A great article about new Internet measures trying to be enacted by Illinois

This is a good start I think: http://www.kansascity.com/news/business/article141666679.html

Secure your wireless network!

This is the start of many small writings about security:

Secure your wireless network

Having an unsecured wireless network can allow anyone within range to access your network or use your internet connection. They could use up your download allowance (possibly resulting in excess usage fees), intercept and read your email or, more seriously, use your account to access illegal content or undertake criminal activities.

If you are using a wireless connection to connect to the internet, or between other computers in your home or business (a wireless network), make sure you can protect your connection.

The access point makes itself known to other wireless devices (like the wireless card in your computer) by broadcasting an identification number (SSID). Computers that have a wireless card, and have permission to access the wireless frequency, can use this connection.

Because wireless networks do not require a wire between a computer and the internet connection, it is possible for anyone within range to intercept the signal if it is unprotected.

If you use a wireless network:

• Change the default SSID and administration username and password.
• Turn off your SSID broadcast.
• Turn encryption on and use the strongest encryption option available.
• Restrict access so that only specific computers or devices can access the network.
• Turn off remote access.
• Turn off your wireless connection when you are not using it.

Change the default SSID and administration username and password

Wireless hardware and software usually comes with a default digital name - your service set identification number (SSID) – and default administration username and password set by the manufacturer. These are standard names and passwords that any person with the intention of accessing your wireless connection is likely to know.

Change the SSID, if you can, to something unique (that does not include the brand name of the router) and set a strong administration password on your wireless network.  Brenda and I once helped a library that was being used and was seeing a lot of porno coming in and out of the library computers! We found out theoir wireless router was set to the defalt of ADMIN and then kids outside would park close and surf and surf! We changed the password to a very hard one and guess what the hijacking of the signal stopped!!

Restrict access so that only specific computers or devices can access the network

You should restrict access to your wireless network to specific computers that you nominate.

Every computer connected to your network uses a network adaptor. Each one of these has a unique 12-digit identifier called a MAC (Media Access Control) address. To give specific computers permission to use your network, add their MAC addresses to the wireless network through the wireless software settings.

The MAC address of a computer can sometimes be found on a sticker attached to the computer. Alternatively, most wireless routers can tell you the MAC address of the computers connecting to them. ( we were just at a dentist office and this subject came up and the smart operator told another woman as to why only certain people had access and not everyone!

Some information from Stay Smart.................

More to come from Joe Rossini!

Internet is not a closed private communications medium!

My statement above speaks for itself. So many people billions of them are on the web and what is so sad is that many think that what they type is private. The fact is the second they push the enter key someone might be looking! Many do not  care, it is just part of today and the way things are. Remember or at least a few of you remember party lines on phones? i use to slowly lift the phone off the hook and listen in on conversations it was fun and I swear I could hear some other kids giggling on another line!!! Who really knows who is monitoring your surfing habits and your e-mails but now with the new legislation anyone with money can potentially buy it. I am going to look for those ISP providers that at least for now will hold your trust. I know they are out there so I will search. We all value our privacy what is next, how about allowing a person to peep in your window and see what you are doing with no ramifications.  How about somehow intercepting a letter you wrote, opening it up, reading it then putting it back in the mail with again no ramifications. What this new bill passed by congress but as far as I know asked by none will open a shit storm on those same congress people. People are going to get those peoples surfing history and many are not going to like what these people find. I guarantee it will cross all party lines! When a new administration or congress gets in I bet this terrible bill will be changed but until then hesitate just a bit on where you surf and what you look at (not my blog of course) ::)

More to come soon.

Joe Rossini

Can you secure your internet connection?

Way back when when I first got on and used AOL I had no idea how many people were looking at me! I surfed away in total bliss.  I was told to get a software to load that would give me protection and would tell me every time someone tried to hack my connection and I was stunned at just how many times this software pinged. That was then and this is now and it is only worse, I mean far worse. You only have to watch the news and the hacking of the election and such and yes I do believe we were hacked. My electronic election station changed my votes right in front of me several times I had to force my vote into the machine!!!  But this article is not about that it is just about security. I found an article that I think is a good one and may not be perfect but take a look and tell me what you think.

More to come from Joe soon:) Oh yes I am still writing my second sci fi novel:)

How can I secure my internet connection?

Tags: security, network, wifi

Service: Resident Hall Network (Res-Net), Wired Network, Wireless Network, Security

Do you have an "always on" Internet connection? It's easy to think that no one could possibly be interested in your personal computer, but that's simply not the case. Having a fast Internet connection that's "always on" when you want to surf the Web is great for you, but it's also great for hackers from around the world who sweep through thousands of random IP addresses looking for computers that they can exploit. And what they can do is really quite scary. Without any visible sign or warning, hackers can infiltrate your system to obtain personal information about you or to use your computer to disguise themselves when they attack other computers.

