google Archives - Bluewire Media

Posted on Oct 22, 2013 by Sam Sargent

Getting your Event’s details in Google results

The Google Algorithm is clever but sometimes you can help it out by giving it a little nudge in the right direction. With some help, it’ll be able to highlight extra information in your search listings to make it easier for users to find what they’re looking for.

Normally you don’t have a whole lot of control over what a result looks like. A search engine will find what it thinks is most relevant and you’re pretty much stuck with that. By including micro-data that the search engine can consume, you can have a bit more control over what your search listing includes.…

Posted on Sep 7, 2012 by Christopher Wallace

Facebook Falling? Preparing Your Business for the New Social Media Frontier

Facebook Falling? Preparing Your Business for the New Social Media Frontier

People love to root for the underdog. Remember when MySpace still ruled the land, and Facebook was the small competitor gaining ground with college kids? You couldn’t get a Facebook account without a university or school email address, so people went out of their way to obtain these and keep them after graduation.

Limiting a good product’s availability is a classic method of creating hype. By the time you launch to the general public, the idea is to have generated buzz that will propel your business to mass public acceptance.…

Posted on Mar 13, 2012 by Angus Russell

Google Launches GoMo – A Service To Help You Take Your Website Mobile

It’s no secret. The internet is going mobile.

Depending on where you’re getting your stats from, internet enabled mobile devices will outnumber desktop devices as early as 2013.

Google, of course, knows this (because Google knows everything), and they’ve launched a simple tool to help you evaluate your current website’s mobile friendliness, and what you should do to make it more accessible to mobile users. The tool is called GoMo, and it shows you what your website will look like on a smartphone, then gives recommendations as to how you can make it more mobile friendly.…

Posted on Jun 30, 2011 by Sam Sargent

Add +1 to your pages and help your website stand out – Why Google+ makes the +1 button important

You’ve probably seen these Google +1 buttons around the place. While I knew Google might be onto something, it hadn’t really clicked for me until until now. Today I got an invite and signed up to the new Google + Project. It’s basically Google’s answer to Facebook.

Seeing the below in my profile screen inside Google + has made the little +1 button make a whole lot more sense and seem that much more of an important addition to your website. All your +1’s while not only having an impact on search results*, will show up in the streams and profiles of everyone using Google +.…

Posted on Sep 28, 2010 by Lesley Hays

Analysing your AdWords budget & exploring history on your phone (Weekly round-up Vol. 74)

A Guide to AdWords ROI, Profit & Revenue – Reload Media
ROI, profit and revenue are all important but which one should you aim to maximise with an AdWords campaign – or any advertising campaign – and do they all peak at the same time? Craig from Reload Media does the maths for you and takes an indepth look at how they could differ, and how this can impact your AdWords budget.

How Businesses Are Unleashing Their Employees’ Social Media Potential – Mashable
This article shows how some companies are harnessing their employees’ increasing technical knowledge to innovate.…

Posted on Sep 21, 2010 by Lesley Hays

Why projects fail, your website sucks & nobody reads your blog! (Weekly round-up Vol. 73)

The two key causes of web project failure – Smart Company
…and how to avoid them! Craig Reardon explains how 1) major changes of direction can throw a project out of wack and chew up budget and 2) competing phases that don’t align can create dominos of missed deadlines.

4 Reasons Your Website Sucks – Hubspot
How to make your website not suck: make sure people can find you (search engine optimisation is a start), focus on your client/user (talk about them, not your company), have clear navigation and calls to action (more important than “wow factor” or bleeding-edge design), don’t automatically play sound or video (people will leave before finding the “off” button).…

Posted on Sep 13, 2010 by Lesley Hays

Google Instant, designing great presentations & more (Weekly round-up Vol. 72)

Last week saw the launch of Google Instant – Google’s new real-time, predictive search. Right now, you might only be able to see it when you’re logged into a Google account (it’s being rolled out slowly) but you should come across it in the near future. Here’s a quick wrap-up:

Mashable’s live notes from Google’s launch presentation
Reload Media’s response to what Google Instant means for SEO
Mashable talks about the different results for single letters (eg. “w” brings up weather results before you keep typing)

My initial thoughts are that it will be a toss up between speed and visual disturbance from the constantly shifting results.…

Posted on Aug 10, 2010 by Lesley Hays

Weekly round-up (Vol. 67)

This week we’re looking at website conversions and take a trip back to the future. But first… whatever happened to Google Wave? Well, apparently not much and just last week, Google effectively canned it.

RIP Google Wave – Mashable
Google’s revolutionary product that blends email, instant messaging, file sharing & wikis “didn’t get the uptake they’d hoped for & Google won’t be continuing to develop Wave as a stand alone product.” It only launched in 2009.

Here at Bluewire, we think the problem was the product’s contagiousness, or lack thereof.…

Posted on Jun 21, 2010 by Sam Sargent

Google’s SEO Report Card – how would your website stack up?

I stumbled across an interesting blog post from the Google Webmaster Central team on the weekend. It was the result of an audit which Google performed on over 100 of their different product pages and came in the form of a SEO report card.

It details how the main pages for these various products stacked up in their own search results and how they fair across a number of common SEO topics. It was designed to provide the product teams with ideas on how they can improve their products’ pages using simple and accepted optimisations.…