allamdas

Tutorial: How to Setup Google DFP(doubleclick for publisers) on your website

2011-11-17T11:13:00.001-08:00

Say you use an advertising network like Google AdSense for serving ads but also accept direct advertisers on your website? Or have you signed up with multiple ad-networks but, due to limited ad space on your site, you will only like to run ads from the network that pays you the most money (read maximum CPM)?

In either of these cases, Google DFP, or DoubleClick for Publishers, could be an ideal solution for you. It is a free ad server from Google, like OpenX, that lets you sell ad space on your website more effectively

You may choose to run banner ads, text ads or even rich-media (like video and flash ads) through DFP. The tool, which was formerly known as Google Ad Manager, requires no downloads or installation and any website publisher can sign-up for the DFP program as long as they have an active Google AdSense account.

Sell Your Advertising Space with Google DFP

Say you have a news website (or a blog) where you cover topics such as technology, sports, entertainment and so on. An advertiser wants to serve banner ad campaigns on all your tech related pages. He will pay $20 CPM for all US based impressions (see order) and you can fill your remnant inventory through Google AdSense ads.

Let’s see how we can easily setup such an ad campaign through Google DFP.

Step 1: Create Ad Units

We need to tell DFP about the advertising space on our web pages. For instance, in our above example, we’ll have to create three ad slots for the 300x250 rectangle, the 160x600 skyscraper and the 468x60 banner. These are standard IAB units though you are free to define custom ad sizes as well.

Go to DFP –> Inventory –> Ad Units –> New Ad Unit. Give your ad unit a descriptive name so that you can easily determine where exactly that ad unit will be displayed and it’s size. Also check the option “Maximize revenue of unsold and remnant inventory with AdSense.”

Step 2: Define Placements

You have multiple ad units on the same page and there’s a possibility that an advertiser may want to place ads on more than one unit. Therefore, we need to create a placement which is like a group of one or more ad units where an advertiser's ad can be displayed.

Go to Inventory tab –> Placements –> New Placement and define the placement. To keep things simple, we will associate only one ad unit (the 300x250 one) with our ad placement. Check the option that says “Offer this placement to advertisers” through AdWords and DoubleClick Ad planner to attract more advertisers.

Step 3. Create an Order

Now that we have defined our ad inventory, it’s time to feed in the client’s order. The advertiser will specify where he wants to place the ad, what kind of demographics he wants to target, what’s the price he is willing to pay and how long will the campaign run on our site.

Go to DFP –> Orders –> New Order. Create a company for the advertiser and then fill in the order details under “new line item.” Set the Type to “Price Priority” if you want the highest paying ads to be served on your site. Set Value CPM equal to the price that the client will pay and then add the targeting criteria.

Step 4. Upload the Ad Creative

It’s time for your to upload the “actual ad” that will display on your web pages. You can either upload images, Flash videos or even snippets of HTML and JavaScript in case you’re going with text ads.

Go to DFP –> Line Items and select the “Line Item” that you’ve created in the previous step. Click Add Creatives –> New Creative and upload the image / SWF Flash file. You can even upload multiple creative ads per line item and they’ll display evenly across that site – this helps you determine an appropriate ad copy that performs best with your visitors.

Step 5. Get the Ad Tags for your Site

We are almost done. All we need to do is get the JavaScript code from Google Ad ManagerDFP and copy-paste it into our blog’s template.

Click the Inventory tab in your DFP dashboard and choose “Generate Ad Tags” – select the appropriate ad unit (the one that we created in Step #1) and choose “Generate Tags.” Add this code to your website and within 10-15 minutes, the DFP tool should start serving ads on your pages.

Here's a narration-less screencast that captures all the above steps in a quick video.

If you ever have trouble serving ads through DFP , just open any page of your website, add ?google_debug to the URL and reload. This will generate a tracing log that should help you debug the problem, if any.

Creating Enchantment

2011-11-17T06:27:00.000-08:00

Founder of Garage Technology Ventures
Description

Entrepreneur and bestselling author Guy Kawasaki shares the secrets to being enchanting and developing influence through the "pillars of enchantment." In this funny and engaging lecture, Kawasaki examines the deep value in being likable, creating trust, and taking empowering action. He also shares keys to telling a great story, overcoming resistance, and enchanting your boss and colleagues.