CERT/CC on Using the Internet Securely answers any questions you might have using the Internet and being secure while you do it, including defining every relevant term: "This document gives home users an overview of the security risks and countermeasures associated with Internet connectivity, especially in the context of "always-on" or broadband access services (such as cable modems and DSL). However, much of the content is also relevant to traditional dial-up users (users who connect to the Internet using a modem)."

And Practically Networked Securing Your LAN page tells you what to do secure your LAN. Or your personal computer, if you don't have a LAN.

How to set up your Home Network with Macs: http://www.atpm.com/7.06/router.shtml, At This Particular Macintosh's How To page. And http://www.atpm.com/network/, threemacs.com's Mac networking pages, which are exceedingly complete, but a bit out of date. Their page on network security: http://www.atpm.com/network/problems/network_security.htm

Turn off file sharing

The first thing to do to protect your always-on-the-Internet personal computer from attack from the outside is turn sharing off on all your disk drives and printers. And you must do it right now. (Unless you have a LAN in your house, of course; in that case, you should put a password on all your drives.) This is particularly important if you have a cable modem, because your computer is on a LAN with your neighbors.

To turn off file and printer sharing in Windows: Double-click the My Computer icon on your desktop. Then right-click on the name of a drive, select Properties, click the Sharing tab, then click the Not Shared radio button. Repeat for each drive. Then double-click the Printers folder and repeat the same process for each printer. If you don't have a Sharing tab, then you're set; your operating system was installed without network sharing options.

To turn off file sharing in Macs: Open the Sharing Setup/Sharing (in Mac OS X) control panel. In the File Sharing/Personal File Sharing (Mac OS X) section, you should see the message "File sharing is off" with a Start button beside it or below it (Mac OS X). If you see a Stop button instead, click it. For Mac OS Classic, a dialog box will open asking "How many minutes until file sharing is disabled?" Select 0 and click OK.

Personal firewall

If you have an always-on Internet connection, via a cable modem or DSL or IDSN line, you must also install a personal firewall (a network protection tool that guards against and reports intrusions on your computer from the outside), and you must keep it running at all times.

To get an idea of what the firewall will do for you, run Symantec's Internet Security Check (Click Continue to Symantec Security Scan​) before and after you install a firewall. Running it might be just the thing you need to convince you to run one. This check requires Internet Explorer 5.0, Netscape 4.5, or Safari 1.0 on a Mac. This service checks the security of your computer's connection to the Internet by sending it various connection requests.

The following two sections list a few specific firewalls for Windows and Macs. For more general (and specific, for that matter), information, see the following firewall Web pages:

For a long list of articles of all flavors about firewalls (including review articles, how-to's, and tutorials), see the open directory project's Top: Computers: Security: Firewalls: FAQs, Help, and Tutorials:

For a comparison, a review, and links to other reviews, see Firewall Guide.Com's Firewall Guide Software Reviews.

C|Net's Why you really, really need a firewall--or two (in case I haven't convinced you), which includes rankings.

For a review of commercial firewalls, see About.com's Top Personal Firewalls - Network Firewall Software.

If you're using ZoneAlarm, check out Robert Graham's FAQ: Firewall Forensics (What am I seeing?) for help interpreting your firewall logs. 

LAN and hardware firewalls

If you have a home LAN and use NAT (Network Address Translation) hardware/software, you can run a firewall on/with the NAT that will protect all of your other machines. For more information including links to lists of available broadband cable/DSL routers, see Home LANs and Sharing Your Internet Connection.

Or you can get a "firewall appliance" -- hardware firewall. Turnkey Network Appliances has a short definition:
http://www.firewall-servers.com/what_are_firewall_servers.html

For more information:

• CERT/CC Vulnerabilities, Incidents, and Fixes
  Want to know what's going on in computer security? CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) is the place to go in the US. CERT was formed by the US Department of Defense in 1988, "to address computer security concerns of research users of the Internet". The CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) is in the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
• See also CERT/CC's Home Network Security
  This document answers any questions you might have using the Internet and being secure while you do it, including defining every relevant term.

Need help?

Resident Hall Network (Res-Net)

Email	resnetadmin@uic.edu
Phone	312-413-0003
In person	ACCCeSS Helpdesk

My thoughts about Internet privacy

Little do people know that their so called privacy is and has been a myth. People have known where you surf and what keywords you surf on and in many cases exactly who you are! I do not like that our Internet habits can be bought and sold but think about those shopper cards you get from stores, did not you know that those stores have looked at your habits and marketed accordingly. How about your viewing preferences, the cable channels know where you go and how long you stay and again market accordingly. We are monitored constantly so get use to the fact that now you might get an e mail or a call from a source you had no idea knew you liked Pepsi or steak or well certain x rated web sites! There are some search engines that can protect your surfing habits and I will soon try to tell you about a few of them. I can assure the big one most of us use is not one of them, they have had our data and used it for a long time.

