As YNot Web goes into its ninth year (gulp!), we have considered what direction we are going and how we need to continue to evolve to keep ahead in providing the best marketing and web services for our small business clients.

This year, we feel our marketing priorities will include the following:

• Offer new packages in Mobile optimization.  We want to make sure we help our clients tap into this huge market opportunity with mobile friendly-websites and marketing campaigns.
• Continued efforts in Social Media Marketing(SMM) for clients with a SEO focus for effective online visibility.
• Retool our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and SMM packages to help clients understand the ROI of each and the value they get from our services.
• Continued efforts to market our website  modernization packages.  We love to empower entrepreneurs to have control of the growth and freshness of their own websites.  All of the websites we create or upgrade are easily maintained by an average user.  And although we’ll still help maintain for those clients that prefer a hands-off approach, we feel we best serve our clients with completed website when we assist with ongoing strategy, new features and technology, and SEO, marketing and promotion.
• Increased efforts in educating businesses in the need to keep up with compliance (particularly for businesses with eCommerce offerings) and security updates for their websites, particularly keeping WordPress sites up to date.  New versions come out regularly throughout the year and updates are increasingly simplified.  Whether we assist or not, we suggest that WordPress users update versions at least every 6-12 months.  The current version of WordPress as of this writing is 3.3.1 (released January 3rd).
• Reconnect with past clients to bring them up to speed with the above.  All our past clients can benefit from a security and compliance audit and upgrade.  Those who have had websites built a year or more ago can particularly benefit from mobile optimization. Those whose websites have been built 3 or more years ago could benefit from a design refresher to integrate new user preferences and trends in design.  Those who have websites built 6 years ago definitely could benefit from modernizations and technology upgrades.

Nielsen released their search engine usage statistics for December 2006 and I thought I’d share the results.  Nielsen//Net Ratings gathers data from over one million Internet users in the United States with Nielsen tracking software installed on their home and work computers that records every site visited. Measuring three unique metrics, these statistics provide a view of actual search engine usage.

According to Nielson//NetRatings, an estimated 3 billion searches were performed at Google Search in the U.S. during the month of December 2006, representing nearly 51% of all search queries performed in the U.S. during that month.  This is up from 49.5% of searches for the month of November.

Rounding out the Top 10 are:
Yahoo: 23.6%
MSN/Windows Live Search: 8.4%
AOL: 6.1%,
MyWay: 2.4%,
Ask.com: 2.1%
Earthlink Search: 0.5%
Dogpile.com: 0.5%
Comcast Search: 0.5%
NexTag Search: 0.4%

Keep in mind that this statistic specifies the number of queries conducted– NOT the number of unique visitors to the site.  However, Google now ranks #2 for unique audience, surpassing Yahoo in the list of Top 10 Parent Companies in percent reach with nearly 95 million unique visitors on the home panel and 47 million on the work panel using the Google suite of sites and tools.  Yahoo fell to just under 94 million visitors (home panel) between November and December.  Still dominating the internet in terms of audience is Microsoft, with over 103.5 million unique home visitors and 51 million office workers (a whopping 88% reach in the workplace) in December 2006.  A notable addition to the Top 10 on the work panel is Wikipedia, with a 33.5% reach.

You can find more monthly data at Nielson//NetRatings.

While determining which size ads I wanted to prioritize for one of our online marketing clients, I found the Most Popular Ad Sizes as determined by Nielsen/NetRatings.

Times change and as large screen monitors and larger resolutions come out, more and more advertisers(25%) are headed to the largest ad size- a 728×90 Leaderboard.  These are the large rectangular ads that are usually at the very top header position on a website.

Also popular with 16% of advertisers is the Medium Rectangle (300×250).  These have made popular with many sites that like to place an ad block within their content, usually between the article or page title and the page text.

Rounding out the top three is the Wide Skyscraper with 13% of advertisers using this size.  These ads usually display in a left or right column beside the main content of the site and reach quite a ways down the page.

Of course, knowing your target ad venue is more important than determining what is most used by other advertisers.  If the perfect site to advertise to your specific market only allows for Full Banner (468×60, originally the most popular size) or a Square Button (125×125) then you would need to accommodate their ad specifications in order to advertise on their website. 

Well as another round of “latest and greatest” products come into play after the massive holiday gift-giving season, I like to take a look at trends and current stats for what settings and software internet users have.

The stat I pay attention to most is screen resolution.  This impacts my business the most as I like to keep in mind how wide a website design should be and how much information will fit “above the fold” for most internet users (see my previous blog entry for Above the Fold and stats from early last year).