The slides from this talk are available at:http://www.guykawasaki.com/enchantment/audio-vide...

Technical solutions looking for a problem

2011-11-17T05:31:00.001-08:00

Takeaway: IT is famous for offering solutions that are too complicated or require too much care and feeding for the problem at hand.

I saw a press release recently about a major technology company taking yet another stab at “connected, intelligent devices,” claiming that our coffee makers would soon be communicating with our alarm clocks. We’ve done this dance several times over the last few decades, and I still remember being fascinated as a child by TV programs about “the house of the future,” where lights dimmed automatically and one merely had to shout “chicken and beer” and a disembodied voice would obey your every command.

While there’s arguably some benefit to having one’s appliances communicate, the infrastructure, care, and feeding tend to negate any benefits. My recent entertainment system, which seems to require twelve minutes of firmware updates every time I turn it on to watch 30 minutes of TV, is a hassle that almost negates the benefit of internet-delivered video. I can only imagine sitting bleary eyed while my coffee maker announces “Updating … please wait” every third morning. Connected devices and the elusive smart home have parallels in corporate IT: the solution looking for a problem.

Many of these technologies instantly touch our inner geek, the functionality and technical elegance momentarily suspending the nagging sensation that this is just too complicated, or the “care and feeding” requirements too demanding. At the lower end of the scale, nearly every large company I’ve worked with has an elaborate “wired” conference room, with racks full of equipment and global video capabilities. Nearly without fail, any meetings I’ve attended which attempted to use the technology required someone from the AV department, or consumed 30 minutes with people shouting “no, use that cable” or “switch to input 78, NOT input 76!”

More diabolical are corporate distractions involving large technical systems. It might be an ERP implementation where millions are spent implementing a technically sexy bit of functionality that is never used since it’s too complex to achieve the stated development. In the worst case, most of us have seen entire implementations where the end product is greeted with a proverbial sigh, and is collecting dust a few weeks later.

Pursuing a solution looking for a problem is obviously monetarily costly but, even more dire, can cost thousands of hours of scarce time. Going too deeply down a technical rabbit hole can literally waste years of IT hours that could have been more wisely invested. Furthermore, technical solutions looking for problems make IT appear out of touch. Just as I’m subjected to rolling eyes from my spouse when some component of our AV system demands firmware, your CEO is likely to deliver something far worse than an askance glance when you deliver the invoice for a disused or irrelevant technological adventure.

Luckily, the answer to technical solutions looking for a problem is fairly simple: continually ask yourself what problem the technology is solving, and if the cure is better than the disease. Any time you change the scope of the technology, or deviate from your original plan, ask yourself these two questions to ensure you don’t gradually stray too far away from the original problem. When you have any doubts, review your progress with the community that will actually be using the technology. While any new system will have a learning curve, if it’s looking untenable at any point, reconsider the technology at hand. It’s nearly always better to pull the plug on an immature or unusable technology than throw good money after bad.

Enterprise antivirus: Best practices for smooth deployments

2011-11-17T05:30:00.001-08:00

Takeaway: Dominic Vogel emphasizes the importance of proper planning for deploying a new antivirus product, particularly in large enterprises. Here are his best practice guidelines to follow.

Despite questionable effectiveness against current polymorphic malware threats, endpoint antivirus solutions still play a fundamental role in any enterprise’s security strategy. They provide strong first-line defence and are the most visible form of computer security. Once you have gone through the process of choosing a vendor and product that meets your requirements, the next hurdle is how to handle company wide deployment. Even though these solutions come with extensive documentation and “getting started” wizards, deployment in medium-to-large enterprise settings (1000+ endpoints) or across multiple global locations, is by no means a trivial task. It does not matter whether you go with McAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro, F-Secure, ESET, BitDefender, AVG, or any other player in the AV market. Proper planning is an absolute must in order to ensure a smooth and transparent implementation. You can get away with minimal planning in a small business setting, but doing so in a large corporate environment is simply irresponsible. Try following these guidelines when transitioning to a new AV package.

