By Margery | February 06, 2012 at 06:53 PM EST | No Comments
I’m surprised how often I still get the question “Why should I blog?” Keeping a business blog going is daunting. It takes a lot of time and dedication. For some people, there’s a little bit of stage fright to overcome. Most small businesses have enough on their hands just managing the business without this added burden. And for some people, writing is not a core discipline.
So what's the benefits of blogging?
Blogs add more keywords to your website that maybe you didn't think about before or weren't appropriate for the web page content. These keywords will drive more traffic from the search engines by matching a greater variety of search queries.
Blogs increase confidence from potential customers. They see that you aren't just talking, you are “walking the talk.”
Blogs demonstrate your expertise. Your website pages might talk in general about all the great things that you can do for your clients, but now you can really get down to the nitty gritty with specific examples.
Regular blogging helps rankings. One of the 250 or so known search engine scores is on “freshness.” In other words, websites that are updated frequently get better “freshness” scores than websites that are stale and haven’t been updated for years. And a better “freshness” score contributes to higher rankings in the search results.
Blog readers get a sense of who you are from the blogs, not just what you do. They start to feel that they know you a little. And as we all know, relationships build business.
Blogs have staying power. Popular blogs years old can still draw traffic.
Blogging is cheap. It will take a few hours of your time, but compared to other forms of advertising, you’ll get a good return for your effort.
Interesting blogs will be shared. If you are fortunate, your blog post will be Tweeted and shared on Facebook or bookmarked on Digg or Reddit. A whole new audience could become acquainted with your brand name because of one interesting blog.
And if a blog post of yours goes “viral,” that is, becomes insanely popular and everyone talks about it, emails links to their friends, the Today Show camera crew camps out at your door, and Jay Leno mentions it in his monologue—you get to upgrade your phone system so you can handle all the calls.
So what should you blog about? Anything related to your business services or products can be a blog. You can trade the duties between youself and your staff or hire a ghost blogger that you trust. You can even trade blog duties with a friend to liven things up. But most of all, make the commitment and stick to it. Really. It's worth it.
By Margery | January 21, 2012 at 05:49 PM EST | No Comments
Ever since the Panda update first began rolling out, the new emphasis on site quality has turned SEOs into user experience consultants. I’ve always been a fan of usability, and I agree that content and website design are deeply integrated. So what can Google’s own home page tell us by example? We see that Google, too, has struggled with form vs. function.
The struggle between simplicity and elegance in an interface design and its functionality started with Google’s earliest design, that of a 1998 prototype published on the google.stanford.edu subdomain. The conflict arises from the nature of its job. It’s not just a home page. It’s an appliance. This search appliance is designed to do just one thing – to help you find what you want to find on the Web. But as anyone who has ever opened a door knows, the best interface is one that does one thing and does it well.
But it’s not just an appliance. It’s a home page. Where do you put all the ‘stuff’ that tells you about Google, Inc. without getting in the way of the appliance?
Where to put those links has been the subject of every home page redesign since Google started. Subsequent iterations tried the links in different locations:
In columns on the bottom half
A single line across the bottom
As tabs over the search box
In links over the search box and across the bottom of the page
In links across the top and bottom of the page
And, 14 years later, we have a Google home page that acts like an appliance. The links are transformed into a web-like navigation bar across the top of the page familiar to all Web surfers, even to the drop-down menu. The company links, About Google, Advertise with Us, and such, are gone except for one sentence below the search buttons dedicated to advertising the latest and greatest Google innovation. The only links present in the navigation bar are dedicated to helping you search.
The search appliance design itself was sacrosanct until 2010. At that time, the search box and buttons began to undergo a number of slight changes. The search box was lengthened and broadened. The un-identical twin buttons, “Google Search” and “I’m Feeling Lucky,” were separated. After that, these buttons went through several minor design changes by first getting taller, getting flattened, and then given a more softened look with rounded corners. The current design shows buttons greyed out until you hover over them. The search box and logo are given the preeminence that the search appliance deserves. Its functionality can’t be missed. The buttons and navigation bar are available on the periphery should you need them. A single link advertises the latest Google thing. Now we have an appliance baked in a home page.
Other appliances on the web, like those whose primary business is selling domain names, cannot dedicated their home pages to a sole function because they also offer other services such as hosting websites. Of those, Godaddy.com’s home page comes closest. It attempts to overcome the clutter of its own service offerings, multiple navigation bars, and links with a gigantic search box enabling you to search for a new domain name.While you can’t miss the search box, this design just isn’t in the same league as the simplicity and elegance of the Google home page design.
Has the ultimate balance been achieved? Is this the first true hybrid of Google-ness? Since the Bing.com home page shares many of the same elements, like the web-like navigation bar, the focus on the search box, and the lack of distracting clutter, maybe this is the first true expression of a web search appliance. No distractions. Just get the job done. I like it.
