywhere are already buzzing:perhaps time to re-purpose all those old intro screens? Perhaps the real question is: Do consumers win or lose?

-> MetaFilterBLOG

HOW IT ALL WORKS - Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) compiler infrastructure + ActionScript 3 + API’s!

 

We enabled this by using the Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) compiler infrastructure. LLVM is a modular, flexible compiler system that is used widely in a variety of projects. The key reason we choose LLVM is its flexibility and applicability to iPhone development.

We created a new compiler front end that allowed LLVM to understand ActionScript 3 and used its existing ARM back end to output native ARM assembly code. We call this Ahead of Time (AOT) compilation—in contrast to the way Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR function on the desktop using Just in Time (JIT) compilation. Since we are able to compile ActionScript to ARM ahead of time, the application gets all the performance benefits that the JIT would offer and the license compliance of not requiring a runtime in the final application.

By doing the compilation step, we allow developers to create applications using their Flash skills and their knowledge of ActionScript 3. In the process, we also expose the APIs that developers are familiar with so they can not only use the ActionScript language but follow the customary app-building model. When you build your application for the iPhone, there is no interpreted code and no runtime in your final binary. Your application is truly a native iPhone app.

->AdobeDevelopment

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[October 5th, 2009 ]…Building Applications for the iPhone with Flash -

This morning during the day 1 keynote at Adobe Max 2009, Adobe announced that the next version of Adobe Flash (Flash Professional CS5) will include support for creating stand-alone applications for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. As you can imagine, this is something that we are really excited about, and we expect there to be a lot of questions. This post should address some of those questions, and point to additional resources with more information.

So, what exactly did we announce?

The next version of Flash Authoring will enable developers to create stand-alone iPhone applications using Flash technologies (including ActionScript 3). These applications are just like any other iPhone application and can be distributed via the Apple iTunes Application store. Indeed, there are already a number of applications created with Flash on the store today.

One thing I want to stress is that this is for standalone applications, and is not the Flash Player for mobile Safari (which is something we continue to work on). The end result is a native iPhone application, and not a SWF that runs in the browser. We compile the SWF to a native application using LLVM. There is no requirement for the Flash Player / Adobe AIR Runtime to be installed on the device or included in the application. The end result is a native iPhone application.

Currently, this project is in private beta, and we plan to release a public beta of Flash CS5 with support for building iPhone applications before the end of this year. We are not accepting any new people for the private beta, but you can sign up to be notified when the public beta is available.

We have posted a developer FAQ on labs, which addresses a lot of the questions we expect you will have (we will continue to update this as necessary). The FAQ also includes some information that will be helpful if you want to start working on some content in anticipation of the public beta.

–>(resource:) MikeChambersBLOG

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Today, we are excited to announce the launch of Google Dashboard. Have you ever wondered what data is stored with your Google Account? The Google Dashboard offers a simple view into the data associated with your account — easily and concisely in one location.

Over the past 11 years, Google has focused on building innovative products for our users. Today, with hundreds of millions of people using those products around the world, we are very aware of the trust that you have placed in us, and our responsibility to protect your privacy and data. In the past, we’ve taken numerous steps in this area, investing in educating our users with our Privacy Center, making it easier to move data in and out of Google with our Data Liberation Front, and allowing you to control the ads you see with interest-based advertising. Transparency, choice and control have become a key part of Google’s philosophy, and today, we’re happy to announce that we’re doing even more.

In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we’ve built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings. Today, the Dashboard covers more than 20 products and services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude and many more. The scale and level of detail of the Dashboard is unprecedented, and we’re delighted to be the first Internet company to offer this — and we hope it will become the standard. Watch this quick video to learn more and then try it out for yourself at www.google.com/dashboard.

www.google.com/dashboard.

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The Basics of Social Marketing -

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With Guerrero & Morales…struggling at the plate. WHY would Hughes throw fastballs right down ‘peach-tree-street?’ He threw straight fastballs - right down the middle. Throw on the black (the edge) of the plate. Throw ‘down& out’ or ‘up & in.’ He knows this, but his accuracy was not there. Bottom line he blew the lead. *I still ponder…he should have thrown Guerrero another curve ball…
[on-the-knees].

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We are all familiar with gasoline-powered cars, and most people have heard about or seen electric cars. A hybrid car is a combination of the two. A hybrid vehicle contains parts of both gasoline and electric vehicles in an attempt to get the best of both worlds.

The best way to understand the advantages of a hybrid vehicle is to think about a car traveling down a highway at the posted speed on level ground. In this case, the engine is doing three things:

1. It is overcoming rolling resistance in the drive train.
2. It is overcoming air resistance.
3. It is powering accessories like the alternator, the power steering pump and the air conditioner.

The engine might need to produce no more than 10 or 20 horsepower (HP) to carry this load. The reason why cars have 100- or 200-horsepower engines to is handle acceleration from a standing stop, as well as for passing and hill climbing. We only use the maximum HP rating for 1% of our driving time. The rest of the time, we are carrying around the weight and the friction of the much larger engine, which wastes a lot of energy.

In a traditional hybrid vehicle, you have a complete electric car. It includes an electric motor to provide all of the power to the wheels, as well as batteries to supply the motor with electricity. Then you have a completely separate gasoline engine powering a generator. The engine is very small — perhaps 10 to 20 horsepower — and it is designed to run at just one speed for maximum efficiency. The purpose of this small, efficient engine is to provide enough power for the car at its cruising speed. During times of acceleration, the batteries provide the extra power necessary. When the car is decelerating or standing still, the batteries recharge. This sort of hybrid car is essentially an electric car with a built-in recharger for longer range. The advantage is that the small, efficient gasoline engine gets great mileage. 

Gasoline-electric hybrid cars contain modified car parts. Explore the inner workings of gasoline-electric hybrid cars with diagrams and animations. See more hybrid car pictures.

The only problem with a traditional hybrid car is the weight. The car has to carry the weight of the electric motor, the generator, the gasoline engine and the batteries. You don’t need as many batteries as a pure electric car, so that saves some weight, but a full-size electric motor plus a 10-kilowatt generator can weigh several hundred pounds.

Reference here

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A social media how-to for luxury marketers–and others–that fear social networks.

Image is everything to luxury fashion companies. Preserving prestige is what sets brands such as Gucci and Hermes apart from Gap and H&M. But that same elitism is keeping certain luxury brands from engaging in social media, one of the most powerful forms of marketing at the moment.

Why is it time for these companies to “get social”? Let’s start with the obvious and compelling numbers: About half of the U.S. adult population is actively using social media Web sites, according to a Travelers Enterprise market research study conducted in August. And, according to Facebook statistics, among the next generation of luxury consumers–Generation Y–96% are using social media. Twenty-seven percent of these folks also claim that their purchase decisions are influenced by information gleaned from these sites, according to a recent study by Hill & Knowlton.

Finally, here’s perhaps the biggest reason for luxury companies to jump into social media: Brand makers that don’t create their own conversation with their most passionate customers through social networks risk having a passionate consumer create that presence instead. Facebook and Twitter are cluttered with brand sites that weren’t created and aren’t maintained by marketers. And, what happens when brand makers don’t initiate the conversation? Two good examples can be found on @123dolcegabbana on Twitter and the Emporio Armani fan page on Facebook. Both feature fans boasting of their discount brand purchases and fashion critiques, but no voice from anyone who officially represents the brand.

by Dana Gers  http://tiny.cc/RjTDU

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