The pilot episode

Potential solutions are generally piloted during the evaluation stage. This is the time when you want issues and problems to arise, so you can suitably address them before wide-scale deployment (or even before purchasing the product). Make sure the pilot group is an adequate cross-section of the company (make sure that computers from finance, IT, marketing, executive, and other departments are all included) otherwise certain complications may arise at inopportune times (you do not want the CFO calling you during his presentation to the board because his AV program is on the fritz). Be sure to document all issues and corresponding fixes or workarounds. This document will form the blueprint of your future deployment plans.

Failure to communicate

Before pushing out the new clients to all employee workstations (laptops/desktops/mobile devices) communicate to your desktop support team and IT service desk that a new antivirus client will be installed on all company computers over the course of the coming days/weeks/months (be sure to inform them of the expected timeline). An engaged IT support staff acts as an enabler for widespread acceptance of the new antivirus program. Provide the support staff with any necessary training so they will be able to address any concerns or questions that may arise from the “user” populace.

I would also recommend posting notice on the company intranet or common areas, so all company staff are aware of the impending modifications. Transparency is vital, as not informing your colleagues of these changes will only lead to mass confusion and resentment (especially if something goes awry). Develop a project plan with milestone dates, resource allocation, and identify any potential risks. Take a few minutes every day, to inform your superiors of the project status. You will be amazed at how much smoother the deployment goes when you take the time to plan.

Down to basics

Current enterprise antivirus programs are bundled with so many features (host intrusion prevention, host firewall, behaviour monitoring, and device control, just to name a few) and intricacies that deploying the solution with all the bells-and-whistles can lead to unexpected complications. Adopt a “bare-bones” approach by first deploying only the basic AV protection. Once a stable deployment has been completed, further functionalities can be added in a staggered approach).

Determine deployment method(s)

In order to deploy the AV product/client across multiple offices and sites, multiple deployment methods will be required. Luckily, most corporate AV offerings allow for many options. For main offices with high speed LAN connections (most business networks have connection speeds of 10Mbps, 100Mbps or 1Gbps), remote deployment from the central console over the internal connections will suffice. For remote offices connected over WANs of varying bandwidths, pushing multiple client installs over the wire during business hours probably isn’t the smartest choice. Depending on latency issues, your best bet would be to create client install packages (most enterprise AV solutions have tools that help you create such packages) that can consequently be installed locally on computers at the satellite offices.

Policies first

Before installing a single client, the policies (scanning exclusions, scheduled scans, usability options, update times etc.) need to be reviewed and revised according to your business and technical requirements. Try to avoid using the “off-the-shelf” policies as they are too general. Apply some optimizations to the policies before embarking on massive deployments.

Assess network and infrastructure demands

Familiarize yourself with the network and infrastructure demands of the new antivirus server(s). Determine how updates are distributed from the AV servers to the endpoint clients. Is it minimal traffic? How about updates to satellite offices? By determining the requirements of the AV product and the current capabilities of your network, you can properly address any possible bottlenecks before they bring the network traffic to a crawl (and a noose around your neck).

Quick Draw McGraw

Don’t try and be a hero by attempting to install to all 1500 computers and servers within a day. The big bang approach seldom works for large environments. Start off by installing the clients on “low-priority” computers (such as the interns’) and get some quick wins under your belt. Start with chunks of 5-10 computers (then checking if any issues) and then gradually doubling that number over the course of multiple days (or weeks) until all the endpoints are reached. Most products come with compliance tools that help you determine how many of the networked computers have the AV client installed. Servers should be completed afterwards by following a similar pattern (start with non-critical servers first and leave mission critical servers for afterhours).

Remove previous AV product(s)

Completely removing all traces of the previous AV client is an absolute must as having two different AV products competing for system resources and clashing during real-time scanning will lead to severely degraded and erratic system performance. This will lead to an unruly and bloodthirsty mob banging on your door. Unfortunately, successfully removing and uninstalling enterprise antivirus products can be more difficult than dealing with a used car salesman. They are notoriously difficult to fully uninstall (especially the registry entries). For centrally managed products, it is possible to remove the AV suites remotely. However, these remote uninstalls occasionally hit snags and further work (attempting local uninstall or even re-imaging) may be required.

