1. Use Keyword Matching Options

Most PPC campaigns are set up with Broad Match keywords, this means your campaign will appear for any search containing those keywords; while this will give you the most exposure it may result in your campaign appearing against the wrong searches. For instance, if you're selling a high value product you probably wouldn't want to appear against searches for "free" or "cheap", adjust your Keyword Matching options to prevent this.

2. Use Keywords in the Advert

Ensure you mention your main targeted keyword in the text of the advert itself as this not only helps to ensure the advert appears when that keyword is searched for but it also provides additional visual exposure. Google will bold the keyword in the advert text if that keyword matches the search, this helps your advert stand out from the others on the page. Take a look at the example below...

3. Use Negative Keywords

While selecting the right keywords is an important factor in the success of a PPC campaign an area that is often overlooked are Negative Keywords. While your keywords indicate which words you want your advert to appear against, Negative Keywords can be used to flag terms you do not wish to appear against, this way you can ensure your campaign doesn't appear against the wrong search.

4. Create Multiple Ads

Not every advert you create is going to be effective so it's best to cover your bases and create multiple adverts for each of your campaigns. You can adjust your settings so that Google automatically displays the most effective advert over time, this way you'll only display the advert which is most likely to generate a click.

5. Use Ad Groups

If your PPC campaign is targeting a wide range of keywords you may want to consider splitting the keywords into separate Ad Groups which can then be targeted with their own adverts. Multiple Ad Groups allows you to tailor adverts to target a smaller set of keywords rather than applying the same ads to a long list of keywords.

6. Utilising Analytics

Google offer a fantastic suite of analytical tools to help you assess how well your campaigns are performing but you can also use Google Analytics to monitor which keywords and campaigns are proving effective. You can also use Analytics to see which pages your visitors viewed and how long they spent on the site. A really helpful aspect monitored by Google is the bounce rate; this shows the percentage of people that immediately left the website after clicking the advert, use the other tips to help lower this and keep vistors on your website.

7. Utilise your Quality Score

Google assign a Quality Score out of 10 against each of your keywords, the higher your Quality Score is the lower the minimum bid will be to appear on page one for your chosen keywords. Ensure your website is well populated with the keywords you're targeting in your campaigns to help improve your quality score.

8. Utilise a Landing Page

A landing page is a great way to help turn a visitor into a customer. Rather than sending those that click on your advert straight to your homepage consider creating a shorter introductory page which quickly provides the content they were searching for. A good landing page, which mentions the targeted keywords, can also assist with improving your Quality Score and help reduce the bounce rate.

9. Region Targeting

It is possible to tailor your PPC campaign to target a specific region or area, this is ideal if your business only serves a portion of the UK. A radius can be applied, or you can target specific towns and cities so that your campaign will only appear for those in your target area. You can target as many regions as you require.

10. Regular Updates

Ensure you regularly update your PPC campaign to not only monitor how successfully it's working but also to react to any sudden rise in competition. If you only update your campaigns occasionally you may find your campaigns appearing lower than your competitors who update more regularly and can take advantage of drops in competition.

VSI-thinking offers a managed Pay Per Click service to help you get the most from your marketing budget, couple this with our search engine optimisation services to maximise your website promotion through the search engines. Contact us to find out how else we can help with your website and online marketing.

1. The First Email

The very first email was a test message sent by US programmer Ray Tomlinson in 1971, as it was just a test message it wasn't preserved. Speaking on the first email messages Tomlinson commented that "test messages were entirely forgettable and I have, therefore, forgotten them."

2. The First Domain Name

The first domain name to be registered was symbolics.com in March 1985. You can still visit symbolics.com today where it serves as an advertising portal as well as providing some history on the first domain name. There are now more than 250,000,000 domain names in existence.

3. The First WWW Information Site

The first website providing information about the World Wide Web project went live on August 6th 1991. The website is still live today and you can visit it at The World Wide Web Project

4. The First Banner Advert

The first ever banner advert went live in October 1994, it appeared on HotWired.com and promoted 7 art museums.

