Ever worked with a lead management marketing system? There are many out there, for a monthly fee, you get a website complete with a choice of landing pages, auto-responders (often prewritten for you) and a contact management system. They work well with online advertising; where your banner, PPC ads drive traffic directly to your pre-built landing pages, generating leads for you.
So what about setting up your own domain and pointing it to your marketing system? Not a problem, for $10 or so, you buy a domain and then forward it to your marketing system URL.
This won’t cause any SEO problems for my new domain, right? Well, “it depends”.
Read more on the different ways to forward your domain
Create your Google+ Page
Should you create a Google+ page for your business? Well, yes, of course you should. Just like you should be staking out your business name or brand real estate on twitter and Facebook, you should be doing the same on Google+. It’s a no brainer. Now whether you should put any more effort into the page – that remains to be seen. Opinions are mixed, Slate states Google+ is dead, but yet a recent Wired article predicts Google Plus Pages will beat Facebook and Twitter. What do I think? I think you can’t ignore Google+, at least not completely. Just think about it, do you really think that the Google search algorithm will completely ignore activity on its own social network? Putting aside Google’s emphasis on favoring “trusted” content, just look at the clues. Do searches while logged in and note the “shares” and also note the new +1 stats in Analytics and draw your own conclusions.
One thing I gave some thought to was whether to create the page under a different Google account than my personal account. If you are a larger company, you shouldn’t have your page created from one of your employee’s personal accounts – there is no way to add additional admins for now. However since I was creating a page for my blog, in the end I decided the bother of administrating a separate account was not worth any benefit in keeping my personal page separate from the business page. However this is something to consider BEFORE creating your page.
So I created a page for Webenso. And I’m sure I will be posting on it. You should consider doing the same.
WordPress templates are powerful tools. For example many themes use templates to give you the option of creating a sales page without the sidebar. But I had never seen these custom templates used for WordPress posts.
An artist needed Paypal buttons added to her WordPress site, a portfolio of paintings and prints showcased using posts. But at this point we only wanted to add Paypal buttons for the prints, which were available at a the same range of prices based on size of the print and the paper used. Since most of the posts (but not all) would have the same Paypal buttons, I wanted to find a way to avoid copying and pasting code onto each page. I also wanted to empower my client to have the choice to “turn on” or choose the paypal buttons with just a click or two. I found the answer in WordPress custom post templates.
Ah the old days. The early days when all Google looked at was how many backlinks pointed to your page. These days, trust, creditability and authority signals are a big part of what Google looks for when deciding whether to rank your page in the top ten. This past summer, leveraging Google profiles, Google released another feature that helps it do just that. You can now tag your articles with rel="author" HTML markup to link your pages to your Google profile – which makes you more “real” in Google’s eyes. The nice thing about this is that then Google will put a pic of you next to the snippet of your article that shows up in the search results as Danny Sullivan appears below.
Danny's article with SEO advice to Bill Gates
Google’s desire to tie content to “real” people perhaps sheds some light on the recent mass removal of non user Google+ accounts.
On a recent trip to Europe I took over 200 pictures with my Android HTC Incredible cell phone in Germany, Istanbul (Turkey) and Prague (Czech Republic). The idea was to not only share snapshots as I travelled along, but also to create an online album to share with my friends when I got back. Here some tips on how to upload photos from your phone that I picked up. Note that this post tends to be Android specific.
Roman Cistern - Istanbul, Turkey
The basics
You don’t have to have a smartphone to share pictures. Most cellphones today can take pictures and send them via SMS (the protocol used for text messaging). You usually have the option to send a “picture message” to an email address as well. You can do this with a smartphone as well. With Android, if you email the picture it appears to be coming from your gmail account.
As an aside,the Android OS is tightly integrated with your gmail account, for example sharing contacts … in some ways this makes life easier when you are emailing from your phone, but in other ways it junks up my phone with a lot of contacts I’ll never email again. This also can impact your uploads as I discovered.
