The New York Times has reported that the company gives their customers a bad experience in the hope that they will then write a review about the bad service online. By doing this DecorMyEyes.com managed to get their site to the top of the search rankings by being deliberately rude to customers and sparking complaints.

Vitly Borker, the founder and owner of DecorMyEyes.com, told the New York Times, “I’ve exploited this opportunity because it works. No matter where they post their negative comments, it helps my return on investment. So I decided, why not use that negativity to my advantage?”

Although Borker’s actions are extremely unethical, it does highlight a flaw in how Googles Pagerank system works. One of the main considerations given is how many incoming links a website has, this is why DecorMyEyes.com gets a high position in search results as many negative comments from disgruntled customers are posted across forums on the web.

After the New York Times published its story, a response was soon posted on Google’s Official Blog entitled “Being bad to your customers is bad for business.” According to Amit Singhal, the Google team have written a new algorithm that can detect which merchants have provided a bad experience to their customers.

“We immediately convened a team that looked carefully at the issue. That team developed an initial algorithmic solution, implemented it, and the solution is already live.”

“Being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google’s search results,” Singhal added.

Of course, Google never provides much detail about its algorithms for fear that if it did, its search engine would become easily manipulated. Nevertheless, Singhal admitted that the new tweaks to the system detects merchants that provide their customers with “an extremely poor user experience” and then assigns them lower rankings.

Fix the Web is an initiative of Citizens Online, a UK national charity that campaigns for internet access for all. The internet has been a liberating force in the lives of many disabled people, opening up a wonderful new world of communication, ideas and networks. In theory, it should have created a level playing field.

Unfortunately, millions of disabled and older people are excluded from easily navigating their way around the web because the web sites have not been designed correctly. To compound the problem, it is often difficult to complain about the offending sites. Fix the Web has been launched to provide a quick and easy way for people to make complaints—as well as to introduce a volunteer-led process for those complaints to be reported back to website owners to get fixed. Fix the Web is calling on disabled people to start reporting now.

The process takes less than a minute and is easily done through a form on the site: http://www.fixtheweb.net, via twitter (#fixtheweb #fail, url and the problem) or by emailing post@fixtheweb.net.

A volunteer picks up the report and checks if it is a real problem and then finds out where to report the problem (this is sometimes a complex problem when a website does not have an easy ‘contact us’ facility). The volunteer reports the problem to the website owner and is responsible for getting an answer and hopefully a resolution of the issue. I would hope that many of my readers will become volunteers. Besides helping the community, being a volunteer should increase your understanding of what makes sites inaccessible and therefore help in the design of websites and development tools.

Following the guidelines in WCAG is good but making web sites that are accessible is better. I would also urge my readers to report problems; you do not have to be disabled to recognise accessibility issues. If you see one report it; it might be an alt text missing or an alt text that does not describe the image, or it might b a button that is only accessible with a mouse, or flashing images, or lack of colour contrast.

I am now a reporter and I make it really easy for myself by always having a tab on my browser with the reportng form open. When I am browsing the web and I see a problem first of all I need to make sure my https://troypoint.com/install-vpn-kodi/ vpn is on, then I copy the URL, switch to the Fix The Web tab, paste the URL and then fill in the rest of the form. Literally less than a minute.

We have just added some festive spirit to the Horizon-Security website while still maintaining a professional presence.

Please have a look and let us know what you think.

What is an autoresponder?

An autoresponder is an automated message sent in response to either an email or a web form inquiry. It can be something as simple as “Thanks for contacting us!” to a series of ten or more emails sent at specific, pre-determined intervals.

At a very basic level, you set up the response in an autoresponder system, and set the parameters for when it gets sent.

Who needs an autoresponder?

I would argue that unless company emails and web inquires go to a specific person who responds personally to each one within a few hours, you should – at the very least – have an autoresponder set up that thanks the person for contacting you, lets them know when they can expect a response from a real person, and provides them with a phone number they can call if they need help right away.

