USER AGENT SWITCHER LIST
Optimizing for mobile devices requires you to be able to test your website against different user agents. A “User agent” is a piece of metadata that describes browser or device that it’s being rendered or viewed upon. It’s a string of text that allows the server/client to figure out what browser, mobile device you are using. Being able to manually switch is very important to allow testing and user agent detection.
Personally, I use firefox for web development user. This isn’t built right into Firefox but there’s an extension that allows you to do this:
Firefox’ User Agent Switcher Extension
Chris Pederick has a lovely firefox extension called the User Agent Switcher for Firefox. It’s great to allow you to change manually user agent and to work on your websites with. This will allow you to easily design locally and test for mobile browsers. This isn’t a 100% failsafe solution but it works for the most part.
Once you’ve installed this lovely firefox plugin you’ll want to make sure your user agent list is updated and contains all the important user agents to test against. I’ve searched far and wide for the best user agent list. I made it easier for you and just linked the user agent list below:
User Agent Switcher List
It’s not the biggest but it has all the devices that you need. If you want a super comprehensive list which contains all the user agents i recommend the one from user-agents.org:
Download: user-agents.org allgents.xml 700kb
The list is the most comprehensive out there. It’s really huge and i’m a bit afraid of importing it into my browser. Firefox runs slow enough with all my plugins!User Agent Switcher Extension for Firefo
The user-agent.org user agent switcher list is the biggest i’ve seen so far on the internet. It contains various different mobile devices and has been updated several times. The devices include the major mobile smartphones like: iphone, blackberry, android.
GOOGLE MAKES SEARCH MORE SOCIAL
As more and more players enter into the search engine market, the only way to win market share is to innovate; come out with new features, or make your search engine faster. Recently Google did this, when it unveiled Google Instant, showing results as you search, shaving on average 2-3 seconds off of a search.
Though social media is being universally adopted and growing immensely in popularity, it has been relatively untouched by the search world until now. Bing recently announced a deal with Facebook to integrate Facebook’s data into their search algorithm.
Google is similarly introducing more social into its results. Now when you search a specific topic on Google, a link under each result shows how many people have shared the same link. In addition, Google will also show how many updates on Twitter, Myspace, and Facebook have the link in them.
The new feature between Bing and Google may seem similar – however, Bing only shows social results from your friends, whereas Google shows results from the whole web.
So what does this mean for SEO? It means there will be some changes, but nothing earth-shattering. The biggest change is that it gives more relevance to social media, and also makes the search experience more intuitive. It also means that embracing social media, especially “like” pages, all the more important. However, this will impact the SEO industry, but not dramatically. The SEO industry hasn’t been about simply reacting; for one to stay relevant in this industry, you learn to adapt to changes. In addition to adapting, SEO is about making search better and more intuitive. So even with Google’s new search integration, the search will go on.
MOBILE APPLICATIONS OF WORLDLY IMPORTANCE
Tension continues to rise in Cairo as civilians encourage tyrant dictator of 30 years, Mubarek, to leave his post in office. The Egyptian government tried to cut off contact with the rest of the world by shutting down the internet and inter-continental phone contact to ease the focus of riots and the revolutionary uproar. This preliminary attempt failed as young people were able to connect with the outside world via mobile devices and social media, being the only link to news for the outside world. This shows us just how powerful this technology is. Eric McGehearty, CEO of Globe Runner SEO https://globerunner.com, shares with us his thoughts about mobile applications and how they can not only impact our personal outreach, but greatly benefit your business.
Transcription
Eric: Hi, it’s Eric here with Globe Runner SEO, and I want to talk about a sign of the times. How’s our world changing today, in a more interconnected environment? Today’s events in Cairo, with the political movements that are going on there, and really the Internet and the whole social grid we have was shut down for some time. The only way that we were getting news out of Cairo were through young people using social media Twitter, Facebook through their portable devices and through wireless communication. That is really the way the world is moving, in terms of how we’re communicating with each other. So, as a business owner, how do we take that and really get a deeper, better understanding of how we can communicate with our customers and our client base? It’s about instant, direct communication. How can you and I talk, right now, through the Internet? How can we form a connection instantly, very quickly?
Social media is really the answer to that. Now whether or not it’s young people in a political movement, or a business here in the States, trying to make a better presence, a quicker connection, and a faster access to their customer base, these are the ways that we’re going to be doing it. It’s through mobile devices and it’s through social media.
