New Categories on GraphicRiver
It’s been a busy month over at GraphicRiver. Our team has deep in the code analysing, organizing and expanding our Marketplaces. GraphicRiver in particular received a whole lot of attention with some seven new an improved categories. Since plenty of our VectorTuts+ users sell products on GraphicRiver, we thought it would be nice to introduce you what has changed and any new opportunities to sell your amazing work on the Marketplace.
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Survey: 50% of Users Say No to Facebook Search Engine
Facebook already has the social media market cornered and is even throwing its hat into the Wall Street arena, but any plans to create a Facebook search engine could be a bone of contention.
Greenlight’s Search & Social Survey 2011-12 asked 500 people their opinion on whether Facebook should start a search engine similar to Google or Bing. Facebook has no current plans to start work on this type of venture, so the survey was more of a “what-if”. 48% of the respondents replied that they dislike the idea of Facebook going into that direction.
It is important to remember that most surveys actually question far more than 500 people. It is also important to note that Greenlight said their participant pool was comprised of people from different professions and walks of life. While this sounds like a broad spectrum, Greenlight doesn’t really go into how they came across all these participants. It is possible they just found them through someone’s Facebook friend’s list!
The survey also found that if Facebook did go into the search engine business, they would be able to corner about 22% of the search engine market globally. While the study’s first set of findings seem to imply that half of consumers wouldn’t like a Facebook search engine, 22% of the American market alone still equates to about 13.5 billion individual searches per year. It’s this very number that could eventually sway Facebook to go into the search engine business.
The study went on to say that Facebook could potentially take 50% of the global search engine market within a few years if they were able to convert Google users. Though this claim seems plausible considering how big Facebook has gotten, looking at the actual numbers show what an uphill battle this would be for Facebook. Google currently has over 65% of the search engine market cornered, so it seems unlikely that any other search engine could take 50% within a few years.
Facebook already has plans to improve its search feature, but only within the confines of Facebook. It will be interesting to see if Facebook takes notice of this survey and chooses to look into the possibility.
Create a Beautiful Retro Futurism Portrait – Tuts+ Premium Tutorial
In this Tuts+ Premium tutorial,I’m going to show you how I’ve created this retro futuristic inspired portrait, using transparent radial gradients, Blending Modes and Opacities. This portrait has lots of bright neon glows and a graphic looking hair style. This is inspired by how the 1980′s saw the future with a science fiction twist. If you are looking to take your skills to the next level then Log in or Join Now to get started!
Quick Tip: Data-Driven Graphics Using Illustrator’s Variables Panel
Illustrator’s Variables panel lets you create data-driven graphics in a fraction of the time it would take to do them by hand. In this Quick Tip, learn about Variables and see how to create and save 100 different business cards in under two minutes.
Google Labels Penguin Update a Success & How to Recover If You’ve Been Hit
Google’s Penguin Update has been a hot topic in the SEO world for around three weeks now. With widespread reports of ranking penalties and false positives, Google’s Matt Cutts has chimed in on the debate labelling the Penguin Update a success.
“It’s been a success from our standpoint”, Cutts said.
When asked about the issues of false positives (people who feel they’ve been unfairly hit by Penguin when they weren’t doing any spam) Matt went on to clarify,
“We’ve seen a few cases where we might want to investigate more, but this change hasn’t had the same impact as Panda or Florida,”
“No algorithm is perfect. While we’d like to achieve perfection, our litmus test is, ‘Do things get better than before?’”
Matt also went on to clarify that penguin was designed to be quite precise, only acting against pages where there was a high confidence of spam being involved.
So what should you do if you were hit?
Google have said that those hit by the penguin update will need to make changes to their website or link profile in order to recover.
As we’ve mentioned before, bad linking practises seem to be a major cause of this penalty. Some of the things to look out for include,
- Paid text links using exact match anchor text: For companies that want to rank for a certain term (such as “red widgets”) one way to accomplish this is by buying links from other websites with that exact matching anchor text. This is against Google’s guidelines, as Google would consider this a paid link that exists solely to manipulate PageRank, rather than to provide any value to visitors.
- Comment spam: Two things proved problematic for websites trying to unnaturally rank for specific keywords: signatures in comments that contained exact match anchor text; and people who used a spammy user name (e.g., Best India SEO Company) as exact match text.
- Guest posts on questionable sites: Although guest posts are a legitimate way to earn links to your site, sites dinged by the Penguin had links pointing to their website from sites filled with low-quality articles where the focus was on the anchor text rather than the content.
- Article marketing sites: Thin content featuring links with exact match anchor text were another common factor among affected sites.
- Links from dangerous sites: Do you have inbound links from sites that have been flagged for malware, numerous pop-ups, or other spammy issues? This was another factor that caused websites to lose their Google rankings, so links to and from web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” are a danger.
