Photo by BasicGov; Creative Commons share-alike license

The differences are far simpler, and way more important, than you probably think.

Sometimes the best laid marketing plans end up biting back, and in some truly surprising ways. While most cases of this sort of slip up – either positive or negative – can be chalked up to a failure to get the right message across, not many can be attributed to getting a message across a little too well.

Such is the case for the apparent confusion about the differences between “Cloud Computing” and “Software as a Service” (SaaS). As the digital marketing world is clamoring to get you to “move everything to the cloud” before the next guy, it’s become critical to offer clarification to help you make sure you know what you’re signing up for. Put simply, and in strictly logical terms, while all SaaS environments are by default denizens of the cloud, not all cloud environments are necessarily SaaS.

Cloud environments deliver the use of common applications that are served from the internet and are designed to deliver computing and interaction as a utility – Facebook, Salesforce.com and Google Docs are popular examples. SaaS, by comparison, uses specific software and customized architecture to provide services – primarily to enterprise customers (but certainly not exclusively) – based on specific needs. Bridgeline’s iAPPS Product Suite, for instance, is designed specifically to run as optimally in SaaS as it does in a dedicated server environment using a perpetual license. (more…)

A few blog posts ago, I wrote about mobile SEO.  Since then, there have been a couple of issues and concerns around making websites mobile friendly, and I think it speaks directly to my #1 tip:

“Avoid duplicate content by redirecting useragents to the correct site (mobile v. traditional) by creating a handheld.css and iPhone.css stylesheet”

In this post, I want to explain what that means and how it fits into making your website mobile friendly while link building and avoiding duplicate content issues.

Google has different types of useragents, for instance Googlebot and, in the case of mobile SEO, Googlebot-Mobile. When these bots approach your site, they can see a couple different things.  Either we can send them both to www.site.com, or we can choose to send Googlebot to www.site.com and Googlebot-Mobile to www.site.mobi.  The point is, that whatever these bots see, the user must see as well in order to not get penalized from Google.

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When Apple released the iPad in April 2010 clients began insisting that their websites were “iPad friendly.”  The race to keep internet marketing efforts up with the newest platforms is important, but more important is keeping your internet marketing efforts up with the platforms used by your audience.  Despite the hype around tablet friendly websites, the user percentage is relatively small.  For the most part, focusing on your mobile segment is much more worth your while.

According to Pew Internet, 34% of the population uses mobile devices to send or receive email.  The percentage of your audience may skew higher or lower, but the point is: your audiences are reading emails on their phones.

They key components to building a mobile friendly email are very similar to a traditional email campaign.  It is still important to know your conversion objectives, know your segment, track your emails, and have an engaging subject line….

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2009 was supposed to be the year of the mobile.  We were going to see everyone switching to mobile sites and leaving their regular ‘ole sites behind (bit of an exaggeration, maybe).  But marketers where wrong, and they’re buzzing about 2011 being THE year that mobile will change unlike we’ve ever seen before.

Remember a few blog posts ago, I had mentioned that the current US population is 311 million?  Based on the information in the Nielson Media Universe Chart, that means 73% of us use mobile phones (that’s a lot of talking), and, 36% of us use the Internet from our phones.

It wouldn’t be fair to compare the number of mobile users that use the web on their phones to the past, because technology has changed so much over the past 10 years, including the introduction of the iPhone, Blackberry, Droid and other Smartphone’s.  But, we do know that the total number of US mobile users in 2000 was 97 million… that’s an increase of 135% over the past 10 years!

Are you starting to see the need for your company to take advantage of mobile marketing and a mobile website?  Before you jump in, these are 20 things I think you should know about mobile SEO…

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