Latest from the Essentee blog
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In a recent You Tube video, Matt Cutts from Google answers the question which is better (by better, we mean which does Google...
In a recent You Tube video, Matt Cutts from Google answers the question which is better (by better, we mean which does Google...
Friday, 11 December 2009 10:48
Search engine optimisation is critical for driving traffic to websites. We all know that. Some organisations spend an lot of money constantly reviewing, optimising and tweaking their site to get to the at all important #1 result.
Small business in NZ don't often have access to the same kind of resources or budgets, so must focus on the fundamentals that are going to get maximum return for the level of investment they can afford.
So what is the biggest mistake we see?
Tuesday, 01 December 2009 00:00
According to global web traffic statistics counter, New Zealanders are quicker to move from the ageing Internet Explorer version 6.0 than the rest of the world. Our use sits at 11.92% compared to a global 21.75%.
A greater percentage of us are using Firefox (29.37% compared to 25.83% globally).
It looks like more of us have upgraded to IE7 (44.19% compared to 39.1%) but the stats suggest some people who are making the move from IE6 have jumped to Firefox instead of IE7.
Our statistics are similar to 'Oceania'. So if your customer base is in NZ and Australia, 30% of your users are using Firefox, with about 5% using Chrome or Safari.
We don't know about you, but we couldn't afford to ignore 35% of our user base, so make sure you test your website functionality for IE7 and Firefox 3.0 at the least, and ensure the design gracefully degrades for IE6, Chrome and Safari.
Monday, 26 October 2009 10:15
Updated: After following a link on Twitalyzer to the Web Analytics Demystified website, our anti-virus software blocked a potential threat. Don't know whether the site was trying to do something legitimate or not but couldn't take the risk! We've learnt not to argue with Kaspersky. This would normally result in the post about the particular tool or service to be withdrawn. But the advice still looks worthwhile so I'm leaving it there, but follow Twitalyzer links at your own risk.
Original Post:
If social media is part of your marketing mix, Twitalyzer might prove to be a useful tool. Not because it necessarily assists specifically with your marketing efforts, but because it provides some guidance about how to get more out of Twitter. Based on ratings across a number of elements: Influence, Signal, Generosity, Velocity and Clout you can test how successful you are.
Thursday, 22 October 2009 14:22
Several articles this morning are reporting the impending announcement of deals between Microsoft, Twitter and Facebook to integrate real time status updates into the Bing search engine results.
Monday, 12 October 2009 11:35
If you care about how Google search works, that is.
There are a lot of blogs I read. Some regularly. Some not so much. One I do read often is Google's Matt Cutts.
Matt is the head of Google's webspam team (whatever that means), but what is important is that he knows more about how Google's search works than 99.99% of the planet.
He also writes funny yet informative, to the point blog posts and particularly useful video blogs. And he just seems like a decent bloke.
Read the disclaimer - the comments are quite funny - it would be nice to work for someone who a) pays you a lot and/or b) pays for travel to conferences etc (read: think you are worth the $$). I'll see how I feel when people are banging down my door offering gifts tho.
Sunday, 11 October 2009 12:10
We follow Gerry McGovern and pretty much subscribe to his recommendations and views.
In a recent post, he starts with a statement that we wholeheartedly endorse:
Success on the web is not about making customers do what you want. It is about helping customers do what they want.
Saturday, 10 October 2009 09:57
Latest darling of the social network landscape - Twitter - featured on the local breakfast show recently. An 'expert' (don't know if he is or isn't one) suggested that Twitter wasn't for everyone.
Many small business owners must have breathed a sigh of relief.
Sunday, 06 September 2009 08:22
Just completed new site for a client using Wordpress as a CMS. Wordpress is effective and well supported. Stable and the search engines love it because it is fundamentally (ie designed to be) optimised for search. There is ample community support should you run into problems, although like always you have to be able to weed out the opinions of the real experts from the self-styled ones (no pun intended).
We used Wordpress rather than our other preferred CMS, Joomla!, as this is a small site (11 pages) and Joomla! was deemed overkill.
Tuesday, 01 September 2009 19:20
A couple of news items this morning had a theme of web traffic statistics, hence the theme of today's post.
A lot of people we speak to can't answer the question "How many visits do you get to your website?" - much less know what keywords they used to get there or which is the most popular content on their site. If you have a site, it's pretty much critical that you know what people are doing on it.
Sunday, 16 August 2009 14:35
A group of startups have started an initiative called IE6 No More. They have set up a website explaining why the Microsoft browser must be abandoned to promote innovation on the web. It then provides code snippets that can be added to a website telling website visitors still using IE6 to switch to a modern browser.
It's not a 'I hate Microsoft' move - just IE6 in particular.
Here are the main reasons:
W3Schools report in July that 14.4% of users are still on IE6. For the sites we monitor, the stats range from 6% to 12%. The lower stats are from sites with predominantly a NZ audience, so it might depend on where your visitors are based.
A lot of IE6 users will be those accessing the web from work, where conservative IT departments are reluctant to move to a more modern browser. Microsoft will be supporting IE6 until 2014, apparently due to the number of organisations still using the eight year old browser. But they comment that they would prefer people used IE8 - so why aren't they assisting those organisations to move? Probably a question for another post....<cough>Vista</cough>.
We'll be supporting the campaign by:
This would be our approach regardless of what the browser is. Eventually IE6 will be replace by IEx or Firefox x as the oldest most outdated browser out there, so the issue won't go away.
