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Written by: John Lynch


Last week, there was little surprise when Google's Pierre Far announced responsive design as company's formal recommendation for mobile delivery. Responsive Web Design is the approach that a design should be flexible enough to adapt to the screen size and platform of the visiting user.

This (relative) uniformity in user experience would appear to be wonderful for search engines and developers alike.

Google was going to face a major conundrum: if every site had an entirely separate experience for mobile and desktop users, which site would actually be the one worthy of the incoming link? Would that rank pass to the mobile site and, if so, how much and why?

This is especially important when considering that there are predictions that mobile usage will overtake desktop usage by 2014. By encouraging developers to create one cogent web experience that adapts to the platform, Google is likely able to preserve many of its link algorithms and -- to a certain degree -- avoid the daunting burden of attempting to evaluate mobile and desktop versions as separate entities.

For developers, the benefits are also clear: the burden of needing to maintain multiple versions of a website will disappear over time. Additionally, a move to RWD will likely create a "Mobile First" mentality, which will inevitably result in a more clear architecture and user experience that is appropriately weighted.

Understanding Responsive Design

For a design to be responsive, it typically needs the following three attributes:

• Fluid Grid: A fluid grid system uses percentages to define column or div widths instead of pixels. For example, a "hero" might have a width of 650px in fixed width design, whereas it would be labeled as 100% in the CSS of a fluid width design.

• Media Queries: Media queries enable custom CSS based on the min-max width of a browser. For example, a media query with a max-width of 450px would be intended for mobile only browsers.

• Responsive Images: Similar in nature to the fluid grid, responsive images don't have fixed widths but instead have a max-width (typically labeled at 100 percent when displayed on a desktop). This enables images to be scaled down to fit the width of the screen on which the webpage is rendered.

The output of these attributes is simple to recognize. Simply take a responsive design such as Starbucks and manually resize the browser. You should notice the screen resizes and adjusts based on the width of the browser.

Getting Started with Responsive

Below are just a few great tools for experimenting with responsive design.

• Twitter Bootstrap: Twitter Bootstrap is a fantastic toolset for quickly building responsive sites and landing pages. Most developers consider this a must-have for its robust base CSS and Javascript plugins.

• Themeforest: WordPress addicts and do-it-yourselfers might want to take a look at Themeforest's WordPress Templates. There are hundreds of responsive designs and a pretty active community reviewing them.

• Net Magazine: Check out Net Magazine's top 50 tools for Responsive Wordpress Design.

Immediate Impact

Responsive Design should help encourage the proliferation of more mobile experiences, especially in the small/medium business world. This unofficial standard will be an important step as it will ensure many small/medium businesses will have a mobile presence without significant additional expense. Whether these presences will be able to monetize will be a different story.

See the full story at: searchenginewatch.com

For more information about Website design Company and internet marketing company, just visit us at www.7strategy.com

Written by: Danny Goodwin

Bing will soon debut a big search results redesign. Rather than forcing social results into the main organic results, Bing will unveil a three-column design with organic results as the main pane, "entities" in the middle, and social on the right.

"People are using the Web to do things in the real world, and that's a big change from where things were a decade ago," Bing Senior Director Stefan Weitz said in a statement. "And so the 10 blue links that search has been predicated on for the last decade no longer makes sense. Simply put, that's not how you get things done."

Decluttered Organic Results

Bing, recognizing that not all people want to have their search results filled up with social "clutter" will put its focus on simplified, traditional, relevant organic results, rather than jamming social signals into search results. Bing has found that those results aren't that relevant to users, with 75 percent of searches not providing users the right answer.

So Bing will remove "unnecessary links" to core information users want, divorcing most of the noisy social network results from the organic results, in the hopes of providing more relevant results more quickly.

This revamp was foreshadowed by Bing's simpler user interface rolled out just last week, which removed the left sidebar and minimized the top navigation.

Snapshot

The "middle" Snapshot column aims to show users useful information about specific places or topics - specifically, restaurants, hotels, businesses, and movies. It will be filled with such things as events, hours, phone number, maps, restaurant reservations, and reviews, in part aided by partnerships and integration with companies like Yelp, Open Table, and Fansnap.

In Bing's example screenshot, a specific hotel search returns such info as rates, check-in and check-out dates, a map, reviews, and pictures. More generic searches (e.g., "chicago seafood restaurant") might just provide a map in this column because there isn't clear intent.

This is similar to Google's "Sources" feature experiment from November. It will be a more "selective" interactive experience, so certain search queries may not trigger this column.

"Up until now, people would have to visit different sites, read reviews about that hotel, and cobble them all together to form an opinion," Weitz said. "With snapshot, we do the heavy lifting by assembling the most useful information in a way that allows people to quickly consume it and make it valuable." Bing plans to further expand this feature in the future to add places, things, and people.

Social Sidebar

The Sidebar is where all of Bing's social activity will live. Bing will pull in information from social networks including Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Quora, LinkedIn, Google+, Skype, and Blogger. It will consist of four features:

• Ask Friends
• Friends Who Might Know
• People Who Know
• Activity

Taking advantage of the Bing-Facebook partnership, with Ask Friends, Bing will allow users to ask their Facebook friends questions from the Bing sidebar related to Bing's search suggestions, such as whether a Facebook friend would agree with Bing's top restaurant recommendation. Questions will appear as notifications on Facebook, and can be answered from within Facebook or by returning to the Bing results.

