SEO
A Budding LinkedIn Love Affair
I have a crush on LinkedIn. I’m not sure if the feeling is mutual, but it’s getting pretty serious on my end.
I signed on a few years ago and, like a lot of people, didn’t use it that much at first. It actually struck me as a bit dry (versus the delicious options available through Facebook and Twitter). But now, I see the light. And I’m not the only one.
As you may know, LinkedIn is a social network for professionals. You “connect” with people you have worked with, would like to work with, or have similarities with, professionally speaking or otherwise.
LinkedIn is an incredible source of information for my work. For example, I can browse by keywords to find people or companies I may want to hire or work with. I can see who of my connections are already connected with these new folks and can get a review I can trust. The “Recommendations” feature also helps me understand what sets someone apart from the pack with real endorsements.
LinkedIn Groups also offers me the opportunity to join groups relevant to my line of work, further extending my network. The groups I join also display on my profile so others in my network can join too.
LinkedIn tracks and reveals (to some extent) who has looked at my profile and what other profiles on LinkedIn are looked at after or before mine. This helps me understand how people perceive me and/or the work I do.
Blog posts, book recommendations and Twitter feeds can now be integrated into LinkedIn profiles. But my favourite current feature is how I can build credibility by simply talking about what I know.
The Answers section of LinkedIn allows me to ask a question or answer one. When I answer one, it is recorded on my profile as part of my recent activity. So, once again, my network, or others checking out my profile, can join that conversation or just read the thread. But it gets better. Answers are also rated by other users – encouraging people to give the best answer they can, benefiting everyone. If an answer is picked as the best one, this also reflects on a profile – further helping build credibility. Last but not least, by engaging on LinkedIn, it helps SEO. One of my answers was picked up by Google within 24 hours.
What’s not to love? You can see why I’m smitten.
According to Wikipedia, as of April 2010 LinkedIn has more than 65-million users worldwide. Are you one of them?
Behaviourally Targeted Online Ads…On the Rise!
Check out the eMarketer’s forecast as summarized by the fabulous daily, CynopsisDigital. Based on our team’s experience and success using behaviourally targeted online ads, this trend makes perfect sense. Still, the numbers are staggering.
“Assuming that privacy concerns are adequately addressed, behavioral targeting will generate more than $1 billion in ad sales in the U.S this year, according to a forecast from eMarketer, with that number more than doubling to $2.6 billion by 2014. Behaviorally targeted ad dollars will rise as a proportion of online display spending from 14.2% in 2010 to nearly 20% by 2014, when ads targeted based on interests or intentions will account for 7.6% of total US online ad spending.
U.S. Behavioral Targeting Online Advertising Spending 2008-2014 (millions)
Year Spending % Change
2008 $775 47.6%
2009 $925 19.4%
2010 $1,125 21.6%
2011 $1,350 20.0%
2012 $1,700 25.9%
2013 $2,100 23.5%
2014 $2,600 23.8%
Source: eMarketer”
- Moyra
Tags: ad spending, behavioural advertising, online advertising, online marketing, PPC, SEM
The Near-Future of Search
Happy New Year!
It seems appropriate to write my first blog post of the year on possibilities. Here on the Magnify team we get uber excited hearing about new apps and how the internet is changing and fluxing, even as we sleep.
We have to admit, making a search online still takes much effort and analysis on our part, before we even type in our search terms. But what if instead of coming up with key words, we needed only to speak in conversation and have our computer autonomously select, from our language and tone, key words to search on?
And, what if in the chaotic midst of preparing a four-course roast dinner we could simply turn to our ‘wired fridge’ and demand ‘port reduction’ and set the computer to work? Seconds later, the waterproof screen embedded on our fridge door would display instructions on how to make the sauce, from our favourite cooking website, along with a live chat linked up to a chef-help-line. And if we added the word ‘twitter’ to our demand, the ever intelligent fridge might send off a quick tweet ‘help! with port reduction?’. Imagine a fridge taking care of those trivial but extremely practical posts one makes on a daily basis?! We may not be too far off…
Photo by Mike Warren, Flickr
This article by Google VP, Search Products & User Experience, Marissa Mayer, is a flex-your-brain exercise in imagining the future of search, and how our devices could (will) become an even more integrated part of our lives.
