comScore, Inc., has released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. April 2008 saw Americans conduct 10.6 billion core searches, with Google Sites continuing to gain market share as the leading search engine. Google increased its search share to 61.6% in April, up from 59.8% in March. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 20.4 percent, followed by Microsoft Sites (9.1 percent), AOL LLC (4.6 percent), and Ask Network (4.3 percent). With these figures, the importance of ranking high in Google search results is even more apparent. Websites need to be optimized correctly to make the most of free clicks in the organic search results of search engines and in particular Google. Make sure that the keywords for your industry are used in your website in places such as your URL, Page Title and in particular in the content of your site. In the coming months I will discuss in further detail how to make sure you are doing everything you can to help yourself rank higher in Google and other search engines.

If you have just bought a new mac or you have upgraded to leopard and are needing a back up solution look no further than Apple for the answer. 

You may have noticed when you installed leopard or started your new machine there was/still is an application called “Time Machine” placed in your dock.

Ever wondered what this was ?

Well it’s the client interface for Apple’s personal back up system. Here is a little explanation about how it works.

First you will need to purchase an external back up device. For example the Apple solution is the “Time Capsule” (pictured above). Then all you need to do is go into your system preferences. click “Time Machine” and select the back up drive. 

From then on Time Machine will do an incremental back up every hour.
It will also store daily backups for a month and Weekly backups until the disk is full.

From then on if you misplace or delete a file just click the time machine icon in your dock and the following screen will open.

Simply use the arrows to view the history of your files. When you have found the time you wish to restore. Just click the restore button and the file and folders will be revert to that point in time.

Note: Time Machine backups can also be used to restore your machine from a fresh install of leopard.

There are thousands of retailers around the world, selling everything from food to electronics, and clothes to bathroom supplies. These companies spend millions each year developing strategies to make the shopping experience better, more effective and ultimately more profitable.

There’s no difference online. If you’re running some kind of service or selling a product you have to remember that everyone who visits your site is a potential customer. Consumers these days have been “trained” to expect high standards, clean store layouts and well presented stock, and of course they expect an efficient purchase process. People carry these expectations online too.

Let’s think about how the transactions are made. The store owner knows that without a method of transaction that is painless, the customer may leave the store and not buy anything. But at the same time the retailer tries hard to look like they’re not trying hard to up-sell, cross-sell and add-on to what the customer is buying. Here I’m going to refer to the lot as up-selling.

There are many ways to up-sell, be it verbal, written or prompted. McDonalds is famous for its “would you like fries with that?” and every gas station you visit will probably have a display of confectionery, music and other bits and pieces right at the register. Another pretty common way to get the customer to spend a little more money is to try a “get three for the price of two” strategy. At the end of the day these strategies encourage the customer to spend a little more than they initially would have. Some up-sells are subtle, others are a little too obvious and blatant.

The shopping cart we have developed (and use on lots of stores) tries to balance the up-sell with the usability for the customer. Our number one goal is to make sure that visitors to our stores enjoy their shopping experience and find the cart process easier to use than the average internet shopping cart. We acknowledged early on that we won’t have a store assistant right there to answer questions, so we knew we had to make the cart straightforward and even intuitive. Nothing annoys us more are those carts that have about seven screens and a hundred different messages before you can make a $6 purchase (nudge, nudge GoDaddy). I would hate to think how many people click “buy” and then leave because they’re either ticked off or simply annoyed with the confusing shopping cart. Let’s face it - you would never find something that difficult in a normal retail outlet.

Internet stores that can subtly up-sell a relevant product that will benefit the customer will find the technique is a terrific way to maximize sales and keep the customer happy. The biggest problem around the world at the moment is that most of the shopping carts that are available can’t adapt to what you need to really give the customer what they want, and deserve. Keep looking though - your customers will appreciate it and your sales will increase (ours did, anyway).

Welcome to Strong Arm Tactics - the occasional weblog about what’s happening on the internet and everything to do with online marketing, web applications and other interesting little tid-bits.

To start with I want to introduce the three of us who will be contributing to this blog:

Ben, our Web Marketing Guru (yes, that’s his actual job description) will be writing posts to do with Search Engine Marketing and Optimization. Ben knows everything about the world of Google and their AdWords. Ben looks after our network of online stores and manages our cool (and we think unique) shopping cart system. But more of that later…

Nige is our chief Web Chef. In other words he does lots of cool stuff designing our sites, implementing the latest and greatest techniques and wonders and generally keeps our sites operating at optimum efficiency and improving them as required. Nige will write about coding and development trends that he spots, and anything else that he thinks is worthy of mention.

And I’m James. I’ll be writing about marketing, trends, entrepreneurialism, selling, customer service, online gossip and all the rest. The next few years is going to be quite exciting in terms of developments in the web world and we’ll ride that massive pipeline wave into the great unknown, pointing out some interesting things along the way.

Thanks for reading - I look forward to hearing from you.