All website owners who understand the importance of search engine optimization and having a successful running website at some point are faced with a rather large dilemma, SEO or user experience? Often times those tools and gadgets that really help in increasing a user experience harm on-site search engine optimization efforts in a great way.

In a perfect SEO world everything would be black text on white background but in today’s marketplace that just won’t be enough to really convert website traffic. If the game was just strictly all about rankings and rankings prevailed as the leader than this would be all fine and dandy but we live in a time where branding elements and unique presentation are very important to the whole landscape of online success. There are ways to keep your fun widgets and images clean so that the SEO of your website is not jeopardized. A user experience is very important and goes hand-in-hand with all search engine marketing efforts. If you spend the bulk of your energy focusing on driving targeted traffic to your website and forget about updating your user experience your external marketing efforts will not reach their full potential. If your web traffic does not enjoy their experience on your website they are simply going to leave and not come back.

Take the time and research what your audience would like to do once they arrive at the website. You have to know and understand your audience a great deal before you can create a great user experience for them, if your audience doesn’t not enjoy a certain website or communication element don’t make it a focal point on your website. Keep your website scripts clean, too many scripts acting on a website can slow down load time tremendously and really hurt your onsite SEO efforts. Make your user experience c/> [...]

Thu Jun 17, 2010 23:00 pm

If you have been conducting search engine optimization efforts for your website for some time and you are wondering why things just are not working out like they should you might want to take a step back and take a look at some other factors that could be holding your website back from climbing in the rankings.

Here are a few important areas to consider when marketing your online business:

• Proper Steps? – Did you dive into link building or did you take the proper steps to optimize your website first? If you’re trying to build links without taking the time to focus on your website first you will never see the results you are looking for. Link building before on-site optimization is a lot like putting the buggy before the horse.

• Brand Power – Have your tired to increase the power of your brand? Strong branding elements often times will get a website visitor to reconsider things when they make it to your website. Try either re-branding or branding your business website even more to get people interested what you have to say. Branding is playing an even more important role in today’s market place than it ever has before. Website traffic wants to see your logo and company info in many different places so make sure that you are branding your business actively.

• Website Structure – This is very important, have you taken them time to make sure the layout of your site is completely ready for your business goals. If your goal is online sales on your online store than you should have many ways for that website visitor to make it to your online store. If you want leads your lead form should be visible on every page of your website. You want to make sure your URL’s to al/> [...]

Tue Jan 19, 2010 02:05 am

One of the latest social media applications that has been getting a great deal of buzz is … Google’s Buzz. Google rolled out Buzz not too long ago, with the hope that it would become the next be social media thing. Google is hoping that the fact that Gmail users automatically access Buzz will help it continue. Also helping is the fact that Buzz makes it easy to connect Buzz to other social media feeds, creating a hub of sorts for your various social media accounts, including Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and your Blogger profile.

All of this connectivity had an initial downside. Almost immediately, outcry over privacy on Google Buzz was raised. Private information was widely available, and that caused immediate concerns. The good news is that the widespread panic caused Google to make changes to its set-up, and now Buzz can be adjusted to rectify most of the privacy problems. Now /> [...]

Sun Mar 14, 2010 11:35 am

LotusLive has scored a big win over Microsoft Exchange in perhaps the most significant deal to date for a SaaS provider. The IBM deal with Panasonic means that 300,000 people at the electronics company will drop Exchange for the LotusLive, web-based collaboration service.

We would normally not cover customer wins, but the LotusLive deal with Panasonic is so large it signifies how lucrative this market could be for cloud service providers.

We expect these deals to pop up everywhere as more companies see the benefits of shedding IT assets for cloud-based services. In turn this will change how companies negotiate. With more competition and publicized wins, managers will look beyond the desktop for the best deal possible they can find from a cloud services provider.

Sponsor

Panasonic will use LotusLive for its calendar; email; web conferencing; messaging; file sharing; project management and contact management as well.

LotusLive will also replace Lotus Notes and other collaboration tools.

The LotusLive tiered pricing structure looks similar to what we see with many SaaS providers. According to eWeek, the cost for LotusLive starts at $3 per user, per month. As the client uses more services, the price per user increases.

The win also shows that Google Apps is not as dominant as it sometimes appears. Google Apps has not scored a win on this scale.

Still, Google Apps has had the most success as a /> [...]

Thu Jan 14, 2010 02:05 am