5. The First eBay Sale

The first item to be sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer, for $14.83 in 1995. eBay was called AuctionWeb until it officially changed its name in September 1997.

6. The First Amazon Purchase

Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought was the first book purchased on Amazon in 1995. Amazon initally started as an online bookshop but now sells just about everything.

7. The First Skype Sentence

The first sentence sent through Skype was in April 2003. A member of the Estonian development team asked 'Tere, kas sa kuuled mind?', which means "Hello, can you hear me?" in English. Ten years on many Skype calls still start with this question. Skype was bought by Microsoft in 2011.

8. The First Facebook Profile

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was the first person to create a Facebook profile, the first non-founder to join was Arie Hasit. Facebook now has more than 1.06 billion active users.

9. The First YouTube Video

YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim posted the first video on the popular video service, a 20 second clip filmed at the San Diego Zoo. It was uploaded in April 2005 and has been viewed more than 10 million times. You can watch it for yourself below...

The First Twitter Message

The first Twitter update was written by co-founder Jack Dorsey on March 21st 2006, when it was called Twttr. Like most firsts in this list the update was essentially a test message, you can see it below. Twitter has more than 200 million users and has recently launched video and music services.

just setting up my twttr

— Jack Dorsey (@jack) March 21, 2006

What other internet firsts do you remember and what other internet firsts should we be celebrating? First cup of coffee photographed on Instagram? First person to ever comment "First" on an article? Or maybe the first app ever downloaded to an Android device. Let us know in the comments section below.

Thanks to Yahoo Finance

Jinha Lee's SpaceTop 3D in action

The SpaceTop 3D uses a transparent LED display and built-in cameras to track gestures and eye movements. So rather than using a mouse to navigate through files users simply point and wave in a style reminiscent of Minority Report. Designer Jinha Lee suggested a more natural method of working with documents - "If you are working on a document you can pick it up and flip through it like a book,". However, for tasks that require a little more precision, where hand gestures may not be accurate enough, there is also a touchpad.

Jinha Lee is also working on other ways of interacting with digital information including augmented reality applications, which combine with a virtual reality handset to let users try on items from online shops. Lee's ultimate goal is to try and unite the physical and digital.

While advances like the Xbox Kinect (which was also developed by Microsoft), PlayStation Move and Nintendo Wii show that gesture based input is popular not everyone is convinced by the Minority Report inspired input. Some designers feel that gesture based input neglects the sense of touch, depriving the texture and feedback that can only be garnered from touching an actual object.

Lee hopes the gesture based system could be in general use within the next 10 years, until then take a look at Lee's website to see the desktop in action.

More recently, photo tagging has become the norm for social network users. Facebook’s facial recognition software allows its users to identify their friends in their photos and enables the user to share this identification to other friends. When enough data has been entered by friends for a particular user, the site uses an algorithm to scan the image for faces. Then it attempts to match those faces with previously tagged people in your other albums. As a result, the manual process of tagging users becomes automated once enough data has been entered. This has proved extremely popular with Facebook users and as of January 2011, the site housed more than 90 billion images. Privacy concerns aside, this functionality reduces the number of steps taken for users to share this information with one another and ultimately has increased the engagement among its users on the social network, improving Facebook’s competitive advantage over its competitors in the meantime.

Logically, the next progression for tagging is video. Over 4,000,000,000 hours of video are watched each month on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html), and 72 hours of video are uploaded each minute. Although various forms of tagging currently exist it is mainly used for categorisation purposes and the ability to tag people and objects within a video has up to now remained elusive. People have tried to achieve user engagement within video to attain various end goals, through pop up advertising and annotations but these have been found to be intrusive for mature web users (under 35’s on the whole accept that this is a price for free video provision).