Currently, 75% of web users have a resolution of 1024×768 or higher.  This is in contrast to the 78% that had 1024×768 or lower last April.  More and more wide-screen and large flat screen monitors and better video cards installed in the latest computer equipment are in use than ever before.  However, there is still a functional limit as we humans can only process so much and especially can read text only so tiny.  13% of users still have a resolution of 800×600 (the old standard) and I wonder if that demographic will ever truly go away.  Perhaps we will see trends where websites just start using larger fonts to meet the needs of an aging baby boomer generation.   Perhaps not, but time will tell.

Next, I check out browser popularity.  Microsoft is the giant with 84% of the internet community using some version of Internet Explorer.  However, this is a significant decrease from last year at this time (90%) as Firefox gains ground jumping from 6% to 11% in one year (yep, that is the exact amount Internet Explorer lost). If you want to check out Firefox yourself, you can here.

An amazing 19% already have adopted Internet Explorer 7 even though many early adopters, including myself, suggested that it may be better to Hold Off on IE7.

I hope you’ve found this informative as you build or continue to build your web presence.

This past weekend we took our two seperate existing RSS feeds- one for our blog, the other for our ‘standard’ content like our articles and services- and combined them into one easy-to-access feed.

If you are wondering what RSS is, it means ‘Really Simple Syndication’. Simple enough that once you subscribe to a web site that has this feature, you keep up-to-date with new information without having to check the site every day. You can do get newsfeeds from major news networks, entertainment sources, and business news and aggregate it to access it all from one place.

Once you get started, your favorite parts of the Web come to you. No need to go out and check for updates all the time. If you do not want to download rss reader software, its really easy to subscribe to your favorite feeds through My Yahoo or My Google (free personalized homepages).

To get started with the YNot Web feed, click the orange feed “chicklet” on the lower left side of the screen. This takes you to our Feedburner page, with subscriber options for web-based and desktop-based feed readers.

For another quick overview of RSS and feeds seeFeedburner’s Feed 101.

I’ve been dealing with several clients whose websites have been down or not functioning properly due to server issues at their various web hosts.

No host can provide a 100% uptime, but what DO you look for when shopping for a host?  First, they should publicize some sort of “uptime guarantee.” Without a guarantee, you have no assurances that they are at least trying or providing due diligence in keeping your website available.  I’ve recently seen a popular host REMOVE their guarantee from their sales pages.  Not a good sign of things to come for their clients.

So what kind of uptime guarantee is good enough? This depends on your needs and, honestly, your budget.  Of course, no one wants to have their website DOWN ever, but what do these numbers mean?  Here are some common guarantees in the industry today and the actual amount of downtime per month involved.

• 99.5% uptime = Over 3 HOURS (216 minutes) of downtime in a month
• 99.8% uptime = 86.4 minutes of downtime in a month
• 99.9% uptime = 43.2 minutes of downtime in a month
• 99.99% uptime = 4.32 minutes of downtime in a month
• 99.999% uptime = 0.432 minutes (26 seconds) in a month

Based on these numbers, I would never recommend a host with less than a 99.9% uptime guarantee and I would rather see my clients on a 99.99% uptime server.  I only know one host, Rackspace, that gives a 99.9999% uptime guarantee and they only do managed server hosting and is much more expensive than standard hosting.

So check for an uptime guarantee as one of the necessary elements when shopping for a web host.

There’s a new fad getting pushed by part of the internet marketing community selling paid one-way links on something called ‘Cloud’ sites or ’500 words’ where there are just various words on their web?site up for bid/purchase as a link text for inbound links. These sites are selling the fact that more one-way inbound links help increase your link popularity and are factored into your ranking and site positioning for keywords used in your inbound link text.

This is reminscent of the recent ‘pixel’ page ad sites where the site owners sell one or more pixels on a website for supposed visibility and inbound links to website owners who want to advertise their website. However, the problem with these sites is that your inbound links are only as good as the site they are on.

First off, hundreds of these flash-in-the-pan sites are popping up and most of them have no ranking or traffic themselves. So you can’t expect to have these help YOUR ranking or traffic. In fact, in my opinion- you should never pay for a link on a site less than PageRank 4. I don’t think there is any problem having free links from sites with PR down to 0, as PR changes and not only is there no penalty for links for lower ranked sites, but search engines like Google expect you to have links from a mix of sites.

Second, many of the major engines often pull ‘spammy’ sites from their results altogether. These sites have no real content and are just a bunch of links. They aren’t likely to be in the major engines listings- another indicator that you will not receive any real traffic from them.

Evaluate paid-link or banner ad opportunities wisely. Is the site content related to your site, therefore targetting an audience appropriate to your site? Does the site bring in real traffic? Get some proof of page views and unique visitors. Does the site have a good ranking in Google, MSN or Yahoo?
Don’t be a victim of the latest advertising fads. Use techniques that are proven winners.

Need help finding effective ways to prospect for new customers?
YNot Web can help. Call 916-225-5266 today.