infographic which comes courtesy of Alibaba...

The state of ecommerce in China

Step 1: Show Them the Money

Step 2: Show Them What Their Customers Expect

Step 3: Outline Best Practices and Give Them Choices

Step 4: Help Them Decide Whether They Need a Mobile App

Step 5: Explain the Marketplace and Mobile App Nuances

Step 6: Show Them Options and Give Them Choices

Step 7: Introduce Other Mobile Marketing Tactics

There’s a good chance you’ve heard of Pinterest lately. It has been all over the news, as it’s growing like mad, and driving a lot of traffic to ecommerce retailers. If you’re not familiar with Pinterest, it’s a new social network/application that enables users to pin photos to virtual pinboards, organized by topic. Once pinned, other users can view your photos and pinboards, “repin” photos to their own pinboards, comment on photos, and like them. This had led to an explosion of traffic for some websites, especially ecommerce retailers. Many people use Pinterest when researching new purchases, to organize ideas, etc. For example, I just created a pinboard containing the top golf drivers I’m researching for the 2012 season. That’s if I get to play this year. :)

Based on the rapid growth of Pinterest, and all the buzz associated with that growth, I’ve received a lot of questions recently about how ecommerce retailers could get more involved. Also, website owners want to know the best ways to make it easier for Pinterest users to pin photos that are located on their respective websites. So, I decided to write this post to explain various ways to include the “Pin It” button on a website. I will include instructions and information below for how to include a “Pin It” button on a webpage, on a WordPress blog or website, and how to address adding the “Pin It” button to an ecommerce CMS (which is the most challenging of the three).

What is the “Pin It” Button?

Before we hop into the instructions, I’ll quickly cover what the “Pin It” button is. You have inevitably seen Like buttons, Tweet buttons, +1 buttons, etc. as you travel the web. Those social plugins make it easier for users to share content to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ from websites across the web. Well, Pinterest also wants to make it easier for users to quickly pin content. So, they created the “Pin It” button. In its simplest form, it’s a small button that you can place on a webpage that enables users to quickly pin content to a pinboard, while also showing how many “pins” it has received. You can tailor the code of the “Pin It” button to specify the URL of the webpage, the URL of the image you want users to pin, and the description that populates the “Pin It” form. You can also tailor how the “Pin It” button displays on your webpages.

The “Pin It” button (both horizontal and vertical layout listed below):

Since there are several types of websites, and each brings its own type of installation, I’ll cover a few of the most common methods below. My hope is that the following information and instructions can help you get up and running quickly. Let’s face it, if you make it easier for users to pin content, the greater chance you have of receiving a spike of traffic from Pinterest. Let’s jump in.

Instructions for Adding the Pinterest Button to a Simple Webpage

This is the most basic implementation of the “Pin It” button. Let’s say you have a webpage with a killer photo of your core product. Maybe you don’t have many products, but just sell a handful of core products. If that’s the case, you could use the following instructions to add a “Pin It” button to those product webpages.

Pinterest has created a simple tool on its website to help webmasters create a static “Pin It” button. You can visit http://pinterest.com/about/goodies/ and scroll down to section titled “Pin It” Button for Websites. You will see fields for URL of the webpage the photo is located on, URL of the image located on your servers, and then a description field. The description is optional, but I highly recommend adding that to make it easier for users (since it auto-populates the “pin it” form once the button is clicked). You can also select how the “Pin It” button displays. There is a dropdown that lets you choose if the pin count shows up next to or above the pin button. You can also choose to not show the pin count at all.

Once you enter the required information, Pinterest will generate the code for you below the form. Then you can copy the code and add it to your webpage. There is “Basic” code and “Advanced Code”. The advanced code loads asynchronously, which can help with performance. Also, you should use the advanced code when you want to add several pin buttons to one webpage. You will need to add the resulting code to your webpage (in your html).

Screenshot of what the “Pin It” button form looks like when populated with sample data:

How To Add a Pinterest Button to a WordPress Blog (via a WordPress Plugin)

If you are running a WordPress blog, you are in luck. There are several plugins that you can install that makes it easy to add “Pin It” buttons to your blog posts and pages. I’ll explain two of those plugins below.

The first plugin I’ll cover is called Pinterest Pin It Button, and it provides some great functionality. Using this plugin, you can add “Pin It” buttons to your posts, pages, homepage, archives, etc. In addition, you can choose to show the “Pin It” button either above or below your main content. For even more customization, you can use a shortcode in your post to add the “Pin It” button within your main content. For example, you can use the shortcode [pinit] within your post to add the “Pin It” button within your content (versus just at the top or bottom of the post).

The Pinterest “Pin It” Button plugin settings in WordPress:

The second plugin I’ll cover offers basic “Pin It” button functionality. The Pin It on Pinterest plugin adds a “Pin It” button at the end of your posts, and it enables you to select which image should get pinned, as well as what the pre-populated description should be. Once installed, you will see Pinterest options in your post editor within WordPress.

How to Add a Pinterest Button to an eCommerce CMS

I mentioned earlier that adding a “Pin It” button to an ecommerce CMS is the most challenging to address. The reason is simple. When you have hundreds (or thousands) of products being handled dynamically by a content management system (CMS), you can’t simply add a static pin it button like we did earlier in the post. The code needs to be dynamically tailored based on the product at hand. There aren’t separate pages for each product within an ecommerce CMS, but instead, the CMS dynamically handles each product via database-driven code. This means you cannot simply ftp product pages to your server for each product you sell on your website. The underlying code needs to determine the right URL’s and description for the “Pin It” button.

In order to add any code to an ecommerce CMS that addresses the specific URL, images within the post, etc., you will need to understand the specific functions and variables that your CMS uses. By the way, even WordPress works this way. WordPress is a CMS, although many people don’t realize this. For example, there is a function that WordPress uses to determine the current URL, and it looks like this:

<?php the_permalink(); ?>

In WordPress, the_permalink() returns the current URL, which can be used to populate the “Pin It” button code. This is the approach you would need to use for your own CMS. The good news is that any reputable ecommerce CMS will provide a reference guide that includes the various functions and variables that can be used. Actually, it’s common to use these functions and variables to perform other tasks.

For example, here is a webpage explaining how to add a pin it button to Shopify. You’ll notice that the example includes variables specific to Shopify for determining the current URL, image URL, and description. Again, your own ecommerce CMS provider should provide similar variables you can use when adding the pin it button to your website.

A “Pin It” button on a Shopify ecommerce website:

My recommendation is to contact your ecommerce CMS provider and track down the necessary code for referencing the current page, images within product pages, and the description you want to use for the image. Once you have that information, you can add the necessary code to your CMS template or theme to handle the “Pin It” button. It will then dynamically pull the correct information for each product page on your website.

Summary – Enable Users to Pin Content Easily

I hope this post helped you understand more about Pinterest, including how to add a “Pin It” button to your website, WordPress blog, or ecommerce CMS. Pinterest is growing rapidly and adding the “Pin It” button to your website can make it easier for users to share your content. This can give you a greater chance of having that content get noticed, shared, etc., which can result in increased traffic, exposure, and sales. And that’s what ecommerce is all about!

I recommend you start thinking about Pinterest today. You should speak with your development team or programmer to see how you can implement the “Pin It” button soon. Pins are waiting. :)

There have been instances of user-generated content (UGC) being reproduced as commercial items, like t-shirts or bumper stickers, without the express permission of the creator. Sometimes, when these items are sold by large corporations like Hot Topic, the creators and social networks can get riled up about the corporations profiting from a network’s creativity and hard work.

Maybe it wasn’t ‘hard’ to draw the rage guy, but you get the point.

Users aren’t clear on whether they still own the copyright to their rage comics, original memes, and other UGC once it’s been published to social sites like Reddit, Digg, or Fark. And sometimes, networks are defenseless against other parties re-posting and recycling their network’s goods.

Wait . . . isn’t that the goal of social networks (sharing, social diffusion, etc.)? It’s clear why this topic is so tricky. Let’s go network by network, and review the Terms of Service and all of those boxes you click accept to without reading, to find out if your content is free game.

TOS

Except as expressly provided otherwise in the Privacy Policy, you agree that by posting messages, uploading files, inputting data, or engaging in any other form of communication with or through the Website, you grant us a royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, enhance, transmit, distribute, publicly perform, display, or sublicense any such communication in any medium (now in existence or hereinafter developed) and for any purpose, including commercial purposes, and to authorize others to do so.

LAYMAN’S TERMS

You are sharing with the world. Though you retain a copyright, the content becomes public.

TOS

You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).

LAYMAN’S TERMS

You maintain copyright, but agree to unreservedly share the content with Twitter.

TOS

You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through yourprivacy and application settings.

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

LAYMAN’S TERMS

You maintain ownership of content, but grant unreserved rights to Facebook, and accept that other users will maintain the content even if you delete it on your end.

TOS

For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your Content. However, by submitting Content to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content in connection with the Service and YouTube’s (and its successors’ and affiliates’) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels. You also hereby grant each user of the Service a non-exclusive license to access your Content through the Service, and to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform such Content as permitted through the functionality of the Service and under these Terms of Service.

LAYMAN’S TERMS

You maintain copyright, but agree to unreservedly share the content with YouTube and users until you delete the content.

TOS

By creating and posting content to Digg, you warrant that you own all rights to the content, agree that the content will be dedicated to the public domain under the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication, available at http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ and that you will not object to the use of the content by Digg in any context. To clarify, the above does not apply to the content on external sites linked to by the original submission.

LAYMAN’S TERMS

You maintain copyright, but agree to share it with Digg.

TOS

You agree that you are solely responsible for your own Submissions and affirm, represent, and/or warrant that you own or have the necessary licenses, rights, consents, and permissions to use and authorize Fark.com to use all patent trademark, trade secret, copyright or other proprietary rights in and to any and all Submissions to enable inclusion and use of the Submissions in the manner contemplated by Fark.com. You retain all ownership rights in your Submissions. However, by submitting the Submissions to Fark.com, you hereby grant Fark.com a non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Submissions in connection with Fark.com and Fark.com’s business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of Fark.com (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels/outlets.

LAYMAN’S TERMS

You maintain copyright, but agree to unreservedly share the content with Fark.

TOS

We do not claim ownership in any “Content” (which means any and all postings, e-mails, messages, recommendations, comments, text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, works of authorship, feedback, bug reports, or other materials) that you post on, deliver to, or otherwise make available to the Services, but to be able to legally provide you with and promote the Services, we have to have certain rights to use such Content in connection with the Services, as set forth below. In return, we also grant you certain use rights to the Content that we (or our licensors) own and use to provide the Services to you and other Users, as set forth below.

By posting any Content on the Services, you hereby grant to us an unrestricted, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy, perform, display, create derivative works of, and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution method (now known or later developed) throughout the world. Additionally, by posting any Content on the Services and making your Content available to others (“Third Parties”) via RSS distribution, you hereby grant to all Third Parties an unrestricted, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to copy, display, and distribute such Content in any and all media (now known or later developed) throughout the world. No compensation will be paid with respect to the Content that you submit, upload, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Services.

LAYMAN’S TERMS

You maintain copyright, but agree to unreservedly share the content with StumbleUpon.

TOS

Your Member Content is yours; AVOS does not claim any ownership rights in your Member Content. By posting, submitting or transmitting any Member Content on or through the Service, you grant us and our third party service providers and partners a worldwide, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, adapt, modify, distribute, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, broadcast, access, view and otherwise exploit such Member Content in any and all media or distribution channels (now known or hereafter created). For example, this license allows us to make your public “bookmarks” and comments available anywhere and everywhere in the spirit of the Service i.e., for use by other Members, our partners and via other media platforms. No compensation will be paid to you with respect to your Member Content as a result of your posting, submitting or transmitting Member Content through the Service.

