Moving on, I just answered the Mozilla Survey as share by Yuga. The questions are quite interesting but over all they give me the following impressions:

Mozilla is preparing something big or just something in the back burners - Firefox 3 has scored a Guinness world record and the latest upgrade to it was just released it would seem that Firefox is doing well. Perhaps a big marketing blitz to promote Firefox is on the drawing boards.

They really want to know the mind-set or preferences of Firefox users today - most questions dwell on technical stuff like tabs, anti-phising features, browser speed etc. It’s like they’re asking us which features do we really, really want in a browser nowadays.

Asking us for help - Some of the questions made me feel a bit guilty about making Google Chrome (there I’ve said the magic words!) my de facto web browser. I recall how I use to be a proud promoter of Firefox to my friends and online now it has all slowed down the moment Google Chrome landed on my laptop.

Lastly, here’s the clincher:

Is there anything Mozilla should either start - or stop - doing to drive greater awareness, education, word-of-mouth or press in your market?

My answer was simple,

Do a more proactive marketing campaign, like those “I am Mac” ads or something. Stop relying on a third-party to do this for them because good relationships could suddenly end and turn ugly. Right Google?

Anyone else who took the survey too? What are your thoughts about it?

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Why is my bounce rate so high ?

Definition: A bounce occurs when a person leaves your website after reaching your entry page. The above cases can be considered equally as bounces from your website.

1) Visitor enters your site and press back immediately (before or even after the page has loaded)

2) Visitor waits for the page to load stays on this page for some time and then press back or navigate on another site. ( In this case the visitor might have found the information and then chose to navigate elsewhere to either find some supplementary information. Or it could be that he/she might not have found it but just read some pieces to see what is there, a third case could be the persons did not like the: website, content or colors on the site and went away.)

Therefore there seems to be considerable number of aspects to take into consideration to get a more precise question about “Why is my bounce rate so high ?“. There isn’t any straight forward answer to this question, but there are many questions that can lead to possible solutions:

When you ask your questions about bounce rate here are the different questions that might come to your mind.

Why is my bounce rate so high ?

User Interface
Is my layout/presentation/design attractive to visitors ?
Does my pages load slowly ?
Do my page have appropriate ads ? Are these ads non-aggressive towards the user ?
Is your page browser friendly ? (Can be views at any resolution with any browser the same way)

Content

Does the user find what they are looking for ? ( High bounce rate and high time on site visits)
Is there enough information to show to the user ? Do I display enough or too much ?
From keywords analysis are the entry keyword valid for the content that the entry page ?

These are few questions, and there are much more that can come across when you want to decrease the bounce rate of your website. Personally I think that depending on your audience your bounce rate will always vary. There will be always accidental clicks (people make mistakes).

As mentioned on Bounce Rate article on Wikipedia: Taking the example of news site, which have all their information on the first page itself. People might just scan the page and then exit to another website. News website might just be off having 80% bounce rate with a satisfied visitor who was able to have what he came for. From this point of view: Informative website will most likely have high bounce rate compared to E-Commerce one’s for example where you must navigate on several page to be able to perform a checkout.

A word of conclusion:

Source Wikipedia:
Google.com analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik has stated:

“It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying.”

References and useful links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_Rate

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81986

http://newsletter.blizzardinternet.com/how-high-is-your-bounce-rate/2006/02/09/

As I continued to think, I found comfort on my desk chair where I saw my laptop open and Google set as my home page. I thought to myself, if my jacket were some bit of information that I can find on the web, I could just google it.

———–

Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
goo·gle
Pronunciation:
\ˈgü-gəl\
Function:
transitive verb
Inflected Form(s):
goo·gled; goo·gling Listen to the pronunciation of googling \-g(É™-)liÅ‹\
Usage:
often capitalized
Etymology:
Google, trademark for a search engine
Date:
2001
: to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web

———–

Unfortunately, my addiction to technology has not only forced me to take constant sabbaticals from my twitter, facebook, gmail, blog, and all the RSS feeds from multiple news sources but also Google (my number one source of knowledge for anytime I may have a question).

As smart phones become ’smarter’, people are not paying for minutes or texts. Rather, they are paying to have the entire world in the palm of their hands. For me, Google (and now maybe Cuil ) has become one of the gateways that has provided me access to all this useful/useless information. Unfortunately, I have begun to notice that my habit of Googling people, dates, reports, journals, news articles, etc…has made my memory a bit weak. As my research professor, Dr. Leonard Sender , would call it Google Assisted Memory (GAM). I just thank God I am starting school again in the fall.

