The South African stadiums include the Peter Mokaba Stadium in Polokwane, Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban and the big Soccer City in Johannesburg.

If you follow the Street View’s path far enough, you will notice you can actually enter the stadium and get a feel for the scale of the stadiums which will be hosting major football matches over the next few weeks.

With the World Cup bringing massive exposure to South Africa, it makes you wonder how many companies have taken advantage by displaying their brand names, which in this example would get captured by the Street View teams displaying them on the web for all to see.

Now is the time to start thinking about how a World Cup-themed website or the recent surge in social media activity can boost your company’s presence and traffic within the next month.

Why not give it a try yourself and let us know how you are taking advantage of World Cup fever?

Chris Hutchison
Web Developer / Designer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

SSL is a communications protocol and stands for Secure Sockets Layer. The simple explanation is that it encrypts data that transfers over a website, thus keeping it safe. Its main use is for payment gateways where sensitive data such as credit card details are passed to a third party for processing, such as PayPal.

If you are familiar with SSL you will notice your browser bar going green when you visit https://www.google.com as this will confirm the data you send from the page is secure from anyone trying to look in.

SSL also means that referral strings will not be available to provide analytical data and as far as us SEOs are concerned, the removal of referrer strings will create a bit of havoc  in trying to determine which Google site and what keywords were used when a visitor lands on a website.

So, all in all, it is an interesting addition from the Google team. SSL is currently in beta and is likely to roll out to other services such as images and maps in the near future. We’d be interested to know how you get on with them.

Chris Hutchison
Web Developer / Designer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

For example, if I tweeted about a brand new car and added the hash tag “#cars”, then this will allow other Twitter users to search for messages relating to cars. This can be open to abuse, mostly due to hash tag spamming, however the good tweets normal greatly outweigh the bad.

This now leads on to YouTube and other services which have recently started to adopt the feature.

By allowing users to add a tag to their video comments, YouTube visitors can now add hash tags to their search which will display all videos containing comments with the relevant tags.

A good example of this can be seen below, where we search for videos branded “#omg”.

This is good for us, as visitors, to be able to use familiar social media tools on all the websites we use every day. The more websites that adapt to popular systems or short hands, we will be able to get information we want much quicker and be able to share with more people who have similar interests.

Chris Hutchison
Web Developer / Designer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

For those of you that are new to Google Places, it’s a free service in which Google caters to the small business world by allowing local listings to show up in regular Google search listings. These listings also populate Google Earth and Maps, with an additional business information page tied to them with opening hours and business pictures including Street View photos (if available) and other information.

The new feature extends this information even further by allowing a sponsored ‘link’ style box to be drawn below the local listings. This box then contains one of the following, which Google plans to charge roughly $25 a month for:

• photos
• website
• menu
• reservations
• coupons
• videos
• directions

You will be allowed only one; however the system will allow you to rotate which one you display, possibly costing extra fees to do so.

In summary, the new feature doesn’t sound like much, however, in a competitive business, having a small advantage over another with one of the above featured links will not only allow the visitor to gather more information on your company but also provide your listing with extra eye candy and most likely improve your click-through rates.

Chris Hutchison
Web Developer / Designer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

If you are familiar with E-commerce systems then you might be aware of how little changes to images, the product pages or the checkout stage can have a big impact on your sales.

Customers like to be reassured as much as possible that a website is safe and secure after the recent influx of phishing and general credit card security reports published in the newspapers and on TV.

Because of this, including small additions such as a list and image of credit cards and security used on the website gives peace of mind to your customers and this can increase sale conversions over a website which doesn’t make its payment methods as clear.

Other small changes can include the structure of product pages. By rearranging key elements such as ‘add to cart’ and then placing them in a position which increases visibility, this will put a higher emphasis on them, resulting in more clicks. Making ‘add to cart’ stand out more by increasing its colour or contrast will also have a similar effect, providing it stays within the style of the web page and not a horrific neon orange colour, for example.

All of these points are basic usability issues. If you spend time improving and optimising as much as possible the results will speak for themselves. Give it a try, or get in contact for a usability report on your website!

Chris Hutchison
Web Developer / Designer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

According to David Drummond, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer, recent events, including the allegation that attacks originating from China were logged gaining regular access to Human Right activists connected with China, and also ongoing attempts to block access to many popular social media websites has given Google reason to remove the censoring of its products.