By Margery | January 07, 2012 at 03:31 AM EST | No Comments
Videos, videos, videos. Everyone loves videos. In October 2011, 20 billion videos were viewed on YouTube. And that number is only a little less than 50% of all the videos watched in the U.S., according to the comScore (And I have a suspicion that 75% of those videos were about cats!) So, your videos should be part of your organic ranking strategy.
800 million videos are viewed on YouTube in a single day. You want your video to be one of them. The YouTube Creator Playbook, published last November 2011, offers tips for optimizing your videos to rank well in YouTube search.
But YouTube isn’t the only game in town. Videos are indexed by Google in their Video vertical as well as blended into their universal search results. Since Google owns YouTube, it’s pretty obvious that there is favoritism at play. When was the last time you saw a Vimeo video incorporated into Universal search results?
So how do you optimize for both Google and YouTube? Actually, optimizing for both search engines isn’t very hard. The requirements are very similar.
Write compelling titles. Give the searcher a reason to click to view your video. Place your important keywords at the front of the title.
Make your video content accessible. Neither Google nor YouTube search can watch your videos. They make sense of the topic through the text surrounding the video.
Add a transcript. Enabling Closed Captioning makes the all the audio available to the search engines and to visually impaired viewers as well. YouTube recommends CaptionTube to help with subtitling.
Optimize your video description. Add keywords just like you would in your webpage copy.
Link generously. Cross-link to your Channel. If this is video #1 in a series, link to the next video. Link to your home page. Link to your social media accounts. Link from your social media accounts to your videos. Link, link, link.
Tag generously. The YouTube Creator Playbook recommends a minimum of 12 tags. Don’t be shy. List the tags in order of importance. Include a tag that is a shortened version of your video’s title using the same words in the same order.
Likes contribute toward rankings. Ask everyone in your office, ask all your friends and relatives, ask people you pass on the street (okay, maybe not that) to Like and Google Plus your videos. They need to watch the video for at least two minutes, though, to get credit.
Engagement. Respond to video comments immediately, even the negative ones.
Content. The more videos you have in your Channel, the better.
Freshness. The more you interact with your videos, the better.
If you can’t afford a professional videographer, there are many college students willing to work cheaply for the portfolio piece and can produce a very good video. Beware of posting amateur videos, even if you’ve done them yourself. The quality of your videos will reflect on your product or services.
By Margery | December 22, 2011 at 11:03 AM EST | No Comments
When Bing merged with Yahoo in 2009, we in the SEO industry knew that our beloved Yahoo Site Explorer’s days were numbered. In case you didn’t use it, Yahoo provided a free tool what displayed the backlinks to your site that were in Yahoo’s data base. There were toggles to display only the external links, and only show the links to the home page or to the entire domain. This was fairly trustworthy data, as far as search engine disclosure goes. Google and Bing will display only sample data through their search operator and filtering is messy. Now with the Yahoo Site Explorer only a memory, what other tools can replace this venerable work horse?
You probably already have Google Webmaster Tools loaded into your website. In addition to crawl errors and diagnostic tools, Google Webmaster Tools shows limited backlink and anchor text information. The key here is the limit. The data comes straight from the horse’s mouth, so is probably reliable. But it is neither deep nor thorough. Plus, you can only use it on your own website. You can explore your competitor’s backlinks using Google Webmaster Tools.
A new tool on the block is the Ahrefs Site Explorer. For free, you get up to 100 queries a day, 3 reports with up to 500 results per report, and .01M backlinks. This is probably enough for the small business owner working on his own site. If you need more, there are plans ranging from $49 a month to $499 a month for more results.
Ahrefs displays information for backlinks broken down by type, number, and domain. It also has a neat domain comparison for a side-by-side comparison of up to 5 domains. You can also see anchor text and keyword positions. Pretty nifty, huh?
Arguably the best known tool is the SEOMoz Open Site Explorer. The information available for free is limited and there’s much pressure to subscribe to SEOMoz to use their tools. Fans of the dear departed Yahoo Site Explorer will recognize the options to filter results by external or internal links or to the domain or by a specific page. Unique to the Open Site Explorer is the ability to filter backlinks by only nofollows, 302s, or 301s. Otherwise, you get everything that Ahrefs.com offers including anchor text, number of backlinks, and a domain comparison table. SEOMoz uses its own page authority and domain authority rating scores, which can be a challenge to explain to non-SEOs, but is still useful.
Subscription backline services run the gamut from expensive to cheap and dirty. In fact, most SEO packages that include rank checking and tracking now usually include backlink checking capabilities. It’s all a matter of need. If you run a website, get something. Backlinks are that important.
By Margery | November 18, 2011 at 09:39 PM EST | No Comments
My friends on Facebook are my spiders - they go out and find interesting material to share with me. Because they are my friends, very likely whatever they find interesting will interest me, too. They find interesting articles, upcoming local events, or news. And I don't even have to optimize them!
