Why Your Company Should Start Using Google Plus

We’ve had many clients ask whether or not they should invest in creating and managing a new Google+ account for their company and brands. The major source of concern seems to be using staff resources for “yet another” social media platform that needs to be managed beyond the Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn pages they already manage. Maintaining regular and relevant posts, photos, and truly socializing with followers on each network can be a drain on staff time.

Our first response to that is about your business priority – customers first. It’s not about what’s easy for you, it’s about making access to your brand easy for your customer. However, marketers are always strapped for time, so it is important to put that time in the best…

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Mind Your Canonical Tags - Latency Issues

We had a site recently that was built to have a number of dynamically generated pages based on geographic locations. These were setup using a URL rewriting tool for “pretty URLs” and as such we wanted to make sure that Google always attributes the page to the nicer “pretty URLs” instead of the possible alternate URLs that include QueryString variables.

For this specific case, Google pioneered the “Canonical Tag” which is a flavor of the LINK tag that looks like this:

<link rel=“canonical” href=“http://dbdnet.com/” />

Where the “href” attribute is the desired URL for the page being looked at.

With this tag Google views it as a recommendation from the web developer…

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Google Analytics Intelligence - immediate knowledge of trend shifts

Google Analytics recently added some new features to their service, and one of them in particular is going to prove to be extremely useful: Intelligence reports and alerts.

Here’s Google’s spotlight blog on the new feature:
Google Analytics Blogspot Article

The purpose of the intelligence section is for Google to alert you to unexpected changes. Google highlights items (anything like visits, or people from California, or specific referring sources) and it will show the value that Google expected and what the actual value was (high or low). It even lists a significance meter on each alert.

Additionally, you can create custom alerts so that if something important takes a dip or gets a spike, you can have an email sent to yourself.…

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Google’s Data Liberation Front

Interesting… Maybe they really do mean what they say with their simplistic “don’t be evil” code of conduct montra:

Google’s Data Liberation Front Aims to Make Your Data Portable

Seems like a good role-model move for others.

Here’s the official Data Liberation Front website.

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