Archive for August, 2010
Interactive Art Designer (Woburn, MA)
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010About Snapfinger
At Snapfinger, our success is two-fold. We are the Internet’s largest web and mobile food ordering site. We are also the leading provider of integrated remote ordering and pre-payment solutions for the restaurant industry. Oh Snap!
In 2010, Snapfinger drove millions of online orders while serving more than 28,000 restaurant locations in 2,200 cities. We’ve got even bigger goals for 2011 and guess what? We are looking for talented, enthusiastic, creative individuals to join our team! So if you have a passion for online and mobile ordering and you love to eat (who doesn’t?) Snapfinger just might be the place for you!
Interactive Art Director / Graphic Designer
About the Job
The Interactive Art Director is a member of the marketing team, responsible for developing interactive and traditional media across the marketing mix. The role includes developing, designing, and maintaining digital and print assets including the Snapfinger.com website, email campaigns, display ads, social media, and various print materials.
Snapfinger is seeking a talented candidate who has a diverse range of design capabilities, high energy, and attention to detail.
Primary Job Responsibilities:
• Develops and designs new creative concepts for various marketing programs, including but not limited to: interactive ads (flash/rich media), brand and product related ads, landing pages, social media/partnership/loyalty program graphics
• Creates graphics and templates for email marketing campaigns
• Further develops Snapfinger.com site with careful consideration for user experience
• Builds creative files to the proper specifications necessary for digital or print advertising
• Maintains brand standards across all marketing and communication platforms
Job Qualifications:
• Experience in digital graphic design for consumer sites, email marketing and display advertising
• Email marketing implementation experience in Fishbowl or similar platform
• Expert in Photoshop, Illustrator & Flash
• Proficient in InDesign and Office
• Knowledge of HTML/CSS required
• jQuery experience a plus
• 3-5+ years professional design experience (preferably in the B2C or ecommerce space)
• Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design, Visual Arts, or other related field of study
• Must be self-motivated with excellent communication skills, and strong attention to detail
• Must have the ability to perform creative work under deadlines and have the ability to work independently, as well as a team member, and to successfully manage competing projects
• Possess a professional and positive attitude!
*Portfolio Required
*Local candidates only, no relocation (Greater Boston Area)
For immediate consideration, please send resume, cover letter, and *portfolio indicating “Interactive Art Director” in the subject line
* Snapfinger is an equal opportunity employer.
Job posting from: Graphic Design Jobs
Canonical Tag on Mobile Site?
Monday, August 30th, 2010The title of this post is actually a query that I see frequently on this blog, and I’m a bit disheartened that so many people are still confused about this issue. Wanted to quickly clarify to help those people who are wondering whether they should use the rel=canonical tag on their mobile sites. The short answer is an emphatic “no”, you shouldn’t use a canonical tag on your mobile sites; but if you want more information on the topic, keep reading.
The issue as I understand it is, site owners are creating mobile-formatted versions of their desktop sites, and because there’s no content on these sites that isn’t on their desktop sites, they don’t want to hurt their desktop web site’s ability to rank on competitive keywords by diluting the link equity to the page. It’s a legitimate concern, but it’s a bit paranoid, as in reality mobile sites are not treated like duplicate content.
In fact, if you assume that they are duplicate content, and remove them from the search results with robots.txt or the canonical tag, you make it very difficult for people to find your mobile site if they’re looking for it.
Take Toys R Us, for example. Their mobile site is currently powered by Digby, who nofollows their mobile sites with robots.txt. This, like the canonical tag, effectively makes them invisible in search results. For example, if you search for [toys r us mobile site] hoping to find a site that works on your phone, you get a paid search ad, followed by 2 superpages.com listings for the Toys R Us locations in Mobile, Alabama, followed by the Toys R Us desktop site with a page talking about the Toys R Us mobile content, which includes a mobile site.
If you can read the tiny text on this page, you might click through and be redirected to the mobile site at toysrus.digby.com, but you’ll probably have to magnify the page in order to understand that is an option.