Using autoresponders to walk prospects through the sales cycle

A more sophisticated (though not necessarily more complex) way to use autoresponders is to set up a series of emails that helps walk a prospect through the sales cycle. For example, if a web visitor fills out a contact form on your website and checks a box saying she would like more information on product X, you can respond with a series of emails that go something like this:

Immediately: send the prospect a thank you email along with a product brochure. Give them the contact information for a sales rep if they should have any further questions.

Week one: send the prospect a follow up, including a deeper piece of collateral, such as a case study involving the product. Again provide a call to action with the email and telephone number of a sales rep.

Week two: Send a helpful email with a few FAQs and a client testimonial.

Week three: Send the latest white paper and offer to set up a web conference to go over the solution with all members of the decision-making team.

Week 4: Send along an industry report on the subject.

Week 5: etc…

As you can see, setting up an email responder series for each of your products and services creates a hands-free follow-up system that keeps you top-of-mind with your prospect for weeks or even months.

Of course, be sure to follow SPAM guidelines and always make it easy for a prospect to “stop receiving emails” if they want to. It’s only good business.

We would welcome the opportuity to discuss how autoresponder will help you grow your business.

In the last couple of weeks, Google has tacitly launched Google Instant, an enhancement to the Google SERPS user interface where the SERP updates dynamically to show results as the user types search terms.

The effect is that searchers will see results more quickly than before (where searchers would have traditionally either clicked the search button or the “enter” key).

Currently, Google Instant is only available to Google account holders, but no doubt it’ll be rolled out across all users in time.

The question on the lips of digital marketers is: how will Google Instant affect SEO and PPC performance. The possible effects on metrics and measurement, brand and content strategy need to be taken into consideration.

Impression metrics according to Google

Let’s just talk about metrics first. According to Google, they will only record an impression in the following situations:

• The user begins to type a query and then clicks anywhere on the page
• The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing Enter or selecting one of the predicted queries
• The user stops typing and the results are displayed for a minimum of three seconds

PPC Performance

1. Impact on Quality Score

From a Google AdWords performance perspective, Google’s definition of an impression should in theory mean that Quality Score wont be negatively affected on the occasions where searchers change their search term rapidly. However, the question begs, how many of us dwell for longer than 3 seconds when searching; or click “enter” or the search button by default? And will the effect of Google Instant change our behaviour requiring us to search less than before?

2. Listing position strategy – which position will perform best?

Aside from Quality Score implications, my feeling is that the first three ads (appearing in the box directly above the organic results) will most likely get more attention than they may have had in the past. This could mean that traditional ad positions such as 4 and 5 – that were often cited as the most efficient in terms of CTR and conversion rate – may lose their popularity in favour of ad positions 1 – 3. Only time will tell!

If this is the case, our keyword CPCs will need to increase – or respective keyword Quality Score will need to increase to improve our listing position.

SEO Performance

1. More impressions – lower CTR

The first thing that springs to mind is, will I get more impressions as the number of SERPS presented to searchers increases. The answer is most likely, yes.

Google has kindly illustrated this as we can see on the left.

But what about SERP click-through rates (CTR)?

If we see a drop in CTR for each of our keyphrases, this could impact on our SEO performance. Again, back to Google’s definition of an impression: if searchers don’t click on the screen, refresh their query before 3 seconds is up, or don’t click “enter” or “search”, then in theory no impression will be recorded.

But given that even Google estimate impressions will increase, the chances are strong that CTRs will indeed decrease.

Once again, time will tell.

2. The decline of the long tail?

As searchers type in search terms, the dynamic and instant results are likely to prevent us from searching long tail. Not only does the screen distract us, but the constant nature of being spoon-fed results may well make us less interested in long tail searches.

If this is the case, we may need to rethink our content strategy and focus more on the first two or three words in a phrase as opposed to qualifiers that make up long tail phrases.

As Microsoft pointed out with the launch of Bing, only one query in four is successful and hits the nail on the head first time round; this may well be set to change as Google Instant gives us more instant feedback.

