Today I became aware of a very unfortunate branding issue with a new social media platform called Posterous (pronounced Post-Er-Us). First of all, you should know that Posterous is a killer application that I have little doubt will soon be a leading social media property; I will have a follow-up post outlining the reasons. Now onto a sad yet humorous (IMO) lesson in branding; Posterous appears to be commonly misspelled (and even mispronounced) as Posterious (Post-Ear-E-Us). Read more…
Happy Independence Day to all our American friends, clients, and readers!
We will be open, business as usual, on Friday July 3 & Monday July 6 for those of you not taking a long weekend.
From all of us at StepForth we wish all of you a safe and enjoyable holiday!
The Internet is a-buzz with the latest offering from Firefox – the best browser available in my opinion – and the upgrades look absolutely tantalizing:
It is twice as fast as Firefox 3: an impressive feat!- You can save movies as easily as saving an image,
- It will download fonts from websites if your computer does not have the necessary font – this is very new and very very cool. Why? Because now sites can include their very own custom fonts that can add a lot of pizazz to a site and create a very unique look. Now you will be able to see the site as the designer intended.
- It offers location-aware browsing: an option that will enable the browser to tell websites where you are located so that they can tailor their content for your area. Again this is an OPTION do not fret over your privacy.
- You can surf the net anonymously using private browsing options just like Google Chrome offered when it released.
BUT! Read more…
While doing some local search marketing for a client of mine last Friday I took a moment to watch the introductory video at the Google Local Business Center and I was impressed on how well it got the message across to viewers. As a result, I think it is a benefit to you to watch this if you are not already maximizing your Google Local account:
One critical element that this intro leaves out is Read more…
If you don’t know already it is very important to setup your local business listing on local and mainstream search engines. Well since Bing came out I thought I would go there and get StepForth’s listing. So I visited the Bing Local Listing Center and tried to add my company’s local listing but I ran into an annoying wall a little ways into the process that was a real let down; they didn’t bother to tell me that only the USA is supported at the moment.
If you are in the USA the process to get your local listing is straight forward – at least as far as I got. Just go to the Bing Local Listing Center and log in with your Microsoft Passport (or create one) and if the system does not find a current listing it will allow you to create one. Well StepForth does not have one yet according to their system so I was directed to the listing local listing creation page. When I got to the creation page and began to fill out the submission form I was rebuffed by a big pet peeve of mine… the system knew I was Canadian (it is noted in the header of the page) and yet the only way to add a listing was to enter a State and Zip (see screenshot). Read more…
At SMX Advanced a few weeks ago there was a huge hullabaloo about Matt Cutt’s saying that PageRank Sculpting using nofollow tags is no longer effective and it should no longer be used. I haven’t posted anything about this until now because frankly there were enough people making a stink about this topic. That said, I now am ready to weigh in on the subject mainly because Matt Cutts posted his own take on PageRank Sculpting last week and it gave me some food for thought.
So what is the deal? What did Matt say? Let’s examine the details based on his post:
Matt’s Post: “So what happens when you have a page with ‘ten PageRank points’ and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? … Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.” (Colour formatting added.)
Good news fellow Wordpress junkies! John Godley at Urban Giraffe has kindly updated HeadSpace 2 so the rel=”follow” attribute is no longer implemented! I don’t know about you but having that made-up attribute on my website as a result of using HeadSpace was not a comfort to me. 
Anyway, a big thanks goes out to John Godley for being such a great guy and acting on my suggestion to drop the psuedo attribute. Thank you John!
Not sure what I am talking about? What is HeadSpace?
If you are familiar with Wordpress but you have not heard of HeadSpace then you are in for a real treat. Read more…
Sillicon Alley Insider just released this insightful set of charts illustrating the “horrendous” drop in user engagement MySpace has experienced in the last 12 months.
Average Stay per Visit (in minutes, rounded up)
- MySpace: May 2008 = 20 min, May 2009 = 10 min!
- Facebook: May 2008 = 14 min, May 2009 = 16 min
Average Visits per Person:
- MySpace: May 2008 = 14, May 2009 = 12
- Facebook: May 2008 = 11, May 2009 = 16
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