More to come

Joe

What is Google doing about mobile websites? You should read this!

Google is rolling out a new mobile-first index. This means Google will create and rank its search listings based on the mobile version of content, even for listings that are shown to desktop users. Wondering how this will all work? We’ve compiled answers below.
Since the announcement, we have been tracking what Googlers have been saying about the change based on the industry’s questions. Below you will find a compilation of those questions and answers based on coverage from Jenny Halasz, Jennifer Slegg and me.

What is changing with the mobile-first index?

As more and more searches happen on mobile, Google wants its index and results to represent the majority of their users — who are mobile searchers.
Google has started to use the mobile version of the web as their primary search engine index. A search engine index is a collection of pages/documents that the search engine has discovered, primarily through crawling the web through links. Google has crawled the web from a desktop browser point of view, and now Google is changing that to crawl the web from a mobile browser view.

What if I don’t have a mobile website?

Google said not to worry. Although Google wants you to have a mobile site, it will crawl your desktop version instead. Google said, “If you only have a desktop site, we’ll continue to index your desktop site just fine, even if we’re using a mobile user agent to view your site.”
If you have a mobile site, then you need to make sure the content and links on the mobile site are similar enough to the desktop version so that Google can consume the proper content and rank your site as well as it did by crawling your desktop site.

My mobile site has less content than my desktop site. Should I be nervous?

Potentially, yes. Google has said that it will look at the mobile version of your site. If that has less content on page A than the desktop version of page A, then Google will probably just see the mobile version with less content.
This is why Google recommends you go with a responsive approach — the content is the same on a page-by-page basis from your desktop to your mobile site. You can do the same with other mobile implementations, but there is more room for error.

What about expandable content on mobile?

With desktop sites, Google said that content hidden in tabs, accordions, expandable boxes and other methods would not be weighted as high. But when it comes to mobile, Google’s Gary Illyes said content like this will be given full weight if done for user experience purposes. The idea is that expandable content makes sense on mobile and not so much on desktop.

Will this change the Google rankings in a big way?

Both Gary Illyes and Paul Haahr from Google said this should not change the overall rankings. In fact, they want there to be minimal change in rankings around this change. Of course, it is too early to tell, they said — but their goal is not to have this indexing change impact the current rankings too much.

When will this fully roll out?

Google said they have already begun testing this mobile-first index to some users. But it looks like we are still months away from this fully rolling out. Google won’t give us a date because they are still testing the rollout, and if things go well, they may push it sooner. If things do not go well, they may push it back.
Google did say they will push this out to more and more searchers over time as they become more confident with the mobile-first index.

Is this a mobile-friendly ranking boost?

Google has previously said that content that’s not deemed mobile-friendly will not rank as well. That remains the case with this new index.
In the current index, which most people will continue to get results from, desktop content is indexed and used for showing listings to both desktop and mobile users. A special mobile-friendly ranking system is then used to boost content for Google’s mobile listings. Content that’s not mobile-friendly doesn’t perform as well.
In the new mobile-first index, which some people will get results from as Google rolls it out, mobile content is indexed and used for showing listings to both desktop and mobile users. Then the mobile-friendly ranking boost is applied, as with the current system, to mobile-friendly pages.

This was from Google!~

Interesting facts about responsive design

Responsive design is a hot topic these days, and for good reason. With most companies seeing mobile traffic coming to their sites exploding, a lot of people are scrambling to make their sites accessible.

One thing we like to tell clients is that responsive design is almost like a media format change. Like when VHS went to DVD, the people who want to stay competitive are going to have to update. And, since a good share of the web is going to need to be rebuilt, there are a lot of opinions, and general nonsense out there. Our hope is that we can help you cut through all of this, and understand what responsive design can (and can’t) do for you.

1. Responsive Design is Not A Cure-All

One of the most important things to keep in mind about responsive design is that it is a quality of a site, not how the site itself is built, that matters. Sure, responsive design is important, but it will not make a bad site good (or vice versa). It is true that responsive design allows a great site to be seen and enjoyed by more people in the manner in which it was designed. And, because of this, the user experience on mobile devices is typically better (if not much better) because of responsive design, but the site itself is not fundamentally made much better, or much worse, because of it. To put it in simpler terms, responsive design is the sauce, not the steak.

2. A Responsive Site is Different from a Mobile Site

Mobile sites were one of the first efforts to better cater experiences to mobile users. Most of the time, site owners would design a special version of their site for mobile users, usually with a sub-set of the site content (as to not overwhelm the smaller screens). The problem with doing mobile sites, for most site owners, is two-fold. First, it can be difficult to have to maintain two separate versions of the same site. From keeping content, offers, images, etc. in sync, to simply knowing what was on the mobile site (and what wasn’t, and why) does create a maintenance burden. Secondly, many site visitors do not want to have a watered-down mobile experience and many actually opt for the full site on their mobile device, which creates doubt as to the overall effectiveness of the mobile site. By using responsive design, on the other hand, both of these issues are mitigated. Site owners are happy to not have to maintain two separate sites, and site visitors are treated to a site’s “real” experience.