3. Bigger brands will benefit

What about the brand effect with Google Instant?

Many SEO consultants have already hinted that big brands that are more likely to rank well with single short tail search terms – branded or not – will get more exposure. So, whether I’m searching for “apple” or “hotels”, the bigger brands with the higher search rank will receive impressions as the searcher types the initial part of a search term.

Furthermore, even if searchers do make it to a long tail search term, the top half of the SERP – often dominated by bigger brands – is likely to receive even more attention.

“Can’t you just do it anyway? Help us out here!” A client said this to me last week, and I did help them. Sort of.

Fewer UK firms plan to increase their spending on protecting corporate information than their global rivals, research by a consultancy firm says.

Some 31% of UK firms plan to spend more, compared with 52% globally.

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) also suggested that less than a third had installed technology which monitors employees’ use of social networking.

This is half the number internationally and could mean UK employees are more at risk of identity theft, PwC said.

Exposure

Security spending can include a wide range of measures – including using experts to advise on what the company should do to keep their information secure, and encoding technology which protects a company’s data.

It also includes the use of specialist technology which monitors employees’ activities on Facebook and other social networking sites – technology which PwC says 32% of UK organisations has installed, compared with 60% of companies globally.

“Lack of focus on social networking can expose organisations to a variety of risks, including loss or leakage of information, damage to a company’s reputation, illegal downloading of printed material, and identity theft,” William Beer, a director at PwC, said.

The survey also suggested that just under a third of UK companies planed to increase security spending over the next year.

That was despite the fact that 60% of respondents said that economic conditions meant their companies are more likely to be exposed to risk.

Source: BBC

Who hasn’t ever started writing his own Framework/CMS? It is considered best practice for learning purposes, but going through all the security stuff can be stressful and boring at the same time. That’s where most devs start to contribute to big Open Source-projects like Typo3 or the Zend Framework, because they are already experienced working with it and yet evolving another system on the market or even getting people to contribute seems like an unachievable task. Instead of wasting his time on yet another ACL implementation, the developer is taking part in making a software become even better, no matter if he delivers new features, reports / fixes bugs or works on documentation (another, yet an often underestimated part of contribution). It is also worth noting that every single Blog-entry and every HowTo thats put on the web also is a great deal of contribution that helps the software spreading. Beginners articles are important to put on the web since every one of us had it’s beginnings and these are the sort of articles where many people decide to either use the software for a certain project or not.

As you might see, this article is not only a guide on contributing bugfixes, but also I want to motivate you to just give it a try.

… on Zend Framework

Having spent almost a year at the IRC support channel, I can tell they’re really fun guys to hang around with. Of course, the Framework itself developed into a great piece of software. I do not want to discuss the up or downsides of a use-at-will framework, neither I want to recommend it over {put your favourite software here}. But what I can talk about is a little summary of the support channel’s chatlogs. The widely annouced channel (which is #zftalk on Freenode) includes all kinds of concerns. One kind of people finds bugs, the other do have really clever ideas on improvements, but when you ask them to contribute its all the same: they either think it takes years to get into it, the others think they might be “not good enough for this”. We sure won’t force or threaten people to contribute, but what I can do is taking the fear out of it and demystify the thing, so later you might see that its actually just a few minutes to spend. Let me just loose a few words to the latter ones before we get into it: You can’t destroy anything, and every idea of yours can also lead to a great improvement either realted to your concern or in a completely different area. We’re glad that you take your time, even if you are completely new to ZF. Some beginners concerns already caused developers to write guides and articles that are still around and are linked at times in #zftalk…

… on contributing to Zend Framework

Contributing any code to ZF requires signing the CLA, which is an agreement that both you have the right to share any code you supply, and that you will not patent that code. This is to ensure that the frameworks codebase remains business friendly, and free to use for everyone. In fact you have to actually sign a paper, having done this you can just scan and mail or fax it. This is an important step, and none of your code will be used in any official package unless you did this.