In the article, Marissa describes Google’s ideal search engine:
“Your best friend with instant access to all the world’s facts and a photographic memory of everything you’ve seen and know. That search engine could tailor answers to you based on your preferences, your existing knowledge and the best available information; it could ask for clarification and present the answers in whatever setting or media worked best.”
Katy
Tags: future, google, search, smart fridge
SEO for WordPress Sites
There’s no denying that WordPress is a platform that makes it easier for companies and individuals to publish, update and manage blogs and sites. However, for all its advantages, there are a few points that count against WordPress, when it is interpreted by search engines. In this post, I pinpoint some of these issues, and how to address them:
Photo credit: Randy Stewart, via Flickr
Potential Duplicate Content
One of the great things about WordPress blogs is that they make it dead-simple for a visitor to find the post that he/she is interested in. The visitor can select articles to read according to category, keywords (tags) and authors. Unfortunately, this means that all posts that are organized by those criteria end up being duplicated in one way or another. For example, let’s suppose that Jane writes an insightful article about Ferraris, and chooses to file that post under the “Italian Imports” category, as well as using the tags “Ferrari” and “Testarossa”, right before filing it under her own author name – “Jane”. Consequently, that article will be found not just in one page, but anytime someone chooses to view posts within the “Italian Imports” category, the “Ferrari” or “Testarossa” tags, or that were written by Jane. Hence you have the issue of several pages containing duplicate text – a “no-no” in Google’s eyes, since it views duplicate content as an illegal attempt by Webmasters to inflate a site’s search engine rankings. These sites often end up with a lower position among search results.
One way to avoid this common problem is to ensure that there’s a large distinction between your tag and category archives. So, as an example, you don’t want to have both a category AND a tag to be called “Italian Imports”. A good rule of thumb is to assign larger subjects and topics as categories, and leave tags for nuances of those topics. So in our example above, we could choose “Italian Imports” and “Ferrari” to be categories, while setting “Testarossa” and “Pininfarina” as tags.
Optimized Description and Keyword Tags
When you publish your WordPress blog right “out of the box”, description and keywords meta tags are not automatically included in your posts. That’s not a bad thing, though. Although keyword tags are not as useful in search engine optimization as they once were, description tags are still used by search engines to decide on how they describe your pages in search engine results. As such, an effective description plays an important effect on whether someone will click on your link among many other search engine listings. You definitely want your words to be compelling and separate your listing from the rest of the pack. Each page on your site should have a unique description tag since, optimally, everyone of your Web pages should be distinct from others. How do you work around this WordPress shortcoming? You need to resort to a WordPress SEO plugin.
Two main plugins that facilitate the optimization of a WordPress site are “Headspace 2” and “All in One SEO“. They both have their own advantages. “All in One SEO” makes it easier to formulate title and description tags for a site, but since the description and title tags that it composes are somewhat automated, this plugin does not grant you as much control on the text on those tags as you might like.
If you’re more of an SEO control-freak like me, and want to be picky about how your page descriptions show up in search results, then “Headspace 2″ may be a better fit. That is because this plugin doesn’t automatically compose meta title and meta description tags – so you can enter copy and keywords that you know are bound to generate the most clicks for you.
Google XML Sitemaps
WordPress sites allow for new content to be added, easily and painlessly. However, as far as Google is concerned, if it is not aware that you have new content on your site, then it’s all for naught. You want to notify Google that there’s new material on your WordPress blog, and one of the easiest ways to do so is by installing a plugin that will automatically generate an XML Google Sitemap for your blog as new content is developed. Some of the many plugins available are:
This is another major step in optimizing your WordPress site which will make it that much easier for Google to take notice of your blog.
PageRank Dilution
Links pointing to someone else’s site from within your own blog dilute your own PageRank. For that reason, you will want to be very specific and strategic about where in your site an outbound link can be counted as an endorsement from your blog (hence helping the landing site’s PageRank) or, in contrast, which areas of your site carry no PageRank value for links posted there. A helpful hint is to add the “nofollow” attribute to any links to which you do not want to give any “PageRank power”.