3. Not All Sites Need to be Designed ‘Mobile First’

There is a big trend among designers about thinking “mobile first”. Since mobile device use of the Internet is exploding, it can be easy to get carried away trying to cater to mobile users. The truth of the matter is that your focus should be on what your users and customers need. Look at your web analytics. Is the overall mobile use of your site less than 10%? If so, then mobile users (clearly) are the vast minority. It is not that they should be ignored, after all, by ignoring a good % of your users you are just offering them to your competition who isn’t ignoring them, but like everything else, it is good to keep things in perspective.

Thinking mobile first is actually more of a design problem than a website problem. That is, when making a website responsive, it is important to consider how the site will break-down on smaller screen sizes. Usually, this is done by creating grid-based “blocks” of content, prioritizing them, then re-stacking them on smaller screens based on priority. For some sites, especially that are more focused on consumer goods, services, and entertainment, taking the mobile experience into account early AND throughout the design process can be critical. However, for your project, your job is to figure out how important the mobile experience is to your overall site’s audience and plan accordingly.

4. Most Sites Can be Converted to be Responsive

For the most part, most sites can be converted to be responsive. Typically, the only show-stoppers are sites that simply cannot be broken down into multiple horizontal chunks. An example of this type of site is one heavy in data tables (or other large, continuous elements). Sites heavy in high-definition video sometimes fall into this category too.

However, these problems are almost always solvable. And, since (often) responsive conversion projects take between 60%-80% of the time and effort of developing a new site from scratch, it can make a lot of sense to spend some time re-designing the site to work better across all screen sizes. Responsive conversion projects typically end up being a bit like a home remodeling projects. Sometimes, many of the existing elements can be re-used and just shifted around a bit. Other times, a little bit of new construction is needed for the project reach its full potential.

5. The Best Responsive Sites Keep an Eye on Responsive Issues Throughout Design and Development

Ideally, you will want to be thinking about responsive design before, during, and after your project. Although, for most projects, it should not the the main thing you think about, doing adequate planning almost always saves heartache down the road. The main thing to keep in mind is to think about how you want your site’s content to react to smaller (and larger) screen sizes. Even if it just in the form of wireframes, knowing how your site will still create a great experience on small AND large screens is key. We will say, though, that the longer you delay thinking about (and planing for) responsive design in a project, the more likely you are to have budget overruns, re-work, and generally a much more complicated (and expensive) project.

6. Responsive Design is a Design and Development Issue

Responsive websites get their behavior from the front-end HTML/CSS (and sometimes JavaScript) code that runs in the web browser. However, the code is only the means of putting the site’s design on the screen, it is not the design itself. As such, for high-quality responsive experiences, what shows on the screen is tightly-choreographed ahead of time, as part of the design process. Like most things, it is hard to create a great user experience on accident. Instead, most great experiences are well-thought out ahead of time and well-executed.

7. Responsive Websites Do Cost More, But Not Drastically So

Every website project is different. There is no real “industry price” for any of these things, but adding responsive design to a project typically adds about 20% to the project. Sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, but the average is about 20%. One of the main reasons why responsive design adds this much to a project isn’t actually the design and development itself (after all, if we are designing and developing the site anyway, why the increase?), it is actually in the testing. By offering you a responsive site, we will now need to test the site across a multitude of different devices, at wildly different sizes. Although responsive sites do add to the design and development workload some, often, the lion’s share of extra work comes in the testing of a project, making sure everything works on every device it is supposed to.

8. Not Everyone Needs a Responsive Site

The simplest way to tell whether or not you need a responsive site is to look at your site analytics. Tools like Google Analytics (and others) make this pretty easy. For most site operators (even those in industries who would not expect it), they are seeing trends showing mobile traffic increasing an average of 100% per year. As an example, with our own site, we saw mobile usage go from about 1% of our total traffic to almost 10% of our total traffic in about 18 months. This is a bit above the trend-line that we are seeing elsewhere, but not much. In fact, it is not uncommon for our clients to have seen an order of magnitude jump in mobile traffic in just a year’s time. Like anything else, the key is in figuring out how going responsive could help you, and by how much. If you are hardly seeing any mobile traffic, a trend you expect to stay the same, then converting an existing site may be a waste. However, for any new project, with the way these trends are going, not building-in responsiveness from the start could end up shooting you in the foot.