So for this particular query, which is not only a brand-loyal query but a navigational query, it would require the user to either click through on the paid listing, or scroll down, click through, magnify their screen and click through to find what they’re looking for. For the organic results, that’s asking a searcher to type in a query and do 4 additional steps before they’re able to find what they’re looking for, when they had already put in a very specific navigational query in hopes of getting to this site more quickly.
If you think that this is a user experience that Google will reward with long-term rankings, you may have become an SEO yesterday.
When you consider queries that are not brand-loyal queries, the situation becomes even more dire. Keeping with the Toys R Us example, let’s assume that I know my son likes Thomas the Train and I want to get him a Thomas the Train toy for Christmas, but I don’t know what’s out there or where to buy, so I do some research in a cab on the way to a meeting downtown. When I put in [thomas toys] in Google (which is one of the top toy related queries in the past 90 days, so Toys R Us should have optimized content for it even though it’s not a brand-loyal query) on my Android phone, I get a result page that shows two paid ads and one natural listing above the fold.
Fortunately for Toys R Us, they are accounting for mobile searches with the paid ad, but since mobile SEO is about the natural results, this is not optimization.
If in my taxicab search session I decide to scroll down to the fifth organic result on my mobile phone, I will find a relevant page on the Toys R Us desktop site. But since the only page that appears to redirect for mobile users is the root domain, it will not redirect me looking for results in a cab on my way to a meeting.
Because I have a limited amount of time to do research, it’s very likely that I will not spend a lot of time pinching and zooming on my smartphone to find the information that I’m looking for, and Toys R Us would have wasted an opportunity to convert a user who might have otherwise purchased a Thomas the Train toy either on my way home for the meeting or right there in the cab.
Consider a hypothetical contrary example as an illustration for what should be meant for mobile search engine optimization: Toys R Us doesn’t nofollow their mobile site with robots.txt, but instead optimizes their mobile site for the mobile user experience. They do query analysis to better understand the mobile user experience and find that their audience includes people like me who are frustrated at their mobile search experience. They take time to properly index the site and ensure that it is returned for relevant queries by creating a mobile search-optimized information architecture that meets the needs of the mobile searcher. Once all that’s done, they make it possible for the site to meet the user’s goals with as little hassle as possible by allowing one click conversions and local store directions and hours. They get more qualified traffic from search results because they would have, in this scenario, a more optimized site.
Unfortunately, they simply made their desktop site usable in mobile in certain scenarios (not search), and made the mobile version invisible in mobile search. If you consider this optimization, please continue to use the robots.txt file or canonical tag on your mobile site and call it what you want. Just hope your competitors don’t actually do some optimization of their mobile content and displace you even more in the natural search results.
Also, no disrespect to my friends at Toys R Us or Digby. I used them as an example, but I could use many others in their place. Please consider this free advice about the value of optimizing mobile sites instead of burying them.
Listing some good resources below about how to properly show content to mobile users and desktop users. And if you do represent a brand that wants to be competitive in mobile, but you don’t want to go it alone, there are a few agencies out there who can help you do it successfully, including my employer, Resolution Media.
Resources about alternatives to using rel=canonical on mobile sites
- Google SEO Starter Guide Includes Information About Serving Mobile Content and Search (page 24-27 in the current document)
- All my Search Engine Land articles about the topic of Mobile SEO
- Google Engineer Scott Huffman talking about mobile search�quality in 2009
Natural Search & Mobile SEO Blog
SEO Strategies That Actually WORK
Saturday, August 28th, 2010SEO Strategies do not have to be complicated, in fact so many people over complicate and and spend so much time trying to get around “google” that they don’t actually take enough action and start generating traffic to their website.
First, lets go over exactly why SEO (search engine optimization) is important and what makes an SEO strategy work.
SEO is all about helping google and other search engines find your website by including the correct keywords in your article or blog post. If you can determine what your target market is looking for, and produce content that meets their needs, all you need is some good SEO strategies to make sure your content gets in front of your target audience.
So is SEO really that important?
With so many ways to drive traffic online, SEO can be pushed aside in favour of social media, video marketing, Facebook pay per click and many other ways of marketing online, but here’s the BIG reason search engine optimization needs to be an important part of everything you do…
With the right SEO strategies in place, one piece of content like a blog post or article can bring you in traffic day after day without ANY additional work. That means that you can have 100′s of visitors coming to your site daily from work you just did ONCE. That’s leverage!
