And no doubt then, you’ve been smacked by the Auto Correct feature.

I sent my significant other to pick up my nephew’s birthday present. The conversation (via text) went as follow:

SO: “What am I getting him?”

Me: “Any kind of legislation”

Me: “Lego. [expletive] you, auto correct!”

That’s pretty poor intuitiveness when a four letter word becomes twelve. It honestly slows me down more than anything and I should have the option to turn this off.

But alas, I don’t. I’m sure if I tried to send a strongly worded text message to Android, it would auto correct into some compliment about the feature.

Maybe that’s why the feature still exists. Their inbox is full of compliments.

Last week, Facebook announced it has partnered with video chat giant, Skype, to give Facebook users in browser video conferencing. This is a significant move, considering one of my favorite features of Google+ is the Hangouts feature where you can video conference with multiple people in your Circles at once.

As the Project Manager here at Plush Marketing, what does this mean for me? Not much. Facebook is used surprisingly little here at the office, aside from the company page, which I also update. We do, however, use Skype fairly regularly just for calling our overseas contacts. Video conferencing isn’t something we have deemed necessary in the office yet. If I need to demonstrate something, I’m pretty good at scribbling on a screenshot and drawing out what I’m trying to communicate. Sometimes “Can we move that squiggly thing beside that input box and move it up about 5 pixels?” doesn’t make sense, but drawn arrows work wonders!

So for now, I will not get excited about this latest feature of Facebook, one of many I am already indifferent to.

Except Polls. I should have the option to remove that feature altogether.

Right out of the gate, Google has many advantages just in how much more experience they have in handling a user’s data and privacy, something Facebook should take some cues from who has had many issues, past and present. It seems like every other week I have to go turn off another “feature” Facebook has included in their latest update that compromises my account’s privacy. But back to Google+.

One of the features I’m most looking forward to is Hangouts. Right now free video conferencing is dominated by Skype, but if you want to video chat with more than one person at a time, you’ll have to pay for the upgraded version. In my family, video chat has become a wonderful feature because we’re spread all over the place and it would be nice to have multiple users video chatting at the same time.

Another nice addition to Google+ is Sparks. On Facebook, you add interests and then get updates from the official page, if applicable. Sparks takes this idea one step further and will intuitively recommend other sources based on your interest. If you like the MMO World of Warcraft, for example, Google+ might suggest the YouTube series The Guild or a podcast about Blizzard news. That could mean big things for companies and marketing, too. It is not yet clear how Sparks will rank content, but if you add Web Design to your interests on Google+, maybe you’ll see this site popping up as a recommendation!

There’s plenty of other (better) blogs out there right now with more information about Google+ features from people who actually got an invite, so that’s all I’m going to really talk about.

Hear that Google? I’m waiting for my invite.

Its a basic idea, generate traffic through search engines by optimizing your website to get the first three spots under each keyword. The norm is that most prospects will compare the first three websites that they find from their search results before they make a decision. How many of those visitors a website can convert is dependent on the design and functionality of the website. The process is easy to understand if you are currently using a search engine to compare different products or pricing on different websites.

How do you gain ranking?

There are two methods to approach this. One method is to learn how to do Search Engine Optimization yourself or you can hire a company like Plush Marketing with years of experience in optimizing various websites for competitive keywords. If you would like to learn SEO than Google will be the best place to search for tutorials and information on how to optimize a website to do on-site SEO and off-site SEO. Its crucial that you also learn how to do Search Engine submissions and Directory submissions. Depending on the depth of knowledge, it can take anywhere from a few months to a few years to capture competitive keywords so its best to contract these services out to professionals.

If you have any further questions about SEO or WEB DESIGN than please call us at 1-888-58-PLUSH and one of our consultants will guide you through the process. Thank You

The Meta Tag Title

The Meta title should match the title that visitors to the site can see on the page. It is also a good idea that both closely match the words in the URL of the page – even if only the second part of the URL can be used:

If your website page URL is yourownwebsite.com/meta-tag-relevancy, then it would be better to have the title of your page as well as your meta tag title saying “Meta Tag Relevancy” than “How to check the relevance of Meta tags.”