9. Responsive Sites are Not Typically Harder to Maintain

For most of the responsive sites we build, the back-end is typically WordPress. That is, when the site operators want to update any of the sites content, or manage its functionality, they use WordPress to do it. And, it does not matter whether a site is responsive or not, WordPress works the same (in fact, the admin interface of WordPress has been responsive for some time). Although making code-level changes to your site can be a little more challenging with a responsive site, doing normal maintenance of the site is just as easy as with a non-responsive site.

10. Responsive Design Can Make Your Site More Effective

By taking the time to offer your mobile users a higher-quality experience, many sites almost cannot help but be more effective by being responsive. Users, almost universally will not only appreciate those sites that better cater to them, but will also spend more time on them, are more likely to recommend them, and are more likely to return. Like anything else, people will use the things that are best designed towards their needs, and with (rapidly) growing mobile use of the Internet, responsive design can be a way to offer a better, more tailored experience to your website users.

By 3112

Do I need a blog?

This is a neat article and it is so true:

Do I Really Need a Blog?

Written by Nick Stamoulis
One of the first things we recommend to full service or consulting SEO clients is to add a blog to their website if they don’t already have one and to start publishing posts regularly. It’s not uncommon to get pushback from clients since blogging is time consuming. Another deterrent is that there’s no way to directly tie blogging efforts back to sales, since blog posts are informational in nature and tend to capture people at the top of the sales funnel while they are doing research and aren’t ready to buy. Blog readers may never be ready to buy. So, is a blog really needed? Yes, it is. Here’s why:

Ability to target more keywords

Doing keyword research and optimizing the homepage and primary product/service/category pages on a website serves as a great foundation for an SEO campaign. However, each of these pages can really only target a few keywords, tops. It’s likely that there are plenty more (including longtails) that are relevant to what you offer and have search volume, but aren’t the best ones to target on these main pages. This is where blogging comes in. You can target these longtail keywords in blog posts and gain the ability to appear for more searches overall.

Gain more inbound links

Inbound links are an important search engine ranking trust factor. The best links are the ones that occur naturally when another site owner decides that your site has content that is worth linking to. In general, people are more likely to link to informative blog content than promotional service/product pages. In addition to improving search engine trust, these links will also drive traffic to the website.

Keeps your site fresh

The search engines like sites that are updated regularly and keep their content “fresh.” Whenever a website is updated and new pages are added, it gives the search engines reason to come back and crawl it and can result in a ranking boost.

Enhances your social media presence

Despite no longer being “new” many companies still aren’t using social media properly. They might set up a profile but then they either don’t post anything or post content that is of little value to followers. Blogging is a way to ensure that you always have something to share with social media followers, keeps social media profiles active, and helps to gain new followers.
Of course, the key to blogging success is to create high-quality blog posts that will resonate with target audience members. Posting thin content is actually worse than not posting any content at all. If resources are an issue, focus on posting a few well thought out articles a month to start. As you get the hang of things, you’ll be able to up it to once a week. Over time this will strengthen the website overall and generate more organic search traffic

Video and how it can affect your business

More and more I am hearing about using video to sell your products. The more you have, the better your sales are or will be. You can add video on your own and of course it may not be as nice but the cost can be right. Professional videos can be costly but the results are usually better than an amateur video.  So here is a bit more about video:

In any given minute, 300 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube. That’s 12 ½ days worth of video every minute, or about 50 years worth of video every day. So it’s no wonder why Cisco predicts that by 2017, video content will make up 69% of all web traffic.
So between the videos of corgi puppies walking down stairs, cats playing the piano, and all the other noise on the Internet, it might be hard for your company to stand out—unless, of course, you have your own awesome videos to capture the attention of visitors on your site.

Video is taking over the Internet. Every minute, 300 hours of video content is uploaded to YouTube, which has over 1 billion users ready to consume that content. This means one of two things: 1. Businesses have a great medium for sharing engaging content with potential buyers, or 2. We’re all going to become brainwashed zombies.
For the sake of time, we’re just going to cover #1, considering that 70% of marketing professionals believe that video converts better than any other medium—and that’s a huge opportunity.

When it comes to content creation, explainer videos are gaining major ground. In the next few years, they may even be the most important (or one of the most important) aspects of your inbound marketing plan. Video content will account for 69% of all web traffic by 2017, according to Cisco. That’s not nearly as shocking as the 92% of B2B customers who watch videos online.

OK are you convinced yet? I know I am but it does take time and money and you should want the right topic to display. If you sell conveyor systems a good video about your brand of conveyors would be appropriate.  How about you are a vet, perhaps a video about your office and its facilities.

There are several platforms that you can use for videos, one of ours YouTube. Another is Vimeo. Either of these platforms are great and we have used both but it seems the more popular is YouTube. Google also seems to like this platform.

I recommend you interview a few video advisers and see how you feel about them and look at some of their work.

Well more to come soon.

