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Hints and Tips
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Introducing the Google +1 Button
Google recently launched its new “+1 Button”, a new feature on Google’s search results. Now let’s determine what the +1 button do and it’s similarities with others. The Google +1 button is a simple way of recommending a search result. You might want to share a perfect recipe that you found while searching the net or stumbled upon a wonderful site and you want to recommend it to your friends, the +1 button allows you to do this. The Google +1 button seems to be very familiar with other existing buttons in the internet. The +1 system works more like Like’s of Facebook or Digg’s of Digg. According to Google itself, the +1 button is the digital shorthand for “this is pretty cool” or “you should check this out”.
Now is Google going Social? We’ll the +1 button is definitely social but it’s not a social network. The Google +1 button is not going to replace Facebook like buttons. The +1 button adds a flavor of social in your searches since it allows you to publicly recommend something to your friends, contacts and others on the web. In some kind of way, it’s Google’s answer to its competition with Facebook. A representative from Google Jim Prosser was quoted saying “People consult their friends and contacts about decisions. It’s very easy and lightweight way to make search result more relevant.” People are also asking, will +1 button help their rankings in Google? As of the moment it’s doesn’t but Google is not rejecting the idea of incorporating it in some form at some point.
In order to use Google +1 button, a user must first have a public Google profile. You can create your Google profile here. Your Google profile also keeps a tab of all the +1’s you made making it a sort of bookmark for anything that you like on the net. You can show you +1’s tab to the world, or keep it private. Once you have logged in to your profile, your free to +1’s anything you love on the web and share it to your friends, contacts and others on the web.
To have you first experience with Google’s +1 button, you can test it here at this site. (http://www.google.com/experimental/). For those of who want to have the Google +1 button on their site, contact us. We will gladly help install it for you.
Portrait display in Windows 7
Have you ever tried reading or writing long pages of documents on a wide screen monitor? How about navigating through a site with long web pages using a wide screen? Don’t you notice that you keep grabbing you mouse and scrolling through the pages? Well I do and sometimes it annoys me. Luckily, Windows has a solution for that. Windows 7 now has a built-in portrait option on their display settings.
But 1st, lets understand the difference between portrait and landscape. As clearly shown on the figure below, landscape is oriented horizontally or simply, the width is greater than the height. Portrait is other way around. The height is greater than the width or vertically oriented.
Portrait orientation comes in handy when you’re going through long pages. A portrait orientation easily fits 1-2 pages in the screen without sacrificing the readability of the documents. Very helpful when your reading your favorite Ebook. Landscape on the other hand is best when you need a wide area of visibility on your screen. Like when playing games or when you’re using wide tables for your reports. It is the default orientation for windows.
Adjusting the display orientation on Windows 7 is quite easy. Here are simple ways to change your display from Landscape to Portrait.
Basic way is to:
- Press the Start Button (or windows icon) on the taskbar
- Go to Control Panel
- Go to Appearance and Personalization
- Click on Display
- Then Click on “Change Display Settings” located on the left side.
- Change orientation and the click apply. (See Fig. 1.2)
- The orientation of the Display will then be changed and you will be asked to keep the display setting or not.
Fig. 1.2
Another way to change the display settings is simply to:
- Go to your desktop
- Right Click on the screen and click Personalize
- On the bottom left side of the window, click on Display
- Then Click on “Change Display Settings” located on the left side.
- And then you will still arrive on Fig. 1.2
These are the simple ways in changing the display orientation on your pc. Now you can easily change the orientation of your display according to your preference. May it be landscape or Portrait.
Crafting an Email Signature
Email signatures are not something many business owners think much about, but they are an important part of your communication toolkit, and some thought should be put into them.
Key Details
Make sure your email signature includes, at the very least, your contact details besides your email address. Your phone number is a must, fax number if your industry still uses faxes. If you are using Twitter and Facebook for your business, make sure you have links to those profiles.
Branding
Some would say you should not include graphics, but I disagree. Including your business branding in the signature keeps all your communications consistent. Don’t go overboard though, your signature shouldn’t be too big.
Your Website
It’s worth linking to your website in your signature. Giving the people you email a quick and easy way to get to your website and find out more when they need do. Sure, it isn’t that hard to get to your site manually, but making life easy for people who are doing business with you is always the name of the game.
Consider a Signature Service
A site like Wisestamp can create your signature for you, and append it to your emails. They can take a lot of the tricky stuff off your hands, and are a good idea if you don’t have the technical skills to set it up easily yourself.
