Memorize and Make Use of Keyboard Shortcuts Shortcuts are a great way to increase efficiency and save time. Google+ has some shortcuts of its own that you can learn and employ while using the social network, so getting to know them from the start is beneficial. For example, you can hit Tab and Return to finish a comment, hit Q to jump to the chat feature, hit K to scroll up a post, and much more. Use Drag and Drop to Save Time You may be used to programs that require you to upload files using a clunky interface. Luckily, Google+ is no such program. Adding photos, videos, and links to your ...
Google has been making posts on the progress of their cleanup once a month since September. In that first post, the search giant reported plans for ten of their products. Discontinued or substantially altered products included Aardvark, Desktop, Fast Flip, Image Labeler, Google Pack, and many others. In some cases, products were deprecated; in others, the product's technology was moved for use in other services Google provides. In this first post on the spring cleaning, Google noted that it would make things much simpler for our users, improving the overall Google experience. It will also m...
Cyber Monday is the day after the long weekend, when those of us in the US get back to work. We point with pride to our reputation for productivity, but few of us can resist the call of high-speed Internet access at the office to goof off at least a little bit. On Cyber Monday, though, we productively focus our goofing off on online holiday shopping. Online retailers respond with a plethora of deals: free shipping, special prices, BOGOs, and the list goes on and on. Cyber Monday has gotten bigger and bigger every year. This year might be the biggest yet, if the numbers Greg Sterling collected ...
As with the previous article, I've drawn these tips from the very awesome infographic created by Monetate and picked up by Search Engine Land. While the earlier tips focused specifically on shopping cart features, in this article I'll be looking primarily at aspects of your website that shoppers will find before they even get to the first page of your cart. As Monetate did, I'll present my tips in the form of dos and don'ts. We'll start with a few things that you shouldn't do. And the first of these will probably drive you crazy. Do not force shoppers to register before making a purchase. I...
SeeWhy recently quoted a Forrester report on the top five causes of shopping cart abandonment. These included too-expensive shipping and handling; not being ready to purchase the product; a desire to compare prices on other sites; the product's price being higher than the shopper was willing to pay; and a desire to save products in the cart for later consideration. While you may not be able to address all of these issues, you can address many of them (and others) with proper shopping cart design and layout. Monetate posted an awesome shopping cart abandonment infographic that Search Engine Lan...
The death of Yahoo Site Explorer has even inspired a eulogy over at SEOMoz by Michael King, to say nothing of write-ups at Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land, among other places. The tool was born in September 2005. What is it about the closing down of a five-year-old tool that brings on nostalgia in SEOs? Quite a bit, when the tool was YSE. Many SEOs started their career with this tool. It was free, after all, and at the time it came out, users couldn't get the kind of information it offered without paying through the nose. Not only did YSE give you complete information on your own ...
Crosby Grant reported on the news for Search Engine Land. You can also find Microsoft's own blog post by Tina Kelleher on its adCenter Blog, explaining the change. The timing could hardly be more perfect. Some marketers might have wished for more time to prepare to before the rush of shoppers searching for Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, but it shouldn't take them long to get the hang of the new feature. After all, users of Google's AdWords search advertising service have been able to make negative exact matches for quite some time. If you use adCenter's web interface, you can already tak...
It's been a long time since I've even thought about preparing a holiday feast, but I know friends for whom it just wouldn't be a real celebration without inviting friends and family over for a big meal. So when I saw Matt McGee's article on Search Engine Land about the changes Yahoo made to enhance the user experience of searchers looking for recipes, I knew I had to try it out. So I popped right over to Yahoo and began searching for holiday recipes. I performed several searches, but I'll use my search for diabetic apple recipes as my example. (Hey, why should we get left out of all the holi...
Before I dive into this topic, you need to be aware that not all browsers fully support HTML5. In fact, as Kerry Dean notes in an article for Search Engine Land, to date, none of the popular Internet browsers fully support all of the features and codes in HTML5. But there are certainly degrees of support, and for all of the popular browsers (even Internet Explorer), those are growing. Even so, why should you think about switching your site over to a fledgling standard that still isn't well-supported? According to Dean, if your site fits into certain categories, you stand to gain a nice SE...
We'll start with Katango. This start-up company released an iPhone application in July that generates a list of Facebook friends. The science and algorithms behind it is a bit complicated for me. Here's a video of Robert Scoble interviewing Katango co-founder/chairman Yoav Shoham on how their product works. To protect their intellectual property, Shoham in the interview can hardly be more specific than magic when asked how it works. He does, however, explain that it took them a year to figure out how to work this particular brand of magic, and that it uses much more than comments, contacts,...
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