A pain-free antivirus transition cannot be guaranteed as there are many variables that need to be taken into account. These recommendations, while not bullet proof, will help ensure that any disruptions are kept to a bare minimum.

GOOGLE+ for businesses and brands

2011-11-17T05:27:00.000-08:00

Takeaway: The long-awaited Google+ Pages for businesses and brands have officially launched. See who has Pages already and when you can get one.

Google continued its steady rollout of new features on Google+ on Monday with the official launch of Google+ Pages for brands and businesses.

Google+ chief Vic Gundotra announced it on the Official Google Blog:

“So far Google+ has focused on connecting people with other people. But we want to make sure you can build relationships with all the things you care about—from local businesses to global brands—so today we’re rolling out Google+ Pages worldwide… For businesses and brands, Google+ pages help you connect with the customers and fans who love you. Not only can they recommend you with a +1, or add you to a circle to listen long-term. They can actually spend time with your team, face-to-face-to-face. All you need to do is start sharing, and you’ll soon find the super fans and loyal customers that want to say hello.”

Google has a bunch of guinea pigs that have already built pages (including Google+ itself, fittingly). Here’s a selection of some of the pages that are already live:

Oddly, while Google announced Google+ Pages on Monday, it didn’t open it up for everyone to start building pages. Instead, it simply stated that “any organization will soon be able to join the community at plus.google.com/pages/create.”

Here’s Google’s one-minute video intro to the new feature:

Sanity check

Despite the fact that Google+ Pages aren’t available for everyone yet, this is a good move — and I expect that Pages will open up to the public within the next week or so, if Google’s usual patterns prevail. We could argue that Pages are long overdue. When Google+ first launched, a lot of brands created faux user accounts that were basically company accounts, until Google shut them down and told people to hang on until it launched brand pages.

So far, the implementation of Google+ Pages looks solid, although very simple. A Page is basically a subset of the standard Google+ account for users. One of the most interesting things Google is doing with Pages is called “Direct Connect,” which will allow you to directly add a brand to your Google+ Circles from Google search results. This will be highly convenient, but could raise monopoly concerns. Would Google offer Twitter and Facebook the same opportunity to directly follow or make a friend request from Google search? It’s doubtful. Remember, it’s not actually illegal to have a monopoly in the U.S., it’s only illegal to use a monopoly unfairly against your competitors.

Google+ brings productive chatting, sharing and hangouts

2011-11-17T05:24:00.000-08:00

Takeaway: Google+ could become your preferred tool for communicating with your immediate team and slicing and dicing your network at large.

Watch out Chatter and Yammer, Google+ may just be the next enterprise social network. Google+provides a range of ways for coworkers to share information on clients, projects, and industry events.

Circling up

If you are using Google+, one of the first things to do is tocreate a circle composed entirely of your coworkers. When you make a post to Google+ you can decide if you want to share the post with an individual, a few individuals, a circle or the public. If you are making a post that is relevant to everyone at your company, then you should select the circle you created for your company. You can also create circles for different departments or teams within your organization like Sales, Accounting, Marketing, or NY Office.

Your profile

Each Google+ account is associated with a Google Profile. You can edit your Google profile to share your name, a brief bio, employment, education and places you have lived. Sharing these details with your coworkers not only helps them to get to know you better, but it also allows them to see your areas of expertise.

For example, you might find out through Google+ that your colleague (we will call him “Bob” from Accounts Receivable) lived in Istanbul for two years. Google+ is a great way to build relationships across the organization by allowing employees to show more of who they are on a personal level.

Share news and information with your coworkers

With Google+ you can now share relevant news and information with your colleagues without overloading their inbox. When you come across a useful website, video, or post, just copy the link and post it to Google Plus. You can select the circle you want to share the post with, or if you have Google+ on your domain you can share it with everyone on that domain. You can also add your own comment that explains why you are sharing the resource.

