SEO Werkt!

At the end of every month, as an affiliate marketer, I get lots of reports. Some of them come with money attached, which I enjoy, and some do not:

This program is obviously going away for me. It’s not performing, and thus it has to go, because that space can be used for something else.

Here’s a simple (but not easy) question to ask yourself: how much stuff do you have laying around in your own marketing programs that’s not performing? Why haven’t you sunset it, let it go into graceful retirement?

It’s harder than you think. Sometimes it’s a business partner that’s also a friend. Sometimes it’s a program that used to work well. But right now, in this day and age of rapid responsiveness and even more rapidly changing conditions, we can ill afford to hold onto things that aren’t working.

It takes courage to let go, but the alternative is to hold on to iron weights while sinking.

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With a boring website, you are getting further and further away from attracting traffic to your website. Come to think of it, what’s the use in having a website without traffic? Well, you agree that you would want visitors into your business website. Hence, you need to begin with getting a website and a reliable website design company that has all the support and help that you need.

In this modern age of technology, everyone has turned to getting their answers from the internet. You cannot afford to disappoint such people. You would only remain competitive in the marketplace if you get rid of that boring website and at least got a website with a design that will appeal to your target market. In the section below, you will get to know how great website designs can profit your business and some of the ways through which you would get to know the right website design company to work with.

Why insist on a great website design

It is one thing to build a website and completely a different one to have a website with a beautiful design. The latter is the best as it presents several advantages to businesses that are worth looking into. For instance, the beautiful design of the website would ensure good usability and you can be sure that this is something that your visitors will enjoy.

The business world is quite competitive and you would want to impress. With the appeal that comes from the beautiful designs of the website, you will be able to get rid of that boring website and impress visitors to your website that will no longer be boring.

Great website design guarantees responsiveness, elegance, and search friendliness. As you may already know, internet users are the least patience lot. They will not have the time to wait on a non responsive site; instead they will click away to a responsive one. A great design also means elegance and search friendliness which cannot be achieved when it is not well designed.

It also goes hand in hand with search engine coding as this is the first step towards getting better ranks in the worlds of Yahoo, Google and Bing.

How to find appropriate website Design Company

With the above advantages of a great website design, the next important question is to find out where you would get the services from. There are several companies that provide the services but not all of them will give you that great overall quality finish on the website.

Hence, it is best to take time and scan the different companies and then make a decision based on your analysis. There are about 4 main qualities that you may want to check on when you are looking a company to task with the website design so that at least you get a responsive, elegant and search friendly site for your business.

• The website design company should be in a position to customize your website in a way that makes it unique while still remaining search friendly and lively.

• The company should be willing to allow you to modify or add content to the website. As a matter of fact, the website belongs to you hence you should be in charge of content management. You should be able to add or delete pages from the website without much struggle and at your liberty.

• The company should provide you with post project support. Website design does not just end with the creation of your website. You therefore need to have support for some time so that you are able to understand it better.

• You should also be granted full copyright. The website is yours to keep.

Yes, there is a website design company named www.serpholic.co.uk that is willing to help you maximize your business revenues by creating the best website for you where great sense of business, innovation and professionalism remain as the drive. You should get a free estimate and make your selection.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/complete_business_systems/5654600691/sizes/s/

How a Good Website Design Leads You In The Market is a post from: We Blog Better. © 2012. Share it freely, but please link back to this source.

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Count me very happily surprised.

I was ordering a gift card for someone, and figured – what could be more universally-loved that some luscious Vosges chocolate? (if you’ve tried it, you know – if not, well, what are you waiting for??)

So I go on their site, and the ordering process is easy, with one interesting chocolate-centered twist – when you plug in the zip code of the recipient, the site does a quick calculation about the destination and the time of year, and if it’s going to be a hot trip, Vosges automatically adds some cooling materials for 10 bucks. After all, you don’t want to receive a gooey mess in July, do you?

Except plastic gift cards don’t melt like chocolate. Oops.

A bit frustrated, I filled in the on-line form for Questions and explained the dilemma. I wanted to order, but…and I went off to walk the dog, grumbling under my breath that:

1. I would probably not hear from anyone in a timely fashion;
2. Any response would likely be some canned apology with no resolution;
3. I was going to have to abandon the shopping cart and go buy something else.

Wrong, wrong, WRONG, you overly cynical consumer from New Jersey!

While still out strolling with my black lab Mystic, I received an e-mail from a “Chocolate Concierge” named Anna. In that message, she apologized for the problem (and promised to alert the web team so that it can be fixed), and provided two avenues whereby we could complete the process, including a direct phone call. Speed and a pathway forward – problem solved. Customer happy.