Non-intrusive video tagging has the following benefits:

• Allow more information about objects within a video when the user is engaged.
• Increased click through rates and conversions.
• Allows new ways of interaction from the user (such as automatic engagement on social networks through the video)
• Potential to decrease supporting advertising (although this requires a change in advertising model) through affiliated embedded links within the video

Consider this, imagine you were a golfing fan and enjoyed watching golf highlights on YouTube. If a player was using a new golf club and you wanted to get more information about it, how would you achieve this? The most common way to find more information about it would be to search for the club name using a search engine. However to do this you need to leave the original site that you were on, and your online journey is now out of the advertiser’s control. By giving users the ability to click on aspects of a video that they are interested in, you remove any linguistic barriers (how the user would describe your product exactly in the search engines), intermediary channels (dubious suppliers of the product) and potentially could give the user the opportunity to buy the product that they are interested in then and there. As with photo tagging, the number of steps taken by the user to achieve an end goal has dramatically reduced by including non intrusive video tagging.

When considering the current levels of worldwide video usage, the existing state of video interaction by the main video suppliers is not what it should be. In its current form the built in functionality of YouTube video tagging doesn't really hit the mark and the aesthetic look does not match up to the high levels of production used in some videos. Couple overlaid annotation tags with adverts that load before the video plays, and adverts that popup during playback and there are a number of barriers preventing users engaging with the video.

Lots of elements covering the video

Analysing video in order to recognise objects is in its early stages and requires a high level of human interaction. The automatic recognition of objects, people or places in video is not currently available for mainstream usage and as a result video tagging had been consigned to niche markets.

However, in recent months there are a number of firms which have made great strides in bringing this technology to the mainstream marketplace. An early leader is a small British outfit called wireWAX. Using its own technology, wireWAX allows users to upload their own videos or link from a number of video suppliers, including YouTube, and allows users to add motion-tracked hotspots or ‘tags’ to people and objects within the video. See the example below...

In addition, viewers can also access feature rich applications with video-in-video, image carousels, and interactive apps (such as Flickr, Instagram, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter etc) within the video player. Aesthetic concerns have also been addressed by allowing video makers to fully brand the experience for their own look and feel. The tagging functionality also makes videos touch friendly as the buttons are generously sized. By using tagging as a base allowing new features and functionality, WireWax offers viewers a reason to engage with the video by offering additional content and gameplay within the video.

Although we are in exciting times, video tagging is a technology currently in its infancy. The ability to connect, interact and ultimately engage with video using different forms will emerge and develop over the next few years and the ability to detect objects within video through automatic tagging will provide the key mechanism for it to be a success.

Peter Fieischer, Google's global privacy counsel, said "Our new privacy policy demonstrates our long-standing commitment to protecting our users' information and creating great products. We are confident that our privacy notices respect European law".

Almost everyone uses a Google site or product on a daily basis, whether you watch clips on Youtube, search for a business with the Google search engine, send messages through GMail or hangout on Google+, not to mention using the Google owned Android operating system, so it is important the privacy policy is clear so people can make an informed choice.

The EU has proposed that Google must reinforce users' consent, provide a centralised opt-out tool, and also proposed that Google should limit data use for authorised purposes. Considering the vast amount of data Google can collect it's no surprise that some people have gone completely Google free, cutting the search engine's services and products out of their online life.

While there would have been a higher cost to register a shorter UK address Nominet were keen to highlight some extra security features which would have been provided to sites that opted to change. All sites which were to use the shorter .uk address would be DNSSEC-signed (Domain Name System Security Extensions) which would make them a harder target for hackers.

After a three-month consultation Nominet revealed there wasn't enough support for the proposed idea. While some agreed that the shorter web address would have benefits many were concerned it would be confusing for web users as it would exist alongside the current .co.uk domain.

Nominet are still pursuing the idea and a revised proposal will now be drawn up. The new proposal will maintain the focus on security measures; pricing and registration verification will also be scrutinised in response to the feedback received. A statement released by Nominet shows their continued interest in this idea "We are going to explore whether it is possible to present a revised proposal that meets the principles of increasing trust and security and maintaining the relevance of the .uk proposition in a changing landscape,"

This isn't the first time Nominet has looked into top level domain names; in July Nominet applied for control of the extensions .cymru and .wales. Their application is currently being evaluated by ICANN.

Internet Explorer 10 was previously only available on the new Windows 8 operating system; however a Release Preview version was made available to Windows 7 users which, while stable, was still a work in progress. Aside from the Release Preview the latest version of Internet Explorer that could be downloaded by users of Windows 7 was Internet Explorer 9.