Celebrate success

Google+ is a great tool to put a colleague’s name in lights, or perhaps even the entire team. Examples include a colleague closing a deal, earning a professional certificate or speaking at a national conference. It’s also great to make it a habit of publicly recognizing team successes on Google+ like meeting quarterly objectives. This is an effective way to build camaraderie in a distributed workforce. If you see a coworker post a win, go ahead and respond to the post with a virtual “high five” or maybe a link to the famous Peanut Butter and Jelly Time video.

Share status updates

Using Google+ you can let your colleagues know what you are working on through status updates. You might be inspired to provide valuable content by sharing an article, video or another relevant piece of content. Stuck on a project? Consider posting a status update with a specific question.

Use hangout for impromptu meetings

Leveraging the Google+ Hangout you can stay in touch via a private chat room with your colleagues, business partners and others in your extended community. Use live video chat that puts you in the same room together - something very beneficial for a distributed workforce. Using the Google+ Hangout you’ll want to coordinate plans, whether it’s working on a project or meeting up for coffee.

Share photos

Create engaging content for your Google+ community by uploading photos on your Google+ account. Leveraging the tool, you will be able to create dynamic photo albums to share with your colleagues. You can customize your preferences and create photo albums to share with only specific individuals within your group.

Build community by sharing photos of conferences, company events, or even your last vacation. Photos are not only a nice way to make the work environment more personable, but it’s also a helpful way to onboard new employees. By directing new employees to photo albums on Google+ you will allow them to answer some of their own questions, like learning the names of people in other departments.

Build the network

Google+ is a free way to network within your organization. This invaluable social network can help you build out your own network within the larger organization. Enjoy Google+’s ease of use as you sync Google+ with your mail, calendar, docs and the rest of your Google presence. You will prevent email inbox clutter by using Google+ to improve collaboration and information sharing.

Additionally you will notice you will improve trust among employees through more personalized interactions in addition to being able to nurturing relationships among the team. Don’t forget to enjoy video capabilities for meetings. You will find Google+ to be your preferred network as you leverage the tool to communicate with your immediate team and slice and dice your network at large.

Googlebot-crawls web

2011-11-17T05:14:00.000-08:00

Googlebot is Google's web crawling bot (sometimes also called a "spider"). Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.
We use a huge set of computers to fetch (or "crawl") billions of pages on the web. Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.
Googlebot's crawl process begins with a list of webpage URLs, generated from previous crawl processes and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites it detects links (SRC and HREF) on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index.

For webmasters: Googlebot and your site

How Googlebot accesses your site

For most sites, Googlebot shouldn't access your site more than once every few seconds on average. However, due to network delays, it's possible that the rate will appear to be slightly higher over short periods. In general, Googlebot should download only one copy of each page at a time. If you see that Googlebot is downloading a page multiple times, it's probably because the crawler was stopped and restarted.
Googlebot was designed to be distributed on several machines to improve performance and scale as the web grows. Also, to cut down on bandwidth usage, we run many crawlers on machines located near the sites they're indexing in the network. Therefore, your logs may show visits from several machines at google.com, all with the user-agent Googlebot. Our goal is to crawl as many pages from your site as we can on each visit without overwhelming your server's bandwidth. Request a change in the crawl rate.

Blocking Googlebot from content on your site

It's almost impossible to keep a web server secret by not publishing links to it. As soon as someone follows a link from your "secret" server to another web server, your "secret" URL may appear in the referrer tag and can be stored and published by the other web server in its referrer log. Similarly, the web has many outdated and broken links. Whenever someone publishes an incorrect link to your site or fails to update links to reflect changes in your server, Googlebot will try to download an incorrect link from your site.
If you want to prevent Googlebot from crawling content on your site, you have a number of options, including using robots.txt to block access to files and directories on your server.
Once you've created your robots.txt file, there may be a small delay before Googlebot discovers your changes. If Googlebot is still crawling content you've blocked in robots.txt, check that the robots.txt is in the correct location. It must be in the top directory of the server (e.g., www.myhost.com/robots.txt); placing the file in a subdirectory won't have any effect.
If you just want to prevent the "file not found" error messages in your web server log, you can create an empty file named robots.txt. If you want to prevent Googlebot from following any links on a page of your site, you can use the nofollow meta tag. To prevent Googlebot from following an individual link, add the rel="nofollow" attribute to the link itself.
Here are some additional tips:

