Thanks to Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s Blackberry software, there has been an exponential explosion of smartphones hitting the market; the average consumer is presented with at least 20 different and competitive choices when shopping for a PDA’s and smartphones.  The ubiquity of these phones has forced most manufactures to undercut prices to stay in the game against tougher competitors and what it leads to is an over-abundance of phones in consumer’s hands that are full of features like Wi-Fi, web browsing, mp3 playback, movie playback, etc.  Countries like China are known for the majority of their internet/broadband users accessing websites and interacting with one another through mobile media rather than going home and logging onto their personal computers.  More and more, businesses marketing to specific audiences are taking into consideration how their websites are viewed on mobile phones; this brings us to the question: how do I optimize my website for mobile media?

Overall, search engine optimization for mobile and smart phones isn’t vastly different than normal SEO practices for websites viewed on a desktop; however there are key concerns which desktop web developers don’t necessarily have to consider such as:

1. Website Resolution: Can the website be viewed correctly?

There are thousands of smart phones on the market that are available to consumers are varying prices which means that when designing a website to be vewied on a phone you have to take into consideration that your iPhone touch screen isn’t the same size as a HTC Tough Diamond phone, nor do they share the same resolution.

2. Images:  How many are there and where are they placed?

The amount of images you have is directly related to how long a person will stay on your website and how long it takes too load.  Too many images obviously causes a longer download time (despite the revolutionary 3g network) and most users will immediately bounce off your page they’re looking for doesn’t come up fast enough.  Images that are too large will take up most of the user’s screen and will force them to scroll around just to see an entire image.

3. Filesize: Just how much content should you have?

Despite the rise in broadband networks and drop in data-usage plans, how much content and the total size of your webpage still directly influences how many hits your website will get from mobile phones.  Many phone plans charge its suscribers based on how much data(bandwith) they use everytime they log onto the web from their phone; which means the longer your site takes to load, the more you are costing a potential customer and the less likely they are to come back to your website.

4. Scrolling: How much should a person scroll before reaching content?

This is something that happens with normal websites viewed on computers at home or the office; who wants to scroll around just to get the content they need?  The most important information should be available the moment a user logs onto your website to minimize your bounce rate.

Hellow Blue Fountain Media Blog suscribers.  We just wanted to make sure that you knew we did more than just awesome corporate web design and SEO services; we have a special for you from our designer Megalongcat.  He’s giving all of you a chance to download is “Nightlife Special” wallpaper in assorted sizes for your Desktop backgrounds.  After all, we could all use something interesting to look at when we’re at work.

Feel free to download the wallpaper here and make sure to stop back next week for more.

SEO - Search Engine Optimization

Earning Trust One Click at a Time

User Generated Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is bad enough when you fall prey to pagination (especially those of us with blogs) but user generated duplicate content?  Rand over at Seomoz discusses the frightening reality of duplicate content made by your precious readers.

Web Development - “There’s an add-on for that, right?”.

http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/pc/the-four-best-open-source-innovations-480163

Design - Because nothing should ever look ugly.

Regardless of what your website is about, if you have a blog, it is quite easy to bring a great number of visitors to one of your blogs by watching Google’s Hot Trends. This is a list of what keywords are being looked up the most at the current time. Simply watch for non-competitive search terms such as “phloem bundle” to come along and include them in a blog post.  Of course, unless your website is about a related subject, those visitors will most likely not lead to conversions. This practice is only recommended if you are actually providing your visitors with relevant results, not spam.

Currently, at around noon, the keywords “phloem bundle” are“volcanic” according to Google. It is most likely that researchers (that could include grade school students) are looking up information about the Fall season. A vascular bundle is a part of the transport system in vascular plants, according to Wikipedia, and Phloem is one of its two forms of vascular tissue.  Now let’s see how many completely visitors we get out of this.

Also: Here comes a plug for one of our clients. Whether you missed the IRS 1040 extension because you were too busy watching baseball or Tina Fey imitations of Sarah Palin on SNL, don’t worry: you can simply file late taxes. We recommend using our web design client, PriorTax.com, when filing taxes online. They are among a few trusted sources for this type of service. If you’ve ever taken a look around the online tax filing landscape you would know what I mean. If you just want to read about taxes in general, take a look at this tax blog.