LAYMAN’S TERM

You maintain copyright, but agree to unreservedly share the content with Delicious.

CONCLUSION

Regardless of the forum or the TOS agreement signed, if you are lawyered-up, there’s still a chance that your UGC can be protected. For example, if a third party wrongfully posts your original content, then the TOS have been violated and are nullified in many cases (think stolen sex tapes).

However, under ordinary circumstances, a good rule of thumb is that if you posted it for free, it is free for general use. Also, under most TOS above and elsewhere, you grant explicit rights to the social network to use the content any which way they please.

Facebook is all about creating friends and that the first time you signed up an account, you have nothing else in mind but to fill your friends list. As time goes by, you may have realized that it's quite unfit to have someone you really don't know personally seeing all your private information. In that case, you would "unfriend" them.

Self-preservation is innate to us and that is what also keeping us being a human. Anything that degrades us even in insignificant ways is factually frustrating; so we always tend to retaliate. This is very true when it comes to Facebook. Anyone who has "unfriended" us is not just right especially if we are not even notified about it with a valid reason. Not really degrading but sort of an offense to our ego if we have befriended someone in Facebook and yet that someone has actually "unfriended" you in unknown time.

The purpose of this post is not to make you bad but to keep your self-preservation intact. In simple term, I am giving you tips on how to detect Facebook friends who have unfriended you so you could delete them in your list.

The new Facebook allows seeing your timeline when you have activated it. This timeline feature allows you see a rundown of friends you have lost.

Here are the steps:

• Activate your Facebook Timeline.
• Choose a year in the timeline and find the "Friends" box.
• Mouse-over and click "Made X New Friends."
• As soon as the list is made available, scroll through it. Those Facebook friends with "Add Friend" next to their profile link (with photo of course), are the ones that have “unfriended” you.

Image credit: Financial Times

It’s hard to believe, but mobile marketing didn’t really get going in earnest until Apple launched its App Store in 2008. Three years later there are now marketplaces on all five major device platforms - Apple’s iOS, Android, BlackBerry, HP WebOS and Windows Mobile. What’s more, there seems to be a constant footrace between brands not only to be first to market with their own apps, but to refresh them for a fickle public.

Some of what’s driving this is the zeitgeist. Overnight, it seems, apps have become deeply embedded in our culture. To stand out at a dinner party you better pack some apps. The New York Times now has a weekly column covering them. And even Sesame Street, arguably a mirror image of American society, posted a video ode to apps on YouTube that has been viewed nearly 750,000 times.

This columnist, too, has gone ape for apps. A year ago I posited that, as smartphone and tablet adoption rise, mobile applications could unseat the web as the primary means we interact with content. Now I am second guessing myself. Things are once again changing.

This summer, the app ecosystem started to show signs that it maybe fraying at the edge. Several major players in media and social networking including the Financial Times, Twitter, LinkedIn and
Facebook have all launched rich web applications. These sites, thanks to the magic of HTML5, run in any modern browser and come very close to matching the functionality of their “native” app cousins.

Now none of these companies has abandoned their Apple or Android apps. Still, the sudden interest in web apps is notable. There are arguably three factors driving it.

First, HTML5 has finally matured into a strong alternative to native iOS and Android apps. These web apps can even run offline.

Second, it shows that perhaps developers are frustrated that they need to support multiple platforms. Android devices alone come in so many shapes, sizes and resolutions, that supporting them is a difficult and expensive challenge. Web apps solve this conundrum.

Finally, there’s freedom. Apple, most notably, recently changed the way that developers can sell content from within their applications. If a developer links out to their own online store, they must also allow consumers to purchase content using an iTunes account. However, Apple takes a 30% cut of the latter.

Most content companies have reluctantly relented to Apple’s rules. However, a few, notably Amazon, chose not to provide any e-commerce functionality in their iOS ebook apps. Amazon instead responded by launching the Kindle Cloud Reader, a web application that runs in a browser across multiple platforms. It features a rich, engaging shopping and reading experience that rivals their native apps. Downloaded books can also be read offline.

To date, no major brand has made the jump to prioritize an HTML5-based web application over a native app. This is for a good reason. Most consumers are still downloading smartphone and tablet apps in droves.

However, this could change over time as marketers get more comfortable developing for mobile devices, start dabbling with new web development tools from the likes of Adobe and aspire to exert greater control over user experience.

Here are three trends to watch when considering your own strategy.

First, there’s Apple. To date, the company has backed off on some of its more draconian policies. Still, they remain strict. However, if more companies start to prioritize their web apps over iOS apps, Apple may blink to protect its ecosystem and relent further.

Second, there’s Google. While Google has thousands of native applications in its Android Marketplace, the company has also been actively promoting HTML5 as an emerging alternative, starting with its own sites. Web applications are arguably more important to Google than native apps. They encourage users to browse and search more and thus could drive ad revenue.

Finally, there’s the global economy. The fragmentation in mobile space shows no signs of abating. Marketers may decide it’s more cost effective to develop a strong web application and control the experience end-to-end, rather than support hundreds of phone and tablet formats.

Time will tell how this all shakes out. Remember that just a few years ago there were hardly any mobile applications. Today there are hundreds of thousands of them. Things can change fast if developers are motivated.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkAgiv6EE-g

Facebook Marketing for Local Businesses

As more customers become smartphone-savvy, local businesses can leverage the opportunities offered by Facebook Places and Facebook Deals to get new customers to come to their location and to reward current customers. Mari shares what you need to know.

Facebook Places

You’ll learn how to claim your business on Facebook and take advantage of your Facebook Place page so you can make offers through Facebook Deals.

Facebook Deals

Find out about the four different kinds of deals and how your business can use them.

1. Individual deals: For one-time offers


2. Loyalty deals: To reward repeat business


3. Friend deals: To incite up to 8 people to check in at once


4. Charity deals: To get people to donate to a charity

And Mari shares how some brands are using deals to grow their business.

Be sure to listen for Mari’s hot marketing tip to find out how you can also include Twitter to leverage your Facebook marketing with Places and Deals.

Bing isn’t the top search engine used by searchers but it still is a powerful tool for driving traffic to your blog and most likely you’ve got a good percentage of organic traffic coming from Microsoft’s Bing – enough to warrant a bit of time learning more about it and how you can maximize some returns.

And the reasons are only getting stronger: If you add up Bing and Yahoo! search queries you might get an accurate picture of what the future looks like for your blog and it’s traffic from Bing since Yahoo!’s search engine is going to be powered by Bing (and co-branded with “Powered by Bing”) starting in early 2012:

Microsoft’s Bing search engine will power the Yahoo website and Yahoo will in turn become the advertising sales team for Microsoft’s online offering.

That’s worth noting – that’s worth mentioning and studying a bit, right? And even without a Yahoo! + Bing partnership it’s been shown that Bing’s marketshare is increasing year over year growing nearly 7% from 23.64% to 30% from 2010 to 2011!

Some people have suggested that at some point the possibility of Bing overtaking Google’s marketshare is possible:

Now I’m not sure if it’s really going to happen but it’s worth my time (and yours) to understand at least the basics of Bing-related SEO strategies, right?

And, of course, we all get traffic via Bing already so it’s also worth it to optimize and maximize if possible:

So here are a few suggestions that are relevant to not only search engine optimization for Bing but also most other search engines as well.

Bing breaks it down into 5 main areas: Crawlability, Site Structure, On-Page SEO, Content, and Links:

Your Blog’s Crawlability:

• XML Sitemaps – Make sure to have one! You can create one here if you have WordPress.
• Navigation Structure – Make sure it’s easily accessed by crawlers. Learn more about site architecture here and here as well.
• Limit Adobe Flash – Read more about SEO limitations here.
• Limit JavaScript – Read more about SEO limitations here.
• Limit Ajax – Read more about SEO limitations here.
• Rich Media – If you do use rich media make sure that the user experience is clean and has a down-level experience and flow to it.
• Keywords – Use clean and keyword rich URL structure. Permalinks and blog post slugs can help.
• Robots.txt – Make sure you have one!

Your Blog’s Site Structure:

• Logical Hiearchy – Make sure your content is laid out logically and with a focus on usability.
• Internal Linking – Make sure your content has a great internal linking. Become a master architect!
• Clean URLs – Make sure that your links have no extraneous parameters where possible. Examples are adding sessions, tracking, and other calls on the links when not necessary.
• Sitemaps – Make sure you have sitemaps for both humans and search engines!
• Rich Media – Make sure they don’t block links or cover up links. See SEO limitations as well here.

Your Blog’s On-Page SEO:

• Good Titles – Should be unique relevant and between 60 and 70 characters in length. Read this kick-butt post on how to optimize your titles! Only one title per page please!
• Meta Descriptions – Make sure they are unique, relevant, and 160 characters or less. You can learn all you want about meta descriptions and meta elements here. Only one description per page as well here!
• Content Tags – Make sure you have the right content tags (H1, H2, etc) in your content. Learn more here.
• Images – Make sure you are using images well and wisely with ALT tags as appropriate and descriptions with keywords. Learn about images here.
• Keyword Targeting – Make sure you use targeted keywords for each blog post and piece of content.
• Internal Linking – Make sure the links have the right anchor text.

Your Blog Content:

• Keyword Research – This is so important that I dedicated an entire blog post to it! Learn more about keyword research.
• Usability – Make sure your content is usable and is built for people, not search engines!
• Design – Design is so important and even more important now for SEO.
• Copy – Written copy is your ultimate weapon of choice when it comes to creating an attractive blog for search engines.
• Architecture Depth – Make sure you create deep and content-rich pages.
• Authority – Create amazing blog content and you’ll be seen as an authority via the search engines. Your level of authenticity helps with this as well
• Consistency – Create a schedule and have the discipline to produce new content frequently.
• Unique – Make sure your content is unique and not re-blogged or re-used from other sources.
• Broken Links – Make sure you’ve captured any 404 errors, broken links, and internal 301 redirects. Have a useful 404 page as well.
• Canonicalization – Make sure you understand the power and importance of the Canonical tag.

Your Blog’s Links and Link Structure:

• Links – This is one of your top ingredients for optimizing your blog. Become a master link architect! Internal and external linking strategies!
• Linking – Make sure your optimizing your links for SEO.
• Viral Content – Make sure you know which types of blog posts often get a lot of viral traffic!
• Paid Links – Stay away from paid links. Period.

You’ve heard this: “A picture is worth a thousand words.” But can it actually help you engage with customers and prospects?

In this post, I’ll share ways you can ensure your images provide the best experience they can; ones that will help keep the conversation flowing.

Among the topics covered in this post are tools, tips and strategies that can be used to enhance the visual representation of your business.

As I’ve done in the other posts in the 26 Tips series, this post provides an easily digestible A-Z guide to which you can return time and again.

A-Z Guide

#1: Adverts

Location, location, location. Talk about good real estate. You can use the Facebook photo strip space for pictures that serve as adverts for your business. You can include descriptions, links and calls to action.

In the post How to Use the Facebook Photo Strip on Your Fan Page, you can learn more about optimal sizes for photo strip images.

Watch how Make It In Music created them in this helpful video.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx1svhz8sE4

#2: Brand awareness

Ann Smarty suggests watermarking your images to protect your brand and increase brand awareness. She recommends a number of tools to get the job done; e.g., Fast Watermark and Photo Watermark.

#3: Creative commons

The service through Flickr makes it possible for users to offer their work under a creative commons license where people can search through images under each type of license: attribution, noncommercial, no derivative works and share alike. Before using a creative commons image, be sure to check out the license.

