2010 March | 65under.com

What’s Next for Google China

On March 20, 2010, in Uncategorized, by 65under

Two months after Google shook the world with its threat to leave China on censorship and hacking concerns, there are increasing signs that an exit is imminent as the two sides refuse to back down.

Google said in January a key condition to staying on in China, the world’s largest Internet market by users, would be an end to rules that require it to self-censor results. Beijing has repeatedly thrown cold water on any such expectation, maintaining that all Internet firms need to abide by local laws.

Following are the possible paths the world’s largest search company could take, and the possible reactions from Beijing:

Google China

GOOGLE PARTIALLY WITHDRAWS

In addition to its Chinese search site, Google.cn, Google has two research and development centres, hundreds of sales and customer service staff and engineers working on its Android mobile operating system and other initiatives in China.

Google could well decide to pull the plug on Google.cn, but leave its other China-based operations intact.

The manner in which the company executes such a pull-out would also be of importance to its employees and reputation.

If Google goes out with a bang by halting censorship of its China site before shutting it down, hundreds of local employees could be at risk for working for a company that broke local laws.

But given the very public nature of its initial threat, many believe such an underhanded withdrawal is unlikely.

By being up-front about shutting its China search site, Google — whose motto is “Don’t do evil” – could generate positive publicity from sympathetic quarters in the West, including politicians, media and human rights groups.

Hong Kong Web Design

GOOGLE FULLY WITHDRAWS

Google could decide that China isn’t worth the trouble and completely pull out, including all its R&D and Android support operations.

Such a move would put hundreds more out of work, and could jeopardise firms like Dell and Lenovo that were banking on Android-based phones as a major part of their push into the China cellular market.

Independent software application developers who were counting on Android phones to carry their programs could also find themselves out in the cold.

China warned last week that it would be “unfriendly and irresponsible” for Google to suddenly stop filtering searches, and added the search giant would have to bear whatever consequences might follow.

Some say that such words could be a veiled warning from Beijing that Google would not be welcome in China if it leaves the local search market, giving the US search giant no other choice than to pull out entirely.

Common SEO Mistakes by Newbies

On March 2, 2010, in Hong Kong Web Design Tips, by 65under

Here’s a few mistakes made by many self-professed SEO wannabe’s – has your web developer/SEO expert told you any of the following? If so, might be time for you to say goodbye and hire a decent Hong Kong web design company such as 65UNDER (applause for gratuitous self promotion)

1. Links Will Increase Rank
This is by far the most common mistake made by someone who decides to manage their own website. It’s not the amount of links, but the quality and relevance of the link. In very general terms, what this means is that 1,000 incoming links from low page rank sites with little or nothing to do with your sites content, is probably less use than 1 link from a highly ranked site on a similar subject as yours. At 65UNDER we’ve had a site rank #3 on google for a highly searched for keyword term with NO incoming links at all.

Common SEO Mistakes

2. Site Validity
Having your site validate in W3C standards does NOT help a lot with SEO, only in the way the page displays for the user, and even then having a “W3C Valid” site doesnt guarantee anything – the proof, Google.com doesnt validate and Google themselves say site validation is of little importance with a tiny percentage of sites actually validating under W3C standards

3. Keyword Frequency
May website newbies read about keywords and litter their site and content with keywords. This not only makes it difficult reading for your visitors, but can actually penalise you and in extreme circumstance, get you on Googles dreaded spam list. Depending on who you listen to and what you read, a general guide is to have 7-8% keyword frequency i.e for every 100 words your keywords are repeated 7-8 times. This is a very general guide so don’t go counting words and adding or deleting keywords to arrive at that quota.

Web Design Tips Hong Kong

4. Guarantees of #1 or 1st Page Rankings
Be very weary of any companies or individuals that guarantee you they can get you on the first page of Google. To prove this point lets say Company ABC is offering a guarantee and tells you they can get you on page 1 of google for the keywords “Don’t Trust Me”. What if 11 companies with the same set of target customers and keywords come to this company? Hint: There’s only 10 results on the first page. If you dig deeper under the “guarantee”, you’ll find some small print because, and this also according to Google, no company should offer a guarantee of getting you on the first page

5. Hits Are Not
The very novice Hong Kong web designer can be fooled into thinking how many visitors a site has. A hit is measured every time a file is called from the server, so if your home page has 100 images, this means 100 hits, not counting all the other files that are usually not seen by the average visitor. Note this if you are intending to advertise on other websites, if they even mention “hits” it usually means they have no idea of what they’re doing, or they’re trying to trick people – neither of which are qualities you want in a business you intend to do business with.

