| design | concept | develop | eat | sleep | work | rinse | repeat |

Click to view larger image, if you want it.

Tagged as: Lol, Only in SA, Talent

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For all of us who feel only the deepest love and affection for the way computers have enhanced our lives, read on, because at a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated:’If General Motors had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that gave 1,000 miles to the gallon.’

In response to Bill ‘ s comments, General Motors (GM) issued a press release stating:

If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash… twice a day.
2. Every time they re-painted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, re-start it, and re-open the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
4. Occasionally, executing a manoeuvre, such as a left turn, would cause your car to shut down and refuse to re-start, in which case you would have to re-install the engine.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only five percent of the roads.
6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single: ‘This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation’ warning light.
7. The air-bag system would ask: ‘Are you sure?’ before deploying.
8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out, and refuse to let you in, until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
9. Every time a new car was introduced, car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again, because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
10. You’d have to press the ‘Start’ button to turn the engine off.

PS - I’d like to add that when all else fails, you could call ‘customer service’ in some foreign country, and be instructed in some foreign language how to fix your car yourself!!!!

Tagged as: Computers, customer service, Lol

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Virtual Africa presents: The highest definition picture ever taken of Cape Town.

It might not look like much on first glance, but try the following and be ready to be blown away: click on the full screen button (bottom right) and then ZOOM !!

Visit Virtual Tours South Africa to read more about how they have done this.

Tagged as: Cape Town

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The HYPE framework is a collaborative visual framework developed in FDT and AS3 by Branden Hall and Joshua Davis. For the Flash junkies makes life so much easier when dealing with action script.

HYPE is a creative coding framework built on top of ActionScript 3. A major goal of HYPE is to allow newcomers to Flash and ActionScript to creatively play and express themselves while they are learning how to program.

To get started, the user needs only the most basic knowledge of programming – variables, conditionals, loops, and functions, for example.

As the user learns more about programming they can extend HYPE and thus grow their skills, while at the same time inspiring the next generation.

Now, that’s not to say HYPE is just for people who are new to programming. Instead, HYPE is for anyone, regardless of skill, who wants to play with code. Fundamentally, the point of HYPE is to make Flash fun again. We made HYPE to help bring back the playfulness that once defined our community.

HYPE - come out and play! Check it out here http://hype.joshuadavis.com/

Tagged as: Coding Stuff, flash, hype

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Depending on the keywords for which you want to get high rankings, you have to employ different tactics. Keywords with less competition require different tactics than keywords with high competition.

The effect of different SEO tactics on the position of your website in the search results

If you target long keyword phrases with little competition, then the relative value of on-page web page optimization is very high.

For example, if you want to be listed for the search term “buy black adidas samba sneaker in knoxville” then it is enough to optimize one of your web pages for that search term because the competition for that search term is not high. You don’t need many inbound links to get high rankings for that keyphrase.

The more competitive the targeted keyword is, the higher is the effect of inbound links on the position of your website in the search results.

The importance of an SEO tactic is not the same as its relative effect on your search engine positions

By taking a look at the chart above you might get the impression that web page optimization is not important to get high rankings for very competitive keywords. That is not the case. Optimizing the contents of a web page is the essential basis for high search engine rankings.

By optimizing a web page for a keyphrase, you tell search engines that the web page is relevant to that keyphrase. If more than one web page has been optimized for that keyphrase (which is usually the case) then the web page with the best inbound links will get the highest position in the search results.

For example, the website www.cnn.com has 46,600 inbound links according to Google. Although CNN.com has so many inbound links, they do not rank for the keyword “buy black adidas samba sneaker in knoxville” because the website has not been optimized for that keyphrase.

If you want to get high rankings for a keyphrase, the first step is to optimize one of your web pages for that keyphrase. Then work on the links that point to the optimized web page to outrank other websites that have been optimized for the same keyword.

Which tactic should you use for your website?

1. The best web page optimization tactic:

When you optimize your website, optimize different pages of your website for different keyphrases. Start with longer keyword phrases that don’t have much competition and then proceed with more competitive keywords.

For example, start with the keywords “buy sneakers in knoxville”, “buy cowboy boots in knoxville”, “buy pumps in knoxville”, “shoe shop knoxville”, etc. When you have managed to get high rankings for many of these keyphrases, Google will know that your website is relevant to the topic “shoes”.

As soon as Google knows that your website is relevant to the topic, it will be much easier to get high rankings for more competitive keywords such as “buy shoes” or even “shoes”.

The more pages of your website you optimize for different but related keywords, the better.

2. The best link building tactic:

It’s not always necessary that you have more links than your competitors. You need better links.

Try to get links to your website that use the targeted keyphrase as the link text (also called anchor text) and that point to the web page on your website that has been optimized for that keyphrase.