#4: Digital art

Greg Finn writes that digital art is a staple in social media news sites and suggests that design-related images should be “high resolution and content should be truly extraordinary.” He describes four examples of design images typically used in social media: design art, graffiti, web design and fonts. One outstanding example he references was created by Kevin Hulsey for Royal Caribbean, which can be viewed on his site, where you not only see a representation of the full ship but can go cabin by cabin through the ship. Pretty impressive!

#5: Effects

Create interesting effects with your images to help them stand out in the crowd. There are countless apps which can help to create all kinds of effects; e.g., collages, high dynamic range rendering, tiles, vintage, sketches and interesting textures. If you work on a Mac, you can check out the photography apps online.

#6: Facebook Photos Plus Comments

Photos and comments are the perfect duo for Facebook. While you may think you have the most fantastic photo to post on Facebook (and you might), sometimes it won’t be enough to stand on its own. As, Jim Lodico writes in his post, 6 Tips to Increase Your Facebook Edgerank and Exposure, ”Photos and videos show up in the Facebook new feeds as thumbnail images. Due to their size, they almost require interaction as users click on them to make them large enough to see. Be sure to add a comment that encourages users to open the photo and add comments of their own.”

#7: Google index

Text isn’t the only thing that Google indexes. That’s right. Google indexes your images too. Images are a very powerful way to add more Google juice to your site’s search ranking. Panda’s post 9 Ways of Optimizing Your Site for Image Search says, “If you have optimized your images correctly, you can get yourself a very attractive top 10 position by tagging your images correctly.”

Fun Tip: You can check how many pictures Google has indexed from your site by going to http://images.google.com/images?q=site:yoursite.com, and replacing “yoursite.com” with your domain name.

#8: Hipstamatic

If you’re on the go and want to take some interesting photos with your iPhone, Hipstamatic is a great app worth exploring. Photographer Stephanie Roberts lists it as one tool to fuel your creativity in her article in Digital Photo magazine. She says, “Hipstamatic mimics the unique style of vintage prints characterized by vignettes, blurring, textured edges and oversaturated colors created with the original analog plastic camera. Using a square-format viewfinder, the app lets you switch ‘lenses,’ ‘flash’ and ‘film’ with the swipe of a finger. I often shoot with Hipstamatic because I like composing images in the square-format viewfinder and I like the creative constraint of choosing the ‘film’ and ‘lens’ before I shoot.”

Rich Brooks from Flyte talks about Hipstamatic and other apps in this video from 207, the evening news magazine on southern Maine’s NBC affiliate, WCSH.

#9: iPhoneography

Stephanie Roberts, author of The Art of iPhoneography: A Guide to Mobile Creativity, gives a number of compelling reasons for seeing the iPhone camera as a powerful creative device for photographers. My personal favorite is: “You rarely go anywhere without it, which means you increase the odds of your ability to capture fleeting magic moments as you move through the day.”

I can’t begin to tell you how many times I think I should have brought my digital camera when I remember that my iPhone, the constant friend and companion, is ready and waiting and very up for the task at hand!

Stephanie suggests loosening up and following your instincts and crafting your toolkit with apps to fuel your creativity. She recommends Photo fx from Tiffen, Iris Photo Suite, Hipstamatic and Adobe Photoshop Express.

#10: Join the community and be social with your photos

Stephanie Roberts also recommends creating an Instagram presence. “Instagram is a rapidly growing social network of iPhoneographers sharing images in real time. The Instagram app displays a chronological feed of photographs shared by users you choose to follow. You can use Instagram to shoot an image (or choose an image from your photo library), apply an image filter (or not) and quickly share the image with your followers. Instagram also can automate image sharing to your online journal, or your Twitter or Facebook accounts.”

Steve Kovach’s post, HOW TO: Use Instagram for Your Business recognizes the ways businesses can use Instagram to make their photos searchable with hashtags. As he says, “This is fun for the average user, but a huge win for brands that want to get more attention with the Instagram crowd.” He offers four tips for leveraging hashtags for your brand on Instagram: host a contest, target people by interest, create an RSS feed and encourage participation.

News organizations are using Instagram, too. In this recent post, Anthony Quintano, the community manager for @NBC News, offers three tips: upload original photos that share a unique perspective, thank and follow other Instagram users and search for user content.

#11: Keywords

Where would we be without keywords? They’re everywhere we search today. But when it comes to searching for the perfect image, they become even more important to understand. Getty images put together a very comprehensive guide to help users search for images. Whether you’re looking on Getty Images or not, the concepts are important to consider. For example, they suggest using keywords related to concepts, topics, people, age, sayings, image and footage styles, editorial-specific terms and human emotions. They offer advice for refining your search; e.g., combine terms, be creative, editorial and footage.

#12: Link

This may be an obvious piece of advice, but nevertheless it’s worth mentioning. Users have become accustomed to rolling over images in hopes that they will be able to navigate to a destination. So why not link the screenshot and take users directly to the website. This is particularly useful on web roundup posts. In this roundup, “The Art of Facebook Page Design,” the images represent the artwork of 50 Facebook pages. When the user wants to see more about the Facebook page, he or she can easily navigate to the page by clicking on the image.

#13: Movies

Images needn’t be stills. With a variety of tools, you can create short movies with a series of photos, add music, embed on your blog, link on Facebook and wow, think of the impressions you can make. One such tool is Animoto.

Here’s a good tutorial by mentorMichel.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=48194ShehLI

#14: Networking sites

Looking for a way to keep track of the images you’ve shared on different social networking sites? There are several options to help you. One such product is GRID, which “fetches all your photos from different social networks and lists them out by week. Currently GRID can rewind your memories from Facebook, dailybooth, Instagram, picplz, twitpic and yfrog.”

Pixable, another fun service, makes it possible to view your friends’ photos shared on Facebook. Young writes in the post, View Facebook Photos with Pixable, “For every photo you can see on the Pixable website, you can also like it, read its comments, comment it and see who is tagged in it. Very enjoyable, especially when your friends share many beautiful photos of themselves.”

#15: Optimize

In the post 9 Ways of Optimizing your Site for Image Search, we’re advised to: use descriptive file names, use the html alt tag, add descriptive text close to the picture, keep the most important images close to the top headline or title, put photos within articles and blog posts away from navigational elements, do not add code to break out of frames, use images that read well when thumbnailed, make the photos accessible, and use social photo sites like Flickr with links back to the relevant page on your site.

#16: Profiles

The placement of social icons on blogs is an important consideration. Cindy King points out in her post, 19 Ways to Use Images to Enhance Your Blog, “A blog is considered a social media platform and you want to make it easy for readers to connect with you on the social platforms they feel most comfortable with. This is why many blogs have easy-to-recognize social icons in a prominent position.”

#17: Quality of experience

While we’ve been talking largely about images and photos so far in this post, Greg Finn suggests six formats for informative images that work in social media: charts/graphs, flow charts, how-to’s, maps, screenshots, and guides. “The key for these images is to be easy to consume and to be comprehensive. The images should not only be helpful, but should also be designed well. Great design can make an ordinary informative image turn into an essential resource.”

#18: Resize images and use same sizes

Greg Finn offers great advice for using the same size for each image in your piece. Go a step further and make it part of your editorial standards and request that all images have the same dimensions. As Greg says, “This gives your article a more professional feel and gives the submissions a much more uniform look. Never use a jumble of different image sizes; your story will look much more amateur.”

#19: Screenshots

Sometimes nothing says it better than a screenshot, the “image taken by the computer to record the visible items displayed on the monitor, television, or another visual output device.” (Wikipedia) Screenshot images are often used to demonstrate a point and show users how to complete a task. Another powerful feature of screenshots is the ability to annotate them, and this is where you might want to explore software options. Recently I’ve started using SnagIt by TechSmith, which I’ve used in this post. The annotating features really help add pizzazz.

#20: Twitter

As discussed in the post, 26 Twitter Tips for Enhancing Your Tweets, images can be shared on Twitter via a number of Twitter image sharing services, SMS or email, Brightkite or FriendFeed, Skitch and Encoded Tweets. You can learn more about these options from Josh Catone in his post.

#21: User Photos

One of Facebook’s newest developments is the ability to tag pages in user’s photos. Right now it’s limited to pages categorized as “Brands & Products,” but it can be very effective for brands looking to expand their reach. As Josh Constine writes, “A tag of a brand or public figure represents a strong social recommendation of that Page, which will make a user’s friends curious to visit that Page and improve the chance that they’ll Like it themselves.

“Photos are Facebook’s most popular native application, receiving huge numbers of Page views. Tags of Pages in Photos could gain many impressions from a user’s friends over a long period of time, offering many opportunities for that Page to gain new fans.” Josh demonstrates this new feature in the Coke brand photo below:

# 22: Volume

While there aren’t any hard-and-fast rules about the number of images to include in a blog post, I think most bloggers would agree that effective blog posts should contain at least one or two. Keep in mind that Images will help engage readers by breaking up long blocks of text and enhancing the readability of the page. Posts on Social Media Examiner for example, always include a number of images and the pièce de résistance, captions!

#23: Widgets

Cindy King discusses widgets and how most social networking sites provide widgets for you to embed on your blog. Cindy says, “This is a great way to grow your communities on social media platforms. It gives your readers the choice of where they want to connect with you. And as the communication styles vary on different social media platforms, it also lets your readers choose how they want to connect with you.”

#24: Experience

In the post How to Improve the Appeal of Your Graphics, Connie Malamed discusses research that indicates the ease of processing information (otherwise known as processing fluency) which influences a person’s aesthetic pleasure and contributes to positive experiences. Four features attributed to facilitating fluent processing are: symmetry, high figure/ground contrast, visual clarity and less information rather than more.

Use images as a way to facilitate a good experience for your customers, fans and followers.

#25: Why images

Adam Singer describes images as being vital to modern blogs for six reasons: content moves through the social web lightning-fast and strong imagery can’t be ignored; images are a signal to visitors that a site’s material is premium and unconsciously we elevate the worth of a site that has images mixed in with stories; strategic imagery helps bloggers build their brand—the imagery can help build a stylish brand associated with their sites; images are mood setters and help writers tell their stories better; images are a precursor to the inspiration that happens from effective copy and can give a blog an advantage over their competition; images help bloggers create viral content.

#26: Zero impact

At this point we’ve explored 25 tips and good reasons for using images in your social media to engage customers, followers and fans. With that being said, there’s really no good reason to use images that have zero impact. I’ll end with these last pieces of advice: with all the great possibilities out there, use images with the most dynamic impact and ones that are representative of the points you are trying to make.

Don’t you wish you could track the traffic impact of Twitter, Facebook and Google+ using Google Analytics? Well now you can. Keep reading to learn how.

Google’s getting social in a big way.

Google has been quite busy lately, rolling out Google+ (Google’s social network) to a limited audience, the Google +1 button (a feature similar to Facebook’s Like button), a new Google Analytics interface and Google Analytics Social Interaction Tracking.

Google Analytics Social Interaction Tracking

This new Analytics feature allows you to track social interactions on your website, your blog or on your Facebook fan page. These actions include the Twitter button and the Facebook Like, Unlike and Send actions.

In this article, I will guide you step-by-step in adding this powerful new tracking feature to your Facebook tabs or web pages.

NOTE: Adding Google Analytics Social Tracking requires access to and modification of your web page files. It’s pretty basic, but you should be somewhat comfortable working with HTML files.

What is currently supported by Google’s Social Tracking

As of this writing, my testing shows that the following social buttons are supported:

• Facebook Like, Unlike, Send


• Twitter (only via the “official” Tweet button, not Tweetmeme or other third-party buttons)


• Google+

I’ve not yet found a way to track the LinkedIn Share button. If anyone has had success tracking this button with the new Google Analytics, let me know in the comments!