Avoid Software Licencing Traps
Something every small business owner should pay serious attention to is software licensing. Keeping track of your licensing can lead to disaster, as it’s all too easy for software providers like Microsoft, Adobe and others to get judgements against your business, and ultimately, you, that the average small business won’t survive.
There are several ways that small business owners end up falling foul of licensing issues, so with this post we hope to illuminate these trouble spots so you can make sure your business doesn’t end up being a software piracy statistic.
Unlicensed Software on New PC’s
This is still very common, although getting less so as we move away from Windows XP. If you are buying new machines, you need to make sure that the people providing them are providing you with fully legal copies of the software on the machine. In the case of Windows, thats easy, there should be a sticker on the tower, or on the underside if it’s a laptop, that proves the machine has a legal copy installed on it.
In the case of things like Office, photoshop and other business software, you should be given something with the PC. Exactly what you get depends on the software, the company making it, and the specific license you are being supplied. For example, it’s normal not to be given a disc with Microsoft Office, but you still get a little package with a licence key;
It’s up to you to make sure everything is above board, as if it’s not, you’ll end up paying twice when you have to go out and buy the software again to get legal.
Academic Licenses
This is another common problem; Microsoft and Adobe in particular provide students, and sometimes teachers, with heavily discounted licences for software. They do this so that students can learn how to use the software without having to spend the big bucks for the software, but these licences are ONLY valid if being used by a student. We recently saw a quote given to a child care centre where academic licences had been offered. If the centre agreed to use that software, they could be liable for signifant penalties, and be forced to purchase a new copy of the software with a licence for business use.
Multiple Installations
The area where business owners leave themselves with no defence is where a single license is purchased and installed on multiple machines. Most business owners are savvy enough to know this is a recipe for disaster, and with technologies like Microsoft’s activation, it’s actually quite difficult in many cases. The real problem here is where staff decide they know best, and start installing stuff themselves. This is where having your IT managed by a reputable firm (like us!) can be a benefit, as the software licenses on each machine can be logged and checked periodically, and problems avoided.
Staff Theft
It’s a good thing this isn’t common, but from time to time staff decide that it would be great to take home the software your business has paid for and install it there. Apart from being a licensing problem for your business, this can lead to all sorts of trouble down the line when you need to reinstall your software;
The obvious problem of missing installation discs and licence codes are enough of a headache, but most modern software uses activation systems, which means your licence may no longer work, as it will have been activated too many times. The amount of trouble this causes usually leads affected business owners to simply buy a new copy, but with a little preparation and vigilance, all of these costs and burdens can be avoided completely.
Have you run into licensing trouble? Leave us a comment and tell us about it!
Top Tips for Adwords Landing Pages
If you are creating landing pages that need to be optimized for the use of Google AdWords campaigns, there are some things you may want to take in consideration so you can maximize on the benefits that using Google AdWords provides. You may or may not know that even though you create a campaign using Google AdWords, the actual program scans your target page for relevancy. Once it’s finished scanning your page, it gives your page a quality or relevancy score. For this reason, building a landing page that will take advantage of the ‘relevancy score’ is vital.
These are our top tips for creating an AdWords landing page that will maximize your relevancy as well as being AdWord friendly.
1.) The file or page name should be the same as the keyword: When saving your page you’ll want to make sure the page name uses the keyword as well. This will ensure you maximize on AdWords ability to target the keyword not only in the domain but the page name too. If you are using WordPress, this is nice and easy as your page title is usually the page name as well.
2.) In-page title should also be the keyword: The title of your page should also reflect the keyword as well. This will allow the AdWords bot to recognize the domain, page name, and page title as all having the keyword, making it all relevant.
3.) Meta tag keyword placement: For some of you that use blogs this may be difficult if you’re unsure how to edit your landing page but the fact remains, your landing page should contain Meta tags. You will have keyword Meta tags that you’ll use for adding the main keyword. This will also be applied to the description Meta tags as well. All of these tags will need to be optimized using the main keyword(s) to ensure maximum exposure.
4.) The heading tag must utilize the main keyword: The heading tag will need to incorporate the keyword because Google AdWords recognizes this tag as well as the others.