Joe Rossini

New info from Google

The following is information on Google and other sites that may help your rankings: The importance of having a secure website

Google made it clear that secure websites are important for them:

"At Google, user security has always been a top priority. Over the years, we’ve worked hard to promote a more secure web and to provide a better browsing experience for users. [...]

We also started giving a slight ranking boost to HTTPS URLs in search results last year. Browsing the web should be a private experience between the user and the website, and must not be subject to eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle attacks, or data modification.

This is why we’ve been strongly promoting HTTPS everywhere."

If your website does not use HTTPS, Google does not rank it as well as it could. Even if it did not affect your search engine rankings, a secure website is a good thing. Consumers prefer secure websites that they can trust.

Google: You can rank for medium competitive keywords without links 

"We've seen Googlers say time and time again that you can rank without links because Google will look at the content but most SEOs know that without links, you cannot rank for anything somewhat competitive. [...]

So someone asked [Google's Gary Illyes], is it possible to rank for a 'medium competitive' keyword phrase without any links. And get this, the domain is only one month old. Gary said, it is possible, but I guess he means, anything is possible?"

Does Google use Chrome to discover new URLs for crawling?

"The results are pretty simple: Googlebot never came to visit either page in the test. [...]

However, bear in mind that this test was specific to testing if they used Chrome to discover new URLs. [...] This does not mean that Google does not use Chrome data in other ways, such as to collect aggregate user behavior data, or other metrics

Some info about Google Adwords:

Location extensions help people discover local businesses as they use Google.com and Google Maps to find places they love. Starting today, eligible Google Display Network ads will automatically include information like photos, business hours, and your store location, making them more useful to shoppers who are nearby or show interest in your business location. For example, a foodie browsing cooking blogs might see local information for a bakery, making it easy for her to visit your physical store and make a purchase. In fact, early testing has shown that advertisers see an increase in clicks to their business, with 60% of clicks on this extension related to directions or store information.*

 

*More info to come soon. This info was courtesy of Axandra.

Be active with your website!

Recently I was talking to one of my most active customers Mr. Randy Rundle owner of http://fifthaveinternetgarage.com/. Randy is proud of his web site and has been constantly upgrading it, adding to it and now has two very successful blogs. Here is why he is now the most visited website of all of my customers. We just got an e-mail from his blog saying he published three new articles and that I should go visit!  We visited and wow so cool. This is a reason why he is so successful, he works at it. Yes this takes time and yes it does not always work but my reports show that it is working big time!

Make time, most web site vendors make websites that can be upgraded by you so if you add a new product or maybe add a new person to your company or make a big sale, tell the world about it! You are your best cheerleader! I can help and I do but you own your business, you need to make sure that your marketing arm is loaded with the best information you have.

How about new pictures, put them on your website!  How about a video, put them on that website. People process video faster and better than reading. If you go to a show, take pictures, take videos and do as much as you can to get names and numbers so you can call back after the show. Recently we published about QR codes, you know you have seen them those funny looking codes you see on products, not the UPC scanning code but the other codes that will take a customer right to a web site or sign them up for a coupon.  Do these things and you will increase your sales!

QR code
















How about reporting, do you have it and do you use it? We offer standard simple reporting or more advanced reporting that can tell you if your website or parts of it are working well. You spend money on a mailer, how about tracking the success of it.  Reporting is one of the most overlooked and underused feature of a web site. Remember it is your money and your success!                                              





Remember, you hold the key to your future and we can help you open that door to success!
More to come soon!

Joe Rossini

The buying experience on mobile!

This is a cool article and it shows how brick and mortar stores are trying to fight back!

Who really owns the buying experience?

By a MCD columnist

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March 15, 2017

Stephan Schambach is founder/CEO of NewStore

By Stephan Schambach
Experiences are the new common currency of shopping.
So when department store chain Barneys New York allows its customers to get up-close and personal with stars such as Drew Barrymore through their native mobile application, they are just doing what they have been doing well for a long time – turning shopping into an experience that goes beyond the mere purchase of an item.
Check it out
Consumers are demanding something more than just a sales transaction. They expect retailers to take the convenience and fulfillment capabilities of Amazon, the omnichannel approach of Apple, the me-to-me world of Uber and the visual social interaction of Instagram, and blend them into a consistently pleasing experience.

A few retailers are getting this message and are delivering it back to their customers successfully.
● Rebecca Minkoff is trying out instant pay self-checkouts in place of traditional cash register terminals
● The app from Lush allows customers to specify what mood they are in, and receive the attention that matches it
● Starbucks is now capable of sending out 400,000 variations of its promotional email, essentially guaranteeing a message that fits the particular individual to whom it is sent
These types of activities are the new beating heart of mobile retailing because technology enables more personalized customer attention than ever before.

What does Google think?

Google seems to be constantly changing and upgrading but here is an area they seem to be constant on:

Google has been very clear: mobile pages are going to be more important than the desktop versions of your web pages. In the near future, Google's index will be a mobile-first index. Are your pages ready for Google's new index? How doe your web pages look like when they are crawled by a mobile bot?