Don’t focus on quantity, focus on quality. Getting hundreds of links from a link farm won’t help your website as much a few dozen links from relevant web pages with authority.

If your website has both optimized web pages and good inbound links then it will be easy to outrank web pages that only have one factor.

Tagged as: Positive SEO, search engine marketing, Search Engine Rankings, SEM, SEO tips

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Twitter is a micro-blogging site that asks you a basic question, “What are you doing?” It allows anyone with an account to write up to 140 characters in a text field as a means to update, comment, promote or communicate to others who are “following” you. When people follow you, they see what you’ve recently contributed when they login. They see your “tweets”, which are the messages you leave.

And of course you can follow others who tweet about the things that interest you. As an Internet marketer you may want to follow other Internet marketers, for example.

Like anything, and this is especially true of working with social media, the more you give, the more you get. In other words, the more often you tweet the more activity you’ll generate. Some suggest that you tweet a few times a day, every day. Not every tweet needs to be profound. But they should all be useful.

It’s important that you don’t abuse Twitter for marketing and promoting your products, services or affiliate links. Most of your tweets ought to be about offering your followers useful and valuable information. Only once in a while should you try to use Twitter to promote something. Otherwise you’ll be perceived as a spammer, and no one wants that tag.

Imagine if you had a large number of people following your tweets? Some people have tens of thousands following them. If you had something to promote and you had a large following, you could quickly and efficiently alert a lot of people of your promo. It acts sort of like a mass emailíng blast to your house email list, but it’s a heck of a lot easier and faster. This is the power of Twitter.

One thing that I’ve noticed with Twitter is that it can seem overwhelming at times. The sheer information on Twitter, the ‘how-to’s’, tutorials and all the other ubiquitous advice on how to use and take advantage of it can seem hard to understand and implement. So here’s an easy-to-understand list of the top ten ways in which you can use Twitter to market yourself, your business and your website.

The Top 10 Ways To Use Twitter for Marketing:

1. Use it to promote new pieces of content you or your company create to drive traffic to your site. From online articles to blog posts or from videos to webinars, each time you add something to the Web that is of value, tweet about it and include a link. (Most people on Twitter use www.TinyURL.com to take a long URL and make it short.)

2. Use it for learning new marketing ideas, strategies and techniques. If you follow the right people, and you have to be picky about who you follow, you’ll get pointed to a good amount of useful tutorials, videos, e-zines and other things that teach you about marketing.

3. Use it to get new customers. Use Twitter’s search to find people who may be interested in your product or service. There are many ingenious ways to search for people on Twitter. For example, if you sell red widgets you could go to http://search.twitter.com and find people who have tweeted specifically looking for red widgets. To do this, type the following into the search box: red widgets?

• You’ll notice a lot of the results will be of others selling red widgets. These ones will all obviously have links in them to direct people to the site they’re selling red widgets on. To weed these people/tweets out, use the negative sign like this: -http red widgets?

• Since every link has ‘http’ in it, using the negative sign in front of it will cause your search results to not include any tweets with links in them.

4. Use it to build your email list. Use Twitter’s search to find people who may be interested in the monthly newsletter you send out to your house email list. Invite these people to join.

5. Utilize Twitter plugins or add-ons such as TweetMyBlog or The Twitter Updater, which both automatically make tweets of every new blog post you publish. Also check out TwitThis. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the Web page and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their followers on Twitter. Finally, look at TweetLater, a service that allows you to write lots of tweets at once and then schedule them to go out over time.

6. Use it to build buzz about an upcoming product or website launch.

7. Use it to better brand yourself or your business. Remember, when someone wants to learn more about you or your company, they are increasingly using sites like Twitter for research. You could easily use Twitter to establish yourself as an authority in your field.

8. Use it to update followers on breaking news regarding your company. If your company is mentioned in a new article, tweet about it and include a link to the article. Or if you’re at a conference or trade show, you could tweet what you’re doing and invite people to visit you in person.

9. Use it for business networking, master-mind groups (see Napoleon Hill), and getting yourself seen by high-profile people in your industry.

10. Use it as an instant messaging system to keep you and your team on the same page during projects. This is especially useful for those who work with teams spread out in different cities or countries.

You should note that this top 10 list is not in order of importance or in any particular order. I suggest that you give Twitter a try if you haven’t already. See if you can apply a few of these techniques and tactics to help you take advantage of Twitter as a marketing tool.

And one more important thing to remember is that there is no silver bullet in marketing. You should always be trying and implementing numerous tactics when marketing your business. Don’t only rely on Twitter or any other one thing. Instead, use Twitter (or any other Web 2.0 site) as simply one more tool in your entire social media and marketing toolbox.