As for WordPress plugins, you’ll have to wait for plugin developers to integrate social tracking into their plugins. The one WordPress plugin for adding Google Analytics social tracking only supports the buttons listed above.

Google’s New Google Analytics Interface and Tracking Code

In order to implement Social Interaction Tracking, you will have to update your current Google Analytics code to the latest version, and then add a few snippets of code to your HTML file.

In order to view the Social Interaction Tracking metrics, you will need to use the new Google Analytics interface, which is available as an option at the top of the page when you’re logged in to your Analytics account:

How to Get Your Updated Analytics Code

To get your updated Google Analytics code:

1. Log in to your Google Analytics account.


2. View the new Google Analytics interface by clicking “New Version” at the top right of the screen (see above image).


3. Click on the domain account you wish to access.


4. Click the “gear” icon, in the orange bar at the top right of your screen:




5. Click on the “Tracking Code” tab: Under “Standard” tab and below “1. What are you tracking?” select either “A single domain” (if you’re tracking a website or blog) or “Multiple top-level domains” (if you’re tracking a Facebook fan page).




6. Copy the code under “2. Paste this code on your site”. It should look like this, but with your “UA-xxxxxx-x” account number:

You now have your updated Google Analytics code.

Putting the code in all the right places

The new version of your Google Analytics code should be placed before the closing </head> tag of your HTML file. (Yes, this is different. The old version was usually placed before the closing </body>, but that was then…)

Between your Analytics code and the closing </head> tag, insert this bit of code that calls the JavaScript that enables the social tracking:

The end result will be:

The “UA-xxxxxx-x” will be replaced with your unique Analytics ID for this domain.

Now let’s add the Like/Send button code

As I mentioned in my Social Media Examiner post on Social Plugins for fan pages, Facebook generates the Like/Send button code for you on its Social Plugins page. For the Like/Send button, you just need to enter the URL you want people to “like”, select whether you want to include a Send button and a couple of other options, then copy the code in the popup dialog, which will look like this:

The “#appId=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx” is a random app ID that Facebook generates that allows you to access Insights for the button, but it’s not necessary for the button to work. In my example, I omit the appId value from the code, which will work fine.

IMPORTANT: You must add the snippet of JavaScript (shown below) to the code that Facebook generates so that actions on that button trigger Google Analytics:

Add the above code before the <fb:like /> tag:

Paste your Like button code anywhere between the <body> </body> tags.

Viewing your Google Analytics Social Tracking reports

As mentioned above, the Social Tracking reports are only available in the new Google Analytics interface. (See above for how to choose the new version option.)

NOTE: It usually takes a few hours for Analytics to reflect activity on your web pages, but it can take up to 24 hours. See “Troubleshooting” below.

After logging in to your Analytics account, click into the domain for which you want to view reports, then in the left menu go to “Visitors > Social“:

You have three options for viewing the social interactions:

1. Engagement: You see two metrics: 1) Not Socially Engaged and 2) Socially Engaged. This shows you how effectively each page is in motivating users to Like or Tweet your content:




2. Action: This shows you the specific actions taken (Like, Unlike, Send), how many of each and percent of total actions:




3. Pages: Details on which page’s actions were taken and what those actions were.

Adding the Twitter button to the mix

Google’s Social Tracking will also track tweets made with Twitter’s Tweet button. Interestingly, Tweetmeme now recommends using the Twitter Tweet button.

After logging in to your Twitter account, go to the Twitter Tweet button page, where you can select one of the three available options:

Once you’ve made your selection, just copy the code that is generated for you and paste it somewhere between the <body> </body> tags of your web page. Your code should look like this:

Add a bit of JavaScript to activate Twitter Social Tracking

Before the closing </head> tag, place this bit of JavaScript to activate the Google Analytics tracking (the social tracking won’t work without this tag!):

I don’t think it matters where you put the above Twitter-tracking code, as long as it’s inside the <head></head> tags. I put it right before the closing </head> tag, after the Google Analytics tracking code and the call to the “ga_social_tracking.js” JavaScript.

A word about Google +1 tracking

As Google states on its page about Social Interaction Tracking,

Out of the box, Google Analytics provides integrated tracking with the Google +1 button. This means if you have set up both Google +1 and the latest version of Google Analytics on the same page, all +1 social interactions will be tracked automatically.

As I mentioned above, the +1 button is Google’s version of the Facebook Like button. I’ve added it to the HyperArts website and blog, but I haven’t seen much traction with it yet. However, adding it can’t hurt, and as it grows in popularity it will help your content reach a larger audience.

Troubleshooting

If you implement the above instructions accurately, you should see tracking results within several hours of initiating tracking, although Google says it can take up to 24 hours to display results.

If, after 24 hours, you don’t see any social tracking results (and I’m assuming you will have done some testing of the buttons to ensure they work and to provide some data to Analytics):

• Double-check your code. Make sure you have placed the code as instructed above, and make sure your URL values are correct.


• Check the Google Analytics date range. By default, Google Analytics displays the past month of data up to the previous day. You can manually change that range to include the current day by clicking the arrow next to the date range and changing the end date to the current day:




• Adding Social Tracking to your WordPress self-hosted blog: There is already a plugin for this feature.

Although this may look a bit, um, complicated, it should be pretty easy for those who are comfortable working with web files.

The threat to Facebook posed by the Google+ project became a reality Tuesday with its official rollout — or did it?

While reaction to the debut of Google+ was mixed, the consensus was that Mark Zuckerberg will still have a job when he wakes up Wednesday morning.

Here are some highlights of the online reaction to Google+ and how it stacks up against Facebook, starting with the official introduction of the project from the official Google blog:

Among the most basic of human needs is the need to connect with others. With a smile, a laugh, a whisper, or a cheer, we connect with others every single day.

Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools.

In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.

We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests. And so begins the Google+ project.

Not all relationships are created equal. So in life, we share one thing with college buddies, another with parents, and almost nothing with our boss. The problem is that today’s online services turn friendship into fast food — wrapping everyone in “friend” paper — and sharing really suffers:

It’s sloppy. We only want to connect with certain people at certain times, but online we hear from everyone all the time.

It’s scary. Every online conversation (with over 100 “friends”) is a public performance, so we often share less because of stage fright.

It’s insensitive. We all define “friend” and “family” differently — in our own way, on our own terms — but we lose this nuance online.

In light of these shortcomings we asked ourselves, “What do people actually do?” And we didn’t have to search far for the answer. People in fact share selectively all the time — with their circles.

From close family to foodies, we found that people already use real-life circles to express themselves, and to share with precisely the right folks. So we did the only thing that made sense: We brought Circles to software. Just make a circle, add your people, and share what’s new — just like any other day.

From GigaOM:

I don’t think Facebook has anything to worry about. However, there is a whole slew of other companies that should be on notice.

One of the reasons why I think Facebook is safe is because it cannot be beaten with this unified strategy. Theoretically speaking, the only way to beat Facebook is through 1,000 cuts. Photo-sharing services such as Instagram can move attention away from Facebook, much like other tiny companies that can bootstrap themselves based on the Facebook social graph and then built alternative graphs to siphon away attention from Facebook. Google could in theory go one step further — team up with alternative social graphs such as Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr and use those graphs to create an uber graph.

From TechCrunch:

“We believe online sharing is broken, and even awkward,” Google senior vice president of social Vic Gundotra said. “We think connecting with other people is a basic human need. We do it all the time in real life, but our online tools are rigid. They force us into buckets — or into being completely public. Real-life sharing is nuanced and rich. It has been hard to get that into software.”

From the little that I’ve seen so far, Google+ is by far the best effort in social that Google has put out there yet. But traction will be contingent upon everyone convincing their contacts to regularly use it. Even for something with the scale of Google, that’s not the easiest thing in the world — as we’ve seen with Wave and Buzz. There will need to be compelling reasons to share on Google+ instead of Facebook and/or Twitter — or, at the very least, along with all of those other networks. The toolbar and interesting communication tools are the most compelling reasons right now, but there will need to be more of them. And fast.

From Silicon Alley Insider:

Yes, it has been hard to get sharing into software. That’s why Facebook was created seven years ago. That’s why Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been trotting around the world for the past five years telling everyone that the company’s mission is to facilitate “sharing.” That’s why Facebook is now used by nearly 700 million people worldwide. That’s why Facebook is basically subsuming the Internet.

From AdAge Digital:

The major difference between Facebook and Google+ is that instead of having a massive friend list, users collect each other into groups — called “Circles” — like family, work, and friends. This context has been missing from Facebook and has gotten some people in hot water — for example, those who post their wild weekend party photos that may be seen by family and colleagues. And on Google+, there are no friend requests. People do not need to agree to be friends with one another and can view updates without sharing their own.

From paidContent:

Circles: This seems a clear poke at Facebook’s groups and lists features, which are not the easiest thing in the world to use. Google has created a way to let Google+ users create groups of friends, colleagues, and family members that’s almost exactly like creating a new folder on your hard drive and adding pictures. Simply drag the name of a friend or connection into a newly created circle to assign them to that group, and when you create a new post, you can select which circle will receive that update, allowing you to share the latest off-color South Park clip with your close friends (but not your uptight boss) and your goofy family reunion pictures with those who won’t judge (and not that first date that you’re hoping will turn into a second).

From Mashable:

Circles is well-implemented. It’s far easier than creating a Twitter List or a Facebook Friend List. The drag-and-drop functionality is a welcome addition, and the cute animations that appear when you perform actions give the product personality. That doesn’t necessarily mean users will take the time to create friend groups.

From Wired Epicenter:

Parts of it certainly seem to appear similar to what we’ve seen before. One significant component is a continuous scroll called “the stream” that’s an alternative to Facebook’s news feed — a hub of personalized content. It has a companion called “Sparks,” related to one’s specified interests. Together they are designed to be a primary attention-suck of Google users. Google hopes that eventually people will gravitate to the stream in the same way that members of Facebook or Twitter constantly check those continuous scrolls of personalized information.

The Buzz disaster came just as Facebook began to look like it may make good on its goal of signing up every human on the planet — creating a treasure trove of information inaccessible to Google’s servers. People at Google began to worry that Facebook could even leverage the information its users shared to create a people-centric version of search that in some cases could deliver more useful results than Google’s crown jewel of a search engine.

From Silicon Alley Insider:

Apparently, Facebook got wind of the Google+ feature, now called Circles, that allows users to share information with only select groups of friends, rather than their entire Facebook network.

Mark Zuckerberg took a personal interest in meeting this threat from Google, and put a team on it last summer. The result: Facebook Groups, which launched in October.

It doesn’t seem to have taken off — at least not like hugely popular features like Facebook Photos — which suggests maybe this is a solution to a problem most people don’t worry about. That doesn’t bode well for Circles.

Since the release of the Google +1 button for websites in early June, many webmasters have been trying to figure out the best ways to implement it across their sites. In its most basic form, the +1 button is relatively easy to add to a webpage. You can grab two line of code, add them to your webpage, and be on your way. That said, Google has provided several parameters you can use with the +1 button that control how the button looks, what is displays, which URL should receive the +1, and which function you want to call when someone clicks the +1 button. Wait, did you catch that last part? Google added a mechanism for webmasters to trigger a JavaScript function when someone clicks a +1 button. The mechanism I’m referring to is the “callback” parameter of the +1 button, and it opens up a world of opportunity for webmasters. Let’s explore the parameter in greater detail, including what it is, how to use it, and how to avoid problems down the line.

What is the Callback Parameter?