Test that your robots.txt is working as expected. The Test robots.txt tool in Webmaster Tools lets you see exactly how Googlebot will interpret the contents of your robots.txt file. The Google user-agent is (appropriately enough) Googlebot.
The Fetch as Googlebot tool in Webmaster Tools helps you understand exactly how your site appears to Googlebot. This can be very useful when troubleshooting problems with your site's content or discoverability in search results.

Making sure your site is crawlable

Googlebot discovers sites by following links from page to page. The Crawl errors page in Webmaster Tools lists any problems Googlebot found when crawling your site. We recommend reviewing these crawl errors regularly to identify any problems with your site.
If you're running an AJAX application with content that you'd like to appear in search results, we recommend reviewing our proposal on making AJAX-based content crawlable and indexable.
If your robots.txt file is working as expected, but your site isn't getting traffic, here are some possible reasons why your content is not performing well in search.

Problems with spammers and other user-agents

The IP addresses used by Googlebot change from time to time. The best way to identify accesses by Googlebot is to use the user-agent (Googlebot). You can verify that a bot accessing your server really is Googlebot by using a reverse DNS lookup.
Googlebot and all respectable search engine bots will respect the directives in robots.txt, but some nogoodniks and spammers do not.Report spam to Google.
Google has several other user-agents, including Feedfetcher (user-agent Feedfetcher-Google). Since Feedfetcher requests come from explicit action by human users who have added the feeds to their Google home page or to Google Reader, and not from automated crawlers, Feedfetcher does not follow robots.txt guidelines. You can prevent Feedfetcher from crawling your site by configuring your server to serve a 404, 410, or other error status message to user-agent Feedfetcher-Google. More information about Feedfetcher.

How to Check Multiple Gmail Accounts Automatically

2011-11-17T05:12:00.000-08:00

If you have multiple email accounts on Gmail - say one for your personal emails and other for your business - you don’t have to log out of one email account to check the other mailbox.

Google, as most would probably know, allows multiple sign-in so you can easily log in to two or more Gmail accounts simultaneously inside the same browser. And this works with Google Apps accounts as well.

There’re however some limitations here. One, if you sign-out of one Google Account, you will automatically get logged out from all your other Gmail / Google Accounts as well. Second, if you are launching a new browser session, you’ll have to log in to all your Gmail accounts separately because you can switch from one account to another.

Alternate Approach - Sign-in once for all your Gmail Accounts

Let’s say you have three Gmail accounts – one is your primary account that you need to check throughout the day while the other two email accounts aren’t that important.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just log into your main Gmail account and automatically get signed into all your other Gmail accounts as well but without having to type the login credentials of any of those accounts? The trick is really simple.

Gmail offers a useful feature called Email Delegation where you can share your inbox with other people (say your spouse) but without revealing your password. Once you delegate your Gmail account to someone, they get instant read-write access to your mailbox and they get signed in to your Gmail account as soon as they sign in to their own Google account.

If you apply the Email Delegation facility to your own Gmail accounts, you can check all your mailboxes by simply logging into your primary Gmail account. Here’s how:

Sign-in to one of your secondary Gmail accounts and go to Mail Settings –> Accounts –> Grant Access to your account (screenshot). Choose “Add another Account” and specify your primary Gmail email address here. You’ll now get a confirmation email (screenshot) in your primary mailbox. Accept the request and repeat these steps for all your other Gmail accounts.

That’s it. Once you sign-in to your main Gmail account, you also check all your secondary email accounts by choosing the “Switch Account” option in the upper left corner of your Gmail window. There’s absolutely no need to manually sign in to any of the other email accounts.

Should you use email delegation instead of multiple sign-in? It depends.

This delegation option is only limited to Gmail so while you can check your email account from another Google account, you would still need to sign-in to access your Google Docs, Calendar, Google Plus and other Google products.