6. Visitors
Related to above, even visitors don’t necessarily mean money. If you adopt black-hat (illegal/trick) techniques to get people on your site, it doesn’t matter if 1m visitors arrive on your site because if they come across something they’re not looking for they’ll click off within a second or two – think about the last time you clicked on that hot pic of Jessica Alba only to find yourself on the next Nigerian Goldmine home page, or something totally not what you were expecting. You can find this “Bounce Rate” in Google Analytics, which will be given as a percentage, and is the number of people who click on to your home page and click off without visiting another page – of course, you need to make sure you install Analytics on every page for this to be accurate.

More to come…

Make Your Website Fast!

On March 1, 2010, in Golf Website Tips, Hong Kong Web Design Tips, Hong Kong Websites, by 65under

These day the web is all about speed with Googles’s Chrome browser aimed at making the web faster and users demanding things faster then ever before. You can spend a lot of time and money to get your Hong Kong web site just right with big glossy photos making it look “awesome”. But things can go wrong, when you check your web site visitor statistics, you noticed most people clicked to your site, then clicked away after just a few seconds.

Like many sites designed by Hong Kong Web Design compaines, your site could take too long to load. The very graphics and programming tricks that seem so exciting are loading at a slowpace on the dial-up connections the large majority of web users have. Yes, high-speed connections are common, but the actual speed of these connections can be much slower than advertised.

Fast Hong Kong Web Design

Here’s a few things that you need to do to make your Hong Kong or golf website faster:
Right now you can’t do better than to scale back the time it takes your site to load. A few years ago Zona Research estimated 40 percent of sales were lost due to customers who left a site early after waiting on slow web pages. That translates into $21 billion in lost sales. If you’ve ever visited the FedEx site lately to track a package, you may have noticed their pages come up much faster. Now pages download in less than two seconds. Big sites like FedEx have special server tricks up their sleeve, but some of the time- cutting things they do will work for anyone.

Don’t have so many of those graphics unless they are a critical part of your business i.e Photography. FedEx took the big jpeg file photo off the page and replaced with a much faster loading gif file graphic. Jpeg files, commonly used for photos, require thousands of colors. A gif file, used for drawings and simpler graphics, can be compressed to include only a few colors and load much faster.

Think of your favorite cartoon character. Chances are he or she is created with a just a few colors, maybe as few as two. That translates into a graphic that downloads fast. A designer confided you can get killer graphics with just 16 colors. FedEx made their pages speedier by replacing the little graphics next to links with HTML dots. The old graphics popped onto the page one by one. Done tastefully, the dots appear instantly and look just as good.

Java enabled links that change their look when you wave a mouse over them require three different graphics to work. A visitor’s computer also has to take time to interpret the Java code. Use non-Java links instead. 65UNDER, a Hong kong web design company specialises in not only making sites fast, but making fast sites fast!

Make Your Hong Kong Website Fast

Also reconsider those Java scrolling news headlines. They also take time to load. CNN took their Java ticker down, making their page load faster. Visitors never missed it. Cut down on links. Lots of sites have a big thick forest of links at the bottom of each page. It’s doubtful many visitors even see all of these. If you’ve got more than ten links, you have too many. Cut some out and watch your page load just a bit faster.

While I’m for copy-intense sites, very long copy can make a huge difference in how fast a page loads. Keep your text at around 300 words on the opening page. Inner pages can be longer.

Repeat graphics. One of the best ways to speed up your site is to use the same graphics on every page. Once a graphic has loaded, it doesn’t have to load again. I like to have a medium-sized logo at the top of the page, then a small logo at the bottom. It adds color and personality to an otherwise plain page, giving your site a feeling of continuity.

Once you’ve paired down your pages, try comparing them to your competition. Clean out the cache on your browser, then time how long it takes your page to load. Now time how long it takes for competitors’ pages to load. Results will vary from one user to the next, but you will get a pretty good idea of where your pages stand and how your Hong Kong web designer has designed your site in terms of speed.

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