As I mentioned earlier, you can implement the basic +1 button on your site with just a few lines of code. You need to include a JavaScript tag and then the +1 button tag. It’s essentially two lines of code and you’ll have a +1 button on a webpage. But, if you review the Google Code page for the +1 button, you’ll notice several other parameters. You have count, size, and href, which control the display of the +1 button, as well as identifying the URL that should receive the +1. Then you have the callback parameter, which takes the name of a JavaScript function as the value of the parameter. The JavaScript function you trigger can do anything you want (ok, not anything), and I’ll cover more about this soon.

Here is what the google +1 button code would look like when using the callback parameter:

<g:plusone callback="helloWorld"></g:plusone>

When you include the callback parameter in the +1 tag, you provide the name of a JavaScript function that will be triggered when someone clicks the +1 button. In this example, the function called “helloWorld” will be triggered. Note, helloWorld() needs to be part of the global namespace, meaning it needs to be included in the page or referenced in the html file via a script tag. The function will receive a JSON object, which includes both an “href” value and a “state” value. “href” will include the URL that received the +1 and “state” is either on or off (where on represents a +1 and off means someone removed a +1). That information is good to know and you can handle each situation separately. More about this soon.

Example: A Simple JavaScript Function

Below, I have included a very basic JavaScript function that’s called when someone clicks a +1 button. It simply throws an alert displaying the state of the button when clicked. Note, this function could either reside in the page itself or it could reside in an external JavaScript file that’s referenced in your html page (via a script tag).

 function helloWorld(plusone) {
 window.alert('+1 Triggered, State=' + plusone.state);
}

How the Callback Parameter Can Be Used

Based on adding the callback parameter to the +1 button, Google is enabling webmasters to creatively use the functionality to interact with users. For example, you could reward users that +1 a page on your site. There are some rules, though. Remember, +1’s impact rankings, so you don’t want to “buy” rankings. I attended a Google webinar last week that covered best ways to implement the +1 button and Google made it very clear that you should not pay for +1’s. That means you shouldn’t incentivize users with money, product, or services based on those users clicking a +1 button on your site. Here is the actual language from Google’s policy page:

“Publishers should not promote prizes, monies, or monetary equivalents in exchange for +1 Button clicks.”

The reason Google doesn’t want publishers incentivizing users with prizes or money is simple. +1’s impact rankings, rankings should not be manipulated in any way, and paying for +1’s is like paying for links. Don’t do it.

Unlocking Content is OK

Although you can’t provide products or services, Google explains that you can unlock exclusive content. Here is the language in Google’s policy regarding enabling content and functionality:

“Publishers can direct users to the +1 Button to enable content and functionality for users and their social connections.”

If someone +1’s your new blog post, you could unlock exclusive content for that user (and you can use this approach creatively, depending on your specific industry, business, etc.) For example, you could provide a study that goes deeper into a topic, you could provide additional tutorials on the subject matter, provide additional news about a topic, etc. Just make sure you wouldn’t ordinarily charge for that content. Yes, this seems like a slippery slope, since exclusive content might already have a price tag associated with it. As a webmaster (or marketer), you might need to build new content that could be part of your +1 program.

An Alternative Approach – Catching +1 Removals

Earlier in this post, I mentioned the “state” value that gets passed to your JavaScript function in the JSON object. That value will tell you whether someone +1’d a page or removed a +1. Knowing that someone just removed a +1 is important information, and you can act on it using the callback parameter of the +1 button. For example, maybe you can ask the person why they removed the +1, ask them to reconsider their +1 removal, or redirect them to a page that provides a more creative approach to catching +1 removals. Now, you don’t want to go overboard here. If someone just removed a +1, they obviously had a reason. You don’t want to add fuel to the fire and push the limits of getting that +1 back. That said, the right messaging could act as a legitimate confirmation that a user will be removing a +1, which could potentially save some of those votes. It would be interesting to test this out to see how many +1’s you can gain back by using the callback parameter.

Unlock Content, Get More +1’s?

As you can see, the callback parameter can be a helpful addition to the +1 button code. Depending on the “state”, you can either reward users with exclusive content, or you can address the removal of a +1. Remember, +1’s impact search rankings, so they can be extremely valuable to your organic search traffic. Just be careful about what you’re giving away to users that +1 content on your website. Make sure you aren’t giving away prizes, money, or services. The last thing you want is for a creative use of +1 to get you penalized. And if history has proven anything, you can bet that some webmasters are going to try and manipulate the system to gain more +1’s. As I said earlier, don’t go down this path. It’s not worth it. Play by the rules, be creative, and gain more +1’s the right way.

By the way, have you +1’d this post yet? :)

Many brands trick out their Facebook pages with flashy apps while ignoring some of the most valuable (and free!) tools available. Case in point: the often-neglected photo strip that came as part of the new Facebook Pages format rolled out in March. When done wrong, the photo strip makes an otherwise impressive page fall flat. When done right, the photo strip creates a stunning page design. A little bit of creativity and upkeep can transform the photo strip into a powerful branding tool.

How it Works

By default, the most recent five photos uploaded to a page – either as wall photos or in a photo album – are displayed in the photo strip. Although only 5 images will show at one time, an unlimited number of photos can be set to appear in the photo strip. New images uploaded to the wall or photo albums can be hidden from appearing in the photo strip by clicking on the X in the top right corner of the image. Hiding all but a select 5 photos enables page administrators to control which photos appear in the photo strip.



Unlike with personal profiles, the images on a page’s photo strip appear in random order. Every time the page is refreshed, the photo order is shuffled. Presumably, Facebook did this to keep brands from using this as static advertising space. Many pages get around this challenge by embracing the randomness and using images that work regardless of order.

Here’s where it gets tricky: the image that appears in the photo strip is actually a thumbnail cropped from a section of the uploaded image. Even more tricky: the cropped area used in the thumbnail cannot be chosen (unlike with a profile picture). Instead, Facebook automatically crops an off-center part of the image as the thumbnail. Figuring out exactly which part of the photo is cropped is difficult, but properly formatting images is crucial since some photos appear unrecognizable when resized as thumbnails.

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Alternatively, making making photos the same dimensions as the thumbnail (98 x 68 pixels) prevents them from being cropped. The downside to this method is the image appears very tiny in the photo viewer.

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After much weeding through Facebook pages, I’ve found some brilliant ways brands are using the photo strip.

1. Incorporate the Profile Picture

It takes a great concept and well-designed photos to pull this off, but the results are awesome.

Secret’s creative use of inner tubes melds the profile picture into the photo strip in this celebration of reaching a million fans.

Lysol’s banner tying in the profile picture is on-point with their “Mission for Health” initiative that promotes weaving healthy habits into communities.

2. Product Placement

This one’s obvious: feature products in the photo strip! Another no-brainer: including a description and link to the product in the photo caption. However, making the product photos too promotional may turn off fans. Focus should be on adding aesthetic value to the page and clarifying what the brand is about.

A white background and consistently sized images make Nikon’s cameras pop across the top of their page.

Chevrolet uses the same color cars and labels each model in these attractive, brand-focused photos.

3. Show Gratitude

When reaching a milestone, such as X number of fans or overwhelming participation in a contest, the photo strip space can be used as a thank you.

Dove said thank you in different languages when they reached a million fans. This is also an example of selecting more than 5 photos to use in the strip, since this design can be used to spell out “thank you” in many languages.

Nutella also used the space as a thank you when they reached 10 million fans.

4. Highlight New Stuff

Placing upcoming products or services in the photo strip builds buzz and awareness around a new product launch.

Chicken McNuggets swimming in sauce isn’t the most appetizing visual, but these colorful, consistent images are still a nice plug for McDonald’s new dipping sauces.

In a more indirect approach, Panda Express advertised their new extended hours with a night sky.

5. Be Useful

Since this is the first thing fans notice on the wall, why not make it a quick reference tool?

Redbox’s photo strip allows fans to check the page each week for new releases.

Dole Bananas features photos of recipes made with bananas. The photos’ captions are links to the recipe on Dole’s site.

6. Say it with Words

Using words instead of pictures can effectively showcase brand messaging, services and products, or compel fans to take action.

Involver uses compelling words to promote their Social Markup Language.

These simple words entice to fans looking for discounts and coupons.

7. Play with Color

Creatively using colors can really make the photo strip pop.

UNICEF USA uses splashes of their signature cyan color to pull together these photos of children from around the world.

Crystal Light’s same photo in different colors has a powerful effect.

8. Sequential Randomness

In contrast to playing up randomness, using images that belong in sequential order is a playful way to get fans refreshing the page continuously to put the photos in the correct order.

Seattle’s Best Coffee is not only nicely using product placement, but their numbered levels of coffee make for a great out-of-order set of pictures. I may have spent a few minutes trying to put these in order (unsuccessfully).

9. Do It All

Why use the photo strip to promote one thing when you can promote everything?

Kraft Macaroni & Cheese uses the photo strip as a cross-promotional tool for their site’s recipes, new products, other social profiles, and a Facebook app. This manages to not feel overly promotional since it is so well-designed and subtle.

This week, Facebook launched its new Ads Power Editor desktop software for buyers who work directly with a Facebook ads representatives. The new multi-pane graphical user interface presents a streamlined way to create and manage multiple Facebook ads simultaneously. It also integrates with Excel, and replaces the Facebook’s bulk uploader ads tool which will be deprecated on June 30th, 2011.

Alloffacebook has provided a functionality overview of the Facebook Ads Power Editor and present some questions regarding how the enhanced native tool impacts third-party tool provider working off of the Facebook Ads API.

Until now, Facebook provided four main ways of purchasing and managing ads. The public self-serve graphical user interface ads tool, the bulk uploader for managing ads through Excel, the Facebook Ads API for programmatically managing ads, and a direct relationship with Facebook ad sales representatives for the site’s biggest advertisers. Now, those working with ads reps have access to the Power Editor that combines and strengthens the features of the self-serve and bulk uploader tool.

While Facebook has continued to augment the self-serve ads purchasing tool and Ads Manager with more conversion and reach metrics, new ad units such as Sponsored Stories, and new targeting options such as broad category targeting, the design of the graphical user interface has for most part remained stable over the past few years. For those that needed to create and manage large scale optimized ad campaigns, the self-serve tool and bulk uploader were a bit too clumsy.

While the Power Editor doesn’t support Sponsored Stories, it makes generating and editing multiple ads at once much simpler.

New Features

Downloading the Power Editor

For now, the bookmark for the Power Editor only appears in the ads accounts of ad buyers who work with Facebook ad sales representatives and are running the Google Chrome internet browser. Those who qualify can download and run the software locally from their Windows, Mac, or Linux machine. Users then download their existing ad account and campaigns into the software from Facebook.

Multi-Pane Interface

Power Editor users are shown three panes shown in the image above:

• Left pane (A)- Select between ads accounts and their campaigns


• Main pane (C) – Use tabs (B) to view all the campaigns or ads from the account or campaign selected in the left pane


• Bottom pane (D) – View editable fields for the campaigns or ads selected in the main pane

This tiered interface makes it easy to navigate between and edit a huge number of ads from different accounts and campaigns. The old Ad Manager required many more clicks and page loads to access all of this information.

Performance Metrics Settings

Users can check boxes to select which metrics will appear in the main pane. These include standard metrics such as clicks, impressions, and bid, as well as new metrics such as Facebook content and errors, and basic targeting attributes such as age and sex. Users must set a date range with the stats drop-down to load the new metrics.

