I believe we are at a digital tipping point. It is happening in slow motion as we speak but when we look back it will appear as though it took place in the blink of an eye.

The tipping point I am referring to is the death of traditional high street players in the face of an online onslaught. Take a look at my four examples below to see how this is playing out and how it is now at a stage of no return:

1. Retailers – Under pressure from the mass movement to online shopping and faced with larger overheads more high street shops are closing. This in turn makes the average high street a less appealing place to visit and therefore more people move online. This then results in further economies of scale for online retailers and they attract more traffic AND more shops close.

2. Banks – Online lenders such as Zopa are stealing vast market share through innovative credit worthiness tests and low rates. Banks cannot compete due to expensive overheads (and a host of other well publicised issues) so they are lowering their high street presence. This is resulting in more people using online solutions which in turn is resulting in the online portals such as Zopa being able to offer even better rates and attract more share from the high street.

3. Book shops – Under immense pressure from Amazon more shops are closing resulting in more Kindles being bought. This in turn means fewer footfalls for book shops and more will close.

4. Estate agents – They are under pressure from online only portals that charge less commission. This means the high street players are working on smaller margins with larger overheads. More of them are moving to an online only presence which will see the high streets importance in the property market diminish.

It is a repetitve and obvious story. The high street is in the throes of an insurmountable challenge and will need to adapt to survive.

Sometimes you might come across a scenario where you might want the t.co version of your URL without tweeting it on Twitter publicly.

Usually this is mostly for SEO purposes where you want to copy/paste the t.co URL for sharing on other sites or you might want to see it just out of pure curiosity.

Finally, the day arrives when Facebook plan to file papers with the US financial watchdog which will begin the process of becoming a publicly listed company.

This looks to be one of the biggest share sales witnessed on Wall Street yet!

They expect to raise around $10 billion with the flotation that makes the $1.9 billion raised by Google in 2004 look like small fry by comparison.

The two companies lucky to be involved in this flotation will be predominantly Morgan Stanley with heavy involvement from Goldman Sachs.

Reportedly staff at Morgan Stanley have been told to be prepared to work over the weekend of 19^th and 20^th May, so maybe this is the estimated IPO date??

During all the speculation, and there has been lots, Facebook have determinedly kept quiet.

When link building in SEO, once in a while, you might want to mix it up a little. Particularly when it comes to blog commenting.

Blog commenting is still a main staple in the SEOs diet. It’s a little more refined than the SEO of yore where sticking your link in any old blog would do. I’ve personally never gone down that route, but obviously you see a lot of it about, and it still continues.

Blog commenting is needed for variance in your backlinks. And you need those quality relevant blog comments for those extra brownie points in the rankings.

Choosing the right techniques should help your comments stay a little longer as well. It only makes sense. Spammy and un-moderated blogs don’t last long – they’re either cleaned up or Google catches on and those comments lose value (that is, if they had any to begin with).

In February Twitter is going to roll out branded pages for advertisers who spend over $25000. Twitter is one of the most successful social networks on the planet yet they have failed to find a lucrative business model. Let’s hope this changes things for them. I am always very sceptical about “customized” pages as they remind me of glittery MySpace themes…

Here is a screenshot of what you might come across from next week onwards.

This is a question a client recently asked me – hence I thought it may prove a subject worth a quick blog. The client in question was pondering fragmenting their website into several microsites dedicated to each of their specialist areas. Our advice was not to do this and here are a few of the reasons:

Perks for influencers on PeerIndex?

I am firm believer that Peer Index is the leading light in measuring a user’s social influence. You may have read a series of posts on our blog before about how it is possible to “Game” Klout and influence other social metric sites. To give you an idea, I spent a week away from the social world recently with very minimal activity. In that time Klout increased my score by 8 points. Hmm… PeerIndex however has held firm, make less knee jerk decisions about how influential an individual is on certain topics. This is why I was happy to discover this little gem on my peer index Dashboard…

Here is the relevant video based on this announcement.

Simply click and copy the following code to embed this infographic on your website.
<br /> <a href="http://www.elevatelocal.co.uk/"><img src="http://www.elevatelocal.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/google-infographic.jpg"><br /></a>Infographic by: <a href="http://www.elevatelocal.co.uk/">Elevatelocal</a>

Last night Google announced the introduction of a latest update to its core search engine algorithm. The article written by no other than Matt Cutts himself titled Page Layout algorithm improvement sheds light on how Google takes UX into context and applies that to the way it ranks pages in its search results. Google states that they have “heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.”

This new update will hopefully get a lot of MFA (Made For Ad Sense) sites out of the way and will encourage web designers to focus on user-centred design. Yes, all designers should focus on usability and user experience but unfortunately not many do. Although Google makes specific comments about ads being above the fold, the truth is that if your main content is not above the fold then you will not rank very well even if there are no ads on your website. Furthermore, if your main content is not above fold and you have a clattered design then it is very likely that you will have a high bounce rate.