But, the mobile device is key. The mobile device lets me connect on the street every day. The traditional media now is being superseded or supplemented through word on the street, through individuals who are using their phones to capture bits of information, news updates, and push them out through social media.
If you’re set up properly with your mobile devices, you can very, very quickly get information out. As a business owner, it’s an incredibly powerful and quick way that I can communicate with my customer base, through my device, out and about, and really engage with people and excite them about what we’re doing as a business. If you can incite them, make them interested in your business, and help them connect to you, they’re going to be more engaged and more likely to spread the word about your company.
Thanks so much. This was Eric with Globe Runner SEO. Hopefully, today we can keep connecting things that are happening in our world with how we can grow our business, stay connected, and grow a powerful company. Thanks so much, I appreciate it. Great talking to you.
TOP 3 UPTIME MONITORING SERVICES
When creating a website, you work with a designer to refine the appearance and a developer to build out the code- then after lots of hard work, your site is live. A month later, you check your website and it doesn’t load. What could have possibly happened? Everything seemed normal the day before!
If you have managed a website, I’m sure you must have encountered a similar situaition. Let me tell you, it can be quite frustrating. Downtime isn’t only annoying, it can also very costly: a tarnished brand image, loss of potential business opportunities, etc.- something no one wants.
How do you avoid this? Sign up for an uptime monitoring service: whenever your website goes down, you can immediately contact your hosting provider- potentially reducing your site’s the downtime. Here are three that caught my attention:
Alert Bot (http://www.alertbot.com/)
Site 24×7 (http://www.site24x7.com/)
Pingdom.com (http://www.pingdom.com/)
AlertBot.com
Alert Bot comes with cell phone notifications as a standard service. Also, Alert Bot does not shy away from showing off its customer list, which includes some computer giants like: IBM, Mint.com, and Sony.
site24x7.com
Although most other uptime services check your website’s uptime from different locations, site 24×7 takes it to the extreme by checking your uptime in 25+ worldwide locations. Also, for all developers out there, site24x7 has a REST based API, which allows you to access all of its data from the comfort of your website’s back-end.
Pingdom.com
Pingdom seems the most promising of the three, featuring an iPhone app, SMS, and Twitter notifications, multiple locations monitoring, and a huge list of clients, including but not limited to: Microsoft, McAfee, Huddle, StumbleUpon, Amazon, Twitter, and ABC Family. Also, for all of those who own a wordpress blog, Pingdom has a wordpress plugin that can be easily installed in your blog.
By signing up for an uptime monitoring service, you can be sure to stay in control. Whenever your website goes down, uptime monitoring services take measures to resolve those issues. Find the uptime monitoring service that’s right for your business and sleep easier tonight.
FACEBOOK AND BING INTEGRATION BRINGS SOCIAL INTO SEARCH
Another big announcement from Facebook: Facebook and Bing are teaming up to make search more intuitive and help your decision-making by integrating Facebook data into Bing search results.
Searching on Bing won’t send any social interactions back to Facebook, however Zuckerberg says if a friend has shared or liked content that relates to that search, Bing will offer that as a search result. For example, if you’re searching for a restaurant in town, it’ll have results saying your friend liked that restaurant. Friends who like the movie you’re searching for will appear above the showtimes. There will also be “People Search”, where Bing will return Facebook profiles as search results. Type in a name- if you were searching for Eric, you’d type in his name and it would return his facebook profile if he was in your social network. This is especially helpful if you’re looking for someone with a common name- Bing will use this data to return the person most relevant to you using your social data. No more searching through endless John Smiths.
This means that, for Bing, having fans who like your brand on Facebook will become even more important- people will see your business at the top of their search results because their friends like your business. These social search results will help drive decision making based on confidence in the opinions of peers, so this is a new consideration for social media strategies. If you haven’t made your Facebook page a priority, now is the time.
“THE SOCIAL NETWORK” IS #1
How many of you have your Facebook open in the next tab on your browser? Do you even remember when you joined- did you think it would grow into the huge internet phenomenon it’s become today? How did Facebook even begin? The origins of the popular website are the subject of the highly-anticipated movie, “The Social Network,” which made its box office debut at #1 this weekend.
