How to create good presentations (part 276)

We've spoken before about ways to make better presentations (because who hasn't sat through a bad presentation). Here's a good article which covers the same topic. http://lifehacker.com/5810271/how-to-create-presentations-that-dont-suck

Key points:

1) Keep it simple
2) Engage with your audience
3) Crack an occasional joke

Bing Goes Social too!

It's official. Microsoft's search engine Bing has integrated social networking into its search results.

Now when you perform a search on Bing, you will see sites that your friends 'Like' (as long as you are logged into Facebook at the time).

Moving away from traditional search, Bing is trying to integrate search results which will provide a 'conversation' among friends, as they believe this will lead to better decision making.

Bing has integrated more than a dozen types of social networking into its results.

• Read this article at Search Engine Watch for more details.

Why Your Business Needs a Mobile Presence

There are 6.9 billion homo sapiens on the planet and 3.7 billion of them actively use 4.3 billion mobile phones. What's your excuse for not spending a few dollars making your site mobile-friendly?

Read more Digital Marketing Crimes Against Humanity at Occam's Razor

Google Goes Social

Last week Google made changes to the algorithm it use to display search results.

For the most part this update centered on reducing the power of 'spam' and 'link farms' in their search results. But they also rolled out a new feature which displays social search information from your friends on Blogger, Twitter, Flickr and other sites. You must be logged in to your Google account for this to work.

See how it works on this brief video:

Dirty Little Secrets of Search

A great article in The New York Times about Google Search... uncovering tricks used to gain top search engine positioning and discussing 'black hat' SEO techniques.

• Read the article here... Dirty Little Secrets of Search

Do you need a Mobile version of your site?

This is a question that would have been answered with a resounding 'Yes!' some time ago. But now it's not so clear cut. The fact is, your typical smartphone is growing in capabilities by leaps and bounds, and nowadays the screens people use to browse your website from their phone are showing off your current site in all its glory.

If we look at a typical snapshot of traffic, you'll see that the sophisticated devices rule the roost. And these devices tend to have the larger screens. My Android sports a 3.7" screen, making viewing most websites A Good Experience.

What you do need is to know how your site performs on a mobile device. View your site and try navigating around it. Do those pretty menus work on a smartphone? What about that fancy Flash? Then delve into your analytics. Are your bounce rates worse for mobile devices? In short, experience your site from the POV of a mobile user of your site.

Analytics insights: Bounce Rate

This year we're going to be focusing on providing some detailed insights into the world of website analytics. We've spoken before about the critical importance of analytics, so lets look at some of the key measurements of your site's performance. First off: Bounce Rate.

A bounce is not, as I've heard suggested, when someone scrolls up and down your webpage a few times. A bounce is simple - it's defined as a single page visit to your website. In other words, it's when someone goes to your site, and views no more than one page before leaving.

So your bounce rate indicates how 'interesting' your page (and site in general) is to a visitor. A high bounce rate suggests you have nothing to offer the visitor. But what's high, especially within the tourism market? I'd say you should be looking for a bounce rate under 50%.

And the next question you should be asking is: how can I improve my bounce rate? That we will explore in depth at a later date!

It's worth mentioning there is a related measurement - % Exits from a page. This is the percentage of visitors who left your site after viewing a particular page. Note the difference between % Exit and Bounce Rate - a bounce is a one page visit to the site. while an exit is simply leaving the site (and as such, not necessarily A Bad Thing).