About The Author
Jason OConnor is a Web consultant. He writes for The Net Gazette, a Web marketing newsletter, and owns Oak Web Works, LLC, a Web design and marketing company.

Tagged as: Online Marketing Strategy, Social Media, tinyurl, twittering

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If your business website doesn’t have a blog, get one. A blog, if done right, can act as a direct and indirect mechanism that brings large amounts of qualified visitors to your site, many of whom may become customers.

This is mostly related to the way blogs interact with search engines and the traffic I am speaking of will come from search engines, mostly Google.

Before I explain how you can do this to help your website, let me first give some background on how search engines work, Google in particular.

When it comes to optimizing your website (or blog for that matter) for search engines you must always keep in mind two things: on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

On-page optimization is the elements of a Web page that better optimize it to be found and ranked well in the search engines. These elements can include on-page content such as the actual sentences and paragraphs on the page, the headlines (or headers or Hx tags), the links, the links’ text, the title tag and much more.

Off-page optimization means the things that are done on sites besides your site, namely link-building. Off-page optimization is the process of creating links (or causing others to create links) on other websites that point to your site. Inbound links as these are often called have a major impact on how well you rank in search engines. Generally speaking, the more inbound links, the better. But the quality of the sites with these inbound links, or the way the search engines perceive the sites, is even more important.

To rank on the first couple of pages on the search engines requires work on both on-page and off-page optimization.

Two additional and important pieces of information that you’ll need to understand are related to site content and internal links.

Search engines also very much love new, original and quality content, and they like to see your website regularly adding this kind of new content. You don’t need to add pages every day, just add pages at the same rate over time. So if you add a page a week to your site, keep it at around that same pace, or increase or decrease gradually.

A website can be considered a living entity in a sense. It certainly shouldn’t be static. It should grow over time. And the fantastic thing about content is that the more of it there is on your site, the more chances you have of getting found in the search engines.

The idea that inbound links help your search engine rankings that I explained above can be extended to your internal pages as well. In other words, the more links to a particular page coming from other pages within the same site will boost that page’s rank as well.

Think of it this way. If you had a ten page site, including a product page and every page on the site contained a link to your product page and, if all other things were equal, your product page would rank higher than the rest of your site’s pages (besides the home page which is given a little extra weíght).

Now let’s consider what would happen if there were only you and your competitor in your industry (if only that could be true!) and your site still had those ten pages while your competitor’s site contained one hundred pages. Furthermore, your competitor set it up the same way as you where he added a link to every page on his site that pointed to his product page. If all other things were equal, his product page would outrank your product page every time. Why? Because he had 100 internal links pointing to his product page and you only had 10.

If you put all these pieces together now, on-page optimization, off-page optimization or link building, content creation and internal linking, can you begin to see why a blog may be a good thing? A blog helps with all of these.

A blog that is regularly updated is providing a mechanism for adding fresh content on a regular basis. Plus, it’s so easy to use a blog that anyone can use them, so even if you or your employees don’t know a thing about Web pages and HTML, you’ll still be able to add new content to your site.

Consider this. If you add fresh, quality content to your blog on a regular basis by writing posts, something the search engines love, and within each post you link to an important page within your site, let’s say your product page for instance, you’re now building links to help your rankings using your blog. With this additional link your product page gets that much more boost in the search engines.

Remember how I explained that links from within your site help your rankings? Adding links within your blog posts pointing back to your other important pages that you want to rank well is a great way to help your rankings.

And every time you publish a new post, you’re giving the search engines one more entry point into your site. Your site will quickly get bigger, and with each new page your site gets more visible.

Keep in mind that the links you make within your blog posts should be relevant. Only link to your product page from a post that has to do with your products. And also, blog posts ought to be useful to your site visitors. The less you talk about your products and instead offer useful, free information that people can use, the more traffíc and repeat visitors you’ll get.

Remember that people really don’t care about you, your website or your products, they only care about how you can help them. If you sell furniture, a blog post about how to find the best deals on furniture would be far better than a post about how your chairs are the best in the world.

One important thing to remember is that if you plan on creating a new blog for your business as a way to augment your website be sure you put the blog on your actual domain. This means that you would not use a remote service like Blogger.com. Instead, you must have the blog on your business website’s address (or domain). For example, if your website address is http://www.yoursite.com/ then your blog should be located at http://www.yoursite.com/blog or http://blog.yoursite.com/

By adding a blog to your business website you are creating a way to get additional traffic. You’ll get direct traffic from your posts, which get indexed by the search engines and drive traffic to your site from searches. And, you’ll get indirect traffic from your other site’s pages ranking well in the search engines because they have links pointing to them from your blog posts.

You’ll be regularly adding fresh content to your site, which search engines love, thereby creating more ways to be found in the search engines at the same time. And each post provides a new chance to create a link or two to other pages and blog posts on your site, thereby boosting those pages’ rankings.