Second, while multiple sign-ins allow you to check a Gmail account from a Google Apps account, delegation would only let you share your mailbox with accounts withing the same organization (i.e. email with the same domain name).

One more thing. If your main Gmail account gets hacked, the person will instantly have access to all your other mailboxes as well.

BEST OF WEB IN TECHNOLOGY DOMAIN

2011-11-17T05:01:00.000-08:00

Best of the Web

This is a round-up of some great websites and cool blogs that we think you should check out.

Improving snippets

2011-11-17T04:48:00.000-08:00

Improve snippets with a meta description makeover

The quality of your snippet — the short text preview we display for each web result — can have a direct impact on the chances of your site being clicked (i.e. the amount of traffic Google sends your way). We use a number of strategies for selecting snippets, and you can control one of them by writing an informative meta description for each URL.

Why does Google care about meta descriptions?
We want snippets to accurately represent the web result. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL's content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don't achieve this goal and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular, non-meta description, snippet. And it's worth noting that while accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won't affect your ranking within search results.

Snippet showing quality meta description

Snippet showing lower-quality meta description

What are some good meta description strategies?
Differentiate the descriptions for different pages
Using identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site isn't very helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. In these cases we're less likely to display the boilerplate text. Create descriptions that accurately describe each specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and consider using page-level descriptions everywhere else. You should obviously prioritize parts of your site if you don't have time to create a description for every single page; at the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your homepage and popular pages.

Include clearly tagged facts in the description
The meta description doesn't just have to be in sentence format; it's also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information -- price, age, manufacturer -- scattered throughout a page, making it unlikely that a snippet will capture all of this information. Meta descriptions can bring all this data together. For example, consider the following meta description for the 7th Harry Potter Book, taken from a major product aggregator.

Not as desirable:

There are a number of reasons this meta description wouldn't work well as a snippet on our search results page:

The title of the book is complete duplication of information already in the page title.
Information within the description itself is duplicated (J. K. Rowling, Mary GrandPré are each listed twice).
None of the information in the description is clearly identified; who is Mary GrandPré?
The missing spacing and overuse of colons makes the description hard to read.

All of this means that the average person viewing a Google results page -- who might spend under a second scanning any given snippet -- is likely to skip this result. As an alternative, consider the meta description below.

Much nicer:

What's changed? No duplication, more information, and everything is clearly tagged and separated. No real additional work is required to generate something of this quality: the price and length are the only new data, and they are already displayed on the site.

Programmatically generate descriptions
For some sites, like news media sources, generating an accurate and unique description for each page is easy: since each article is hand-written, it takes minimal effort to also add a one-sentence description. For larger database-driven sites, like product aggregators, hand-written descriptions are more difficult. In the latter case, though, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be appropriate and is encouraged -- just make sure that your descriptions are not "spammy." Good descriptions are human-readable and diverse, as we talked about in the first point above. The page-specific data we mentioned in the second point is a good candidate for programmatic generation.

Use quality descriptions
Finally, make sure your descriptions are... descriptive. It's easy to become lax on the quality of the meta descriptions, since they're not directly visible in the UI for your site's visitors. But meta descriptions might be displayed in Google search results -- if the description is high enough quality. A little extra work on your meta descriptions can go a long way towards showing a relevant snippet in search results. That's likely to improve the quality and quantity of your user traffic.

Design thinking

2011-11-16T01:50:00.000-08:00

Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, says design thinking, which involves viewing problems from the end user’s perspective, could be an important tool for social innovators.

The Takeaway:Design thinking, which encourages consideration of a wide array of solutions, can be applied in the field, and used incrementally, is an important tool for social innovators. It approaches problem solving from the point of view of the end user and calls for developing a deep understanding of unmeet needs, thus avoiding the pitfall of imposing the wrong solution on a community

We have well-developed tools for tackling social issues based on thoughtful analysis and technological inventiveness, but there has been something missing from the toolbox. We have not traditionally applied design thinking to this set of problems, yet design is a process especially suited to divergent thinking—the exploration of new choices and alternative solutions.