Internet Explorer 10 delivers improved performance over its predecessor, along with multi-touch capabilities for those with touchscreen devices, and improved web security. Internet Explorer 10 also has support for more than 30 new modern web standards including HTML5. Arguably the best feature however is the fact that Microsoft will now auto-update users to keep them on the latest version. Those using the Release Preview will be first to be updated followed by users running Internet Explorer 9.

Internet Explorer 10 will auto update in future

Web designers and developers will be pleased to see a more up to date, standards compliant browser seeing widespread use. Auto-updating also means that developers will be able to take advantage of some of the latest web technologies without having to worry so much about backwards support for older versions of Internet Explorer. Usage of Internet Explorer 9 is anticipated to fall rapidly as the automatic updates roll out.

1. Growing user platform

There will be one billion HTML5 capable phones sold in 2013, up from 336 million HTML5 capable phones sold in 2011 according to Strategy Analysis. Phone buying trends are pushing HTML5 forward and in 2013 this will only increase.

2. Single standard platform

HTML5 features such as graphics, video, data storage, multimedia and user interactions will be widely used over the next few years. In total, 25 HTML5 features currently in development will be used more widely, replacing several current technologies with a single standard platform.

3. HTML5 is going to be the standard

50 organisations are working as part of the HTML Working Group. The aim of the group is to create a W3C standard which has a target date of 2014. HTML5 and CSS3 are definitely the future standard. They are robust, solid and have plenty of features.

4. Companies will compete

Companies such as Microsoft and Google also know HTML5 is the future standard and therefore they will compete against each other for the best products to be prepared for 2014 and the future. Both companies are already taking steps to promote the use of HTML5.

5. Gaming Apps

HTML5 gaming apps are becoming more and more popular. HTML5 enables developers to create interactive apps without the need to use Adobe Flash or any 3rd party plug-ins, making HTML5 an ideal platform for cross platform games.

The increase in mobile phones usage in terms of the internet over the past few years has pushed the need for HTML5 and will continue to do so. Large and small companies understand the importance of HTML5 for web development in the future.

Optimisation not only helps your user interface but is also an important factor in Google’s ranking.

Summary

• Download size compressed to 1,200kb from 3,400kb
• Page load time down to 4.67 from 9.83 (cut by 50%)
• Cached pages are down to 2.8 seconds load time

HTML

General HTML for pages has been reduced; this has helped with the W3C validation which is now completely compliant.

• Download size compressed to 28.9 kb from 78.0kb
• Page load time down to 1.54 from 2.62

JavaScript

Reduced libraries, and set to compress with web server.

• Files reduced to 15 from 20
• Download size compressed to 163.3 from 416.6
• Page load time down to 0.43 from 1.47

Stylesheets CSS

Optimise, optimise, optimise. We looked at every aspect of the stylesheet and optimised new. The stylesheet was then set to compress with web server.

• Files reduced to 3 from 5
• Download size compressed to 9.3 from 44.9
• Page load time down to 0.268 from 0.65

Images

With images the philosophy is to remove, compress and consolidate.

• Files increased to 62 from 34
• Download size compressed to 981 from 2,800
• Page load time down to 2.72 from 7.31

One of our senior web designers, with over 16 years experience says, “Web design is not just about the pretty pictures it’s about the technical implementation, how you code the site. Optimisation is very important as it can make the difference between customer engagement or leaving the site for a competitor. Reducing bounce rate is a key issue for high conversion rates and improved completion goals on a site and we help our customers achieve this.”

VSI-thinking has designed and optimised many customers’ sites for mobile and tablet. Managing Director, Mark Thomas said “many of our clients are now asking us to develop their site using our responsive design technology, to help accommodate the ever increasing mobile and tablet usage.” Mobile users also have the option to view the site as a mobile optimised page or the desktop version.

Mark Thomas continues “one of the most impressive aspects of the site is how the functionality works with mobile and tablets. Even complex functionality for room booking and tee time systems works on every smart phone”.

VSI-thinking, is a leading web design Cardiff agency.