I’ve talked up and given away Vosges chocolate bars in the past, but now they’ve really won my heart. How’s your responsiveness? Is it personal, and fast, and blog-worthy like Vosges’ is?

Well-played, Anna and Vosges. That’s some pretty sweet customer service!

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When Google’s upcoming Android 4.1 Jelly Bean mobile OS hits devices in July it will incorporate “Project Butter,” a processing framework designed to speed up UI responsiveness and graphics processing.

Flash mobs are kind of played out (and I find a little awkward and creepy…), but this one is actually interesting.

Intel used a flash mob to create a human billboard out of 60 synched new ultrabook laptops that projected messages to people in the area. The stunt was to show the light weight and responsiveness. The project was created by Party.

Via.

The WordPress engine is pretty efficient out of the box, but once you start loading plugins the performance and responsiveness of your site might go downhill. On top of that the consumption of resources might become too big, possibly leading to a suspension of your hosting account (especially if you use shared hosting).

Over the years I played with and tweaked my WordPress plugins trying to achieve a good performance level, and below you’ll find the tips I learned along the way:

1. Use a Cache Plugin

Serving cached versions of your pages is one of the most efficient ways to speed up your site and to reduce the CPU and memory consumption on your server. Also, if you are not using the W3TC plugin yet I highly recommend you switch to it, as it works much more efficiently than the other plugins available.

2. Remove All Unnecessary Plugins

Unless your site absolutely relies on a plugin to work I would recommend removing it. Sure, you might need to lose a functionality or two, but in the long run this will keep your site running fast and securely. Keep in mind that it’s possible to hard code what some plugins do, as well. For example, instead of using a plugin to generate a list of “Popular Posts” on your sidebar you could create the list yourself with raw HTML. Instead of using a contact form plugin you could simply write a paragraph on your “Contact” page including your email address there. So on and so forth.

3. Pay Special Attention to Post-Level Plugins

On most WordPress sites and blogs, the bulk of the traffic goes to the posts. The homepage, the category and archive pages receive around 20% of the overall traffic, if that, while the posts receive 80%.

This means that plugins that act at post-level will consume most of your resources. Examples include plugins to change SEO aspects of your posts (e.g., All in One SEO Pack), plugins to display related posts and so on. As a result you should put an extra effort to either remove or optimize those plugins (more on that below).

4. Consider Substituting All In One SEO Pack

The All in One SEO Pack plugin is certainly one of the best SEO plugins around, but it’s also pretty intensive on the resources of your server. For small sites this won’t be a problem, but once your traffic starts growing you might start to feel it.

A good alternative is called Greg’s High Performance SEO. According to the author All in One SEO Pack outputs 2000 lines of code per page load/view, while Greg’s plugin output only 700 lines.

In my opinion the main benefit of those SEO plugins is the ability to customize the title tag. If that is the most important factor for you as well you can be even more extreme and use no plugin at all. Instead use the piece of code below to create optimized title tags for your posts:

<title><?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo(‘name’); }
elseif ( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo ' - ' ; bloginfo(‘name’); }
elseif (is_single() ) { single_post_title();}
elseif (is_page() ) { single_post_title();}
else { wp_title(‘’,true); } ?></title>

5. Consider Substituting YARPP

Along with All In One SEO Pack there’s another plugin that is very popular and yet very resource intensive: YARPP (Yet Another Relate Posts Plugin).

One alternative you can consider is the Efficient Related Posts plugin. The main difference is that the database of related posts is updated only when a post is created/updated, while other plugins tend to build the list on the fly, whenever a post is loaded.

6. Optimize Your Database Tables

As with any dynamic content management system, great part of the work your WordPress site does is related to getting, storing, removing and updating information on its database. That’s why optimizing your database tables can affect your site’s performance.

A nice plugin you can use for this purpose is WP-Optimize. It will remove your post revisions, clean your comments (e.g., spam and deleted ones), run optimization queries and so on.

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Intel isn’t just about making and selling chips. It is in the company’s best interest to make sure that the ecosystem around its chips and the markets for computers and other electronic gadgets stay healthy.

That’s why Intel does some serious market research into what people want with their consumer technology. It also delves into ethnography, or the social science of observing people and how they behave in their everyday lives. Two of the top Intel people doing this work are David Ginsberg, who runs the Insights and Market Research Group at Intel, and Tony Salvador, senior principal engineer at Intel’s Experience Insight Lab.