Social media moves so fast that while it is GREAT for building up leads, branding yourself, creating a following all at lightning speed, you need to combine it with good SEO strategies to ensure that you have a high volume of traffic coming in even when you do NO marketing for a week.
My favourite SEO strategy is one that fits in to my existing blogging strategy. I write my blog post and ensure that I have chosen a good keyword using google keyword tool. I look for a keyword that has over 1000 searches per month and less than 100,000 results in google.
I then write my blog post using the keyword in the title and throughout the body along with some of the other relevant keywords from the keyword tool.
Sounds pretty simple so far, right?
Now I just simply start to syndicate this content using the social media strategies that you can read about at the end of this article. Now I have hundreds of backlinks from highly ranked websites like Facebook, Twitter and Digg which makes google LOVE the post and usually I will find myself on page 2 of google within the hour before I have even done step two!
So what is step two in our SEO strategy? We write an article on our chosen subject. Again, there is so much information out there on article marketing and to be honest, I think it is over complicated by people trying to find shortcuts instead of just churning out as much high quality content as possible.
Put simply, I write an article on my chosen keyword and put it on high authority sites like Ezine articles with a backlink to my specific blog post on the same subject. When these articles begin to get traffic, so does my blog and the backlinks to my blog from these articles also helps push the original post higher up in google.
Learn more about SEO strategies that get results with our FREE webinar recording where Joe Musumeci reveals over 10 years of SEO experience in a simple, easy to implement strategy Free SEO Strategy Webinar
Notebook Cases Will be the Protection For Your Laptop
Saturday, August 28th, 2010Notebook Cases Will be the Protection For Your LaptopNotebook Cases Will be the Protection For Your Laptop By: Ronin JoucOffer protection to The LaptopLaptop cases are an important pc accessory you must make certain you obtain. When you purchase a laptop, sometimes the case is added for a low price or even free of charge. Even so, these Supra Cruizer may possibly not be an effective way to protect your personal computer. Search via the internet, go by means of reviews, or ask around for recommended laptop cases, so you’ll be able to pick one of the most suitable 1 to fit all your wants.What exactly Ought to To take into consideration?The basic elements that any person will need to look for when shopping for laptop cases are features, protection, and price.FeaturesThe features that distinguish cases from 1 and one more include points like: size, colour, additional storage, construction material, etc. The case which could come standard along with your laptop is usually just major enough to hold laptops, but not large enough to hold any additional folders, disks, DVDs, or some other Supra Baby Skytop that you might require. When searching at laptop pc cases, you need to also give consideration to the weight and comfort from the case. If your laptop is light and portable (under 4 pounds)you don’t have to worry on picking out from laptop cases that weigh 2 or three pounds. Unfortunately, in case your laptop is over eight pounds, those additional two or tree pounds might be the weight that makes it overweight to lug all over the location. Laptop cases can be discovered that are created of lightweight and comfortable resources with well-designed holding straps that don’t slide, pinch, or dig into your shoulder. Go into various stores to test unique laptop cases prior to purchasing 1. When you get on the internet, make sure you may acquire there is superior return policy.ProtectionProtection is important in choosing the correct case for the notebook. Laptop cases are created with soft, waterproof outsides with challenging, inner core to stand up to dropping, Supra Bandit, spills, etc. Laptop cases are tried for toughness. So evaluate your protection wants (traveling, lots of maneuvering, etc.), and opt for a case which will protect your investment.PricePrices will vary according to the above mentioned features, protection, and also the manufacturer from the diverse cases. Make sure you know your budgetary limits prior to purchasing, but what you spend will absolutely be worth it.
Sphinx Full Text Search, What I have learned
Friday, August 27th, 2010For those of you that do not know what Sphinx is, check out their site here.
I started writing a post on Sphinx a few weeks ago, only to realise that the way I was approaching Sphinx was wrong and that I had to rethink my strategy. Anybody that follows my personal blog will see that I had to rewrite my Sphinx implementation several times because of my approach to the problem.