Design thinking is scalable and can be applied incrementally to improve existing ideas (such as how a service is delivered or how a product performs for the user) or it can be applied radically to create disruptive solutions that meet the needs of people in entirely new ways.

Safepoint founder Marc Koska was seeking to reduce the transmission of blood-born diseases through the reuse of syringes. He could have designed better packaging or communications to educate medical staff about the dangers of not properly disposing of used syringes. This approach might have helped in an incremental way. He chose instead to design an entirely new autodisabled syringe that breaks automatically after first use. This disruptive design has the potential to significantly reduce the more than 7 billion unsafe injections given every year.

Design thinking is accessible as an approach to innovation in a way that technical R&D is not. It can be applied by people from a broad range of backgrounds to problems ranging from creating new products and services to redesigning business processes, building new brands, and improving communications.

Design thinking is centered on innovating through the eyes of the end user and as such encourages in-the-field research that builds empathy for people, which results in deeper insights about their unmet needs. This focus helps avoid the common problem of enthusiastic “outsiders” promoting inappropriate solutions and ensures that solutions are rooted in the needs and desires of the community.

And how exactly do you go about it?

Ask a good question. The most important prerequisite to a good idea is a good question. When we face intractable social ills we are doomed to failure if we simply ask the same questions over and over again, expecting to receive different answers. The greatest entrepreneurs and creative problem solvers (social or otherwise) exhibit an ability to ask surprising and insightful questions.

Dr. G. Venkataswamy (Dr. V), founder of the remarkable Aravind Eye Care System that makes high-quality eye care accessible to low income customers, asked the question, “Why can’t the principles of McDonald’s be applied to eye care?” Asking this question led him to creative ideas about efficient, high-quality care that have had untold impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of the poor of South India.

Get close to the lives of those you are trying to serve. Understand their actual needs rather than posing a hypothesis about what they might need. All successful innovations balance the requirements of desirability (what people need), feasibility (what technology can do), and viability (what is sustainable or profitable). Design thinking starts with what is desirable, not what is feasible, in order to seek out the best opportunities to create value and impact for the user.

Build to think and launch to learn. Use prototyping, not speculation, to learn about the viability of ideas and to evolve them toward fitter solutions. Launch simple ideas early but structure to learn from these experiments and iterate the ideas quickly.
Through our work with a US-based consumer goods company, we tried to understand what people in rural Ghana would pay for in terms of health and beauty products. We asked many questions, but not until we set up a mock shop on the side of the road in a village did we understand that people would pay more for some higher-quality, branded products, such as vitamins and toothbrushes, and were reluctant to pay for others, such as detergent and toothpaste. This market knowledge allowed us to recommend a basket of goods, a pricing strategy, and a branding direction to the client, who has now effectively established a microfranchising business.

See the entire business system as a design opportunity. Products and services may be at the core of what poor people need, but often the surrounding infrastructure of distribution, communications and marketing, support services, and business models are the least well developed and offer the most potential for innovation.

In Kumasi, Ghana, we worked with Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor to design a toilet and system around it for in-home, urban sanitation. We first designed the service and business offering, which led to the pricing, branding, and, finally, design of the product. This offering is now being tested in 100 Kumasi households, with plans to expand to 10,000 households in the near future.

Teach a person to fish…. Sometimes the end solution is not the only benefit of design thinking. We have found that designing effective tools for others to design with can have significant impact. Not every nonprofit has access to designers; indeed, there are far too few designers focused on solving challenges in the social sector. To help mitigate this deficit, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded a project to create the Human-Centered Design Toolkit to act as a field guide for NGOs and non-profits looking to innovate. The toolkit has been downloaded well over 60,000 times and used to support projects such as the design of a maternal hospital in Nepal, a cooperative of weavers in Rwanda, water distribution management systems in Malawi, and hand washing stations in Vietnam.

Given the scale and diversity of social challenges facing us today, ranging from climate change to failing education systems to threatened food, water, and energy supplies, to chronic health “pandemics,” I would argue it makes sense to use every approach we have in the toolbox to seek out new solutions to improve the state of the world.