While many are perplexed as to why a movie about Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was made while both are alive and doing well, it has been universally praised by movie goers and critics alike. Written by Aaron Sorkin (who wrote The West Wing) and directed by David Fincher (Fight Club, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), the movie is already being talked about for Oscar nominations. The film has been critically praised for its actors’ performances, especially from Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake.
For example, Manohla Dargis from the New York Times said “When Mr. Eisenberg makes Mark’s face go blank, the character seems scarily emptied out: it’s a subtly great, at times unsettling, performance.”
However, many agree that “The Social Network” has a few shortcomings. For instance, Aaron Sorkin has said that he is ignorant of the internet, and blames it for many of society’s current shortcomings. Therefore, he paints a beautiful picture and tells an amazing story, but didn’t do much research on the “social network” topic of the movie. Also, Sorkin seemed to paint Zuckerberg in a negative light; that he was a stoic, lonely outsider who had only one friend and developed Facebook to get a girl. Lastly, though the movie was loosely based on facts and non-fictional characters, Sorkin admitted that many things were exaggerated, and some were fabricated just for the purpose of the movie.
While the movie has entertainment value, we don’t think that social networks, as well as the Internet-at-large, should be dismissed so effortlessly. With 500 million users (numbers which rival the populations of some continents), social networking has changed the way people interact with each other, and businesses, and has caused the advent of new types of marketing and advertising that were unheard of 20 years ago. We wouldn’t be able to share this blog post with you were it not for the internet and the rise of social media.
Therefore watch videos, engage online, and tweet to your heart’s content- we believe the social media revolution is not going anywhere soon!
WELL PLAYED: LANGUAGE THAT RETAINS LEADS
Eric and I are both acquaintances of Brian Massey, the Austin-based e-mail marketing expert who bills himself as The Conversion Scientist. Since we met at PubCon, I’d received email updates from him. It had been a while since I’d gotten any conversion tips from Brian, but I just figured he was busy.
One day, Brian sends out an update noting his absence:
This summer I’ve generated some of the best content ever on the things that make business websites generate more leads and sales… it’s just been a great summer. Through writing, audio and video, I’ve laid out some of my most useful and actionable work, all of it online and all of it open to everyone.
The problem is, I didn’t tell you about it. I haven’t sent out an email all summer.
That was September 7. Brian soon rectified this situation in a big way- I was getting something new from Brian nearly every day, and it was making me crazy. I had to say something, so I hit him up on Twitter.
He responded with concern:
We chatted back and forth for awhile, I assured him it wasn’t the quality of the content, but the frequency of the emails that was bothering me.
And then, the master stroke:
Sliiiiick. Super slick. Because my gut reaction to this tweet took me from being crabby about getting too much of a good thing to saying “whoa there. I’m on the what? I don’t want to quit being special.” I wanted to stay on the -personal- list. Who cares how many people are on it, it’s the -personal- list, and I want to be on it. With one phrase, I felt like an insider. Why would I want to defect to the weekly email when I’m on the good list? The one that must get the best, most timely information, otherwise why even have a special, personal list? That settles it, I am gonna stay on that list and that is THAT.
I’d forgotten about all the email; it wasn’t about email anymore- I felt valued, and I wanted to stay that way. It wasn’t until the next day or so that it really sunk in how precise and effortless the language was there- Brian retained a potential lead with one well-crafted sentence. It’s a trick he’s employed more than once- a recent email about an upcoming conference where he’d be speaking included the line “I’m not supposed to share [a discount code], but, hey, you are a personal acquaintance.” “Acquaintance” sounds professional, but “personal” adds warmth without being phony- a far better option than acting like the members of your mailing list are your buddies. Brian Massey, through his actions, taught me a powerful lesson in captivating an audience and retaining a lead.
Well played, Brian. Well played.
IS AUTOMATION BLACK HAT SEO?
Is automation Black Hat SEO? well I will let you decide. But this is a great interview with social media expert Giovanni Gallucci and Dallas social media speaker J.R. Atkins. Just a FYI: Globe Runner SEO does not condone or employ black hat practices for their clients. Sites that employ black hat SEO techniques have been known to be penalized by Google, even de-listed, so proceed with caution.
Transcription
JR: Hey this is JR Atkins we’re at OpenCamp today and I’m with Giovanni Gallucci and Gio’s gonna give us a few tips that he mentioned in his talk this morning that were three sites that we might find useful in a black hat-oriented SEO
Gio: oh it’s so not black hat…..it’s blackhat.