They have achieved this by redirecting all visitors from google.cn to Google Hong Kong (google.com.hk).

Google have expressed that doing so is entirely legal and hope China respects their actions, however we all know this is far from over and await China’s response and actions on the matter.

If you want to keep up to date with which Google services are blocked in China, you can visit Google’s monitoring tool which details which products are blocked from Chinese viewing (http://www.google.com/prc/report.html#hl=en).

So what do you think about this ongoing dispute? Is Google in the right for wanting to provide uncensored search to China? Or do you feel that China is in the right for wanting to maintain a strict control over opinion in their country?

Chris Hutchison
Web Developer / Designer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

The most common mistake made is regarding web browsers. There are a lot of web browsers currently available on the internet, with 5 or so major ones; Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

If you view your website in Internet Explorer, it might look different in Safari due to the browsers having a different implementation of web standards. The best way to understand the problem is to imagine you are asked to build a garden shed and are handed a document which states how it should look finished. The method in which you get to the finished product can be different and it’s because of this that visual variations amongst browsers exist.

The easiest method of conquering the problem is to simply ignore the issue and assume your visitors use the same set up as you when browsing the website. This is a naive view of the problem and can potentially lead to lost sales if your site users cannot buy your products or services.

The best method would be to use tracking software, such as Google Analytics, to gauge the percentages of web browsers your visitors use. If the results show that a large selection of browsers is used to shop on your website, then you should cater to them all in order to maximize conversions.

Chris Hutchison
Web Developer / Designer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

Google loves great content. And not only that, it loves great content in quantity.

If you refresh your homepage with new content every day, then Google is more inclined to visit your website, especially when you start to build PageRank.

More content also means more possibilities of long tail search traffic. To explain, let’s, for the sake of example, make a new website page or blog post about rabbit hutches. The website which contains this content is a pet shop and has now managed to add a new webpage containing keywords and information on rabbit hutches which Google will pick up on and add to its indexes. If there’s not much competition in the search results for the terms you wrote about, you might start to see your page rank on the first page, even more so if people link to you.

Another factor is the size of your website. If we are believed into thinking Google recognises the size and quantity of information on your website, the continual addition of content will help push you up the rankings, especially if you continue to update and maintain your website for a number of years.

So, in summary, it is always good to always look after your website and to keep adding to it over time with new features, information and tools – not just for Google, but also for your visitors!

Chris Hutchison
Web Developer / Designer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

You may have also noticed that practically every clothes, jewellery and card shop has a Valentine’s Day theme on their website. But why do websites do this, and what does it achieve?

Regular Updates
Google loves a website that keeps up to date. Fresh content and daily updates can really help your rankings. Customers visiting your site will also be given the impression your website is well looked after, with care taken to maintain a number of themes throughout the year.

Aesthetics
From a design point of view, the new colour schemes and holiday graphics will really give out a feeling that the customer can relate to and help you bring home sales during the period.

Increases Sales
If a customer lands on your website in the January sales period and your website is themed and templated towards this, the chances they will checkout and purchase goods from you are dramatically increased. If you can match your website with the trends of your traffic then you will ultimately do well.

So there you have it, if you haven’t yet developed themes for Valentine’s Day, Christmas Day and other holiday periods, what are you waiting for!

Chris Hutchison
Web Developer / Designer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

The first of which is a feature called “Answer Highlighting”. It may not be the most advanced addition; however, by simply highlighting your search question into the results, this makes it very simple to find quick answers. The example Google gives to test the feature is: Who is the author of 1984? The answer is obviously George Orwell, as shown here.

http://www.google.com/search?q=who+is+the+author+of+1984

You will notice across the results that “the author of 1984” is strongly highlighted to improve results.

The next big addition is the increasing support for Rich Snippets. Rich Snippets are the extra mark-up you can add to your website’s content which allows Google to pull specific information (snippets) into its search results.

The new snippets supported are for events. The example on the blog suggests that if, for instance, you performed a search for Concerts in San Jose, you will find that the upcoming events are shown directly inside the results, much like a search result can have site links and website reviews.

If you are technically minded you can follow this link to see how you can add this feature to your website.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164506

Rich Snippets seems to be gaining in popularity since Google took a supported interest in them, and is now worth considering for any new website, to give it an edge in the rankings.

Chris Hutchison
Web Developer / Designer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC