On the left is before the user starts scrolling, but to the right after scrolling a little you can clearly see that the map covers the adverts that were at the top of the column causing less Click Throughs.

Not always easy to spot, but it is something you should check if you have had a high performing keyword in the right column of the search results for a long period of time.

If any one else has lesser known tips, please share your wisdom below.

Personally, having looked through the statistics of the sites I manage, there has been no significant, if any at all, drop in people arriving at the site through long tail searches.

For the purpose of explaining this, I have used and altered code from Jquery Globe’s  Slideshow Plugin. You can download my updated code here.

I had two main questions that needed answered:

• 1. Did users hover over a tab but not click on the content. If not why not?
• 2. Do users actually use the slideshow. We can monitor the usual clicks, but do that actually even look through the content?

To do this the main point in the excercise is to trigger a click when hovering over one of the tabs. Not too hard with Jquery…

tabs.hover(function() {
if ($(this).hasClass('current')) {
    //triggers click event that logs data to Google Analytics
    $("this").trigger('click');
    return false;
}
slide( tabs.index( this) );
});

The ‘a’ tags will also have to have the tracking code added. I simply labelled mine ‘/slideshow/news-item1′ so I can find it easily in Google Analytics. Find out more about tagging links over in the Google Analytics help articles.

"javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview ('/slideshow/news-item1');"

Hope fully this wil be of use to someone, I know it has been for me.
You could also set up Custom reports to easily access this data on demand.

If you have any suggestions on improving this, or have any other ideas, please share your thoughts below.

The flickering occurs when animating content. Example code below…

//Toggle
$('.timeline-btn').toggle(
   function() {
      $(this).toggleClass('close').blur();
      $('#showhide').slideDown(1000);
   },
   function() {
      $(this).toggleClass('close').blur();
      $('#showhide').slideUp(1000);
});

To solve the problem, simply add this piece of CSS code to the flickering element, in this case, the ‘#showhide’ div.

element {
    overflow:hidden;
}

If you know of any other ways to remedy this problem or this hasn’t fixed your problem please post below.

Today, Google officially announced an update to the Toolbar Pagerank, which has sent out a mixed message. Should we now rethink our strategies?

What do you think? Should we still focus our efforts on Pagerank? Is Pagerank just an arbitrary statistic as many people believe? Is it morphing into something else? Share your thoughts below.

While waiting for a flight a couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of Monocle, an excellent read if you like to keep up to date about Global Affairs, Business, Culture & Design.

This particular issue of the magazine covered the topic of ‘Soft Power’. For those of you who don’t know what this is,  it’s basically…

“…an ability to effect change through persuasion and not coercion”

I would love to say that the days of hard marketing are gone, where pop up windows were all the rage, tempting us to ‘CLICK TO PURCHASE’, or ‘SIGN UP NOW’ but sadly that’s not the case. Technology has progressed and consumers are getting savvier. No-one likes to be forced into doing anything. Why would they? This is where soft marketing comes into play and gentle persuasion
wins the day.

What are your thoughts on this subject?