maine web development, web design, internet marketing

During the first two weeks of this month, I was fortunate enough to be on the beautiful island of St. Lucia for my wedding.  During our time there my husband and I agreed to be “unplugged”, meaning no cell phones and no internet (gasp!).  We had the absolute best time, but I must admit that as soon as we landed in Miami for our layover, I was glued to my iPhone.  I needed to catch up on all the news I missed in the search world!

So as you’re preparing for tomorrow’s big Thanksgiving feast, here are a few recent, juicy SEO news tidbits to tide you over while you wait:

Faster Page Load Times =  Better Rankings

Nothing is more annoying to me than web pages that take FOREVER to load (and in web time, “forever” means about 5 seconds).  If you’re like me, you leave sites with slow loading pages in a hurry.  The incentive of having fast loading pages on a website seem obvious: to keep users engaged with what is being offered, to keep bounce rates low, to get quality inbound links if the site has good content, etc.  If that’s not incentive enough, add another one to that list: better rankings.  Google’s Matt Cutts was at PubCon earlier this month and said that fast load times may positively effect rankings.

Get Pumped for Google Caffeine

It’s been a few months since I first wrote about Google’s new-and-improved search capability, which is supposed to make searches faster, index more pages, and present more accurate results.  After the initial announcement, I didn’t hear much more about it until Matt Cutts announced that we should expect to see the Caffeine release after the holidays.  At least we all get to have the rest of the year to relax a bit until we see what Caffeine has in store for rankings!

New Google Interface

Rumors have been circulating that Google is testing out a new look and feel to their interface, which has been confirmed to be true.  I tested it out for myself to see what it looks like:

It’s not a drastic difference, but it does have a fresher look to it. Gotta love how Google always mixes it up!

There were so many things that happened while I was away, but I wanted to share with you what I found to be the most exciting. I am thankful for many, many things in my life and if you couldn’t tell by my post, Google is one of them.  Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

I just came back from a very special cruise. A few brilliant minds got together and invited some of the brightest minds in the social media/internet marketing space to go on a cruise/conference. We all met in Miami for a pre-conference Tweet-Up and then set sail. We traveled to Cozumel, Mexico and back. All the while attending sessions, having candid roundtable discussions and all around spending some serious time talking up what is happening in the social internet space, what we can do with it for businesses and what is coming down the pipe (oh and we had some fun too). It was a truly unique experience and we all left with our notepads and brains full.

One of the reasons the event went so well is we had a seasoned CruiseSource blogger traveling with us. Having that inside scoop with the best time to eat, how to get the best rooms, what to pack, how to navigate the boat made the whole experience so much smoother. We spent less time wandering around lost in hallways and more time enjoying what it was we came there to do. Thank you Rich!

This whole thing got me thinking… a question I get a lot is ‘how do I, as a business owner/marketer/newbie/employee keep up with all this’. Everything happens so fast and there is no way you can read everything on the internet and you probably can’t read everything that is out there about your industry either. So what do I recommend? Find an Internet Marketing Travel Agent!

An Internet Marketing Travel Agent?

Like the value Rich added to my experience, you don’t have to know and read everything. Find someone else that does know the ins and outs and follow them. Just be able to form your own opinion and understand what they are saying. If they discuss something you want to know more about or you want to check a source… go for it! The key is to start with content producers that are in and around your niche and have those people be people you know and trust their opinion. This may take a little time and research to find the right people.

What to look for in an Internet Marketing Travel Agent

• Look for people that share your values
• Do research for people working specifically with your industry
• Listen to what names you hear repeatedly in conferences, presentations, whitepapers, blogs
• Are you a Twitter user? search.twitter.com (I like the advanced search myself) – search for industry terms and find who is talking about what you need to know and follow them

How do you subscribe to your Internet Marketing Travel Agent?

• Follow them on Twitter – add them to a list or category labeled as an influencer
• Connect with them on LinkedIn – look for their status updates, blogs, slideshare presentations etc.
• Subscribe to their blog – either receive the blog in your email or subscribe to the RSS feed (I like to use Google reader)

Another tip: Keep your list of travel agents dynamic. Keep fazing people in and OUT. If someone isn’t providing you the content you need then don’t be afraid to subscribe to them on less channels or unsubscribe completely. Keep the clutter out and you will get more out of your agents. Like my experience last week, knowing Rich enabled me to skip the cruise clutter and really drill down on getting what I wanted out of my limited time with the other people at the conference. You will hopefully see the same results. Erase the clutter and stop trying to read absolutely everything. Subscribe to other people that matter and provide you with the information you want and will get the most value from.

Want a jump start? Here is a quick peek into a few of my Internet Travel Agents. I like hard facts, research and people I trust.

• Hall Web Services (of course)
• To make my brain swell – Chris Brogan
• For real world applications and a business mindset – Amber Naslund
• For writing and blogging – Copyblogger
• For more email – Blue Sky Factory
• For marketing and real business examples – David Meerman Scott
• For Video and specific tips and tools – Steve Garfield

That’s just a peek. There are a lot more. If you are mad you aren’t on that list you probably are on my full list but I can’t give away all my secrets.

So stop drowning yourself in content and find just some key people or companies to tune in to. You will free up your time and get back to finding the value you can apply to your company or brand. Anyone else have other tips on filtering out noise and keeping great content? I would love to hear them!

If you just want to look at some pictures from our geeky cruise look here and here are a few of mine.

One of the most talked about features recently announced by Google Analytics is something called Analytics Intelligence.  This feature was announced about a month ago but has only started to show up in live Analytics accounts in the last week or so.

So, what?  Why the fuss?