Let me just say that I was initially attracted to Sphinx a few years ago, when my site Skylines Australia kept hitting table-locks due to MyISAM. We needed MyISAM for Full Text searches, or at least we did, until we discovered Sphinx. Once our indexes were built, we were searching very quickly across 4.5 million posts with far less overhead than MySQL. It also meant we could change our table engine to InnoDB so we could get around the table-level-locks.
The issue is, that we have a lot of data here at work and we have lots of search inputs. Think ‘keyword’ and ‘category’ in ‘location’; We initially approached it like so;
- Search the location index, get a location id
- Search the Category index, get a category id
- Search the Main index using the location id and category id as filters.
Now, thats ok, but what if you have hierarchical categories and locations? Ie, Searching for ‘Mechanics’ needs to include ‘Motor Mechanics,’ ‘Bike Mechanics,’ ‘Boat Mechanics’ etc… We had one search that needed to search across 1800 categories! The other issue we ran into is we needed to have proximity searches. If there were less than n results at the Suburb Level, we would expand to the Area, then the Region, all the way to the State. This meant that we would need to run the searches 4 times (or 12 in total) so we could keep our results separate. Couple this with 1.9 million searchable rows, 25,000 locations and 2000 categories, searches were taking a __LONG__ time to complete with Sphinx.
So.. Back to the drawing board.
My boss mentioned that Sphinx is built to search documents and that maybe we need to make a ‘document’ structure for each of our records. I was a little dubious at first.. Here is the idea;
As Sphinx searches for matches and does not actually return the data it has found (only the data’s “document id” so you can query MySQL for the exact match) it means that our data in Sphinx does not need to be readable to humans, it can be a mashup of multiple data sources.
- We get all the items we want searchable and all their keywords, put them into a single column named ‘document’ and create a new table in MySQL.
- We get all the categories that this item must appear in, so not exact categories (like ‘Motor Mechanics’) but all the parents also, so we have fewer search terms, we get the category id’s and prefix them with ‘cat_’.
- We create a new column called ‘location’ and in that column, we get the id’s for the location the item is in, we prefix each ‘part’ of the location with its ‘type’, ie ’suburb_’, ‘area_’, ‘region_’, ’state_’, etc.
Once we are done, we have a row that looks like this;
Id: Actual id of the item row (relating to its original table)
Document: ‘Jims Mechanics quality mechanics we do good work cat_199 cat_432 cat_909 cat_2 cat_93′
Location: ‘Manly Sydney NSW Australia suburb_1022 area_300 region_23 state_3′
Once we build this table and index it, we can query the index using the PECL Sphinx library (much better than the supplied Sphinx PHP API) and Sphinx’s ‘EXTENDED2′ query type like so;
‘@document $keywords @document (cat_1|cat_2|cat_3) @location suburb_1′
AND is implied with Sphinx, so the above query is saying match the keywords, any of the 3 categories AND location. More about the cool EXTENDED2 query syntax can be found in the Sphinx Docs.
Basically, because we restructured our data to match Sphinx and didn’t try to make Sphinx work the way it wasn’t designed to, we saved lots and lots of queries, made it perform hundreds of times better (think thousandth’s of seconds to perform a search) and have alleviated MySQL of a lot of potentially damaging work. If you do anything with Full Text or require indexes for anything at all, I’d highly recommend Sphinx. It may seem a little odd at first and hard to get to do something, but persevere and try to rethink your situation, it will be worth it in the end.
The Morning Lowdown 03.03.11
Thursday, August 26th, 2010
Some of the stories people are talking about this morning: » Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is said to be considering legal action against Facebook for poaching. The social giant recently hired Microsoft’s global ad sales head Carolyn Everson as its VP of global sales…
Watch Jersey Shore Season 3 Episode 10 – A Cheesy Situation Online
Thursday, August 26th, 2010Here’s find out what you missed previous time on Jersey Shore. Snooki’s hookups began to find her nerves, Mike made pranks on Deena and Snooki, and then the blokes ditched Mike . Watch Jersey Shore Season 3 Episode 10: A Cheesy Situation online free where Sammi retreat to your house, after which you can Snooki’s feelings for Vinny deepen, however, Mike believes a hook-up has the scent of cheese. Oh because of the most effective way, the other episode will air on March 3, 2011.