Like I suggested at the beginning, if your business website doesn’t have a blog, go get one.

About The Author
Jason O’Connor is a Web business and marketing professional who produces The Net Gazette, a free online Web business and marketing periodical. The Net Gazette covers topics that range from blogging for business to Twitter. Read the September edition or visit the main website at: www.thenetgazette.net

Tagged as: blogging tips, optimize website, Positive SEO, search engine marketing, Website Tips

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The key internet advertising terms explained

Internet advertising offers various ways to reach your target audience in a more effective way. Here are some of the aspects of internet advertising to consider:

Tagged as: marketing glossary, Mobile Advertising, Successful Online Advertising, Thread marketing

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Web readers may be a difficult bunch, they may take a while to digest information and they may need convincing of every single point you deliver but they are essential. They can become long term, loyal customers, as long as you give them what they want.

Writing for the Internet is a different skill to writing for paper print or paper publications. Website readers digest smaller amounts of information in less time when compared to reading from paper.

This means that website content needs to be very well organised, concise, well formatted, and appealing. Throw in the proper use of search engine keywords, a powerful Call To Action (CTA), your Unique Selling Proposition (USP), and the natural scepticism of web users and it’s easy to see why many website owners use professional content writers.

1 - Use An Inverted Pyramid Style Of Writing

The inverted pyramid style of writing means getting your point across early in the text. Web readers are an impatient bunch and they need to know that the page they’re reading is relevant. Include a summary or conclusion of the page’s main points at the beginning of the text and then elaborate on this as you progress.

2 - Make It Concise

As well as being impatient, web readers aren’t able to digest and process information as well on a computer screen as they are on paper. There are masses of studies and numerous sets of data giving statistics on this, but the general point is that basic pages need to be between a third and a half of the length they would be on paper. Try to aim for 300-500 words for web pages, with longer pages for technical articles, newsletters, and other web based publications.

3 - Use Headers And Sub-Headers

Headers and sub-headers not only enable you, as the writer, to properly structure the page; they also enable the reader to scan through and find the information that is most pertinent to them. Don’t try anything too clever with your headers and do ensure that they are relevant and informational.

4 - Use Bullets And Lists

Bullets and lists are another method of enabling readers to quickly navigate around a page and grab the most important information. Many readers will simply scroll down a page and if no information jumps out at them then they won’t read anything. Prevent these readers from clicking away from your website by offering bite sized chunks of information.

5 - Use Simple Language

Another area where statistics and figures differ is in the comprehension level of website readers. No matter which figures you listen to, though, one point is clear - we simply can’t process information as well when reading from a computer. Use simple language, avoid jargon that isn’t necessary or clearly defined, and engage your readers using language that everybody can understand.

6 - Use Short Paragraphs And Shorter Sentences

A paragraph should contain text relating to a single, simple idea. When you reach the conclusion of that idea, you should also reach the end of that paragraph. Paragraphs should contain no more than 70-80 words where possible. If a paragraph requires fewer words then make it shorter. The same goes for sentences.

7 - Make It Easy To Scan

Shorter paragraphs, more concise pages, and good headers make a page easy to scan. So too do bullets and lists. Add formatting such as bold and italicised text, quotes, and even hyperlinked text to make the page easier to scan. Remember to use a degree of caution, however, because a page that consists of different formatting techniques will be very difficult to read and understand. Many readers will simply close your page and move on.

8 - Write Objectively

We’ve already discussed how Internet users are impatient and find it difficult to digest information; they’re also a highly sceptical bunch that will take convincing of virtually anything you have to say. Use objective language and avoid the use of too much marketing fluff. Avoid exaggerated claims such telling readers that yours is the best product in the world and instead show them why - convince them to come to that conclusion on their own and you will enjoy better results for your effort.

9 - One Idea Per Paragraph, One Subject Per Page

A single paragraph should contain a single idea and a single page should cover one topic. If a page is becoming too wordy because it includes information on other subjects, then break it down and hyperlink to those other pages. For longer pages remember the bookmark function and use it wisely to help readers navigate their way around your site and take in all of the information that you have to offer.

Giving Visitors What They Want

Web readers may be a difficult bunch, they may take a while to digest information and they may need convincing of every single point you deliver but they are essential. They can become long term, loyal customers, as long as you give them what they want and that’s why we love them so much. If you don’t have the time or the resource to write your own compelling and effective website content then consider using professional copywriters.

About the Author: Matt Jackson - WebWiseWords offers a full range of copywriting services. They can provide affordable and high quality SEO copywriting services so that you can enjoy the benefits of compelling website content without breaking the bank.

Tagged as: Positive SEO, Web 2.0, website content, website design

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