Because of their social nature, blogs can have a plethora of outbound links. One way to manage how much PageRank juice you want to giveaway from your blog is by installing a “nofollow” plugin, which will enable you to dictate which of your site sections have “nofollow” or “dofollow” tags in their links. As an example, you can choose for all links in your post pages to have a “nofollow” attribute attached to them, while all links in tag archives would receive the “dofollow” accreditation. This plays a part at conserving your PageRank, since you’re communicating to the Google Crawler that outbound links on specific pages are not to be countered as endorsements (which dilutes that page’s PageRank).
For a list of nofollow plugins, check out this link.
SEO-Friendly Permalink Settings
A permalink (an abbreviation of “permanent links”) is the URL that WordPress designates to a blog post, and which is then used by other sites to link back to that article. It’s also the link that you’d email to a friend, or that you’d bookmark, if you desire to access that post a later date.
By default, permalinks assigned by WordPress are neither “human” or “SEO” friendly. Typically, a permalink looks like this:
http://www.yourwordpressbloghere.com/?p=22
Try saying that, three times, fast! Good luck. In addition, an article will be much more conducive to success in search engines if its permalink resembles more my example below:
http://www.yourwordpressbloghere.com/2009/06/why-ferrari-testarossa-rocks
The process to change your posts’ URLs to a better permalink varies depending on the WordPress version that you’re using. It may be as easy as installing a plugin and making any changes through that tool, or it may require some modifications to be made on a server level. Either way, it’s worth the trouble.
These are merely some of measures that can be implemented to optimize WordPress sites. They should be employed in tandem with other basic SEO measures.
I hope this helps you in some measure. Of course, your comments and questions are welcome. Is there a topic that you’d like us to discuss here on the Magnify Digital blog? Send it our way!
‘Til next time,
Guacira Naves
Online Marketing Strategist
@OnlineStrategy
Tags: WordPress, WordPress plugins
The Social Media Cart and the Marketing Horse
On Wednesday night, I attended the Ask The Experts event in which Liz Gaige (one of our SheTeam contributors)
Photo credit: woodsy, via stock.xchng
participated. The event’s goal was to give entrepreneurs a chance to get answers to dilemmas regarding branding, marketing, Web development and social media strategy.
As the night came to an end, I found myself reflecting on how the variety of experts in the panel illustrated the process that should optimally happen as a company ventures into Digital Marketing waters:
Marketing
Liz Gaige was the in-house expert in charge of addressing questions about marketing strategy and planning. As she answered questions from the room, I was reminded of how important it is to have a clear perspective on who your target market and product/offering are, before moving further toward branding, Web development, etc. Once you have identified who your target market is, and that it is indeed financially able to sustain your business, you are better equipped to analyze how your offering differs from the competition.
The wisdom that is gathered up until this point can now be transitioned toward the next phase…
…Branding
As Ryan Thompson expounded, branding is much more than a logo. It encompasses the perception you’d like your target market to have about your company, your offering. That impression is partially communicated through your business cards, logo and other collaterals, but it is ultimately about the mental picture that one absorbs about you – before, during and after a visual, online and print conversation.
Defining your brand is a key point in this process, since it dictates the tone of your communications later on, during the implementation of our next two points…
…Web development and social media strategy
Ideally, all the steps above will have taken place before you delve into Web development and social media strategy waters. The information that you have collected through your marketing and branding journey makes up your corporate DNA, upon which your Web development muscle, bones and cartilage can be built upon. How those muscles get put to use is another story.
In order to achieve your goals, should you participate in a sprint or a marathon? A sprint could be likened to an AdWords campaign – which can be implemented quicker, with faster returns, but demanding more energy up front – where as a marathon would be akin to search engine optimization: you’re in it for the long haul.
Is your offering best suited to be presented through a ballet or modern dance? In the realm of social media, LinkedIn is more formal and structured (such as in a ballet), whereas Twitter has a younger, more casual tone.
The bottom line is that there is an order of events that should take place before you even decide if your company should be “tweeting”, or if it should have a new Web site. Going through the marketing and branding stages is integral for a solid Web development campaign, upon which a successful social media strategy can then be built. So make sure that everything happens in the right order, and that your social media cart does not come before your marketing horse.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this post, and welcome your questions or comments.
Tags: branding, entrepreneur, LinkedIn, Social Media, strategy, Twitter