JR: So tell us like…Tube Toolbox
Gio: Yeah so actually these are applications that, if you go to tubetoolbox.com you can download this application and basically tube toolbox is a swiss army knife for YouTube. It allows you to go in and find videos similar to the videos you have, find users who find those videos and comment on them, it allows you also to go in and do messaging in bulk instead of going in one at a time for messaging with people so there’s so much stuff that this thing does, I mean I literally use this tool every single day on several machines for different clients so like I said in there, if you’re not doing video, I don’t know why you’re not doing video and you can figure out a way to integrate video not matter what your business is, and you’ve gotta get out there and get smart and use tools like Tube Toolbox that make your life so much easier. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but once you get through that learning curve it makes your life so much easier with online video.
JR: Next one was Bookmarking Demon.
Gio: Bookmarking Demon is similar to Tube toolbox but it’s for Social Bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious and StumbleUpon, Mixx and things like that. You go and plug in all your usernames and passwords for yourself, if you have employees that are part of your social media campaign or other affiliates that you work with, you plug in all their authentication information and then you go in and create a list of your search engine optimized titles and descriptions and links for the things you want to promote, you click a button and walk away and bookmarking demon will randomly go through and bookmark these sites for you. The reason why this stuff is so important is that these let you stay within the terms of service of the platforms you’re working with, and it also looks more natural than if you just sat down for 40 minutes bookmarking all these sites. It looks spammy so it’s really important that you’re using something that runs in the background and waits three minutes and updates something then waits eight minutes then updates something because then the platforms don’t get angry with you for just overloading their system all at once and it sits there and does that work for you while you’re off doing other things so you’re billing here, billing there.
JR: OK, last one was TweetAdder.
Gio: same thing, guess what? for twitter! The biggest thing I use Tweetadder for is to look for local users on twitter- I work with a lot of hyperlocal businesses like onehere is youplusdallas.com and we really focus on people in the dallas/ft. worth area that’re looking for things like entertainment and nightlife and restaurants and things like that so I’ll go on TweetAdder, look for names and look for keywords I wanna search on but putting in a zip code to only find people within 50 miles of the central business district in dallas. Then I can take those people, add them to the company account instead of going out there and randomly following anyone on Twitter talking about sushi and then you find out that 90% of your users are in Canada or outside the state of Texas, where we’re at right now, TweetAdder is another one of those tools that allows you to be really efficient, really focused and a lot cleaner about the way you go and do marketing because before these tools were around you kinda went out there and you threw whatever you could against the wall and would walk away, and that’s not good for anybody, it’s a waste of time for your clients, a waste of time for you as a specialist and for the users that are getting messages that aren’t targeted so it’s a waste of their time. You need to go in there and invest in these tools so when someone in dallas mentions a restaurant in dallas and they get something from us they’re like “oh theres an association there, maybe i actually want to follow them” and not some mechanic up in canada who’s complaining about a bad hamburger that he just went and ate.
JR: Well thank you for your time I know all these are $100 or less and if you want more go to GlobeRunnerSEO.com we’ll keep the videos coming.
SECRETS OF SEO TRAFFIC FROM YELP
I got to attend OpenCamp this weekend- a conference in Addison dedicated to developers, bloggers, Social Media and all things internet. Of course it’s always great to share knowledge with like-minded professionals, but I would have to say one of the highlights of the conference was talking to Nikki Bonds, aka Yelper Nikkanore and Yelp Employee Extraordinaire, who writes the Dallas Weekly Yelp Newsletter. I love the newsletter because every week there’s a new subject- the last one was about who has the best potatoes in town– but Nikki herself combs through all the listings on Yelp to find the best companies to showcase in the email. So of course I had to ask- how does a business find its way into the inboxes of thousands of DFW Yelp members?
Nikki works with a different theme each week, but some repeat- for example, in the past there’s been “spa week” and “drinks week” that come back from year to year. But Nikki goes for both mainstream choices and destinations off the beaten path, so don’t be concerned that your mom & pop operation won’t find its audience. Make yourself easy to find with great descriptions including key words and terms.
The main thing is to have a fully fleshed-out profile- Nikki looks for profiles with correct, complete information about the venue, quality pictures, and good reviews. So taking the time to really complete a business’s Yelp profile and encourage your patrons to post reviews can pay off in big traffic increases when Yelp takes note. So go ahead and Yelp away!