May 11, 2010
Search Engine Optimization, Web Site Marketing Strategies
1 Comment
Adding a listing to Google Local Business Center helps your local bricks and mortar business get found by web searchers. Google Local Business Center is integrated with Google local search – that list of results that show up as a map with locations. If you type in a search term plus a geographic term such as “Thai food Fremont” you will often get these “map” results.
Google Map Results
The problem has been that you needed a business address for this to really work for you. Many home based businesses don’t want to publish their home addresses and their service area may be different than where they live. Some home based businesses have gotten PO Boxes just to get a better listing in local search. But a pin on a map that points to a PO Box isn’t necessarily that useful.
Well a fix from google now available. In an indepth interview with Eric Enge, Carter Maslan shares the concept of service areas that google is introducing. If you are a dog walker that serves an area differently than where you live, this update is for you. You can now specify what area you want to appear in for a local search. Check out the service area help page for more info.
April 30, 2010
HTML, Search Engine Optimization
2 Comments
Part 2 of What are Meta Tags?
We now know what are meta tags (previous post) and that they are really only two that we care about (well most of us, there are some additional ones that should be in a webmasters tool kit). So how do search engines use meta tags?
Keywords meta tag:
It used to be that you could put the keywords you wanted to rank for into the keyword meta tag, and the more the better right? Then you could sit back and consider yourself done with your SEO efforts. This has not been true for a while. Google completely ignores this tag and has for years, and while yahoo and bing probably look at the tag, it is not clear that they give it much weight in determining how to rank your site. Regardless, do not put 30+ keywords into this tag, this is known as keyword stuffing and will only harm your page. Keep it to 10 at most. If you do use adsense or other context driven ads on your site, there is evidence that they use the tag to determine what ads to show.
Description meta tag:
Technically this meta tag doesn’t help your web page rank any better, but it is still important. Why? Because if this tag is set, google will often show it as the snippet underneath the title in the SERPs (search engine results pages) rather than grabbing some random chunk of text off your page. I’ve seen some funny snippets over the years, usually from sites that have no text, so you get a snippet that says “you need flash version xxx to view this site”. Is that going to entice you to click? You can think of your description meta tag as the “welcome” mat to your site. Put together a catchy description (no more than 160 characters as that is all that will show) that will invite your reader to click through to find out more.
April 29, 2010
HTML, Search Engine Optimization
1 Comment
I belong to a mastermind group that is following a Joel Comm video series. We get together every week and discuss the particular session we watched during that week. Some of his videos do assume a certain amount of knowledge especially when they veer off the prepared materials.
The discussion was concerning meta tags and how important (or unimportant) they are for SEO. I was glad I watched because I picked up one interesting tidbit about meta tags that I hadn’t known before .. but I’ll get to that in another post.
So what are meta tags?
First off, it’s useful to understand that what you see on a web page isn’t the whole story, there are certain HTML code elements that are not visible on the rendered page but still read by search engines. Meta tags fall into this category. Meta tags are metadata, essentially data about data (if that is confusing, I’m afraid the wikipedia entry won’t be much help). However in this specific example, the concept is a little easier to grasp, since on an HTML web page, meta tags help describe what the web page is about.
What can you say about a web page? Well a number of things, but you need to only pay attention to two tags “description” and “keywords”.
- Keywords is just that, a list of keywords that you think describe your page the best
- Description is a few sentences that describes what your page is about
Many website building tools and CMS (content management systems) will have some way for you to fill these tags in, without having to learn how to code them into HTML. If they don’t, consider moving on to one that does.
Next – how search engines use meta tags
April 28, 2010
The Online Life
1 Comment
Have you opted out of the new Facebook instant personalization feature yet?
Last week Facebook introduced a new feature that “allowed non Facebook partner sites to personalize your experience using your public Facebook data”. The partner sites listed are Microsoft Docs, Pandora, Yelp.
The fact that the default setting was “Allow” immediately touched off a furry of posts that urged friends to: “Go to Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites and uncheck “Allow”. Please copy & repost.” I got at least 4 of them in one day. I did wonder whether most actually read through the feature, or just participated in the knee jerk reaction “there goes Facebook trampling on my privacy again”.
It’s easier to opt out than to think through the ramifications, which are pretty broad. First of all you have to think through what about you is public, not just public public, but to your network. Someone who is not my facebook friend can see quite bit about me because he is in my “network” (depending on how your privacy settings are set). And if my facebook friends don’t opt out, they can still share my public info with these sites, even if I opt out, to prevent that I have to explicitly block the actual applications. So perhaps it is time to review those settings again to more tightly control what is public.
Do I really want the guy in accounting to know I listen to speed death metal? That I gave a poor review to a steak house because I’m a militant vegetarian (for the record I like trip hop, electronica, folk and do eat meat). Do I really want my facebook identity linked with my yelp persona? A site that that tinkers with review placement?
I’ve done all of one (yes just one) yelp review, and I use last.fm more than pandora, so it’s not likely not that big of an issue for me, but sharing data like this is huge and will have unanticipated rippling effects. In the end it’s a control issue. Better make sure those electronic footprints show up where I want, so let’s opt out in a futile but proud gesture.