The NYT recently published a story, “Stuck in Google’s Doghouse,” about Sourcetool.com owner Dan Savage who sent a 4,000-word letter to the antitrust division of the Justice Department to fight against the Yahoo! – Google PPC deal.  Sourcetool is a free directory for industrial product websites. Mr. Savage was using Adwords to target relevant keywords and attract visitors who would then click on his Adsense ads to pay his bills. He used to make around $115,000/month from $653,000 in revenue.

When Google started increasing minimum Adwords bids, the jig was up for Savage. His Adwords placements fell and he got fewer visitors at the same price he used to pay (10 cents according to the Times). The website that was once an “Adsense site of the week,” was disgruntled with the service.  So Savage had his lawyer craft this thick document, which was sent to the Justice Department two weeks ago.

The only thought that came to my mind was “Why isn’t Savage doing SEO?” He was spending upwards of $500,000 on Adwords while making little effort (or so it appears) to have his website come up in the organic search results. With that kind of a budget and especially with the profit he was making, he could have easily spent some money on SEO consulting (or hire an in-house employee) to bring his site up naturally and “beat” Google at its own game.

Of course there would be a lot of SEO work to do. Before even getting into the details, here are five quick no-brainer suggestions for Savage:

Mr. Savage, instead of paying your lawyer or Adwords, do a little SEO to help your reduce your costs. Here is where you can start:

1.) Improve the content of your website. You need to increase your link-worthy content. Find experts to create content that people want to read. Make your website a true online resource with links to sites that only merit your attention.

2.) Fix title tags to make them more descriptive (and keyword rich).

3.) Get rid of your subdomains that are acting as sub-categories in the directory. They aren’t helping with SEO. And if that is not an option, then don’t link to their index pages (/index.php). Use “/” instead.

4.) Clean up the links to nowhere (i.e. http://www.directory.sourcetool.com).

5.) Make effective use of CSS. The entire first paragraph on your homepage is in an H1 tag. Place your main header in an H1 instead.

With SEO, you could start charging for “featured placement” and the free submission area could become more popular as SEO’s get drawn in by your PageRank for their client sites.  And Sourcetool is halfway there already. With years of Adwords analytics, there is already plenty of data to target the right keywords.  And according to SEOMoz’s Page Strength tool you have a strong domain (plenty of inbound links).

You have a directory that is not completely full of spam that now has links to it from various news websites – most importantly The New York Times! What a better time to start an SEO campaign?

Although most SEO experts agree that having fully valid html and css are not prerequisites for perfect search engine optimization, we recently found out how it could bring us additional traffic: many blogs out there feature validated sites on their homepages.

These blogs have a large readership (mainly designers) and submitting to many of them can bring in hundreds of visitors to your website. For example, we submitted our website to cssdrive.com, which not only featured us for our site, but also for our menu design. We have received over 2,000 visits from this site since BFM was featured on August 8. Of course, most of these visits consist of designers - not exactly the kind of customers we are looking for in terms of new web design projects. In any case, it is always nice to be recognized by other designers as a web design company that does adhere to W3C standards.

Here are some of the websites that brought us a decent amount of traffic:

1. CSSDrive.com

2. CSSClip.com

3.  CSSBased.com

4. CSS-Design-Yorkshire.com

5. CSSCreme.com

6. CSSContainer.com

7. MabucPlus.com

8. CSSSnap.com (Note: This website recently got hacked by Turkish hacker(s), “Beyaz”.)

Basically, the main challenge is to design a website that passes W3C validation. Then submit away!

In journalism and in SEO, we are told that “content is king”. It is true that killer content is what will draw attention and ultimately lead to an increase in readership/inbound links. But perhaps it is also important to pay attention to format as well. For example, WIRED is not nearly as fun to read online as it is in magazine format. But then again, I have come across a wide variety of literary pieces via Google Book Search that I would have never sought out in a library. It is very important for businesses to look into what format they should use when providing information to users. The point is to engage audiences and draw attention organically with strong content distributed in the right format.