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In Jersey Shore Season 3 Episode 10 as those who don’t ever got a little while ago, here’s what we neglect on “Kissing Cousins”; Because of the Jenni, Snooki remarked that your girlfriend previous hookups today related when Ronnie contemplated once again on departing from until a dad prepared him understand wherever they goes, he could always genuinely feel crappy. Subsequently, Mike’s frank cracks turned adjacent to him that experts claim laved him believing that they wasn’t so competent on implementing people shy. Eventually, often the group obtained commited to memory apart until Sammi done her retreat in the coast. And that is certainly anything you wouldn’t notice last week, almost all excitement in addition to revelation. Nevertheless it wasn’t over nonetheless since this The subsequent t hursday, March Three or more, 2011, those red carpet is ready readily available for “A Cheesy Situation” cartoon to Watch Jersey Shore Season 3 Episode 10 online.
Watch Jersey Shore Season 3 Episode 10 oahu is the next curvaceous reality issues that will likely make your shore within fire wherein Sammi finally contributed to on the residential home while Snooki’s emotions for Vinny enlarge. Mike alternatively believes a superb solid hook-up smells like gouda and that’s the spot where the title emanates from (Am Everybody right?). Repeatedly We’re wrong or right, it doesn’t concern because as installed on now I’m truly engrossed watching for Sammi’s return. Uh-uh, no trouble or stop working when possible Ronnie become one and don’t toss your heat range on people poor items. Beyond doubt it truly is deemed an episode we must not do not catch in order that you guys on the web; be sure to look at Jersey Shore Season 10 Episode 10 online this Wednesday. Coupled with don’t forget to be able to puff a little bit of corn this will let you cola in your. Cheers!
Watch Jersey Shore Season 3 Episode 10 Online
The Top 10 Internet & Search Marketing Trends for 2011
Sunday, August 22nd, 2010As the year comes to a close, we share with you our insights related to the Internet & Online Marketing trends of 2011. We examine closely the most important trends from the SEO industry to Social Media & Location Based Marketing and from Mobile Marketing to Email Marketing and Budget Allocation. Of course there is [...]
Web SEO Analytics
Full time Graphic designer for Automotive industry (Gardena, CA)
Friday, August 20th, 2010Company: American Auto Accessories Inc.
Title: Graphic Designer
Position type: Full-time In House
Location: Gardena, CA (West Coast Branch Office)
Designer Requirements:
Expectations/Responsibilities: The candidate will work closely with the sales and marketing team to create all visual materials from initial concept to final production. Creativity, attention to detail, and organization skills are key to a successful candidate. Must have the ability to manage multiple projects and hit deadlines in a fast paced environment. Must also have good communication skills to positively engage in creative meetings with management to develop new ideas and concepts. The candidate must also have experience working with outside vendors for print and photography to handle successful production of final product. Must have experience managing and cataloging a high volume of digital assets. Experience with automotive products is not required but a big advantage. Occasional travel to industry events and shows.
Qualifications:
• BA in Graphic Design is preferable but not required
• Design experience in the following – packaging, logos, ad campaign development, catalogs, sell sheets, sales materials and etc.
Quick turn around and have the ability to meet and adapt to fluctuating deadlines
• Expert Mac user with ability to trouble shoot day-to-day computer issues.
• Expert knowledge of current Adobe CS Indesign, Photoshop and Illustrator
• Knowledge of current Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint
• Illustration ability a plus
• Photography experience is a big advantage
• HTML / Web design experience a plus
• Excellent print production experience of projects
• Excellent packaging design experience
• Excellent project management, communication and organization skills
Fax submissions can be sent to: (310) 436-3615 Attn: HR
We will review your portfolio at the scheduled interview.
Job posting from: Graphic Design Jobs
Microsoft puts the pedal to the metal on tablets
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010Put bluntly, Microsoft has blown it when it comes to tablet computing. Yeah, the company was the form factor’s earliest champion, but its vision was essentially rejected by the mass market. But work appears to have ramped up on Windows 8, which will include an interface designed just for tablets.