Fruition Attending the World Trade Day 2013

Today, members of the Fruition team will be attending World Trade Day 2013 at Infinity Park in Glendale, Colorado, just a few miles away from our home office in Denver. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the conference, which features the most current innovations in technology for business through a series of speakers, open forums, and interactive demonstrations. The theme for 2013 is “Plug In to the Global Economy: How Technology Impacts Trade.” Representatives from major firms like Microsoft, Google, and IBM will be on hand to show off the latest and greatest alongside IT pacesetters from local Colorado businesses. We’re looking forward to learning from these global technology visionaries and applying new concepts to the already exceptional work we do for Fruition clients. If you’ll be at Infinity Park tomorrow, make sure to look for Kara and Jen…
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SEO is like dating – Get a big sample and zero on what works

Recent advertising has suggested that through the use of analytics they can hone in on the individual interests of customers. Interestingly the very definition of analytics includes large data sets to allow for generalization of our results. This means that analytics is specifically designed to allow us to see the big trends that can be proven to be true of the whole population. Though the advertisement appeals to many potential customers and clients, it is misleading at best. The reason we need large data sets is so we can establish a relationship between our sample and the population. The population in many internet contexts is every web user, or every website. Clearly, we cannot collect data on every one of them (though perhaps Google does). What we do instead is collect data on a large number of websites. We could…
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Responsive Websites – Build for Mobile First

If you’ve ever tried visiting a website on your smart phone or tablet that wasn’t optimized for mobile use, you know how frustrating the experience can be. Website elements like navigation, hover-triggered features, sliders, flash script, and small buttons can quickly deter mobile users from spending time on your website. An alarming numbers of website users are now viewing websites on their smart phones and tablets, especially when they’re searching for quick information like hours of operation, business location, services, directory information, and more. Also, if you’re running any ads through social media websites or Google AdWords, those ads seen on mobile devices will direct your users to your poorly-optimized website and will affect your ad conversions and waste your ad budget. Some businesses will hire agencies to create a completely different website just for mobile, but this can quickly…
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Thoughts from SES New York

On March 25, 2013, four members of our Fruition team traveled to New York City to exhibit at the 2013 Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference. We spent three days immersed in everything SES had to offer— attending speaker sessions on current trends, catching up with current clients, meeting lots of new people, and showing off our Google Penalty checker! Here are the takeaways from the event: Our Google Penalty Checker tool is awesome. Prior to SES, our SEO experts developed the Google Penalty Checker, an accurate and user-friendly tool that requires only a few pieces of information and can instantly identify Google penalties that may have been imposed on your website. These penalties range in severity and affect your website’s search engine ranking. We debuted the Google Penalty Checker at SES, and business owners crowded around our booth to see if their…
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Why We Love Magento

A Powerful E-Commerce Platform for Businesses Large and Small Magento is a fairly new e-commerce shopping cart that made its debut in 2008. Since then it has quickly become one of the leading e-commerce platforms used on the web today. Magento offers two paid versions, MagentoGo for small businesses and Magento Enterprise Edition for larger corporations. Magento also offers a free and open source version called Magento Community Edition. We’ve found the Community Edition extremely adaptable and able to meet the needs of the majority of our customers who are looking to upgrade or create a new online retail shop. Because it is open-source, many great extensions have been created to extend the functionality of the Magento Community Edition. However, without any upgrades, Magento still offers an impressive list of features out of the box. Base features Magento offers without…
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Show Fruition Your Negative SEO Examples

Introduction – Negative SEO Examples Project Fruition is looking for examples of a negative SEO campaign that was “successful” at hurting a website’s Google rankings. We know of several attempts that were unsuccessful but none that actually hurt a real website. From the submissions that we receive, we will evaluate each to determine if there is the potential for taking legal action to uncover who launched the negative SEO attack(s) against your website. If we find out who did, we will be publishing that information in a well known magazine. What will happen? If we find a good candidate we will take the initial legal steps which include filing a complaint to track down who messed with your website. There are no guarantees that we will find out who did it or that we will be successful in removing the…
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Don’t “Enhance” AdWords Until You Read This!

By Todd Atkins Recently, Google released information about a big upcoming Google Adwords update that will be launched around June 2013. The update will affect how Google Adwords will segment mobile campaigns and different types of advertisements targeted at users with mobile devices. Google’s new update will allow advertisers to target mobile and tablet users more ‘efficiently’ with ads based on context – like location, device type, and time of the day in a single campaign. Optimizing for Mobile Users Google says that this update is due to the recognition that users are becoming increasingly more mobile, and using a variety of devices to find information and view ads. No argument there. Google is trying to optimize the AdWords experience to account for this type of user behavior, and allow advertisers to capitalize on the many ways internet users experience…
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Adjusting for the new Google Plus cover photo size

Last week, Google Plus made a pretty striking change to the layout of profile pages for both individuals and company pages. The dimensions of the cover photo used to take up a pretty small amount of real estate on profile pages, at a long and narrow 940×180 pixels. The new cover photos? They’re huge. At 960×540 pixels, they are the largest cover photos on any of the major social networks – Facebook’s comes in at 851×315. In addition to the cover photo size, there are some other formatting changes that you should take a look at if your business is on Google Plus. The profile photo is now displayed as a smaller, circular avatar. In status updates and interactions around Google Plus, the profile photo still appears as a square. Page title, page +1s, and additional company/brand information (including the…
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Cloudflare Outage

Sunday’s early morning wake-up call from Cloudflare certainly wasn’t fun. But before we get into any of that if you’re thinking about trying Cloudflare you should. It’s a fantastic service that is the future of front line website defense and it’s available now. For Fruition, the outage was first detected when our Pingdom alerts and PagerTime pages started beating us over the head at 3 am. Not getting any hardware alerts is a good thing. Those didn’t come but sometimes it all just blows up before the alerts get sent out. After doing some digging through the Splunk server it looked like everything was fine. A quick ssh into the server via my phone from my now disgruntled better half and a quick short key to show what’s running on the server and everything looked fine. Yet, several dozen client…
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Benefits of SEO for Businesses

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is quickly moving from being a misunderstood, seemingly optional marketing tool to a necessary and critical part of every business’ marketing plan. Doing business online is already ingrained in our culture, and as the search engines become more and more advanced in how they rank websites in search results, it’s becoming more and more important to have experts optimizing your website. Business who don’t utilize SEO in their marketing plan are being left behind and missing out on a lot of valuable web traffic. Many people already know some of the well-known details about what SEO is: SEO makes your website rank higher in search results and gets your website more traffic. And we all know, the obvious benefits that come from that traffic is more leads, phone calls, and sales. However, there are many hidden…
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