Another year almost over. Another just begun. We are all relying more and more on the internet. We are posting photos, listening to music, watching videos, banking, shopping, emailing, keeping up on what our friends are doing, and playing more and more games online too. We are about to enter the Zettabyte era. What’s a Zettabyte? Check out the infographic below from the folks at Cisco to see how much data we are all using in 2015.
![internetin2015a1[1]](http://www.the.vg/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/internetin2015a11.jpg)
Mobile phones have changed the world in ways that would have been unimaginable a decade a ago. Did you know for example, that the number one selling camera in the world is the Apple iPhone? We use our smartphones for everything from texting, to emails, from social media check-ins to surfing the web. We even use an app to make phone calls occasionally too. Mobile phones and tablets are the future of technology. Are you ready for that future? Is your website ready? The folks at freestyle interactive have put together this infographic on the short evolution of mobile and its impact on how we live in the 21st century.
![Mobile_infographic_v11[1]](http://www.the.vg/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Mobile_infographic_v111.jpg)
How old is your website? Have you looked at your website on your smartphone? With over 1.4 billion smartphones in use, it’s time to make sure your website is mobile ready, especially after you take a look at this infographic put together by the folks at WebDam. Pay particular attention to the fact that almost 60% of mobile phone users won’t recommend companies with poor mobile websites. How does your website look now?
![mobile-marketing-landscape-infographic1[1]](http://www.the.vg/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/mobile-marketing-landscape-infographic11.jpg)
We’ve discussed selfies before and the popularity of taking photos of ourselves and posting them are still growing. From Ellen DeGeneres Oscar night selfie to all our own individual selfies, we are flooding the internet with over a million of photos every day. The folks at Techinfographics have put together this infographic on our use of selfies.
![salfie-infographic-selfiegraphic1[1]](http://www.the.vg/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/salfie-infographic-selfiegraphic11.jpg)
We are all familiar with the old proverb “measure twice and cut once” that warns us to double check for accuracy in our lives. Let’s take that advice to our online activities. As you certainly know, everything you do online is trackable, whether you do it yourself, or let the NSA do it for you. The problem is of course, the NSA doesn’t share very well.
Do you have a website? If not, let me once of the first to welcome you to the 1990’s. Of course your practice has a website. Do you measure your website traffic? You or your web developer should be measuring your web traffic and your audience. You can purchase all sorts of audience measuring software, or you can install Google Analytics on your website for free (www.google.com/analytics).
Google Analytics is embedded into well over half of the world’s websites. With it, you can easily measure who comes (not individually) to your website, from where, and with what they are viewing your site with. You can review the browsers used, the speed of their internet, what pages are viewed, and how long people stay on each page. Best of all you can review where your visitors are coming from. In Google Analytics visits are broken down most simply into direct traffic (those who typed your URL into their browsers), search traffic (those who found you from searching Google, Bing, or Yahoo), and referral traffic (those who might come from a link such as from www.theopticalvisionsite.com) . In a perfect world everyone knows your name (hearing the Cheers theme song in my head), or in a mostly perfect world, your traffic would […]
As 2013 came to a close, a lot of companies measured all that happened during the year, including what happened in social media. The folks at ShareThis came up with this report, showing the huge growth of Pinterest and the decline of email as a sharing medium.
![sharethis-social-sharing-20131[1]](http://www.the.vg/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/sharethis-social-sharing-201311.jpg)
Yes, most of us use Google for so many things, but there are two other very strong search engines that are used by millions as well, Bing and Yahoo. We shouldn’t ignore them, In fact, since the competition for the race tot he top is so cutthroat and in the case of Adwords, expensive, advertisers might want to consider Bing and Yahoo as a clever move to bypass the competition. Take a look at this infographic from the folks at Market Domination Media that gives us a number of reasons not to forget other search engines.
![Stop-Treating-the-Yahoo-Bing-Network-Like-the-Red-Headed-Stepchild-637x51661[1]](http://www.the.vg/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Stop-Treating-the-Yahoo-Bing-Network-Like-the-Red-Headed-Stepchild-637x516611.jpg)
We are of course BIG believers in blogging. We have seen the difference blogging makes in site traffic for those websites who blog occasionally and for those who do it often. What you say is equally as important as just saying it and the folks at WhoIsHostingThis have come up with this great infographic on how to blog better. We hope to integrate some of their suggestions into our blog…what about you?
![How-to-Write-a-Successful-Blog-Post-1-7+2[1]](http://www.the.vg/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/How-to-Write-a-Successful-Blog-Post-1-7+21.jpg)
How many emails do you get every week from people claiming to be search engine optimization (SEO) experts? How many of you even know what to look for when exploring having someone help you with your SEO? We know many a company who have been taken in by the fast talking SEO sales experts of the world only to be disappointed the magic beans never bore fruit. Even Google gets SPAM emails from companies claiming they can help raise the website in search rankings.No one is safe. We delete the vast majority of those emails. A few we look at the rankings of their companies online. Funny how the majority of these firms who claim to be experts in search rankings have very low or no rankings of their own. Perhaps this is the moment to bring up the old bible quote of “Physician, heal thyself”. If these companies can’t build their own search rankings, why on earth should you pay them money to build yours?
Google is no small hapless company. They have thousands of engineers working on how to provide the best answers to your search queries. If they are manipulated by firms to the benefit of their clients instead of the benefit of providing the best search results, you and millions of others are likely to look elsewhere and there goes billions of dollars in advertising revenue. Google is always refining search engine optimization (SEO) to more align how we as humans think and to try and stay ahead of those who would manipulate the system for their own benefit. Fresh and quality content count today more than ever. So too does social sharing. Here is an updated study from the folks at