Creating New Campaigns

Users can create a new campaigns in three ways:

• ‘Create Campaign” flow – Fill out various fields inline


• Duplicate – Clone an existing campaign and then edit fields


• Copy from Excel – Copy a campaign from the Power Editor into Excel, edit it, and paste it back into the Power Editor

Creating New Ads

Users can create new ads in four different ways:

• ‘Create’ Ad flow – While in the ‘Ads’ tab in the main pane of the desired campaign, click ‘Create Ad”. Fill out fields inline using typeahead functionality, and select an image from the image library or upload a new one


• Duplicate – Select an ad in the ‘Ads’ tab of the main pane and click ’Duplicate’, then edit fields


• Copy from Excel – Copy an ad from the Power Editor into Excel, edit it, and paste it back into the Power Editor


• Import from Excel – Create multiple new ads or new campaigns in Excel, import the spreadsheet by copying it into the Power Editor or clicking the ‘Bulk Import’ button, and upload a zip file of images

The Power Editor is backwards compatible with the Bulk Uploader, so spreadsheets from the Bulk Uploader can be imported the same way as they are from Excel. Whenever edits are made in the Power Editor, the ‘Upload’ button must be clicked to sync the changes with a Facebook Ads account. Changes since the last Facebook account upload or download can be undone using the Revert Changes button.

Power Editor and the Facebook Ads API

The Power Editor provides some of the basic functionality offered by tools built by third-party developers on the Facebook Ads API. Specifically, the ability to create and manage multiple ad variants for A/B testing can now be accomplished through Facebook’s native tools. This to some degree commodifies a core selling point of third-party tools — namely that a significantly level of efficient A/B testing could not be achieved without an Ads API tool.

However, many Ads API tools provide better ad creation than the Power Editor, with visual trees and the ability to cross several creative and targeting variables to instantly produce permutations. Third-party tools also provide deeper analytics, cost per fan and conversion-based optimization models, auto-optimization algorithms, and support for Sponsored Stories. This means that for now there should plenty of value for Ads API tool developers to offer big ad buyers.

alloffacebook is following with Facebook about the direction of both the self-serve tools including the Power Editor, and the Ads API. We’ll return with insights into how advertisers should choose the solution that’s best for them, and how the tools of Ads API developers should look to differentiate themselves from Facebook’s native tools.

Since starting in SEO, I have followed countless numbers of blogs and read a huge amount of information (most of which I don’t understand). What I always found irritating was reading a blog post, knowing the actions you need to take but lacking the technical know-how to put those actions in place. Take site speed, for example.

Site speed is a funny old thing. Ever since Google first announced in April 2010 that they were using it as a ranking signal, everyone has known that they need to optimise it. The problem is that most people just don’t know how to do it (like me: personally, as soon as I see code, I run for the hills).

To that end, this blog post is for all those SEOs out there that know they should be improving site speed, but instructions like “combine images into CSS sprites” means nothing to them. Originally this was going to be one blog post, but after researching it’s turned into what will likely be three posts. Part one will cover the reasons behind wanting to improve site speed, part two will be getting down and dirty with all the techy code stuff and part 3 will be how you can actually get developers and customers to buy into it and how to influence change.

So let’s get started!

How Important Is It?

When looking at how important site speed is, I decided it was important to look at it from various points of view:

1. Is it better for the user?
2. Is it better financially for the business owner?
3. Does it result in higher natural search engine ranks?

Let’s take these one at a time…

1. Relationship Between Site Speed & User Satisfaction

I think it’s fair to say that common sense applies here; people don’t like browsing at slow speeds, that’s why we don’t use dial-up any more. (Plus the dial-up noise was really annoying.)

Image Source: Here

So we already know that people prefer to surf as fast as possible, but since we are geeks, we need proof, right?

For starters, Google, and in particular Larry Page, are obsessed with speed. Have a look at this article on the BBC (from 2009). The “Fast Flip” concept is mentioned, where we Twould be to be able to flip through online content as quickly and easily as we can with a physical magazine.

Additionally, Google themselves ran a test to see if slowing down the search process effected users’ behaviour. They essentially made Google slow down very marginally for a set period of time. They had two groups: a control group, who use Google as normal, and a test group. The test group’s searching habits were monitored over a period of 6 weeks while delays between 100 – 400 milliseconds were applied to their search environment. The test simply showed that the longer the delay was, the fewer searches people were likely to do.

The impact ranged from 0.2% to 0.59%, and what’s even more interesting was that in the longer delays, even after they returned to Google’s regular fast speed, they maintained their newly modified search habits.

Put simply, the effect of a slow user experience changed their search habits for an extended period of time. Bing also found that a 2-second slowdown changed queries per user by -1.8% and revenue per user by -4.3%. That’s pretty amazing. These numbers might not seem like a big difference, but think how quick Google is already: if we were dealing with a site with delays of 4 or 6 seconds, this could have a much bigger impact.

So I think that answers the first part. Yes, a fast site is definitely better for the user… duh.

Oh, yeah – Google also like to remind you just how quick they are every time you do a search:

2. Will a fast site make you more money?

So we now know that it’s better for the user, but do happier users actually make us more money? Is improved site speed worth implementing?

I dug around a little and found a great article, Velocity & The Bottom Line, which has some great case studies that are worth having a look at. I picked a couple that are great examples of how site speed can affect your bottom line.

AOL

AOL conducted experiments to see how their site speed effected the way people viewed their site. For each visitor, they monitored the average load time of the pages. They then broke this down into percentiles of the highest to lowest and examined the number of page views of each group from fastest to lowest. This showed some nice numbers across a range of industries.

Image Source: Here

As you can see from the image above, the faster the site is, the more pages the user navigates through. This is true across all the areas of the site shown. More site views on a site like AOL is very important as more page views = higher advertisement revenue.

Shopzilla

Another site which is used as a case study in that article is Shopzilla. If you are not familiar with Shopzilla (I wasn’t until writing this), they are a product comparison site which allows you to compare prices of products and help you get the best deal. They got some great results from speeding up their site and even in some aspects that you would never expect. Before the change, their site was averaging a load time of between 4 and 6 seconds per page.

After making the changes they were averaging less than 1 second consistently, and this had a dramatic overall effect.

This proves that if your site is fast, people are:

1. more likely to want to spend time there,
2. less likely to leave it, and
3. feel more secure. Since they don’t have to wait about as much, they don’t have time to panic when they hit the buy button.

Can you imagine the testing you would need to do to achieve a conversion increase of 7-12%? Then what about the infrastructure costs? 50% is huge, especially with a site this size. Most small businesses won’t have such high infrastructure costs, but it’s still interesting to know that money can be saved in areas you don’t expect. This is the ideal situation, as sales increase + operational costs decrease = WIN.

I think you would agree this shows that faster sites can definitely increase your bottom line.

3. Does it increase your search rankings?

The short answer to this is yes. Google have publicly said it’s a ranking factor, so improvement here will definitely increase your rankings.

What’s not to clear is how high up your to-do list it should be. According to Google, in April 2010 search speed affected only 1% of queries. That’s not a huge result, but I think we can assume that this number will increase over time.

But if there’s still doubt, I always refer to common sense. Browsing at speed is better for user experience, therefore Google should prefer fast speeds. Building on that, the following is based on my opinion and has not been tested, although I welcome anyone to test and let me know the results.

Personally, I think the increase in ranking may not be a direct effect of increasing site speed. I don’t think Google place enough weight on this single factor to make dramatic rises in the SERPS. Still, consider all the positive things that happen as a secondary effect of updating the sites:

• Users use the site more
• They view more pages
• Conversions increase
• Less down time
• Lower abandonment rates

These are all excellent things from a user point of view, which is obviously Google’s number one priority.

And a close second is making money. When you look at the size of Google’s Adsense network, for example, do you think they would be in favour of getting a 25% page view increase across the network as a whole by way of increasing speed? Of course they would. Results that big could mean millions of pounds every year.

It also makes sense that Google would track site user stats as well. If a site gains all the above stats, that site deserves to rank higher.

I think the secondary increase in relevancy and user experience would drive the increase in rankings, rather than the primary increase in site speed.

It’s all about the big picture in my opinion.

Let me first apologise for the size of this post. It’s massive, but learning ain’t easy. A lot of this does get pretty techy, and you may have to accept that you just can’t do some of the stuff unless you’re a developer. So to make this post as actionable as possible, I wanted people to know what things are achievable for them, based on their knowledge and ability. For this reason I developed an extremely sophisticated algorithm that will automatically let you know which stuff you can do and what you will get the highest ROI from. Without further adieu, I give you “The Dummy Scale”:

This little guy means that almost anyone should be capable of doing the task. It involves mostly copy and paste and will give you the tasks you can do with the least amount of time. Examples would be installing analytics code.

Next up is this guy with the sticky up hair. He’s not quite as simple as the previous character, so if you have a little bit of knowledge of code you should be able to handle it.

Lastly, this guy has glasses: need I say more? This stuff is pretty heavy-handed. Don’t go near these ones without at least six cans of Red Bull and a couple of all-nighters planned. OK, it’s not that bad, but they do involve things like the .htaccess file, which I wouldn’t recommend going near unless you know what you’re doing!

OK, let’s get cracking…

I’m going to run through an example, use some tools that Google recommends and see what the outcome is. Once I have a list of recommendations from the tools I’m going to talk through actually implementing them.

I have picked three sites that are all in the same (kind of) market. The three sites are:

• WH Smith – http://www.whsmith.co.uk/
• Waterstones – http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/ (301 in place)
• Penguin – http://www.penguin.co.uk/

Compare Site Speed

Step 1

To compare site speed, I used a great tool at http://www.webpagetest.org which allows you to add a URL and time how long it takes to load the page. What’s cool, though, is that it allows you to compare multiple sites side-by-side. Once a site is fully loaded, the screen goes grey to help easily identify which sites load first and last. So have a look at the video below comparing the three sites:

1. WHSmith with a load time of 9.9 seconds
2. Waterstones at 10.3 seconds
3. Penguin with a whopping 31.4 seconds

To be clear, even though it won, WHSmith is by no means the Usain Bolt of the internet. Amazon, for example, renders in a cool 4.4 seconds! So what can we do about this? Let’s analyse each of them using some cool tools.

Step 2

Download Google’s Page Speed tool: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

Step 3

Go to the site you want to analyse. In this case, we’ll look at Penguin. Open Page Speed and click Analyse. You will then get an output that looks something like this:

Woo-hoo! All you need to do now is use efficient CSS selectors, combine images into CSS sprites and enable compression! Ehh… what?! If you are like me, that means nothing to you. I don’t know how to do a single thing on that list. But I’m going to find out how.

So in no particular order….

Use Efficient CSS Selectors

This took me a while to get my head around, so I’ll try to explain it the best I can. Apparently, when you load a page, the browser scans that page looking for information that it can put into a tree-shaped diagram. This is known as an “internal document tree” and looks like this:

This helps the browser break the page down into its simplest elements and organise them in a way it can read. Reading the image above, we can see that on this page there is a body element and within that there are another two elements, the <H1> and the <P>. Then under each of those there is an <em> element.

Now let’s assume that I tell you I want to make the words in the <em> element within <P> red. If you write the code: Em {colour : blue} not only would it make the <P> <em> blue, but it would also make the <em> element under the <h1> blue, as well as any other <em> elements on that page. In order to select only the <em> under <p>, I would need to write: p em {colour : blue}. That would only colour the <em> element in the <p> area. What we have just done is written a descendant selector.

Put simply, a descendant selector means isolating one element within another element. This is done most efficiently when you don’t make the browser keep looking for something when it’s already found it. To be honest, though, it’s pretty techy, and unless you’re a developer, you’re not going to be able to correct your code. This site explains the process pretty well.

Prefer Asynchronous Resources

Doing things “asynchronously” is a strange concept. You would think that in order to make your site load quicker, you’d want to do as many tasks as possible at once, so the page could load faster. Although multi-tasking generally makes things happen faster, when it comes to loading a web page, the more things done at the same time actually slows you down. It’s much better to load pages asynchronously, simply means not doing things at the same time.