The Analytics Intelligence tool is designed to tell you when significant changes to your site traffic happen – positive OR negative.  This is immensely helpful because, as Google touts, it helps you catch problems/opportunities you otherwise “might not have noticed.”

By default your Google Analytics account will be sending you “Automatic Alerts” on an “Alert Sensitivity” of fairly low:

What the heck triggers an Automatic Alert?  Google says:

Behind Analytics Intelligence is a sophisticated algorithmic intelligence engine that detects any anomalies in your traffic patterns. That means it’s smart enough to know the difference between a change that’s actually part of a larger trend versus a change that you might need to look into. But, from a user perspective, Analytics Intelligence couldn’t be simpler.

So… yeah.  Not much real detail there, just “anomalies in your traffic patterns.”  So if you want to really control what Google Analytics tells you, it’s time to set up some custom alerts.

Luckily, setting up custom alerts is pretty easy to do, and immensely powerful.

Customize, customize

The above shot shows the default options for custom alerts, and like Advanced Segmentation, Google has done a nice job giving you a selection of useful things to watch.

Nearly all of these alerts could be useful – who wouldn’t want to know when Goal conversion drops suddenly?  Or when the % new visits goes down?  And things only get more powerful from here.

Setting up an alert, you can customize it using many different metrics and dimensions.  For example, you could set up this alert to monitor sudden failure of your pay per click campaigns:

From here on, use your imagination. 

Here are three alerts you can set up right now:

1. See when social media traffic spikes dramatically by adding an alert when “Medium” matches “stumbleupon.com” or “twitter.com,” and visits increase by more than 50%
2. Track the results of a specific high-performance keyword.  Set “Keyword” and “Matches Exactly” (or play with Contains, Does Not Contain, etc!) to the desired keyword, and customize the alerts to show either positive or negative happenings (e.g. traffic up or down by 50%)
3. See when ANY keyword has become more valuable to you by tracking “(not set)” and a positive attribute like increased visits, increased conversion, etc.

These are just three interesting things that you can now track automatically.

Like I said, the Analytics Intelligence tool is extremely powerful and its potential is only limited to your imagination.  It is better for tracking events that will occur randomly, not things you would expect.  It remains much easier to see results of, say, your Fall Email Campaign using segments or filters.

But for those who need to either keep track of a LOT of different websites and a lot of different variables, or don’t have time to dedicated daily to looking at Analytics stats, Analytics Intelligence is one smart tool indeed.

It is no secret that we here at Hall are BIG LinkedIn fans! Me especially.

LinkedIn has been around since 2003. “So what?” you say? Soooo… name another popular social networking site that has been around more than 4 years publicly (and is still being used). Exactly! Only LinkedIn.

If you are wondering why they have stood the test of ‘social media time’, I am going to tell you their secret. They keep updating to provide the functionality that their users want and need. No matter what your business is, this is important. Your product/service/website is not about YOU but about what your customers need.

In the past two weeks LinkedIn has made some big changes and is trying out a few more. Check them out:

Please note – some of these changes are coming, some will be rolled out over the next few days and some are only being tested on certain accounts.

• Coming Soon: LinkedIn for BlackBerry – LinkedIn has had an iPhone application for awhile and just recently updated it. To stereotype a little bit, Blackberry users pride themselves on being serious business men and women. They have no need for silly games, touch screens and applications you can sing into to get the name and artist. They need to conduct business and their smart phones are their bloodline. So it was surprising that the most business friendly social networking site hadn’t lent itself to Blackberry users, until now.

  
  Photo Credit: LinkedIn Blog

  Having LinkedIn at your finger tips is a great way to plan for a meeting, add new connections on the go (before you get back to your office and forget) and more. The new Blackberry app will also work with the Blackberry platform to integrate into your calendar, contacts and messages.

• Twitter Integration – Twitter has become the darling of social media and for those that use it, they tend to be addicted to it. They find a way to integrate Twitter into every moment of their life. Some people consider their Twitter account as an extension of their resume. Now you can Tweet your status and have it appear on LinkedIn and visa versa.
• Following Group Members – Speaking of Twitter… LinkedIn added a new functionality where you can ‘follow’ group members. Think someone is interesting and you want to hear more from them? Then subscribe to follow them and get updates about other content they are posting. Following also lets you get a quick overview of what your personal connections are contributing to groups you are a member of. I think that is pretty handy. Call me crazy but I think my network includes some really smart people so I like seeing what discussions and news they post in different LinkedIn Groups.
• Design Changes – This is only visible to some so if you don’t see it, I swear I am not crazy. LinkedIn is testing some new design elements. The biggest being a new site navigation that, in theory, will let you access more of the site more easily.The redesign effort was started by analysis of how people are using LinkedIn. Brilliant! This reminds me of a news story from the University of Denver a few years ago (details here are vague but the point is crystal clear).The school redesigned a group of classroom buildings but didn’t make any sidewalks. This confused a lot of people. They let the students decide the paths they took to class and then when the grass was worn out, clearly marking the paths students chose, THEN they paved the sidewalks. Why should the construction/school/planning committee decide how students walked to class? The students decided and in-turn the landscaping was preserved once students forged a path. What a concept!

Photo Credit: LinkedIn Blog

LinkedIn is such a great business tool and a perfect social media stepping stone (especially for B2Bs). What makes them a contender in my book is continuing to deliver the functionality that is most important to their users. LinkedIn continues to see rapid growth and I honestly believe it is because they are doing it right. If you want to keep up with any changes from LinkedIn they have a great blog where they announce new things, case studies and more a few times a week.

To learn more about using LinkedIn you can also view our archived webinar on Using LinkedIn for Business.