Currently 78% of teens now have cell phones, and almost half of them own smartphones. That translates to 37% of all teens who now have smartphones.

According to the study, youth in lower-income and lower-education households are somewhat less likely to use the internet at all, but are just as likely, and in some cases more likely to use cell phones as their primary point of access.

93% of teens have a computer or access to one at home. 23% have a tablet computer.

What does this mean to your organization? It means we have a whole generation coming of age who are viewing the internet primarily through their cell phones. Modern websites will need to be designed “responsively” — to work equally well on desktops, tablets and mobile devices. Designs will need to be streamlined to be useful on mobile devices.

Mobile users are no longer a small special interest group on the internet, they are rapidly becoming a norm. Mobile access is becoming the preferred method for a generation who grew up on the internet, but the majority of business websites are not mobile-friendly, and a considerable number aren’t even usable on a mobile device.

It may be time to review your website design.

Chris Jean at iThemes (and a former Main Street employee) has written a great blog post talking about some of the current threats in the WordPress world and some fairly simple security steps you can take to reduce the risk of hackers getting into your site.

Check it out: http://ithemes.com/2013/04/15/ongoing-wordpress-attacks-details-and-solutions/

In the last 10 years WordPress has gone from nothing to running 65% of the top million websites on the internet. Builtwith.com has some fascinating statistics on WordPress and the other major content management systems used today. Besides having the largest installed base, WordPress also is on the receiving side of most conversions from the other platforms (ie. Joomla, Blogger, Drupal). In other words many more people are converting to WordPress from other CMS’ than are converting from WordPress. More stats here: http://trends.builtwith.com/cms

Happy 10th Birthday WordPress!

When we start studying search engine optimization, it’s easy to get sidetracked by the minutia of optimizing techniques – optimizing image tags, managing percentage of copy of a page, and cramming keywords in meta tags. These are all marginally effective, but it’s amazing how many organizations don’t even have their primary keywords on the site.

Examples:

– A local service business complains they are not ranked very highly under “Edmond heat and air”, but when you read their site, the town of Edmond is never mentioned anywhere.

– Another small business wants to attract new work from commercial customers, but all the copy on her site is targeting consumers. Someone looking for business services would never find them on her site.

– A church complains they don’t show up on the first 3 pages of Google when searching for churches in  their town, but their whole home page is a series of graphics with no text-based copy.

Take this quiz:

1) Who are the customers you want to target with your website?
2) What keywords do you think they will be searching with?
3) Are those keywords and audiences represented on your current site?

Are those keywords and target audiences represented by the copy on your site, the page titles, and navigation buttons? If not, there is a very easy way to improve your search engine rankings – update your website copy.

Remember, Google can’t read pictures or graphics — anything you want search engines to see must be in text. A graphic with the words “Best industrial widgets in West Texas” doesn’t do you any good with search engines.

Ninety percent of effective search engine optimization is simple. Get the keywords on the page, the titles, and headlines. That will usually get you a very respectable organic ranking on most search engines. The remaining 10% is magic and top secret stuff, but very few sites are already optimized enough to benefit from these additional techniques.

Take a look at your site – the copy, the page titles, the headlines. Do they target the customers you want with the services they are searching for? Can you improve your site’s effectiveness with some simple copy changes?

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Terrell Sanders is president of Main Street Enterprises, a web development and consulting firm that specializes in small businesses and non-profits. He can be reached at tsanders@MainStreetOpen.com.

Of course, this checklist is only good until somebody changes their format, so get it fast and get all your graphics in sync!

Social Media Graphis Checklist