A landing page differs from a website’s homepage in that it’s created specifically to capture web visitors referred from a unique marketing campaign and to route or convert them to particular marketing outcomes and actions. For example, your landing page may be designed specifically to get visitors to buy a particular product or service, sign up for your newsletter, enter your promotional contest, join your organization or volunteer for your next project. It’s a way of actively engaging potential customers.

Examples of effective landing pages can be found on the website for Metabolic Research Center, a Jacksonville, FL-based company with weight loss centers in 18 states nationwide. Through PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns in various targeted markets, potential customers skip the homepage and get directed to a market-specific landing page where they can find the weight loss centers closest to them and complete an email form for a free consultation. Studies show that a potential customer’s likelihood of buying a product or service diminishes with each necessary click. Targeted landing pages cut through the clicks and deliver customers right to the online goods they’re looking for.

Well designed landing pages deliver businesses new profiled and qualified prospective customer leads, allowing them to better deliver relevant and targeted follow-up marketing communications; boost chances of an instant, online conversion; and give web visitors reasons to return to a website, even if they don’t buy in right away.

Maximize your business’ website with carefully tailored landing pages by calling AppSoft Development at 800-736-9112 or completing our online form for a free website review and quote.

A video produced by Project Glass (see the full video below) shows a mockup of the glasses in action. As the wearer walks through the city streets, he gets meeting reminders, directions to the music section of a book store, notification that a friend is nearby (402 feet away, to be precise), and an alert that subway service is suspended – all right before his very eyes. Of course, we’re betting that the real deal will also include a proliferation of advertisements closer to your eyeballs than they’ve ever been. But if you’re a business owner and can play the game in an effective, non-annoying way, we see some definite potential:

• If you’re in the retail business, Google glasses-wearing customers who spot your product ad can place an order on the spot – even if they’re two blocks away from your store and never step foot inside.
• Restaurant manager? Alert passersby to your daily specials and send them a coupon before they reach your competitor around the corner.
• Realtors are chomping at the bit for Google glasses that can show prospective buyers room dimensions and decorating tips while they’re walking through a home for sale.
• Many in the tourism industry already are brainstorming ways to use Google glasses as the hip new way to offer clients self-guided tours.

As Project Glass continues, you can bet that we here at AppSoft Development will be watching and developing ways to help your business take advantage of what might prove to be a game-changing technology. In the meantime, we can help boost your business via a beautiful and functional website, mobile website and SEO or social media campaign. Whatever your business goal, we’re ready to help you achieve it. Call 800-736-9112 today.

1. Cover & Profile Images: The Timeline format affords you an impressive 851×316-pixel opportunity to give your brand a visual boost. Use it to showcase new products or visually convey promotional messages. And the profile picture allows you to include a secondary image. Businesses typically use it to post their logo or a photo of the business owner or employee, adding a personal touch that lends a feeling of accessibility and comfort level for current and prospective clients.
2. History: Use this feature to highlight milestones or significant achievements your business has made along the way including new product launches, expansions or moves to new offices, head-turning hires and celebrity endorsements.
3. Wide, Pinned & Repositioned Posts & Pics: Got something to say and want to say it loud? Now, posts can be positioned “double wide,” stretching all the way across the two columns. Simply hover your cursor over the image and click the star. Pin it to the top for seven days by hovering over the pencil icon and clicking “Pin to Top.” You also can reposition an image for better visibility by clicking “Reposition Photo” under the pencil icon, then using your cursor to move the photo and clicking “Save.”
4. Customized Campaign Tabs & Apps: Businesses now can run multiple online campaigns with assigned names, images and custom tabs. Tabs are located just beneath the cover image and displayed as Views (for the general default stuff like photos, maps, events and likes) or
   Apps (third party apps). Add custom thumbnails and use your Apps tabs to individually brand special promotions, product pushes and calls to action.
5. Private Messages: Customers who want to ask a question or lodge a complaint can now do so via private messages instead of public posts. Though you can turn this feature off, it’s recommended that businesses leave it on to encourage communication from current and potential customers. The key is to use it. Don’t let customers’ questions or concerns go unanswered for days. Quick, personal attention can make or break your business and this feature makes it easier for both you and your clientele.

To make sure your business is making the most of the new Facebook Timeline, contact AppSoft Development. We specialize in web and social media marketing including tailored Facebook campaigns. Call 800-736-9112 or complete our online email form for a free quote.

“We continue to improve many of our systems, including related searches, sitelinks, autocomplete, UI elements, indexing, synonyms, SafeSearch and more,” Senior VP and Google Fellow Amit Singhal wrote in a recent blog. “Each individual change is subtle and important, and over time they add up to a radically improved search engine.”