BTW, anyone see the South Park Facebook episode? Great episode, unfortunately overshadowed by the episode 201 controversy.
April 14, 2010
The Online Life
4 Comments
I have no idea of how many telecommuters are out there, but I do know their numbers are increasing. I’ve been one of one for many years, I WFH (work from home) 4 days a week and visit the office 1 day a week. The one thing you miss with working with virtual teams is those more casual conversations that used to happen in the hallways and around the watercooler (or break room).
It seems for some of us, that twitter and facebook is the new virtual watercooler. For me at least it’s a handy way to track the goings on of my mostly past colleagues (and a few that are still present).
I know that one of my overseas colleagues is mad for cricket and tweets on the fortunes of his home team. I wasn’t surprised when one of my past colleagues was quoted in the Economist on his views on Cloud Computing, because I have followed his writing efforts on twitter. A past member of a team I managed has turned into quite the wine connoisseur. This is all courtesy of social media.
While not a substitute for real world interactions, Twitter and Facebook are not a bad placeholder for the social discourse I miss by not getting out of the house.
April 11, 2010
Search Engine Optimization, Web Development
No Comments
I saw a blog post on when to use microsites vs. multiple domains. The blog post wasn’t that helpful, but reminded me that I wanted to sharpen my understanding of when:
- use of subdomain is called for versus a sub-directory
- when it makes sense to create a whole separate domain altogether
In my corporate web job, we often used subdomains because we were hosting the new website (usually an application rather than a pure HTML site) on separate servers. But then we would often create a “vanity URL” on the main site that redirected to the sub site. Interesting, but not necessarily helpful to answering the question or when, from the marketing or SEO perspective multiple domains is called for.
I was confused on what the term “microsite” meant. The wikipedia definition: “cluster of pages which are meant to function as an auxiliary supplement to a primary website … most likely has its own domain name or subdomain” helped quite a bit. From both the technical and user experience perspective, it makes sense to install something like a forums, catalog or other separate feature on a subdomain, like maps.google.com .. or even on a completely separate domain. And if it will have a distinct brand identity, a separate domain is called for. One more reason, mentioned by the wikipedia entry, is that it can help target your PPC keywords more accurately.
Subdomains appear to be treated similarly to sub-directories by search engines per Matt Cutts, which means you may not get much SEO benefit for the added complexity.
So microsites usually mean additional domains. However just because you want to expand your web presence into a related but different topic than your web site already covers, doesn’t necessary mean a new domain. A new domain adds management and other costs, and you might have to start from scratch to get it indexed by the search engines. You are also missing out on the opportunity to get your original site to rank for more searches because it has more content.
However, I’ve seen creation of a blog on wordpress.com or blogspot.com with links to a main site be quite helpful for ranking for desirable keywords. A specific tactic to keep in mind.
April 8, 2010
Social Media
No Comments
If you actively tweet and are looking to build followers, here is a round up of useful links of “follow me” twitter buttons, graphics and icons to add to your blog or websites.
April 6, 2010
Social Media, wordpress
1 Comment
Share Your Blog
Make it easy for your blog readers to tweet, digg, facebook your posts:
More Auto Tweeters
Feed your twitter, or get more enhanced with URL shorteners
Soon, follow mes and embedded tweets.
April 2, 2010
Social Media, email marketing
No Comments
With the recent announcement that Facebook’s weekly traffic has surpassed google’s, Facebook has become a force to be reckoned with. Well you already knew that, but really, it’s just not going away.
The world’s largest walled garden does have a way for you to show your public face. Facebook fan pages have generated a ton of interest from businesses who want to use them for branding and customer engagement. Sometimes companies even partner with fans who have created a page as Coca-Cola recently did with coke lovers Dusty and Michael.
With a fan page you can virally get your message out there. When someone becomes a fan of your page, their network knows. With fan pages you can post updates and advertise events. So is the Facebook fan page a replacement for email marketing?
One development to watch, is that Facebook plans to issue 400 million email addresses to Facebook users. The email addresses would use your vanity Facebook name as an username, so that you would have a @facebook.com email address.
So is email marketing dead? Hard to say. But a system that provides a rich interaction with your clients via both fan page and soon via their email systems, could be very compelling, especially since it is all free!
March 30, 2010
Social Media
1 Comment
There are far too many ways to add social media links and icons to your blog. However, if you are playing the social media PR game, it’s a necessary part of your web presence plumbing, those share, tweet this, facebook icons on your site and your blog.
Up to now, I had been happy with my socialable plugin, resisting the siren call of adding bolder and bigger social media icons to my sidebar. Then I looked at AddThis.
AddThis button bar is simple to add to your blog
It’s so dead simple, you can’t help but to just do it. As long as your wordpress theme is widget aware, all you have to do is cut and paste HTML code into a Text Widget that you drag and drop to your sidebar. The step by step instructions are right there on the AddThis web page. The simplicity of the user experience is something that should be strived for by all webdesigners.
You can see it in my sidebar to the right. I still have sociable but I updated the settings to show it only on individual blog posts so I didn’t have dueling social media button bars on my home page.
AddThis also generates cut and paste code for your website, blogger.com and myspace for four different types of buttons.
« Previous Entries Next Entries »