If you’re looking to clean up your link profile one technique you can try is called link pruning. This basically involves identifying poor incoming links to your website and taking steps to remove them.
Here is a basic outline of the steps to take,
- Identify: You need to gather a comprehensive backlink profile for the site in question. There are several tools available that would accomplish this, including Google Webmaster Tools Backlinks Report, Majestic SEO Site Explorer and SEOmoz Open Site Explorer.
- Investigate: Go down the list of backlinks to find the rotten ones. It’s a time intensive step that requires you navigate to each link to evaluate its quality. After a while you may start to get a sense of what’s bad by the URL of the linking page alone. If you opt for using Majestic SEO, you have the benefit of their proprietary ACRank, a quality score that you can use to judge link value.
- Send Requests: Create a template email requesting link removal that you’ll send to the webmasters in charge of the links identified as low quality. The template should candidly explain that you are an SEO or site owner trying to recover from a Google penalty and would he or she please remove the following links. List the URLs where the links can be found, the URL on your site they point to, the anchor text ─ all the info needed to easily find the link you’re requesting removed. To send the request, you may find contact info on the site, you may need to do a whois search, and you may need to do some sleuthing to get names and email addresses.
- Follow Up and Repeat: Expect to receive four types of responses to your requests:● Remove link and tell you.
● Remove link and not tell you.
● Not reply or do anything.
● Will remove the link if you pay them.In the case of the first, verify by going to the page where the link was and if the link was removed, check it off the list. If you haven’t gotten any response back from a contact in 2 weeks, check to see if the link has been removed. It may or may not. If it’s been removed, cross it off the list. If it hasn’t been removed, send a follow-up request.The process of link pruning requires multiple cycles. Each successive cycle will see more links removed. If you run across a webmaster requesting payment for link removal, let’s just say there’s a search engine who will be very interested to hear about this.
- Communicate with Google: Throughout this process you must keep detailed records of your actions. A spreadsheet with columns for the linking URL, the contact name, the contact email, the date a request was sent, and responses or actions taken by the linking site. In the end you will not be able to extract all dubious links from the site but you will want to be able to show you’ve done everything in your power to extract manipulative links from your backlink profile.
Have you been impacted by Penguin? Feel free to leave a comment below.
5 Ignored Page Elements That Will Boost Your Sales
We’ve written many times about the does and don’t of creating a landing page that will convert.
But a recent article from the team at Kiss Metrics caught my attention when it outlined 11 elements of a page that are often overlooked. It certainly made me look twice at the most popular pages on our own site to see if we are overlooking these particular elements ourselves. The good news for us is that we’re not, but for most website owners you could be killing your conversion by simply glossing over these elements.
I have outlined below the 5 elements that I believe are most important, however you can read the full article here.
1 – Clear, Differentiated Pricing Information
Have you ever checked out a product online and been unsure what the difference between the Silver and Gold plans were? Did Pro seem a little too much like Basic? The most effective methods can be boiled down to a simple philosophy – focus on the benefits, instead of features, and highlight the differences. The best pricing tables allow you to quickly ascertain the value you’ll personally get out of each option, and discern the differences between each.
2 – Customer Confidence
There are many ways to build this trust though, and almost all are fairly easy to implement. For instance, if you use an SSL certificate to secure your transactions (and you really, really should be if you’re processing credit card info), show it! Many consumers know to check for secure web pages when proceeding with a purchase, so they’ll be looking for that all-important padlock icon.
3 – Unconventional Social Proof
Incorporating social proof into your product pages is a way to complement and reinforce the positive influences on your visitors for a given product. It can take many forms, ranging from customer testimonials, to star ratings, to simply exposing the number of units of that particular product left in your inventory.
4 – A Clear Next Step
Too many product pages clutter up their pages with excessive calls to action. View customer photos, view pricing, view our knowledgebase, get customer support, talk to a representative, read reviews. Without good design, these calls to action all blend into a confusing mess, and make your user feel like they’ve just been blindfolded and spun around.
Typical methods for designing a good call to action include using high-contrast buttons, treatments or callouts that are unique to the overall design of the page, as well as giving the actionable elements plenty of breathing room to make them stand out.
5 – Wayfinding
How many steps lie between your product page, and your transaction confirmation page? If you don’t know, then it’s probably too many. A convoluted and laborious funnel is a sure-fire way to kill conversion.
If the customer is on the checkout page, then get them to their final purchase as quickly and efficiently as possible. Don’t make their purchasing effort seem like an arduous journey that can leave them second guessing their purchasing decision along the way.
Are your product pages missing some of these elements? If so, it might pay to give it a bit of an overhaul, especially if it means more potential sales.
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