A few of the top changes include:

• Panda update: Data in the Panda system is refreshed to make it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes all across the web.
• International shopping rich snippets: This launch helps online shoppers more quickly identify websites likely to offer the products most relevant to their needs and see product prices, ratings and review counts. It’s been available in the U.S., Japan and Germany for a while, but the new launch takes shopping rich snippets global.
• Official page detection accuracy: Google tweaked its process for detecting official pages, which should lead to fewer pages popping up in search that are incorrectly identified as official. Because, really, there can be only one official Justin Bieber Fan Club page. But seriously, this can help web searchers correctly identify your website as opposed to sites set up by competitors or others looking to siphon off your business.
• Image index expansion: Google expanded its images index, which means web searchers will see more relevant images on a larger set of queries. Remember, effective web marketing is a highly visual thing and photos can be tagged with keywords to help boost your SEO / SEM. So be prepared with some great images of your business’ product and services.
• Locally relevant YouTube predictions: This feature helps localize YouTube video suggestions to your area. For instance, if you’re in the U.S. and searching for Adele, you’ll get YouTube suggestions for “Adele in Times Square” over “Adele in London.”
• Data refresh for related searches: This is a revamp of the approach Google uses to generate its related searches section. So, when you search “banana” and “apple” in succession, Google will know that you’re looking for fruit rather than Steve Jobs, New York City or Gwyneth Paltrow’s kid.

To make sure your business reaps all the potential benefits of the new Google algorithm changes, contact AppSoft Development at 800-736-9112. Our expert SEO team will analyze your website free of charge and develop an effective search engine optimization plan to drive visitors to your site and new customers to your storefront.

Image credit: Annette Shaff / Shutterstock.com

Have your web traffic numbers tanked lately? While the common black-hat tricks may give your inbound traffic a momentary boost, you can bet they’ll cost you in the long run. AppSoft Development specializes in search engine optimization and highly recommends you ditch any thought of implementing these SEO no-nos:

1. Hiding text: Splattering your website’s background with keywords in the same color as your site’s background is one of the oldest SEO tricks in the book. While it worked for a while, the search engines have become quite handy at catching on to this ruse. Try it and you’re headed for a stiff penalty and may even see your website banned. Seriously – Leave the hiding in plain sight to those in the Witness Protection Program.
2. Keyword stuffing: If your company, Wobbly Green Widgets R Us, sells wobbly green widgets, of course, you want everyone in the world to buy your wobbly green widgets. But why should they buy your wobbly green widgets, or anyone else’s wobbly green widgets, for that matter? Because your wobbly green widgets rock, that’s why. Unfortunately, all those wobbly green widgets in your wobblygreenwidgets.com website text just made your SEO rankings quite wobbly, indeed.
3. Cloaking: This is the cyber version of the old bait-and-switch scheme. The search engines want to see and index the same pages that your web visitors see. Get caught giving readers one page and the search engines another and watch your rankings plummet.
4. Over-submitting your URL: You’d think that submitting your website’s URL to the search engines weekly or even monthly would be a nice way to remind them that you’re there and need some search ranking TLC. Um… remember that crazy co-dependent girlfriend you had back in college who called and texted you every 10 minutes just to tell you she missed you? That’s kind of how the search engines feel. And just like your girlfriend got the quick, unceremonious dump, your website will, too. Same goes for those deals promising to quickly submit your URL to thousands of search engines. Turns out, upwards of 99 percent of those engines are powered by one of the SEO Big Three – Google, Yahoo and MSN – anyway. And they like to find you themselves. So make like a hot girlfriend and play a little hard to get.
5. Overdoing the flash: This ain’t Vegas. Going overboard on the cool flash and javascript, particularly in your navigation methods will backfire. Search engines have trouble reading them in the first place. Plus, web visitors typically jettison a website that takes more than five seconds to load.

Bottom line – Everything in moderation when it comes to effectively optimizing your website. For help in building and implementing a solid SEO strategy, call AppSoft Development at 800-736-9112.

StacksandStacks.com, an e-retailer of home storage and organizational products, found that shoppers who viewed an online product video are 144% more likely to add an item to their online cart than are other shoppers, says the company’s marketing director. Want to get in on some of that action? AppSoft Development’s web video production experts have a few tips for creating effective online product videos.

1. Understand that it ain’t about you. It ain’t even about your product, per se. An effective web video is all about the viewer, i.e. your prospective buyer. Make sure your script and images quickly and clearly spell out what’s in it for them – how it will make their lives easier, more productive, happier, etc. In fact, make the very first line of your script about the primary benefit of your product.
2. Keep it quick and concise. The most watched and most effective web videos last less than 60 seconds. After that, viewership drops off dramatically. While web video watchers are high in numbers, they’re short on attention spans, so you’ve got to convince them right off the bat. Open your script with the primary benefits of your product, then fill only the details most relevant to the customer.
3. Use what you’ve got. To keep web video production costs manageable, take a look at what you already have that can be repurposed. Examples are logos; graphs, graphics and stock images used in your marketing materials; and existing video from your company’s commercials, training films, etc.
4. Measure your results. The number of times a video is viewed, the number of unique viewers watching them, the amount of time spent viewing each video and the referring sources that lead viewers to your web videos can tell your marketers how effective your videos are. From there, they can make needed tweaks, such as dumping ineffective videos and boosting traffic to the videos that consistently lead to sales.

