April 11, 2010
Search Engine Optimization, Web Development
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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
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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
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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
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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.
March 20, 2010
Search Engine Optimization, Web Development
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Many people are familiar with google analytics, a free service from Google that provides traffic statistics. Fewer are familiar with google webmaster tools which is packed with all sorts of useful information about your site. Google webmaster tools gives you a number of hints on what to change or fix on your site to help it rank better, you can register sitemaps, see information on crawl information, and even on your site performance.
However up to now, it’s been a pain to help clients, especially the less technically knowledgeable ones, set up verified google webmaster tools access to their site. For every google account, you had to upload a file to the root directory or add a meta tag to the home page. Now, as long as you have one user is verified, that user can easily add additional verified users.
In a blog post, sharing the verification love, the webmaster central blog outlines how it is done. The one caveat is that the access is binary. Unlike google analytics you can’t give “read only” access.
February 16, 2010
Social Media
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Do you buzz? If you tweet, facebook, or even blog, you may want to buzz too. Google took on social media giants such as Twitter and Facebook on their own turf by launching Google Buzz.
If you have a gmail account, you couldn’t have missed it, the first time you have to click through an interstitial buzz setup page on the way to your gmail inbox, and once in, the colorful buzz icon is on the left nestled in among your folders.
The initial launch caused some privacy alarms, and google backed off from automatically linking your other google activity, such as Picasa to Buzz.
It seems to be catching on. I already got two buzzes from one of my gmail chat mates and I noticed that Joel Comm is publicizing his Buzz profile. And Mashable, the venerable social media blog, already has a new Buzz icon next to it’s Twitter and Facebook icons.
I went ahead and created a basic profile so I can join the party but deliberately left many things inactive or blank, I’ll watch how the privacy debate unfurls first.
February 7, 2010
The Online Life
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As a Google apps user I recently received an email from Google advising me that support for IE 6 (Internet Explorer), along with some other older browser versions (Safari and Firefox 2.0) would be dropped in March. If you are a user of Google apps, docs and sites, not to mention gmail, you will need to upgrade.
No one really should be using IE 6. Its security failings are widely known and missing features such as tabs should goad anyone to upgrading to IE7 or IE8, if they wish to continue using Internet Explorer, rather than Firefox.
In fact a recent eWeek article tied google’s recent announcement to the gmail Chinese hacker incident, where hackers that originated from China got access to gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents, apparently exploiting security holes in IE 6 to place some malware for download onto user’s computers. Google in their blog simply points out that the web is evolving at a fast rate and the newer browser versions offer a better experience.
The change will first roll out on google docs and sites on March 1st and then work its way through calendar and gmail through out 2010.
Bottom line? It’s time to upgrade.
January 23, 2010
Online Business, Promotion and Marketing
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Have you noticed that the long sales letter is becoming a thing of the past? You click on an ad or a link in an email and it takes you to a long web page with lots of excited sales copy. Usually included are testimonials from satisfied customers and a progressively marked down price ending with a big Buy ! button. What do you do when you see such a web landing page? If you are like me, you scroll down, barely reading any of the copy, to see what the price is.
There are a couple of trends moving away from the long sales landing page approach.
- The price isn’t mentioned on the sales page. For higher end products, internet marketers have stopped putting the price on the sales page, you don’t find out the price until you click on the “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” button. This allows the marketer to first build a compelling case for the product before the user rejects the product as too pricey.
- The sales letter is replaced by a video. If you haven’t heard about the explosion of video internet marketing, you have been living under a rock. Most people don’t really read anyway and for close to half of the population the preferred learning style is visual. And people retain more information when there is a mixture of visual and audio, making video a much stronger medium than just text. You can convey a lot more information in a 5 minute video than in a 5 paragraph sales letter.
The recent launch of The Magic Bullet System is a good illustration of both points above. BTW, no affiliate link here. I don’t get anything if you buy this and I haven’t evaluated it as a product.
January 15, 2010
Uncategorized
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I don’t support very many causes. But when I was confronted with the scope of the destruction of the earthquake in Haiti I felt I had to do something, so I donated some money.
Right now, unless you are a search and rescue team or have medical supplies, money is what they need the most from you. And quickly. Doesn’t have to be much, just what you can spare.
Here is some places you can donate:
Thanks to webaddict for his tweet with the haiti 48 hours later link, you’ll just have to look, words are not adequate.
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