Take the George Orwell journal entries as an example. All of these entries could have been (and may be) already published in PDF format, downloadable via a website. However, they are being posted one blog post at a time, on orwelldiaries.wordpress.com, 30 years after they were written – to the day. After reading about it in the New York Times, I was quite intrigued, but then found the content to be mainly comments about the weather – not the most interesting of subjects for an Orwell fan. Today’s entry:

August 26, 1938
Hot. Dense ground-mist early this morning. Many blackberries now ripe, very large & fairly sweet. Also fair number of dew-berries…(read the rest)

I expect the content to get more interesting, but the format is still engaging to audiences as it accomplishes a number of things:

1. Gradual release. The entries are delivered to readers as they were written in the journal, one at a time, so there is some waiting involved every day and each one is “bite-size”. No one wants to read through a giant document.

2. Connection to writer. There is the temporal connection of the entries being written exactly 30 years to the date.

3. Format-ready content. As the New York Times article points out, his writing is suitable for a blog. Orwell may well have been a blogger if he were still around.

This example proves that content is not always king, that maybe it is queen from time to time, when format can really play a strong role in engaging an audience.

Now that the Olympics are over, I decided it would be time to take a look at how every nation did at the Games. Checking the 3 majors search engines for the word “Olympics”, it appears that Yahoo dropped the ball on this one. Live and Google produce relevant medal count “one boxes”, while Yahoo just gives news. Looks like Live Search did the best out of the 3 search engines on this one and overall for the Olympics.

The NBC-MSN association bared its fruit for Live Search during the Olympics. Final Score: Google 1, Yahoo 2, Live Search 2. Live Search wins by judge’s decision.

A great post by Jono of Mozilla Labs explains very well what should go into the design of user interfaces. Simplicity is the key and reducing the amount of friction between the interface and the user to a minimum. Keeping the number of options to a minimum while still allowing the user free range to execute all desired tasks from anywhere in the interface is key to a successful design. Adaptive Blue’s blog also mentions Apple’s Jonathan Ive who says, “The task is to solve incredibly complex problems and make their resolution appear inevitable and incredibly simple, so you have no sense of how difficult this thing was.” (Leander Kahney, Inside Steve’s Brain )

Your domain name says a lot about what users should expect to see before they click on a search engine results, follow a link, or enter-in your url. You must be sure that your domain name suits your business and the expectations of your target audience. Remember to not limit yourself when picking your domain name. If you are selling one product one day and selling ten others a few years later, your domain name should be able to stay relevant.

Invent words. There are many domain names out there that are one-word, nonsensical utterances that do not mean anything, but are catchy and easy to remember. One example is Deezer.com, the website formally known as Blogmusik.net. To stand out from the hundreds of “music” and “blog” combinations, they went with the new catch-word, Deezer. This solution is not suitable for everyone (imagine www.lawyuz.com being used for a law firm), especially not for small businesses that do not have multi-million marketing budgets to spread their nonsensical name throughout the Web (i.e. Google).

Use keywords. Whenever possible, add in a keyword or two to give your domain name that extra little boost. Of course that can lead to some very spammy looking domain names such as mortgage-homebuyer-badcredit.net. SEOMoz has a rudimentary algorithm for analyzing a domain name and determining whether it is spammy or not. We passed the test with a score of 0.385 (1 being extremely spammy and 0 being, well, tough to get close to unless using a .gov or .edu domain extension). Remember: do not sacrifice quality for a few keywords. It is more important to have a domain name that is creative and unique.

Keep it short. Whatever you do, make sure that when you say what your domain name is over the phone, that someone will remember it. You should not have to email someone a link for them to visit your website. It should be easy enough to remember that a client can type it in themselves into the browser address line.

Use your company name. Okay, so this is the traditional way of going about picking your domain name when you are not an online company and already have name for you business. It also has its risks, though. First of all, be sure that your domain name doesn’t do something like this: www.atcibusinessschool.com. Second, the length of your company name may be too long. Consider shortening it. For example, consider using www.tahitibar.com instead of an entire company name such as “Tahiti Late Night Dancing Bar”.