Sound a bit overwhelming? It can seem that way when you get to the technical stuff. If you don’t know your H.264 from your HTML5 and have no idea what a codec is, don’t worry about it. That’s what we at AppSoft Development are here for. We can help create, encode and post top-quality, branded online videos designed to drive buyers to your website and convince them to spend. To find out how web video can work for you, call 800-736-9112 today.

• Focus on simplicity: Clutter can be a website killer. Today’s website designs trend toward the simple, uncluttered look in both layout and animation. Clean lines and minimalistic backgrounds with fewer, but more dramatic images.
• Sliders: Image sliders across the top part of your website’s home page are a great way to convey quick bits of information and direct visitors to particular pages while minimizing the clutter. Again, keep it simple. A maximum of five sliders is recommended for most websites.
• Bright colors: Sedated, sophisticated neutral colors are so yesterday. The hippest sites on the web today are sporting bright, saturated rainbow hues. Red, pink and green are popular, as are retro blues and turquoises.  And since Pantone declared Tangerine Tango the color of the year for 2012, we expect to see it on more than a few websites. But don’t go too crazy. Just two to three colors should be used on one page.
• Big, loopy vector art: Bright colors and big, goofy vector art go hand-in-hand. Look for oversized mascot, icon and infographic images designed to grab your attention and lend a zany, fun feel. Circles are favored features. Good news: You no longer are limited to the same clip-arty stock images seen on umpteen different websites. This website branding trend has created a whole new niche for web art and graphic designers.
• Large, custom fonts: Large, textured fonts with depth, gradients, transparency, shadows and 3D effects are all the rage in 2012. Two to a page is ideal.
• Fixed position navigation: Making things easier on your website visitors is an increasingly important focus. Fixed position navigation means that as your visitors scroll up and down a web page, the navigation bar and buttons remain locked in place and visible at all times, dramatically improving website performance.
• Social & mobile: Consumers are more connected than ever before, and they expect to stay connected even while on the move. Integrating your social media sites into your primary website, and providing user-friendly mobile website versions and apps are a must. I you’re not doing this, you can bet your competition is. Retailers, restaurants, movie theaters, nightclubs and other businesses whose customers often make their destination choices while already out and about are prime candidates for this kind of web design functionality.

If you’re ready to revamp your website design, or need a whole new site, contact AppSoft Development at 800-736-9112.

The fact is that word-of-mouth advertising has always been the most trusted form of promoting goods and services. You’ll trust your friend’s opinion of such-and-such a product over a slick magazine ad or lively TV commercial any day. That’s why Facebook fan pages and like buttons work. If your friend likes a company, product or service via Facebook, you’re more likely to try it out yourself. Social media, and Facebook in particular, has digitized word-of-mouth.

Clearly, if you’re not making use of Facebook in a big way, you’re likely missing out on a revenue boon. AppSoft Development offers five great ways to get more people – current and potential customers – to like your Facebook fan page:

1. Post status updates regularly and creatively. Use them to let people know about sales and special deals, give tips on using your products and services and to find out what fans are thinking about your offerings. E3 Spark Plugs, a Florida-based spark plug manufacturer posts a “Wednesday Word to the Wise” car care tip on its Facebook fan page that never fails to solicit comments and new fans. Some of those comments are complaints. While that might seem a bad thing, it’s actually an opportunity for you to find out about glitches in your products and services, and to show other fans that you move quickly to address customers’ issues.
2. Add a Facebook Like button to your website. This allows people to show their Facebook friends that they support your company even when they’re not actively on Facebook. Like buttons can be added to your home page, to individual products listed for sale on your website, and to blog entries
3. Add a Facebook link to your email signature. This makes it easy for those on your email list to find and follow your social media pages. Try the wisestamp app, which allows you to customize your  email signature with your social media pages by showing readers your most recent blog post, your latest tweet or the cause you support.
4. Network with admins of groups whose members are your target customers. For instance, if you sell dancewear, contact the admins of Facebook groups that focus on dance. Offer to promote the group with a series of status updates on your page and ask that they do the same for you on the group page. You might even offer free gifts to the first five group members who join your page.
5. Upload videos to your Facebook fan page, then share them on other websites. Videos are among the most shared items on Facebook and can go quickly go viral. And any Facebook video embedded on another website includes a watermark link in the top left corner to the fan page where it originated.

For help implementing and managing your social media strategy or producing high-quality web videos, call AppSoft Development at 800-736-9112.