Internet Business
How Do I Tell if my Website is Fast Enough?
Measuring website speed is important for any web designer. Google uses website loading speed to rank webpages, although they state “fewer than 1% of search engine queries are affected.” Loading times matter. Even small differences in load times can cause users to leave your site, or to not spend as much time on your site enjoying your content as they might otherwise. A small difference for people with high-speed connections can be quite profound for people with slower connections. Figuring out how fast your website is is actually more difficult than you might expect! There are many wonderful tools out there; some give you a scorecard with suggestions of what...
Read MoreGoogle Plus One Double Plus Good
The Google +1 is similar to a Facebook Like. It appears to have replaced the star feature in Google Search results, which has disappeared. It’s simply a way to say “hey, this is a good site.” Now webmasters and web designers have the capability to add the Google +1 button to their websites. It’s pretty easy, and there is excellent information in the FAQ on Google’s plusone-button page. You can use the +1 button as a sort of bookmarking tool, marking your favorite websites and then viewing the list in your profile (click your email address in the upper right hand corner of the screen when signed in, click “View Profile” then the...
Read MoreWhat Social Media Share Buttons Should I Use?
I’m sure that, when you read a blog post, you have often noticed buttons underneath the blog post (or sometimes on top or beside) saying things like “share and enjoy!” or “get social” or “pass it on” or “tell your friends” or something similar. They may provide convenient buttons to save you a click or two in sharing the link of that website to literally dozens of services. Facebook, Twitter, Google +1, Bebo, Digg, Del.ico.us, email, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Orkut… the list goes on and on. Which ones do you really need? I’ve noticed that major social media gurus–those who seem to be the most...
Read MoreHow to Add YouTube Thumbnails
There are numerous plugins to embed videos into your page, or you can get the HTML to embed a video directly from YouTube. And this can be quite useful, when you want to play a video in your page–typically when the page or post revolves around the video. However, there are times when you just want an image thumbnail linking to the video, instead of embedding the video directly. This can be for a number of reasons: you only want to use a small area for the video–large enough for a thumbnail, but too small to play the video you’re aware that your audience may be looking at your site from work, behind firewalls that may not let them view pages with...
Read MoreWhat Equipment Do I Need for Online Video?
When you think of video, you may find yourself thinking of massive cameras that cost more than a new car and weight almost as much as you do, big boom mikes swung overhead in a brightly lit studio. With every year that passes, however, video solutions are getting smaller and more affordable. The typical small business uses digital video recorders smaller than the hand of the person holding it. Video Basics Resolution Find out how many megapixels your device has. This may be specified as “3 MP” or “8 Megapixels,” for example. More is better and results in a higher-quality picture. This is constantly improving, so just use this to compare devices...
Read MoreCan My Small Business Have a Wikipedia Page?
Wikipedia links contain little in the way of search engine value, as they all contain the “nofollow” attribute and thus do no pass on PageRank, but having a highly respected site with a lot of traffic link to your isn’t a bad thing. But it can be more difficult than you think. Getting Your Own Wikipedia Page The Wikipedia FAQ is pretty clear: you can’t use Wikipedia to promote your business. Read through the detailed rules, but essentially, you shouldn’t be creating a page for your own business. Do people do it anyway? Yes, and typically the articles are quickly deleted–and the users are often banned from Wikipedia. Are there some...
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