Doing things asynchronously allows you to prioritise the items which you would like to load first. When opening a new page, the only information you need to load immediately is the information that’s above the fold. The rest of the stuff isn’t visible to the user until they scroll down, so it makes sense that the priority should be given to making the stuff above the fold load first. Likewise, some items like tracking scripts are never visible to the user anyway, so it would make sense to prioritise all visible content ahead of that.

So our original Penguin site speed report shows two items which should be changed:

The image above shows that the Facebook info and the Google Analytics could be changed to load asynchronously and allow the rest of the page to load more quickly. The Analytics one is an easy win: all they need to do is update the code to the latest Analytics code, and it will be asynchronous. As for the Facebook part, you would need to go the Google-suggested route and use a script DOM element.

Get Site Speed Stats In Google Analytics

This doesn’t speed your site up, but the news broke as I was researching this post, so I thought it was best to include it (plus it’s really easy to do). It’s possible to get site speed tracking data straight from within your Google Analytics account.

• Step 1 – Install the latest version of the Google analytics asynchronous code on your site.
• Step 2 – Add the line: “_gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime'])” to your analytics code.
• Step 3 – Enjoy all your new juicy data.

Specify Image Sizes

This one is nice and simple and actually makes sense. When loading a page with no image dimensions in the source code, the browser needs to guess where to put everything else around that image until it’s finished downloading. Then when the image does download, it needs to go back and do reflows and repaints (kind of like loading it again) and place it at the correct size and reshuffle the page to make it fit.

If, however, you specify image dimensions, the browser doesn’t have this problem. It’s kind of like saving a seat for your mate in a really busy pub. When he finally gets to the pub, he already knows where his seat is and can go straight to the bar and get a nice cold beer! Mmmm, beer!

OK, so how can we get these poor images on the Penguin site some cold beer? Let’s look at the current page and source code for one of the images.

One of the images that the test highlighted as not having dimensions was the image of Jeremy Clarkson. So let’s look at the source code for it.

<a href=”http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/iclarkson/id406162322?mt=8″ alt=”iClarkson” title=”iClarkson” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://www.penguin.co.uk/static/cs/uk/0/penguin_homepage/images/0311/panel_03.3_bg.jpg” height=”81″ alt=”" border=”0″ /></a>

The highlighted part above shows that the image height is specified but not the width. This is an easy fix and just needs a small tweak as shown below.

<a href=”http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/iclarkson/id406162322?mt=8″ alt=”iClarkson” title=”iClarkson” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://www.penguin.co.uk/static/cs/uk/0/penguin_homepage/images/0311/panel_03.3_bg.jpg” width= “67” height=”81″ alt=”" border=”0″ /></a>

Can you taste that beer?

Obviously, this is a really simple example, and to do all the images on a site the size of Penguin’s would take a long time, but it does show these things should just be done right at the start.

One more thing to note is not to resize images on the fly. If, for example, we wanted a large version of Mr Clarkson’s face (don’t know why), it’s not best practice to simply scale up the numbers in the highlighted section above. Instead, use an image editing software to adjust the image to the size you want and then save that version.

Combine Images into CSS Sprites

Let me start by explaining when sprites are useful, as this will help the explanation later seem easier. Social media buttons are a good example of this. Lots of social media buttons are animated, meaning when you hover over them they do something, they might light up, move, get bigger, etc. This is mainly done to let you know you can interact with the object.

Whatever they do, this is achieved by having two separate images. One shows when you are not pointing at it, then another image shows when you hover over it. Think of it like the little flip animations you used to make as a kid:

By changing quickly between all the images in the flip book, it gives the appearance of character movement, and the same thing happens with lots of hover features. The trouble with this is that it uses lots of images (if you’ve ever drawn one of these books, you know how much of a pain it is drawing 50 images that are pretty much identical). Well, to put it simply, browsers can’t be bothered requesting all these pictures from different places, either. Fifty images means fifty URLs that the browser needs to go to and pull that image from, and that takes time!

The whole purpose of sprites is based around the 80/20 rule of optimisation. Apparently the majority of time spent rendering a page is not down to downloading the image. The main cause of slow rendering is excessive HTTP requests. In other words, stop referencing so many places to pull images from. Sprites solve this problem because instead of having 10 images with 10 separate locations, you combine those images into one big image using a sprite, and then just reference the part of the image which you want to show at that particular location or time.

So sprites are created by ripping all the pages out the flick book and sticking them to one big sheet of paper in an organised order. This then becomes one big page instead of 50 individual ones. Now the browser only needs to go to one URL to get all the images.

So how does this actually work? Well, you tell the browser which part of the bigger image to show by referencing an area of pixels. A really basic example would be changing the colour of a square when you hovered over it. Look at the three images below.

If you wanted to make this change from red to blue without using sprites, you would need to request two different URLs. You would tell the browser that by default, it should show the image “http://www.mydomain.com/red-image”, then when someone hovers over it, show the image “http://www.mydomain.com/blue-image”.This causes two HTTP requests.

If, however, you want to use sprites, you’d create the bigger rectangle image, which is the two smaller ones stuck together with one pixel gap. You would then tell the browser grab the image URL “http://www.mydomain.com/new-bigger-image” but only show pixels “0 to 50” x 50 (the red part) as a default. But when someone hovers over the image, you would tell the browser to show pixels “52 to 101” x 50 (the blue part). This means that while the total number of pixels is only slightly increased, the requests have been reduced from 2 to 1. Obviously, this is a very simplistic example, but if you do this across a whole site with lots of images, it can make a considerable difference. Check out one of Amazon’s sprites for example:

Doing this can be difficult, but thankfully the tool which Google suggests, SpriteMe, is really good at talking you through the process. Sprites can seem counter-intuitive because logic tells you that making big images slows pages down, but based on reducing the number of requests from say 10 to 1, the benefits of the reduced calls outweigh any increases in the image size.

Leveraging Browser Caching

Thank God for something that was easy to understand. Learning most of this has been a challenge, so when I saw this it made me smile. While easy to understand, it’s not too easy to do, so it’s mega geeks only for this one, I’m afraid. Like previously mentioned, making lots of requests to external sources – whether its images, CSS, JavaScript – takes time, and if they can be reduced or avoided, it can only speed your site up.

Browser caching is great for doing this, and I have to say it is one of the quickest wins I’ve seen so far. Essentially, leveraging browser caching is a cross between giving your browser a better memory and a camera. If there was no browser cache, then every time you went to a website, you would need to download everything again. Thankfully, that’s not the case. There are ways to make your browsers memory last longer. Most sites have a lot of content that either never changes or very rarely changes. It therefore doesn’t make sense to keep making your browser download the same stuff time and time again. Instead, if you know what items on your site are not going to change for, say, a year, you can tell browsers to remember things the way they are now until a year’s time.

This means that for the next year, instead of downloading stuff, the first time you visit that site those items are stored locally in the browser cache and allows the browser to load the page much quicker.

This isn’t suitable for all sites, of course. e-Commerce sites, for example, have a lot of changing products. So if you are going to be updating the product range regularly, it’s perhaps not worth your while to set the browser cache to a year, though certainly setting it to a month can help. This is probably most likely why the Penguin site does so badly in this area: the site is updated quite regularly with new books and special offers.

To actually do this, you need to use the .htaccess file. Unless you know what you’re doing, I would recommend getting a developer to do this. There is a post here on how to do it, but read the comments at the bottom as some people had some issues with this method. I could write the code out, but I’d just be repeating what’s on that post.

Combine External JavaScript

The theory of combining JavaScript is the same as using sprites. The point is to reduce the number of calls that the browser needs to make to external sources. In this case, it’s JS files rather than images, but the idea is the same. Rather than calling lots of different JS files, let’s just put all the JS code together into one file and reference the correct part for the job.

Points to note – sometimes JS need to be completed in a certain order, so don’t just throw it all together willy-nilly. Look at the page you are optimising, and take a note of the order of the JS files and the location. This should be used as the order in which to paste the code into the new document. So let’s see an example. If we look at the Penguin site again, one of the recommendations is:

So first, we had better make sure this is the order in which they are loaded. To do this, view the source (Ctrl+U) then find (Ctrl+F) and search for “gettopup”.

By searching I have found the order of the JS is slightly different:

I also can’t seem to find the file that ends in “/jquery/all.js”. But for the purposes of this example, let’s assume it’s a perfect world. We could then create a new document in a text editor and call it something like “newjsdocument.js”. Then we would paste the JS code (in the correct order) into that document, save it and re-upload it. Now any time the other documents are referenced, the browser will refer to the one document instead of three or four.

Additional notes to consider

1. Always make copies of your JS code before you go mixing it up.
2. If you use JS resources that are constantly changing, this may not be applicable.
3. Many times there are good reasons for having separate JS files, none of which I understand, but I’m told they are good enough reasons.
4. Additional savings can also be made by minifying the new big JS document (just about to explain what this means).

Minifying CSS

Minifying in general is good practice. When websites are written using CSS, the actual CSS document can be pretty large. Depending how fancy the site styling is, there can be thousands of lines of code. Unlike people, browsers don’t need text to be spaced out nicely and formatted in an easy-to-read and user-friendly manner. If the code is correct, it can all be jammed together by removing unnecessary spacing and commas. To use this blog post as an example, how much space do you think would be saved if I didn’t use spaces, commas, line breaks, etc.? The answer is lots. When it comes to code, Space = Speed.

According to the Firebug speed test, sites could save 20% on load times by minifying CSS files. That’s pretty cool for something that’s really easy to do. So how do you do it? Well, thankfully some clever people have made quite a lot of tools that are really easy to use and do the work for you. All you need to do is paste your code into them, hit the Compress button, save the output in a new document and upload it.

A word of warning: if you minify CSS and then want to change anything in the CSS file later, it can be very hard to find the correct parts you need. Always make a nice, easy to work on version before the compression is done. That way, if you ever need to make any other changes, all you need to do is use the saved version and make a new compressed copy! A good tool for doing this is http://www.csscompressor.com/.

Enable Compression

Enabling compression is one of my favourite optimisation tips, not least because it’s one of the easiest to understand, though admittedly it’s not the easiest to implement unless you know what you’re doing. Enabling compression pretty much works the same as regular compression on your computer. If you have lots of files to email someone, you could attach them one by one and clog up your poor mate’s email inbox, or you could put them all in a folder, zip them up and send it as one small file.

In web design this can be done by the servers. It should be noted that if the user doesn’t have this enabled on their browser or are using a really old browser, this won’t work. To be honest, though, most modern browsers today do support it, so I wouldn’t worry so much.

So if it’s done at server side, what do we need to actually do to speed our site up? We need to tell the server to send the compressed version if the user’s browser supports it. This is done in the .htaccess file again. I would strongly advise against going anywhere near your .htaccess file unless you really know your stuff, as it’s easily the fastest way to ruin your site. In the interest of not adding on another 1000 words to the blog post, I won’t go into the hairy details, but enabling compression is definitely into Dev territory. This post covers it in more detail if you want to know more.

There are definitely big gains to be had by enabling compression so if you have a developer it should be top of your to do list. The firebug plug-in for our Penguin example shows that a 426.7KiB (75% reduction) in transfer size could be achieved by enabling compression, and that would be a huge win

Minimize DNS Lookups

Although they are separate items on the list, I thought I would talk about minimising DNS lookups and parallelising downloads across hostnames together because there are conflicting arguments to each.

Let me explain minimising DNS lookups first. DNS stands for Domain Name Servers, and they work like the phone book. When you tell a browser to go to www.mydomain.com, the browser essentially uses a kind of phone book to look up your domain. Beside your domain will be the DNS code/number, which gives the browser the location of the files on that domain. Looking up those numbers takes time, so the more sites that you need to look up, the longer it takes. Doesn’t that sound much simpler than ‘minimise DNS lookup’? #DummiesFTW!