Has my memory begun to fade at age 22? Nicolas Carr from The Atlantic wrote a great article on this particular topic: What the internet is doing to our brains.

You can read it here: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

In an interview with NPR, Carr says that while the Internet allows us to get lots of information very quickly, it also encourages us not to look at it very thoughtfully. In fact, Carr argues, when we give in to the natural impulses to click and skim, rather than to read and think, the Internet may actually be doing us a disservice: It shortens our attention spans and even inhibits our ability to read longer books and articles.

Carr says it best, “The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”-the perfect algorithm-to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

Well, I am definitely not off to read neither War and Peace nor Anna Karenina . What I am going to do is look for my North Face Jacket hoping that I can find it somehow before Google figures it out before me.

| if I knew all the words I would write myself out of here. |

Wachovia stock closed at $10 on Friday however expectations are for Citigroup to offer less than $2 on Monday.

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1. Separate business expenses from personal expenses - your accountant will love you come tax time
2. Build a business profile and credit which qualifies you for a Dun & Bradstreet profile and EIN number
3. Qualify for 2x the amount of rewards you would be eligible for as an individual

Affiliate Marketers spend a lot of money to drive traffic to their sites, often in the thousands per day just to test a campaign to see if it’s profitable or not. If a particular campaign converts really well then a smart affiliate marketer will throw a lot of money behind the campaign, anywhere from $5k, $10k on up. Try that with your personal credit cards.

The best card for Affiliate marketing in my humble opinion has to be the American Express Starwood Preferred Guest Business Card, and what I especially love about the Starwood card is:

1. The User Management portal is very organized and detailed
2. They have a great number of some of the coolest hotels anywhere (W hotels, Westin, Starwood etc)
3. Redeem any 20,000 Starwood points to mileage and get a 5,000 bonus on any airline - adds up quicker than you think!

Plus you get a 10,000 starwood points signup bonus.

One important thing to note is that a lot of people think Amex cards do not have spending limits, and this is a lie. Once you get an Amex card or any other business card for that matter - you should always set a spending profile with the credit card company. Let them know what the card is mainly going to be used for and the amounts of money you expect to spend. You don’t want to wait until after you’ve launched your campaign to realize you don’t have the money to keep them running. You will miss out on a hot offer and feel like kicking yourself in the head later - trust me I’ve been there.

Cash back cards? Puhlease - a majority of them don’t even come close, here’s a quick example why:

Say you’re going to Affiliate Summit West and you need a hotel to stay. Pull up the Starwood Preferred Guest site and search for hotels in Las Vegas. The site returns two options, the Westin & Planet Hollywood. Planet Hollywood gets my vote because they just re-opened recently after a total renovation and it’s on the main strip - close to all the action.

Change the options from cash to Starpoints to see how many points I would need to get a free night, and the answer is 16,000. The cash amount is $235 per night.

So a 1% cash back card would mean that you would have to spend $23,500 vs roughly $16,000 for the Starwood card. That’s a $7500 difference. Plus you get double Starpoints for every Starpoint property you stay at. Go figure.

If you don’t have the Starwood American Express Preferred Business card yet, get yours here …. and get 10,000 Starpoints with your first purchase.

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Well, the bottom line is that Microsoft’s search engines consistently returns worse results than Google. Don’t believe me? Try it for a few days. You’ll find yourself switching back to Google when you REALLY need to find something. The problem that Microsoft faces is not one of getting people to try their product, the problem is that their search technology is inferior to Google, and at the end of the day, that’s all punters care around. You may attract a small segment of bargain hunters with this strategy, but as soon as you remove the incentive, you will lose them to other schemes like Homepage Friends, who pay hard cash if you search through them (using Yahoo! incidentally)

What do others think? Well, nobody really seems really convinced, with some parties actually finding the attempt hilarious. Begging people to use your products is no way to increase their confidence and it’s practically impossible to “earn” anything of value.

Once again, the search engine war is all about relevance, and until Microsoft get that into their head, they’re just going to keep pumping money into it for nothing. What a waste!