More on this:

What is Google's mobile-first index?

Some weeks ago, Google announced that web pages will be ranked based on the mobile version of the pages:

"Today, most people are searching on Google using a mobile device. However, our ranking systems still typically look at the desktop version of a page’s content to evaluate its relevance to the user.
This can cause issues when the mobile page has less content than the desktop page because our algorithms are not evaluating the actual page that is seen by a mobile searcher.
To make our results more useful, we’ve begun experiments to make our index mobile-first. Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results."

The mobile version of your website is going to be more important than the desktop version of your website soon. If your website cannot be displayed correctly on mobile devices, your rankings might drop dramatically.

More:

        Can there be problems with the mobile version?

Some website owners want to make their mobile pages more streamlined. For that reason, not all the content of the desktop version is included in the mobile version.
When Google uses a new index that is based on the mobile version of your pages, these contents will be lost and your rankings might change dramatically.

Reasons why your web pages do not get ranked
There can be several "invisible" reasons why your web pages do not get high rankings on Google and other search engines:
1. The robots.txt file is not correct

If your content management system offers a development mode, chances are that the robots.txt file of your website blocked all search engines when you developed the website.
If you did not change the robots.txt file of your website, the search engine robots will still be blocked. Remove the "Disallow:" lines from your robots.txt file to make sure that your web pages can be accessed by search engine robots.

2. The HTTP status code of your pages is not correct

When search engine robots and normal visitors request a page from your server, your server answers with a so-called HTTP status code. This status code cannot be seen by the visitor as it is targeted at the program that requests the page.
The status code for a normal page should be '200 OK'. All other status codes mean that there is something special with the page. For example, 4xx status codes mean that the page is broken, 5xx status codes mean that there is a problem with the server, etc.
Some servers have configuration errors and they deliver the wrong HTTP status code. This does not matter for human website visitors and you cannot see it in your browser. Search engine robots, however, won't index your web pages if they get the wrong HTTP status code.

3. There are other technical errors

Other technical errors can also have a negative influence on your rankings. For example, the HTTPS settings on your website could not be correct, or the pages might load too slowly.
In addition, websites automatically get errors over time. Some links on the pages become obsolete, old pages do not fit on the new website, etc. If a website contains too many of these errors, it will look like a low quality website.

Rossini.com can help you find these problems! Call me at 913-244-6132 or e mail me at jrossini@rossini.com.

Video works!!

If you are a complete novice to video marketing, you first need to understand why videos are so much more effective than plain text in improving sales and driving conversion. Apparently, watching videos doesn’t require as much reasoning as it would to derive meaning through reading. The human brain is hardwired so that it can process videos 60,000 times faster than text. Add to that the natural human tendencies to avoid laborious cognitive strain and to get emotionally affected by something they see in a video more than text, it is no wonder that the love for videos is so extensive and deep.
Consumer data show that 69% of people would choose a video over text to learn about a product or a service. Similarly, if given an option between talking to a customer support team and watching an explainer video for solving a problem, 68% of people would choose the latter option. Moreover, nearly three-quarters of the people who watch an explainer video end up buying the product or service.
Not surprising when you consider the fact that more than 75% of businesses that have used videos for marketing and promotion say that their videos have given them a good return on their investment. While 93% say that these videos have helped their customers understand their product or service better, 62% believe that videos have increased the amount of organic traffic their websites receive.


Source: 3 Quick & Easy Ways to Make Your Videos More Search Engine Friendly http://tubularinsights.com/3-ways-videos-search-engine-friendly/#ixzz4alIFcCmH
©TubularInsights.com, All Rights Reserved

They may be expensive but what if they bring you more sales in a shorter period of time!  SEO and rankings can be enhanced by using videos. More good videos means more visitations usually means more sales!

More to come.

Joe Rossini

Web site fun facts

Can you guess the number of websites online today? Well, we are a tad below 1 Billion mark. As of now, there are 945,357,100 websites online (excluding the number of inactive websites)

There are more devices in this world that are connected to the Internet than there are number of human beings living on Earth.

The launch of Mosaic web browser in 1993 is today considered to the turning point for the Web. Mosaic is today credited for making the Web popular. ( I used this browser).

Several names were suggested for the finalized project (The Project – refer to point number 5). Information Mine, Mine of Information, Information Mesh and World Wide Web were the suggested names and the final one was selected over the other names.

Jean Armour Polly was the person to coin the term ‘surfing the Internet’. He came up with the term in 1992.

The Web or the Internet (whatever you prefer calling it) became world’s fastest growing medium of communication. It took only 5 years for the web to achieve first 50 million users as opposed to 13 years required by television and 38 years required by radio. ( I wonder what will be the next great leap forward? I think the mind interface)

Google didn’t really come up with gmail. Gmail.com was in fact a free email service offered by Garfield (the famous cartoon cat character). Google simply acquired gmail.