The next step will be reading the coding & subversion standards. If you already had a look at actual ZF components code you should be familiar with the standards. Once you took a short insight (you probably wont be able to just remember all of this at once), you can check out the official SVN repository. Notice, that you, even having signed the CLA and being confirmed, do not have commit rights. So you might now ask yourself how to contribute then? All magic is taking place in the bugtracker, ZF’s official Jira. All bug tickets, additions and improvements are filed as tickets here. So if you find a bug, report it here, and soon there will be a discussion in the comments section of a ticket.

Mostly all of these people, being listed by their reallife names, are also to be found on different names in the support channel, so feel free to ask them any ticket-related stuff.

The code itself will be submitted as a patch file (svn diff > patchFile), and uploaded in the Jira-Ticket. This might also be done by people who do have commit rights, but one might not be sure how to fix a problem, or any question might be left. This method of code management then leaves it to the original package developer to decide whether a change should be made or it should be thought over again (might have side effects on other packages and so on).

The last yet very important point is unit tests. ZF makes heavy use of them and so should you. The best you can do is report bugs as failing tests with a short description, fix them with the code diff and then deliver them with working tests.

… in closing

As you might now see, once the problems and the contaminated areas are visible, you can pull out your armory and kill the bugs within minutes. The contribution of new packages for the ZF are made in the Wiki, filed as proposals that later get discussed by the community review team, but I might do another article about that one as its a not so trivial workflow. Whenever you fix a bug or deliver an improvement you will be listed on the official Jiras Overview page of top contributors. Can you make it to the top? ZFs bug hunting days are the place for many contributors to join the battle on a shirt, but you might also see that being an active contributor on an open source project might be a good point of interest on your CV.

Having run out of things to say, I want to call all the devs out there to give it a try. A short quote of Ben Scholzen (ZF Core developer): “I code whenever I feel like it”: In closing, remember that neither having an account on JIRA nor Signing the CLA ties you in to any minimum commitment, and you can do as much or as little as you are comfortable with. Just pick the level which feels right for you.

Whether or not you agree, online purchases are the way of the future and if you don’t have a web site and means to purchase from your business online, you could find yourself in a troubling position one day.

People who tell you having an online presence isn’t necessary are still trying to find the best deal on a new fax machine, drive to video stores to rent movies and card shops to send greeting cards.

Convenience rules and the number of online purchases continues to grow because almost anything you could ever want or need can be purchased with the click of a mouse — from skin moisturizers to clothing to pet supplies to vehicles, homes and vacations.

We’re a society of immediate gratification and time poverty.

Standing in line-ups, being restricted to 9-5 store hours and taking hours out of our over-committed day to drive to a mall, fight for a parking spot and try to maneuver a shopping cart through crowded aisles doesn’t make sense any more when we can log into our computer 24/7/365, find what we want within minutes and have it delivered to our door.

Weather isn’t an issue, nor is the price of gasoline. Buying is at our fingertips.

Kids these days are searching for toys, sports equipment and clothing online. They’re demonstrating the way they will be the consumers of the future.

The trend is undeniable and the important question for you as a home business owner is – What are you doing about it? Are you already online, ensuring you get your piece of the pie, or are you operating in the dark?

You can rest assured that whatever product or service you’re selling, it’s already available online or will be soon.

What did you purchase online this year? Why did you buy it using the Internet instead of in person?

    Convenience?
    Selection?
    Value?
    Price?

If I want to buy from you at midnight, can I? Have you clearly communicated the value to me, how you can solve my particular problem, make my life easier, sooner? Have you created trust and credibility so I’m willing to enter my credit card info and hit the “purchase” button?

No matter what line of business you’re in, if you’re not making your products or service available online and communicating the benefits clearly, you’re leaving money on the table and placing yourself in a very precarious position.

The success of your business rests on your ability to see into the future and take the necessary steps to ensure you arrive intact and hopefully positioned ahead of the others in your industry.

Source: xtmotion