VentureBeat caught up Ginsberg and Salvador for a lunch with a small group of reporters. They started out the discussion about research Intel did for the Ultrabook, or fast and tiny laptops that resemble the MacBook Air. Dozens of Ultrabooks will be on display at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show, where Intel chief executive Paul Otellini is giving a keynote speech.

Q: Tell us about your Ultrabook research.

DG: The Ultrabook story actually starts a little bit in the past, about a year and a half ago. My team was doing some work on how people experience this notion of performance. You ask people what matters most about their PC and they will tell you performance. You ask them, “What does that mean,” and they will tell you speed. You ask them what brings speed and, if they have an opinion, they will tell you the CPU.  Then you say, “What CPU companies do you know?” and, if they have an opinion, they will tell you Intel.

We’re the company they know about, the maker of the chip that provides the most value in what they’re buying. But we all know in the real world that when they go to buy, there are a lot of other dynamics going on. We really wanted to take a deeper dive. Maybe they’re telling us speed matters because that’s the only word they know and can verbalize. But maybe there’s something else going on.

So we tried something different from market research surveys or focus groups. We used approaches that are based on understanding the emotional side of things. These tools were based on psychology and neuroscience, to get at the underlying emotions that we can’t really get in traditional survey work; and from that, we did a big project worldwide. We learned some pretty startling things that made us start to look at things differently.

We have a culture at Intel of thinking about performance, meaning speed and gigahertz and that kind of stuff. But what really came out of the study is, when people think about their highest performing computer experience, they verbalize that with the word “speed” because that’s the only word that they can come up with. But that’s not actually what most people are thinking about. When we ask people to describe their experience,  it was an experience of “flow.” It wasn’t just one thing. It was about the entire experience of using a device. It turned out to be much more about this notion of being in the zone or the moment — being in the “flow.” (Flow is the mental state in which a person is fully immersed and energized in a state of concentration).

Q: So you’re concentrating?

DG: It’s almost like the technology disappears and you’re just one with your content, with what you’re trying to do. You might have only have five minutes but an hour goes by because you’re so engrossed in what’s happening. When they’re talking about performance, it’s that experience that they’re thinking about, which is a very different notion than just amping up the speed.

And so this notion arises. How do we enable flow? How do we enable this uninterrupted seamless experience? Because what happens is, as soon as the video gets jaggy or that hourglass comes up, and it pulls you out of that flow experience. Suddenly you remember oh, I should be mowing the lawn or, I should be doing the dishes. It jolts you out of the experience you’re having with your device.

That was a big realization for us as a company, and not just from a marketing perspective but from a product perspective. We really want to enable great experiences. We have to enable this notion of flow or, as we translated into our engineering community to make a little bit easier for them to wrap their heads around, this notion of “responsiveness.” Responsiveness is a bigger part of performance than anything else. So when we started talking to engineers and the PC group about how to enable some new computer experiences.

This notion of flow is really at the heart of the Ultrabook. The Ultrabook obviously is a physical manifestation of the newest thin-and-light devices. But when you look at the four vectors that define the Ultrabooks from our perspective, it was more than just that.

Q: What are the four vecors that define the Ultrabooks? 

DG: Responsiveness was one of the key vectors. That’s why you see things like instant boot-up and all the other responsiveness features built into it.

Mobility without compromise was the second piece of it. People love the mobility their tablets provide for them but there’s a desire for the performance that they’re used to in a traditional computer.

The third vector for Ultrabooks was the design that reflects me. Obviously it’s the thin and light placed into that. Style and the looks of these things really matter today.

The fourth was security. We’re seeing this desire for security and the willingness to value it and actually pay for it, which is a huge shift in the way people are thinking about computer devices.

That was how we approached Ultrabook. It was really grounding how we thought about this and consumers’ needs, as opposed to just going about designing the next CPU architecture.

Q: With the design of the Ultrabook, all Intel really had to do was look at Apple’s MacBook Air, right?

DG: Well, that’s why we say it’s more than just about the thin and light. Obviously that’s a key piece of it, and there’s no doubt that the MacBook Air has shown how important it is; we’re proud of Intel’s role in the MacBook Air in helping power it. There’s no doubt that thinness in general is an important thing in today’s market. But things like enabling responsiveness, enabling the security — those are huge parts of what we are trying to do.

Q: This research is all going on during what time period, relative to the launch of the MacBook Air?

DG: This performance research was end of 2009, first half of 2010. When we did that research, which got us to the notion of flow, we weren’t really thinking about four vectors. Over time, we had this notion of how flow applies to all technology devices. Whether you’re talking about a smartphone or other devices , flow is important. People want the technology to fade into the background so that they can focus on what’s important for them. I would argue is a truism across technology today.