OK more facts to come soon!

Joe Rossini

What is best on your website!

Here are the 15 facts you should know on how people view websites.

1. Text attracts more attention than pictures.
2. People start viewing your website from the top left corner.
3. Readers ignore banners. Surprise, suprise.
4. Fancy fonts are ignored.
5. People only scan the lower parts of your website.
6. Short paragraphs work better than long ones.
7. Ads, that are placed on the top or left part of your website, get the most views.
8. Ads, that are placed inside or below an awesome piece of content, get more views.
9. Big pictures attract more attention than small ones.
10. Also headlines draw attention.
11. Visitors spend more time looking at menus and buttons than other parts of your website.
12. Lists are better at keeping your reader focused than large paragraphs.
13. Some people even completely ignore large chunks of text.
14. White space is good!
15. Menu works best when placed in the top part of your website.

How about your mobile website?

5 Facts on How People View Mobile Web:

1. Reader’s attention is focused more on the top left corner of a screen.
2. Keep your content short & simple. Reading long paragraphs needs concentration, which is something that mobile users don’t have.
3. Users pay most attention on the top 2/3 of the screen.
4. Mobile phone users absorb visuals more than text or content. (But if an image doesn’t supplement your content, you can do away with it).
5. Short, but hard-hitting headlines draw more attention. Make your headlines count.

More to come soon.

Joe Rossini

QR code and how you can use it

QR codes have been around for a while and mostly you have seen them in food stores or retail shops. QR codes can be used for coupons or to show specials or more. We can assist you should out wish to investigate this further.

Fun Facts about the Internet

First webcam was created at the University Of Cambridge to monitor the Trojan coffee pot. A live 128×128 grayscale picture of the state of the coffee pot was provided as the video feed.

Internet sends approximately 204 million emails per minute and 70% of all the mails sent are spam. 2 billion electrons are required to produce a single email.  (Imagine if you could eat Internet spam we could feed the world!)

The internet requires 50 Million horsepower to keep running in the current state.

In 2005, broadband internet had a maximum speed of 2 Megabits per second. Today, 100Mbps download speeds are available in many parts of the country. But experts warn that science has reached its limit and fiber optics can take no more data.

First tweet was done on 21st March, 2006 by Jack Dorsey and the first YouTube video to be uploaded was “Meet At Zoo” at 8:27 p.m. on Saturday, April 23, 2005 by Jawed Karim.

The majority of internet traffic is not generated by humans, but by bots and malware. According to a recent study conducted by Incapsula, 61.5% or nearly two-thirds of all the website traffic is caused by Internet bots.

Google estimated in 2010, that the data size of the Internet is 5 million Terabytes, 61% from videos, and growing rapidly. Google has the largest index of the Internet out of any company, but claims to have scanned only 0.004% of the total.

There are approximately 4,200 new domain names registered every hour, or around 37 million per year.

Facebook has an estimated 1.2 Billion active users. 
To put that into perspective, there’s about 7 billion people on Earth. 17% of humans are on Facebook.

The first ever email was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomilinson, the US programmer who invented the email system. 

The “@” symbol was used to signify that the message was sent to a person instead of a machine.

OK more to come hoped you enjoyed this!!!

Joe Rossini

A finger can be a powerful thing in the computer world!

NEW YORK

Amazon says an incorrectly typed command during a routine debugging of its billing system caused the five-hour outage of some Amazon Web Services servers on Tuesday.
In a summary posted online, the Seattle company says a command meant to remove a small number of servers for one of its S3 subsystems was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed. A full restart was required, which took longer than expected due to how fast Amazon Web Services has grown over the past few years.

Amazon says it is making changes to its system to make sure incorrect commands won't trigger an outage of its web services in the future.

So the next time your web surfing is slow or does not work right ,please think of us web and server people and save the middle finger just in case (oh I am so bad).

From Joe

More to come

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/business/technology/article136008633.html#emlnl=Midday_Business_Report#storylink=cpy

Sometimes life hits you!

Recently I have had some hits from customers that really hurt. I know the old saying that the customer is always right and probably you have to take that way but sometimes you just have to tell a person what you have done for them and how hard you work. Sometimes you are taken for granted and if you just mess up once wow you get hit hard. I had that kind of day yesterday and I stuck up for my wife and my company. I may lose a customer over this and again most will call me a fool but I am proud of our company and how we work and take care of customers and let me tell you it is usually very very good. What that customer did was reenergize me to go out and do more and do the little things to make sales and keep our customers happy. If I have lost that customer well it will hurt but as I have always said, I will replace them because sometimes it just happens and it is time for a good old customer to leave.

Ok enough for now hope you all have a great day!

Joe Rossini