Local reviews, custom reports and more – The Monday Dec 6th Roundup

What a week. All the wikileaks news must have everyone just itching to write. Despite relatively little news (people are STILL talking about the decormyeyes dude), there’s been an abundance of posts. So this week we’ve got some really great stuff.

For the SEO’s there’s conversation on the roles of number of reviews versus rating for local search. For developers there are 100 CSS tricks, for analysts three useful custom reports by Avinash Kaushik, for UX people there’s online card sorting, and for everyone else… well, read on.

• We start the week with information for all you ecommerce sites out there, pointing out that many local searcher marketers have always claimed that review quantity helps more than review quality when it comes to local listings. The question then becomes: how has this changes now that Google has updated their algorithm?
• How do you define your Blog’s target readers? Well, according to socialmediatoday you do it by… getting some one else to do it. Seriously, your advice on how to define your target readers hire trained experts? If people were doing that, why would they be reading your post? Gah.

• Six Revisions has 100 exceedingly useful CSS tips. No, they really are, and although some of them are pretty basic, there’s lots of information that I didnt know about.
• A list apart has a guideline to getting started with ARIA and progressive enhancement. For those who don’t know, progressive enhancement is a development process to assure best practices, while ARIA is a specification designed to provide accessibility at a technical level.

• The GA blog has part two of its three part guest series on analyzing and optimizing for mobile, by the guys over at E-Nor. I do have to wonder what site they’re looking at that made 57% of its mobile revenue off of iPads, though. Maybe an iPad skin store?
• And of course Avniash has a zinger of a post on custom reports. In fact, he has 3 ready made custom reports that you can import directly into GA with a mouse click. Ok, some of them require a little more than a mouse click for more advanced features (like measuring “engaged visits”), but for the most part it’s pretty straightforward.

• Forum One has an introduction to going card sorting online. Card sorting can be an incredibly easy and useful way to organize information.
• Meanwhile Brand Strategy Insider has an incredibly detailed post on using personas to build stronger brands. I’m not entirely done it yet, but for anyone unfamiliar with personas and Joseph Campbell, it’s one hell of a read.

• Our friends over at GetElastic have a post on the problems with horizontal integration in online industries. I’m not really sure where The Digital Divide (or the gap between people with effective access to information), but hey, it’s good advice.
• With all the wikileaks talk going on, how could I not post an analysis of the situation by one of my favourite authors: Umberto Eco. Eco argues that that “cablegate” heralds a “crabwise” progress of communication, returning us (as, he argues, all development does) to an older style.