5.) Maximizing your page content: For everything to come together nicely on your landing page you will need to make sure your content is relevant, as well as maximizing your keywords with at least 2-3% keyword density. Don’t just put a bunch of key words and phrases at the bottom of the page, Google will penalise your page if you do, instead, ensure you have good quality copy written for the page that includes the key phrases you are trying to target.
6.) Do not use links to products on different domains: If you are using an AdWords campaign, do not use you landing page for anything other than your own services or products.
7.) Make sure you have no broken codes: Google AdWords recognizes broken codes and this will leave you out in the cold. Your page quality will score very poorly and regardless of the work you’ve done your landing page will not receive maximum exposure.
8.) Original content: Your landing page should always have original content and not something that has been used everywhere else on the internet. Have an article writer create unique content maximizing your keywords.
9.) Test your page: Test your page before going live to make sure everything is as it should be. This will ensure you receive maximum results for the work that has been performed.
With these ten tips for creating an AdWords landing page you will be able to maximize your landing pages potential and draw in relevant visitors using your Google AdWords campaign.
Google Panda – What you need to know.
The Google Panda update is really a game changer when it comes to search as well as website position. The last time search engines updated their own search algorithm that much was in 2007 with the Google Florida update, which reduced links as well as PageRank as well as re-arranged the search engine results for a large number of websites. This time around it’s absolutely no different.
Google’s update is really a clear effort to improve the actual organic search engine results by degrading the present spam websites which dirty them. To do, this it’s upgraded its algorithm to consider specific ‘signature’ components which right now mark a website which contains spam content material.
By knowing what the actual characteristics of the spam website are in the perspective from the Google internet search engine you may reverse-engineer it and start to understand what you ought to do to be able to stop your site from becoming adversely suffering from the Panda new update.
What Search engines Considers now to become ‘Spam’ Web sites
1. Websites along with content that isn’t sufficiently unique – it doesn’t matter if your articles are item descriptions (which is actually iterated often across the actual web) or you’re reporting a thing that has happened and may therefore not really have a lot of freedom by using it. Google now really wants to see authority meaning originality is actually key.
2. Websites that are keyword crammed and that are a little outdated in their own content additionally flag Google’s brand new filter with regard to spam web sites.
3. Scraped content material or content that has been introduced from additional websites is actually of specific risk because Google right now values creativity above the majority of content under consideration. This penalizes, for instance, the eCommerce websites with item descriptions that repeat specs posted on countless other websites. Also, it penalizes those who have been focusing on a little budget to obtain in just as much content as you possibly can by purchasing it through Content Plantation websites.
4. Websites that have poor navigability as well as a high desertion rate, all proved through Google’s unknown gathering known as Click Thru Rates (CTRs) will even feel the actual might from the Panda sledge hammer.
If your site has any of these no-no’s, you are likely to be tripping Google’s flags and can probably observe declining visitors. If you’ve got a combination of a number of these types of issues turning up on your site you will need to start thinking of how to proceed about it and just start doing the work.
The greatest message from the Google Panda revision is that if you are not ready to take quick, actionable learning to make your web site appear stable and associated with value towards the web, Google will pretend it is invisible thereby making it so. In other words, take your time and allow in your budget for your business’ website to be as full of quality content as possible. This will ensure that your rankings stay at the level that you require for your business’ stability.
Business Email
Email is a critical part of running most small businesses these days, but we are still finding business owners who aren’t aware of the benefits of setting up their email professionally.
The first mistake small businesses make is using the free email address that is provided as part of their broadband internet subscription. In many cases, this will be an @bigpond.com or similar address. Business owners should setup email accounts using a domain name they own (like shiftsolutions.com.au), to give a more professional appearance, and also so that they retain full control of the business email; Locking yourself into using your ISP for email means you will never be able to change your internet provider, which over the years could cost you thousands in higher fees or lost productivity.
Another common mistake for very small businesses is to use one address for the entire business, even when there are more than one member of staff. Even if you only advertise one address to begin with, enabling each team member to have their own, seperate email account provides greater productivity, as each team member can be responsible for their own emails. Worse, it’s often the case that the way the email is setup is such that every team member receives the same emails, so you have the problem of multiple members of the team working on the same email, thus wasting time.
Small business owners should setup generic email addresses, such as sales@ or info@, and when communicating to people outside the business, those generic email addresses should be the ones you give out; This enables you to direct those emails to different team members, as people leave and are replaced in your business, or when they take holidays and someone else needs to handle the email.