The Meta Tag Description

The Meta description should be a summary of what the main body of text is about. For excellent Meta tag description relevancy it is a great idea to have a summary of about 15 to 25 words at the very top of your website page, even if using a slightly smaller font size than the font size on the rest of the page, so as not to detract from the overall look of the page too much. Never use the black hat SEO technique of making these words on the website page invisible to viewers.

Then, use the exact same words in your Meta description.

In this description try and repeat the title of at least some of the words that are in the title. Try and also fit in some synonyms of the title words, as long as these words are also appearing in the main body of your website page text too. Do not repeat any words more than five times in the description. The words that you should be trying to repeat at least two or three time are the words that appear in your title, and that also appear the most often elsewhere on your website page.

The Meta Tag Keywords

List 15 to 25 words or phrases (separated by a comma) that appear most often in your description and website page article or text content. Do not repeat any word more than 5 times. If you’ve listed “meta” as one keyword and “meta relevancy” as another keyword, “meta” has already been mentioned twice.

Checking relevancy

If working online, open another tab on your computer and visit a site that has free Search Engine Optimization tools. You’re looking for a tool that can check Meta tag relevancy – a Meta tag relevancy analysis tool.

Type in the URL of the page you’d like to check and you’ll get a free detailed analysis displayed right there on some sites.

Depending on which site you are visiting, you will see the relevancy for Meta title, description and keywords displayed as a percentage. You will also see how many of each keyword appears in your text.

Your relevancy results might be excellent first time round, but if not, look at the section within the tool where the keywords that are repeated on your page are listed. Perhaps you missed one or two that are repeated quite often.

If you already have 25 keywords in your Meta description, remove the ones that do not appear too often on the page and replace them with the ones that you missed, and that appear more often on your page.

Also, reword your description if its relevancy percentage is not too high.

Then resubmit the URL again for another check.

Try the above methods to improve Meta tag relevancy and Search Engine Optimization on your sites or the sites of your web design clients. You have nothing to lose. The beauty of website coding is if something doesn’t work as you expect it to, you can just change it back again. Give the alterations about four to seven days to be found by Search Engines though, before deciding the alterations have done nothing to improve SEO.

There are many people who believe Meta tag relevancy is no longer important for SEO purposes, but if checking Meta tag relevancy can help people improve the layout of a web page, or help them with the placing of words on a web page, then, for those reasons alone, it is still important.

The key to an attractive, modern website is the layout and organization. Any good website consists of three main parts: the header, the footer, and the body. Generally, the first thing you see when you open up a website is the header. A header usually consists of an image and the navigation bar. The header image is often the website’s name and logo, immediately welcoming visitors to the site. The navigation is a series of buttons that serve as links to separate pages within the website. These can either be aligned vertically or horizontally. When creating a website, it is important to develop a well structured navigation to maximize functionality. The structure of the navigation is known as Information Architecture. The term Information Architecture refers to the way a website’s pages are organized. It is essential to organize these links in a logical way.

Scrolling down the page, you reveal the meat of the website: the body. The content of a website can consist of a large variety of different things. It may be paragraphs of information, images, videos, Flash animations, submission forms, or any number of different objects related to the focus of the website. To effectively lay out this information, it needs to be divided and positioned properly. The Box Model defines how the content of a website should be organized. The main parts to The Box Model are the content, the padding, the margin, and the border. These are defined by width and height in pixels. Content is the actual text and images located within the box. The border will surround the content. The border’s style can be set to solid, dotted, or dashed, depending on the preference of the customer. The padding determines how far away the content is from the border. The margin clears a space outside the border. Properly designating these four aspects will allow any web developer to create an effective layout for a website’s body.

Eventually the website will come to a close. The footer occupies a very small portion of the website, located below the header and body. The footer is usually short and separated from the body by a different background color, or a border. This is a good place to put contact information, copyright information, and links to other websites.

There are a vast number of ways to style a website and make it flashy, attractive, or weird. But without a concept of what makes an attractive website layout, web developers may be lost, not know how to make the site appeal to the costumer, or may not be able to grab anyone’s attention for more than a few seconds. That’s why it’s absolutely essential to know how to make a website simple, easily navigable, and appealing to the average human’s natural sense of order.