Related Posts

• May 8, 2008 — Interesting news day (1)
• March 4, 2008 — Microsoft playing catchup again (0)
• September 25, 2007 — Microsoft looking to buy a chunk of Facebook? (0)
• June 20, 2007 — Google makes Microsoft change Vista (0)
• May 30, 2007 — Some technology news (1)
• April 16, 2007 — Microsoft cries foul (0)

Sex on the other hand is not much to research about. We all know this is one of the most searched for terms ever. So there is not much of a challenge in that one

What I will do is build a few (well actually I believe I need a ton) of links to this particular blog post for the word god, and see what it takes to get it to the top of Google, Yahoo or Live.

Since Google returns more than 150 million results when searching for god, I will probably not get it to the top this year - or next year for that matter.

In another post I wrote about my personal believe - or the lack of believe in god so I will not talk so much about that here.

Update: I had to add a couple pictures regarding god and well.. a girl representing the other word.

What do you think, is it possible at all to rank for the word “god”?

Update: I just looked through the logs, and it looks like this post is starting to rank for the key phrase already

I am now the happy holder of the first position when searching for “God Girl Sex Games” in Windows Live search Go ahead, try searching for the phrase God Girl Sex Games.

Bookmark to:

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Thankfully, Google isn’t holding back in providing the skinny on Android’s oft-overlooked details, and now gives us a first-look at how Search works on its open-source mobile OS, more or less.

Search on Android, according to Google, is integrated “with applications in a variety of ways, in order to make it universally accessible.” There will be a Search menu option in every searchable application, and some of these applications will support type-to-search (start typing, and [insert app name here] will automatically open the Search UI for you) while others will have Search widgets. Also, there will be a dedicated Search key on the bottom row of the keyboard that you can just press before starting to type your query.

As expected, Search on Android is enhanced by Google’s Search Suggest for the web, which automatically suggests search terms depending what you have typed on the Search box.

One interesting new feature for Search on Android, though, is the fact that it’s integrated across the platform “so that applications can even share search capabilities with each other.” The way it works is like this: you search for something inside the music player, and before you know it you’ll be seeing results from other apps as well (like the browser or YouTube).

Clearly, Search on Android seems far more superior than the search features found on many available handsets in the market, but that should pretty much be a given because Android is a product of Google, after all. If they can’t do good Search, then who can?

Watch Google Search on Android in action with the video below.

Via Google Mobile Blog

Similar Posts:

• Verizon and Google about to close mobile search deal
• Sony Ericsson gets blogging
• Google assures us Android-powered Gphone is coming this year
• Google Mobile products to feature flawless integration with online counterparts in T-Mobile G1
• Google Mobile App for BlackBerry now available

I just recently found out and it does look promising as word on the street is that pages are loading faster. Most users have never realised that the Analytics code placed on their web pages using JavaScript (Google Analytics) rather than server-side can slow down how fast their pages load.

For most this is not a big issue but it can be depending on how the JavaScript (JS) is implemented, as I have seen sites that were so ‘modular’ by design that they actually loaded the JS several times turing a site that may be as quick as a Porsche into a VW Beetle.

Anyway I digress as I don’t want to get too techie.

Google Analytics (GA) is again worth a strong look and not because free but because they are reviving its feature set and it is again a serious contender at the bottom of the market.

• As stated it is a faster service but that could be just new servers running the new version of GA.
• Has new languages which should be awesome for GA and I guess everyone in those countries but really I think reflects Google’s tardiness in releasing regular updates that reflect a linguistically diversified Internet
• And my personal favourite e-commerce. That is what Google calls it but I call it eRecruitment. Many many companies are getting aggressive in their recruitment technology and advertising online and some of the e-commerce functionality should come in handy here.

If you want to read more about the ‘new’ GA then check out this list of resources (the top one is Google’s own site for official information)

• Google Analytics Blog - Homepage & related article
• Analytics Talk - GA.JS: New Google Analytics Tracking Code
• Niall Kennedy - Upgrade your Google Analytics tracker
• Occam’s Razor (Written by a Google Employee) - GA is Re-launched:Do these 5 things first
• ProBlogger - Google Analytics Gets an Upgrade

I will be covering Google for the next two weeks so be prepared to have everything Google Analytics (GA) thrown at you. Most of the articles will be for those on the rookie to intermediate side of the knowledge spectrum so you ‘hard-core’ guys don’t get your hopes up, but hop in when I make errors or to add your own tips.