Using a smartphoneI’m into the third week of traveling in Europe. As mentioned in my previous travel in Europe post I’m also working part-time while traveling. The first week I spent in Munich, including a visit to Oktoberfest and the second week in Istanbul, Turkey. Now I am visiting Prague, a beautiful city which I highly recommend.
Courtesy of K Mick - Flickr Creative Common License
- Timezones – Germany is nine hours ahead of California, so this means that my client meetings will need to be at night. Since I will need to meet with a couple of clients during the three weeks I will need to allocate “work” nights during the time I will be there.
- Connectivity – One of the reasons I picked Europe is because it is a developed country and I should be able to find internet connectivity fairly easily in hotels and WIFI hotspots. I do need to be careful on what I send over unsecured WIFI and may need to invest in a USB broadband card. Similar to the card I have here, there are pay as you go plans in Europe. On my todo list is reconfiguring my mail on my phone and laptop to send over SSL as I have noticed that some of my mail providers block SMTP over unsecured WIFI. Hopefully using SSL will do the trick.
- Power – Fortunately I won’t need an actual transformer as the laptop’s power is already transformed to a lower voltage, but I do need a adaptor plug. I picked one up at Radio Shack. My cell phone plugs into my laptop to recharge.
- Phone – This was the most daunting part of planning the trip. At first glance it looked like I would either need to rent a phone when I arrived or try a service here that ships you a phone to take with you. Europe uses a different network (GSM) than the US (CDMA) and although AT&T and T-Mobile phones work on GSM, many of the travel blogs will tell you that Verizon phones won’t. This however is changing, my new Droid does have the capability to work on GSM. I called Verizon to set up a plan and get the magic incantation to activate GSM. The plan is not cheap, it’s $.99 a minute and $.50 to text. However I can receive texts for only $.05. Due to this I may still consider renting a phone, but at least I’ll have a phone that works there. The real killer is data roaming, that can run hundreds of dollars. I plan to keep that that turned off.
- Phone meetings – At $.99 a minute, this is not a feasible option for hour long (or even half hour) client meetings. Enter Skype. I will be signing up for unlimited calling to US landlines and cell phones for $8 / month. Another alternative is MagicJack but this requires additional equipment to order from them.
Although advances have been made in this area, you should assume that an image to a search engine looks like unreadable code. So what you need to do to surround the image with hints on what the image might be about. This gives you another opportunity to add your primary and secondary keywords to your page.
What tags you need to worry about
I guess I should write on why you might want a picture of you to appear in the search engine results when people search on your name … but I do I really need to?
Like most people who are in the new Google+ network, I had spent some time on polishing up my profile and posting some pics to my “scrapbook”. Google+ is, at the current moment, closed to new members, causing frustration, but that shouldn’t mean you can’t enhance your google profile or create one (if you can’t, let me know). If you have a gmail account, just log in .. click on your email address in the new black bar that appears at the top of the page and click on Create Profile. Don’t forget to upload a photo.
Slow website? Webenso has never had great performance, but adding the social media buttons has really slowed things down. Addressing my website performance has been on my to-do list for a while, so it was perhaps serendipitous that I caught a short presentation from Michelle Zatlyn from CloudFlare last night on improving blog performance.
You do need to care about your website speed. Not only because your users aren’t going to stick around for a website that takes 10 seconds or more to load, but it’s bad for SEO as well. Over a year ago, Google announced they would be taking page load time into account for their ranking algorithms.
CloudFlare originally was conceived as a way to block hacker and spam bot traffic to make your website more secure. Michelle quickly got the feedback that any solution they came up with needed to avoid slowing things down. So CloudFlare now has a dual purpose, it looks for “bad” traffic and filters that away from your website, and it speeds up your website’s performance as well. The CloudFlare approach is a little different than the standard remedies for slow websites, it’s not about changing your javascript to load asynchronously or hosting social media button images or installing caching on WordPress (which are all things you should still consider). What CloudFlare does is become a proxy for your website, it caches your pages and can serve your site from it’s datacenters around the world. So instead of someone from Hong Kong requesting your site from its hosting location in the USA, they will get it from the CloudFlare’s Asian datacenter much quicker. Your website — served from distributed locations from around the world — for free. Cool huh?
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