Top 5 Web Tips, Tricks & Digital Stories: March 2021 Edition

Usually, we concentrate on the Tips & Tricks part of the title, but this month there have been some very insightful – and possibly rather odd – stories about the digital world which we would like to highlight.

But don’t worry, we still have one or two tips for you, so without further ado, let’s get started…

1 – Payment processor Stripe is now worth $95 Billion

Yup. You read that right. Stripe is now worth an incredible $95 billion.

This surprised me a little, mainly because I thought that Stripe was just another of the 100+ payment gateway providers out there. A solid payment system, but nothing above or below the others.

Boy, was I wrong!

How did Stripe become worth so much money?

It’s mainly down to the fact that so many large companies use their services to process digital payments.

Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft, Shopify, Uber, and Zoom all use Stripe. And with clients like that, you can see how approximately 90% of US adults have bought from companies that use Stripe.

And they’re not just popular State-side. In 2020, the company signed up over 200,000 new European customers and handled 5000 transactions per second.

Wowzers!

2 – Don’t forget to use Google Trends when researching keywords

Often overlooked and to some completely unknown, Google Trends is a handy tool to add to your keyword research arsenal.

Initially launched in 2006, Google Trends is a tool that analyses the popularity of search terms across various regions and languages.

The website uses graphs to display the search volume of different queries over time, but it is the Related Topics and Related Queries sections that can be of great use to content creators looking to load their articles with keyword variants to boost visibility.

Also of note are the various search-related articles listed further down the Google Trends home page. These articles offer great insight into our search habits and how they have changed over the years.

3 – The Bluetooth name and logo have Viking heritage

This little gem is well-timed considering the recent popularity of Viking themed TV shows and nordic music.

Apparently, the name Bluetooth was inspired by an old Viking-era king who had a serious dental issue.

Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson reigned as king of Denmark from 958 to 986 and did so with a conspicuously blue-ish looking tooth.

Being king clearly didn’t come with a very good dental plan back in the mid 900s.

The Bluetooth logo itself is also based upon the nordic runes for the letters H and B, as in Harold Bluetooth.

For more detail about how the name was conceived over a pint of beer (or three?), you can read this article over at creativebloq.

4 – Featured snippets really do work in SERPs

We highlighted the importance of structure data and schema tags back in January, explaining how correctly formatted data can lead to better visibility in SERPs.

Now a study has been published by SEMrush and Brado showing the real impact of these and other ‘Rich Snippets’ on search results.

The report is an intense and insightful read. Including nuggets of information such as the fact that most rich snippets take-up almost 50% of screen space on mobile devices. That’s a whole lot of attention you can grab with just one correctly formatted web page!

So in a nutshell, you need to be crafting your content with rich snippets in mind.

Search Engine Watch has produced a great article on the subject that is well worth a read.

5 – The first-ever Tweet sold for $2.5 million

We thought we would end this month’s roundup as we began. With a story about money. Specifically how much of it you needed to buy the first-ever tweet sent by Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey.

just setting up my twttr

— jack (@jack) March 21, 2006

Turns out it was $2.5 million.

Be it an interesting exercise in self-promotion or a desperate grab for some extra beer money, Jack listed his first tweet on Valuables towards the end of last year with bids starting at $1.

The winner would be offered the digital asset as a non-fungible token (NFT).

Ownership of these assets is recorded on a blockchain — a digital ledger similar to the networks that underpin bitcoin. However, unlike bitcoin, a person can not exchange one NFT for another.

Each NFT is unique and acts as a collector’s item that can not be replicated, making them rare and therefore potentially quite valuable.

Selling digital assets is nothing new. You may remember the online game Second Life that enabled players to trade in virtual property with real money. But the sheer value of the first Tweet is likely to encourage a steady flow of similar sales, which will soon become a landslide.

As we move away from owning physical items (think music CDs, books, DVDs, etc), how much of our lives and possessions will become completely digital?

How much of our lives will be lived in the real world and how much of it will be lived in The Matrix?

Thanks for joining us

We hope you found this collection of stories useful and delivered a little light relief during your day.

Please visit us again at the end of April for the next round of Top 5 Web Tips, Tricks & Digital Stories.

If you missed February’s edition, including DAN’s Digital marketing trend predictions for 2021, you can find it here.

If you have questions about how to implement any of the tips mentioned in these articles on your website, or if you have been thinking of creating a new site for your brand, please feel free to get in touch. We’re always happy to discuss new collaborations.