Q: Can you see this flow ever becoming formalized or standardized like a service level agreement for how well your technology or device works or your computer works?

DG: It’s actually really interesting, and I don’t know that I’m the right guy to go into all of this part. But a lot of folks in both the labs and in our benchmarking groups within the company are looking at, “How do we quantify this.” You move to some base metrics that measure the experience. How can you create an experience of base metrics that would allow us to actually do that? They’re doing some interesting work on that.

TS: I look after the social sciences. And it’s our job to try to figure out what are the kinds of experiences people might like and how to design for them We have a team of people who actually do what’s called “psychophysicists.” It has been around since the late 19th century and what they do is actually match physical capabilities like frame rate on video to perceived quality. You can actually chart that and you can see, “Is the framework slow?” I can still see frame, frame, frame and at some point, the single still image turns into a moving image, based on how my eyes and brain perceive it.

They actually do quantify the experiences in terms of these physical to perceived relationships. And to think about applying that then to a service level agreement for example of, I’m watching a video on my TV, remote control thing. Or I’m downloading some data or something like this, to quantify that in the context of an experience of a flow experience is a very interesting proposition.

DG: And that is what some of the benchmarking folks are looking at. How you do that? We came out with this research and we were so excited about it and we went and talked to some folks in Tony’s team and they were like oh, that’s just perfect.

TS: So they’re doing it from like a physical point of view, right? We look at the flow experience from a psychological view. There’s been a lot of research and brain study on flow. The science they call “brain work” has been really coming along and people are understanding more and more about how the experience really works. It turns out you can be interrupted for about a minute when you’re doing some sort of writing. That’s when you are deep into it. Somebody can bother you quickly, you can answer them and go back to your work. Your brain structure is still in place to get you right back into it again. If it’s more than a minute, then it takes about 20 minutes to get back into that flow.

DG: What was interesting about the concept of flow is that it wasn’t meant to be applied to technology.

TS: That’s right. To do the work that your team did in this case sort of questioned what does performance mean. From that point of view, it was really interesting work for the company as a whole.

Q: You can apply that to video games as well. Jane McGonigal talks about that in her book, Reality is Broken.

TS: They do apply the theory of flow to games, but I think that’s one of the things that happen in games is people get into the flow experience. It turns out that flow when you look at it this way is actually this edge between order and anxiety. It’s that knife-edge and so when you’re working on something that is right at the edge of your capabilities, or you’re still able to do it but it doesn’t go off into the really high anxiety mode of, “I don’t know what to do. I can’t do it.” That’s the edge where people were just sort of totally engaged in games and they can’t stop playing.

On technology and flow, we heard this coming out of the work we did with real people. It’s like when you’re giving a great presentation. You’re giving like the hardest presentation of your life and people are shooting questions at you and you’re just answering them left or right without having to stop and think. It just all flows.

Filed under: VentureBeat

Riley Gibson is the CEO and co-founder of the Boulder based Napkin Labs, a startup that helps companies manage and engage their Facebook fans and Twitter followers. Napkin Labs launched an updated version of the service today (read, Napkin Labs Lets Brands Better Understand Their Customers (And Turn Them Into Collaborators). Prior to launch, Gibson flew to New York to get advice on building his company during Founder Office Hours with Hunch Co-Founder Chris Dixon and First Round Capital’s Managing Partner Josh Kopelman.

Based in Colorado, Gibson suspects his company might be at a disadvantage because it is not located near vast sources of venture capital. He wonders if moving will help. Kopelman doesn’t think so and responds by saying, “I am not sure it makes sense to move to be near a VC … I think you tend to move if you are finding that you are starved for talent, if you are not able to hire to fill the positions at the right levels. We’ve funded companies all over the country.”

Dixon chimes in with a tongue-in-cheek response that it is often better to move away from sources of venture capital.

Following the exchange, Gibson asks Dixon and Kopelman about raising money. The question is should Napkin Labs attempt to achieve certain benchmarks before raising money, or should it not worry about the benchmarks and just go for it? Dixon and Kopelman take a similar position, with Kopelman saying “it probably makes sense to have just a handful of conversations, test the appetite and responsiveness of investors.” He notes that you don’t turn fundraising on and off, but rather it is a continuous process of engaging backers.

Make sure to watch the entire video for additional insights along with prior episodes of Founder Office Hours featuring Dispatch.io, Schedit and Profitably.