So when the speed tip says “minimise the number of DNS lookups”, it essentially means try to limit the number of different websites you list. So if your website requests information from four different URLs like:

• www.facebook.com
• http://twitter.com/
• www.youtube.com
• http://twitter.com/#!/CraigBradford

That would be a total of three DNS lookups. Why not four? Because, http://twitter.com/ and http://twitter.com/#!/CraigBradford have the same DNS. Anything on the same domain has the same DNS. Easy, right?

So when would you request information from URLs? If you want to pull in style sheets, JS, social API data, those are all DNS lookups. So how do we minimise the number of DNS lookups? Well, the recommendations I’ve read are to essentially do either of the following:

1. Anything that’s on a sub-domain, change to a directory. In other words, if you reference “something.mywebsite.com”, change it to www.mywebsite.com/something. This is confusing because it’s still on the same domain, so it shouldn’t be an extra DNS lookup, right? Wrong. Apparently the browsers treat these as separate lookups, even though they are not.
2. If you are pulling in stuff from several websites, anything that can be put onto the same domain should be. This would be applicable if you had lots of images getting pulled from different sources. If you could stick them all on the one site (the same DNS), like Flickr for example (*wink wink), you have just limited the number of images being hosted on your site and also reduced the number of DNS lookups.

The following example is completely unrealistic but makes it easy to understand. Let’s say you have an e-commerce site with 1000 images on it. But because you’re slightly cheap and dodgy, you just use other people images from a thousand different sites. That means that when loading your huge page, the browser needs to go do 1000 DNS lookups. But if, however, you set up a Flickr account and hosted all your items there, you would only have 1 DNS lookup as every picture would be Flickr.com/image1, Flickr.com/image2, etc.

So if that’s the case, why doesn’t everyone just put all images on Flickr? Well, that brings me to parallelising downloads across hostnames. As you probably guessed from the name, it has something to do with doing things in parallel.

Parallelise downloads across Hostnames

When your browser loads a page, it looks at all the files it needs to download and then the number of places it needs to get those things from. To use the example above, let’s say your page lists:

• 20 Facebook profile pages
• 20 Twitter profile pages
• 20 YouTube videos
• 20 images from Flickr

At this point, the browser does some quick sums and says I have 80 files to download, but there are four places I can get them from, so I need to get 20 from each! Now comes the catch. Most browsers only allow 2 connections to any one host (DNS) at one time. So for the browser to download the 20 files it would need to do 2 at a time and put the rest in a queue. TSo there would be four queues of 20. From this it’s clear to see why hosting 1000 images on Flickr wouldn’t be a good idea as it would be a huge big queue.

This is where the idea of parallelising downloads across hostnames comes in. I think I’ll compare this to toilets at music festivals….

If there are 80 people waiting to go to the toilet and there is only one toilet and these festival goers don’t mind going two at a time, then it would take 40 toilet sessions to clear the queue. If there are 4 toilets and again people don’t mind sharing, it would only take 10 toilet sessions to clear the queue. So it’s easy to see the advantage having more than one toilet (host). Common sense really, once you get past all the jargon. This is where browsers thinking that a sub-domain is a different DNS can be useful. By hosting items of “something.mydomain.com” instead of “mydomain.com/something” you have given the browser an extra toilet to reduce the queue. Just in case I didn’t explain the toilet metaphor correctly, the queue of people represent the time it takes to download the page, so you could consider each person as a second if you like.

I hope you can see the conflict of interest here; I literally just corrected myself from the previous recommendation. Here is a breakdown of the pros and cons of each.

Minimize DNS Lookups

• Advantage – Speeds up page by reducing the time it takes to find all files.
• Disadvantage – Increases the bandwidth on each location, so if there are loads of files, it can make a queue, which can actually slow your page down even more.

Parallelise downloads across Hostnames

• Advantages – Reduces queues at each of the file sources, spreads the bandwidth load
• Disadvantages – Increases the number of DNS lookups.

This is a balancing act and is down to the number of files on any page. Doing either one of these to an extreme will likely slow down your site, as it would have a negative effect on the other. To use another extreme example, if you had only four files it doesn’t make sense to make two subdomains. Assuming these files are not massive, you wouldn’t stand to gain very much. Where this becomes useful I think is more when it comes to using JavaScript and ordering the way your page loads.

“A lot of site speed comes down to setting priorities.”

A page fully loading and the user perceiving the page as fully loaded are two different things. If you have a lot of images, for example, it is really obvious to the user if there are big gaps all over the page. Therefore it might be worthwhile putting the images which are above the fold in a short queue to make sure that the first thing the user sees when they land on the page at least looks like a fully loaded page. The rest, meanwhile, can load below the fold. From my research, a lot of page speed comes down to setting priorities.

If I had to pick one to focus on, I would recommend parallelising downloads as you stand to gain the most if you do correctly.

Conclusion:

I started this series in the hope of being able to make speed optimisation a realistic and achievable goal for almost anyone with little web or code expertise. The reality is that this should really be left to the clever guys. Undoubtedly some of you will finish reading this and feel that a lot of it is still unachievable (myself included), but I hope there are enough quick wins that you feel you can achieve something and have at least learned the areas that you will require assistance in achieving. By learning about the tasks above, it also allows you to delegate the tasks to developers without them saying they can’t do it because it will take them two years to complete. So if anything, you can at least be in a knowledgeable position to outsource.

So what is the take away from site speed?

1- Optimising for site speed should not be a priority. Unless you are a big site, the ROI will be pretty low. Only have developers working on it if they have nothing else to do.

2- A lot of the recommended tweaks that the software suggests will not be suitable for every site. Often there are reasons why things are that way, and it’s best to leave them the way they are. What you gain on one thing could have a negative effect on others.

3- New sites should get this stuff right at the start. It’s easier to do it correctly the first time than go back and pick out tiny pieces of code.

4- Always make copies of all code before making changes. This makes updating much easier.

5- Speed is a project, not a task, so plan to make the changes over time and do them in order of gains. Also keep in mind the consequences of any changes.

6- Lastly, my little bit of wisdom for the day would be, if you want to learn something, teach it to others; it’s the best way to learn.

I hope this post has made a very techy subject actionable for some people. The plan was to have a third part, but I really don’t feel it’s necessary. If you have a big site, the examples in Part 1 speak from themselves. For big sites, there are big wins; for smaller sites, put it on your to do someday list. Thanks for reading, feel free to shoot me questions and comments and I’ll help where possible. You can also get Craig on Twitter: @CraigBradford

As you’ve probably heard by now, Google released its +1 social recommendation engine in April. There are several reasons Google is doing this, including trying to make search results more relevant, enabling you to recommend pages (and ads) to your social connections, and combating the Facebook Like button. At this point, your social connections are your Google contacts, but this should realistically expand to other networks as well. As I just mentioned, the +1 button is a direct shot at the Facebook Like button, which is now plastered across the entire web. Both Google and Facebook want to gather as much information from you as possible, which can then help fuel their advertising programs (which is how they make most of their money). Many people outside of Search don’t know that Google makes almost all of its money from search advertising. It’s 96%+ of its revenue. Facebook also makes most of its money via advertising, although at this stage, it’s a much smaller piece of the pie (for now).

Organic and Paid +1’s

When you +1 a page in the Google search results, the button will activate and show to your social connections. It can also show to people who aren’t part of your social connections, but only as aggregated data. For example, you might see “95 other people +1’d this page”.

Here is a screenshot showing what a +1 looks like in the organic listings:

But, this isn’t just possible for organic listings. Paid Search ads in Google can also be +1’d. More on this below, but +1’s can show up in AdWords ads when someone clicks the +1 button next to the ad, or when that page has been +1’d in the organic results. There’s an important piece to what I just explained…

If someone +1’s a page in the organic listing, and that’s the page you are using as your SEM landing page, then +1’s can show up in the ad as well.

SEM and Landing Pages

If you work heavily in Paid Search, then you probably know how powerful landing pages can be. I’m not talking about the standard webpages on a website where some marketers drop visitors. I’m referring to strategically-crafted landing pages, based on visitor intent. Visitor intent is determined by the customer segments you are targeting. Your SEM landing pages might look much different than a typically webpage, even one holding similar content. For example, you might provide stronger calls to action, rearrange content, limit navigation, etc. Remember, your goal in SEM is to convert at the highest level, since you are paying for every visitor.

In addition, dedicated SEM landing pages enable you to use split testing or multivariate testing to increase conversion. You know the traffic source, the visitor segment, etc. and you can easily limit the variables impacting your test. This is part of the reason landing pages can be so powerful. But, since SEM landing pages can contain very similar content to your organic pages, many marketers block the search engines from crawling and indexing those pages. Note, they don’t block Adsbot-Google from crawling landing pages (due to the possible impact on Quality Score), but Googlebot is blocked from indexing and caching the landing pages.

The Problem for Paid Search Marketers

Jumping back to +1’s for a second, remember that +1’s can show up in your ads when someone +1’d the ad or the landing page in the organic results. If your SEM landing pages are not being crawled or indexed, then they won’t show up in the organic results. If they don’t show up in the organic results, they can’t be +1’d. If they can’t be +1’d, then those potential +1’s can’t show up in your ads. That’s right, you might be penalized by using an advanced SEM strategy… campaign landing pages.

What About the Canonical URL Tag?

Some marketers might be using the canonical URL tag in their SEM landing pages and point back to a page on their standard site that has similar content. Until this can be tested with +1, it’s hard to say how Google will apply +1’s in ads when the canonical URL tag is being used. In theory, Google should apply landing page +1’s to the canonical URL being specified in the tag. But will +1’s at the canonical URL apply back to the landing page you are using in SEM? It shouldn’t, which would still mean problems for +1’s in your ads.

But What About +1’ing Ads?

Maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t think many people are going to start +1’ing traditional ads in AdWords. The logistics don’t even make sense. How will you know that you like the content if you are just reading the ad? You won’t. So then you’ll probably click through to a landing page (which might not indexed by Google) and you can’t +1 it (at least yet). Google will be adding +1 buttons for pages, but it’s not available yet. In addition, I’m not sure how many people are going to legitimately +1 a marketing landing page… For example, many marketing landing pages are not equivalent to a thoroughly-written how-to piece (even though it could be). More on that below.

Will Advertisers Run Ads for Organic Content?

My previous point brings up a good question. If +1’s are going to impact organic rankings (which Google said they very well could), then will advertisers try and gain more +1’s by running ads to that content. They might not be interested in the immediate conversion from that content, but the additional +1’s could possibly help the rankings of those pages. I can tell you with almost 100% certainty that this will happen if +1’s impact organic rankings. That’s unless Google adapts and flags +1’s via paid advertising versus +1’s via organic search (or other sources). Yes, this gets complex, like many other things in organic search. :)

Will Advertisers Be Punished for Using Landing Pages?

I’m confident some very smart people at Google are thinking about the paid search impact, and if advertisers will be penalized for using campaign landing pages. Most people in SEM understand that landing page testing is important. Google even has its own product to help you with multivariate and split testing (Google Website Optimizer). You would hope that Google will ensure that +1’s can help your ads, even if you are using SEM landing pages. If not, you might see some paid search marketers revert to just dropping SEM visitors on their homepage or major category pages. Then +1’s can help both organic results and paid search ads (I guess). It seems click-through rate (CTR) might be higher due to +1’s showing up in the ads, but conversion could be lower (since it’s not the most targeted content for the visitor).

In closing, this important step forward for Google Social could end up being a step backwards for AdWords advertisers. That just doesn’t seem right. Let’s hope it gets addressed soon.