Insode the Friends Who Might Know area, when you conduct a search, the Bing Sidebar will show searchers a list of friends who might be able to help answer your question or solve your problem.

"So if you query 'Hawaii,' user models in the network look at public information in your profile such as where your friends live or have lived, what they've liked on Facebook, and photos [they have shared] -- and turn up a list of people who likely have information relevant to your query," says Sandy Wong, principal development lead for Bing.

In People Who Know, the social Sidebar will show the names of experts, enthusiasts, and influentials who have blogged or tweeted about topics related to a user's search. From the Sidebar, Bing will allow users to click on a person's name to read their blog or follow them on Twitter.

Finally, in Activity, you'll be able to see real-time posts and queries, answer friends' questions, and Like posts. Bing said these activities will show up on Bing as well as Facebook, allowing you to comment from either place. Users will have to be signed into Facebook when on Bing for all this Bing-Facebook integration to work.

The new results will roll out of the "coming weeks". You can sign up to be notified when it's available. You can also a check out a couple videos of the new search layout in Bing's official announcement.

See the full story at: www.searchenginewatch.com

For more information about seo firm and seo services, just visit us at www.7strategy.com

Written by: Gregg Stewart

Small and large brands today often ask about the company website's relevance and importance. At one time, the website served as the foundation of all online marketing efforts. With the rise in importance of social platforms like Facebook, some now wonder: how important is the company website? Since Google Place Pages now dominate the top search positions, many also question whether they should abandon their SEO efforts aimed at elevating search positions for the website.

The website's role has changed - and it hinges on what stage of the purchase process, where and when, a consumer enters a site. Today, directional navigation and conversion optimization have become important. Customers and prospects take many differing paths to purchase, so a diversified, distributed, and integrated approach must be developed to maximize lead and sales volume.




For example, a consumer who has already decided she wants to purchase a widget from Acme Widgets may navigate to the site simply to find the closest location and store hours; we'd assign her to the "purchase" stage of the funnel. The most important thing for people like her is the store locator, access to local location pages, or Google Places. However, a consumer looking to compare Acme Widgets' new "left-handed smoke shifter" to Spacely Sprockets' "smoke diverter" is in the "comparison" stage and needs access to detailed product information, purchaser reviews, or shopping engines like NexTag. Now you start to see the pattern. The consumer's information needs have not changed; it is where the consumer is accessing the information that is important and more diversified.

The lesson? Now, more than ever, websites must become vessels of content that can be distributed across numerous platforms so that consumers working through the purchase process can access the information where they are seeking a personalized solution.

Building a Full Funnel Marketing Plan

Begin with an audit of all marketing and media vehicles that you are using. Much like building an editorial or messaging calendar, map your customers' information needs and label them by which stage in the sales/purchase process they cover. This exercise can be tricky because many marketing vehicles do not solely cover one purpose. For example, display advertising can be used as a top-of-the-funnel vehicle, serving to build "awareness" for your brand or business and retargeting can serve as a direct response "purchase" vehicle. In these cases, break down individual campaigns and discretely assign them to their main or primary purpose.

Once the campaigns and marketing elements are mapped, identify areas where you do not have content that addresses a particular stage in the purchase process. Keep in mind that each stage of the purchase process is important and works in an integrated fashion. I've had major national brands that were spending millions of marketing dollars on branding and "awareness" campaigns question why direct response vehicles like search and e-commerce shopping programs decreased in effectiveness when they paused their branding spending. It's difficult to assign a one-to-one relationship to the various funnel activities; e.g., a dollar in "branding" spend results in x dollars in purchases. All elements have an impact (positive or negative) and need to be stitched together in a comprehensive marketing plan and measurement program. Once this task is completed, you can get better insight into assigning attribution weights to the various elements. Now armed with your "funnel stage" audit, you can identify gaps and develop or redevelop content to cover these holes.

Back to your website. Understanding that consumers will access your site via numerous connections (paid listings, promotions, social platforms, etc.) and that these connections are now assigned to differing stages in the purchase process - are they joined to the correct website content based on their stage? One missed opportunity we see from most advertisers is the common practice of linking most or all content to the home page of their website, regardless of the specificity of the inbound link. In search marketing campaigns, the correct practice is "deep linking" or aligning landing content to the explicit keyword purpose or intent. For example, land a consumer in the e-commerce section if a keyword is combined with "buy" as part of the string or in the comparison section if the keyword string where "Brand A vs. Brand B."




Now back to your funnel audit, is your content in all the places where consumers seek out the differing purchase stage content? Having the website content tuned is good, but you need to ensure that you take a distributed approach so the content also exists where consumers are interacting with it. Conduct an advertising, business profile, and listing reach audit to make sure you have prioritized their most popular access points and that the content is aligned to their purchase stage. An example here is that a business profile of a comparison directory such as Yelp should contain lower funnel comparison and perhaps pricing information and be joined directly to purchase points (telephone, online purchase form, etc.) versus your Chamber of Commerce listing, which should contain more generalized content about your brand, years in business, etc., to establish credibility.

So is the website dead as a marketing method? No, but a website is not the sole content location that consumers use when making purchase decisions. A diversified, distributed, and integrated plan that takes advantage of the entire purchase funnel is the best way to go. Full funnel marketing is hard and detail oriented. But once its lessons are unlocked, the spoils of cost-effective sales leads are the reward.

See the full story at: www.clickz.com

For more information about seo services and internet marketing company, just visit us at www.7strategy.com