Articles

The party's over - here's your back to work checklist

Welcome back to work.    We all have files and little things that must be updated each year.    I won’t even presume to guess what spreadsheets or documents need to be updated at your place.

Here is a checklist as 2009 flips over to 2010.

  • Change the copyright date on your customer-facing websites.  Nothing says dated like a 3 year old copyright footer.
  • Check your web forms.  If any of them (or your paper forms) were configured as 200_, last week was a good time to change them.
  • A new tax year has started.  Talk with your tax consultant or accountant, but if you were supposed to change your withholding or take any payroll actions, you should be dealing with that issue now.
  • My personal favorite for businesses with more than a handful of employees.  Every application that can be logged in from outside (even a blog) should be scrubbed for user name entries and passwords for former contractors, vendors and employees.  You should regularly do this, but using the beginning of the year as a double-check is a good reminder.
Articles

Google has launched a search site listing certified professionals and marketing agencies.

From the company’s description:

Google Advertising Professionals are not Google employees, but rather are online marketing professionals, agencies, and other individuals such as search engine marketers (SEMs), search engine optimizers (SEOs), and marketing consultants. They have been certified by Google to manage AdWords accounts. To become qualified, professionals must demonstrate an in-depth understanding of AdWords by passing exams, and they must meet all our qualification guidelines

You may not have a need for an Internet marketing agency now, but it’s a handy resource to bookmark.    Then again, since you’re here at Big Thinking for Small Business, save some time and bookmark our Google Advertising Professionals listing.

Articles

Browser resolution may be a new SEO metric. It's certainly good usability practice.
Browser resolution may be a new SEO metric. It’s certainly good usability practice.

Google launched another tool hot on the heels of last week’s  release of Speed Tracer, a tool developers can use to determine what elements on a particular web page are slowing down its display in a browser.  And last month, we told you that a new SEO frontier for 2010 would be speed, as in how fast the site renders.

Now comes Google again with a tool that shows how much of a web site is visible for a particular monitor and video card. Browser Size is not a plugin or standalone problem.  Instead, a simple Google page allows anyone to type a web address and see how much of that page is visible to web users based on Google’s data about browser resolutions without scrolling.

Tools like this have existed for a long time, but not with built in Google metrics. Refinements will come.  Some sites will receive more visitors from people with smaller or larger screen resolutions.  Imagine the site designed for a certain width that receives a larger percentage of visitors with smaller resolutions?  Might Google someday begin penalizing such sites or demoting their ranking when the search engine knows the browser resolution as it displays the search engine results?