MarCom Professional

There are so many toolbars, greasemonkey plugins, and Firefox add-ons for analysing websites that I don't even get excited when a new one comes along. In all honesty think that too many toolbars can actually slow down my workflow. Just because you can, doesn't mean that you need to! [Having said that, I've got 62 extensions installed in my Firefox :-) ]

Because most SEO extensions currently available are good in some aspects but lack one feature or another. For the past few days I have been testing Aaron Wall's new SEO Toolbar, and I have to admit that I'm very impressed with its features. More...

As you're reading this article, almost certainly someone is discussing or talking about you or your brand somewhere on the internet. Hence, it is very important to monitor search engine result pages, blogs, reviews/ratings, social networking and news websites for keywords related to your company.

This practice is called Online Reputation Management (ORM). I'm not going to describe the benefits of ORM as there are some good articles on this subject and a free guide too.

We understand that online reputaion management can be extremely time consuming, and unless you know which sites to include in your searches you may not cover everything. More...

Google has published an article on the Google Webmaster Central Blog explaining the relationship between the Googlebots and crawled websites.

I have to say that it's somewhat cheesy the way it has been addressed by emulating a conversion in a hot date between the website and the Googlebot. However, it's worth reading as it explains how Googlebot interacts with websites and how it navigates through them.

For example, if Googlebot is crawling for web search it ignores .JPG or .MP3 files, or if it's crawling for Google Scholar it prioritises .DOC or .PDF files.

The article also addresses other subjects which are continuously discussed in the search engine optimisation world such as file extensions, gzip compression and the robots.txt file. More...

It is very common for web sites to have multiple urls pointing to the same page. This happens especially to a website's home page and where content management systems generate dynamic urls. It wouldn't be wrong to say that the following urls are all the same:

http://helloworld.com
http://helloworld.com/index.html
http://www.helloworld.com
http://www.helloworld.com/index.html

In actual fact they are, and typically all the above web addresses would display the same web page. From a SEO perspective that's where the problem lies.

Search engines are aware of this issue and know that a web server could display distinct pages for all the urls above. More...

Google Friend Connect is a new service which is set out to grow the number of visitors by making your web site more social.

Google Friend Connect makes it easy to enhance your web site's social and viral features, such as member management, message board, reviews, and picture-sharing. All without programming!

To add Google Friend Connect to your web site you just need to add a few lines of code in your web pages where you want the gadgets to appear.

Your visitors will be able to login to your site using their Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID account.

And connect with their friends from Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and other OpenSocial enabled applications. More...

Let's (for a moment) put aside Google Chrome's privacy concerns and find out whether Chrome is really 10 times faster than any other browser as Google claimed.

As pointed out by Adrian yesterday, Chrome's performance loading the Google Analytics pages were second to none, and seemed to load very quickly other process demanding pages like Gmail, Facebook, YouTube, NetVibes, etc...

I have used 3 javascript performance testing tools which in effect push the browser's capabilities to their limits:

• SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark - Measured in miliseconds (The lower the better)
• Dromaeo - Measured in miliseconds (The lower the better)
• V8 Benchmark Suite - This is Google's own tool and was tailored for Chrome.

More...

Marketing research and analysis is one of the most important aspects of any business. Yet, it's normally overlooked by most small and medium size companies.

We understand that back in the old days marketing research would cost a small fortune which most SMEs couldn't afford. However the internet brought us a host of resources and databases where you can get precious information for FREE.

This article covers a variety of tools that we use on a daily basis when dissecting existing markets for our clients, discovering new ones, or keeping a close eye on the latest trends.

43 Things - 43Things.com it's a website where people can share their dreams and goals or find out what others want to do. More...

Google Insights for Search provides additional features aimed to help advertisers and marketers understand search patterns and visitors' behaviour.

Google Insights for Search allows you, for example, to determine the seasonality of any market, or establish the geographical distribution of a given search term.

The ability to obtain this type of data is precious and surely gives you an edge over your competition, whether you need to fine-tune your pay per click ads, evaluate the market potential of your next business venture, or find popular keyphrases for your SEO campaigns.

Below are some examples of how Google Insights for Search can be used for market research. More...