Another issue that is often overlooked is the size of the mailbox most ISP’s give you; Generally, 20 Meg is the limit, which for normal use is more than enough, but many business clients like to get their email on their computer and their phone, and this often requires a larger mailbox to store the email for longer periods of time; With your own domain hosted email, you can control how big your mailbox needs to be, but with ISP email, you have no say.
Finally, for mobile team members, or those with iPhone / iPad devices, consider a hosted exchange service; This service puts your email “in the cloud”, but with a full Microsoft Exchange Server to handle it, which enables things like calendar sharing, a great help to small business owners. It also means when you read an email on one device, it will show up as read on every device, because instead of copies of your email being saved to each device seperately, there is just the single copy, on your Exchange server. (Larger businesses with a small business server get Exchange as part of the deal)
Using email to the full will bring your small business productivity gains and make the job of running your business that much easier.
Password security
Recently this story appeared in the courier mail, focused on the woman how lost a weeks wages to online thieves.
Before I tell you how you should be setting your passwords, I’d draw attention to this quote from the victim;
“It was definitely a shock – the fact that someone was pretending to be me and could log into something that’s supposed to be secure.”
What needs to be clearly understood, is that services like Internet banking and paypal are only as secure at the person who’s using them. You need to use these services properly to avoid this happening to you,
Here are the key tips for staying secure online;
Use a different password for each website or service you sign up for
Make your passwords at least 8 characters long, 12 for banking and finance sites
Include letters, numbers and symbols in your passwords
Make sure your password is totally random gibberish
Where available, get a security token for your account
Ensure you have good quality and updated anti virus software on your computer
Follow these simple tips and your money should stay safe.
Proposals for your clients
I had a great lesson reinforced for me today by one of our suppliers. Central to the theme is how you present the work you propose to your customers, and how easily it can go wrong.
Put simply, you should give your customer a detailed proposal, which explains the work you intend to do for them, and the total cost of that work. I won’t go into detail here, as this isn’t really a business blog, but I’m sure you get the idea.
If you are going to offer your customer options that vary in price, it should be a simple matter to spell each option out, and show the price of each.
Most importantly, the details of what you will provide, how long it will take to complete the work, and what the work will cost, should all be presented to your customer in a SINGLE DOCUMENT.
This is where one of our suppliers fell short this week;
- They listed the price for only one of two options
- The price was not on the same document as the options
- They didn’t clearly explain it would take some days after our order before the work could be done
- They didn’t clearly explain we needed to sign off on the work on their official form.
Most or all of this information WAS provided, but because it was provided in a haphazard way, some in email, some in a document, some by phone, the message was lost in the hustle and bustle of running a business.
The moral of the story; make it easy to do business with you, and you will win more business.
Dangers of Dropbox
Recently we had a case where a client phoned us in a panic, as all of their important documents had simply vanished. They had stored all their data within Dropbox, so that they could sync the documents between their home and work computers.
Lots of people take advantage of Dropbox for this reason, it’s a great way to keep your stuff on multiple computers. There are dangers though, and you should be aware of them;
The main danger is putting your own dropbox onto a computer you do not have complete control over, such as a computer where you work. If you don’t completely control that computer, with a password only YOU know, then someone else has the opportunity to delete files from your dropbox. If they do, dropbox will dutifully DELETE THEM FROM YOUR OTHER COMPUTERS, and they are gone.
The second issue, is that if you use the same dropbox account on all your computers, the computers you don’t have control of will include a copy of everything. So if you have a work folder, and a personal folder, for example, then your personal stuff will be on your work computer.
If you don’t want your boss to be able to find your application letters for a new job, for example, the solution is to setup more than one dropbox account. Just setup a dummy account for the work computer, and share your work dropbox folder with that account, but not the rest of them. That way, work is work, and they can’t mess with your personal stuff.
Make sure, whatever you do, that you have a real backup solution as well. Dropbox is NOT a backup, and should never be used as such. Because it will mirror deletions across all your machines, it doesn’t provide protection against accidental deletion. A good backup solution DOES do this, and a whole lot more.
Another mistake is to put files such as your MYOB file into your dropbox. This seems like great idea, but the problem is that each time you use MYOB, you are making small changes in the file, that Dropbox will then have to update. If you are a regular user of MYOB, this will generate a lot of traffic, and many people have very low bandwidth caps on their internet plan, and this could put you over.
We’d love to hear your comments about your experiences with Dropbox. Let us know in the comments!
