Posts Tagged ‘social networking’
Book Review: Website Optimization – Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets
Thursday, January 14th, 2010Author Andrew King, president of Internet marketing firm Web Site Opimization, LLC has really done it. In Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets
Or at least almost any business. There are still some specialized skills required—it certainly helps to have some background in online marketing, web analytics and HTML coding—though King’s clear and concise prose removes a lot of the mystery.
The book is divided into two major sections: Search Engine Marketing Optimization and Web Performance Optimization. It pays for itself in the first 50 pages—two chapters covering natural search engine optimization and an organic search case study. While much of the material here is well-covered in blogs and other books, even experienced SEOs are likely to find a few new ideas here. For example, though I’ve used many keyword tools and even written about some of the best keyword research tools here and here, I somehow managed to overlook Wordtracker’s free keyword suggestion tool, which uses data from Dogpile and Metacrawler to estimate search volume across all search engines.
Here are several more key SEO insights provided by King:
- Wordtracker’s fee-based tool goes beyond free keyword tools by tracking what it calls a keyword effectiveness index. According to King, “The keyword effectiveness index, or KEI, is a comparison of the number of searches and the number of web page results. Targeting high KEI phrases with adequate search volume gives you the best chance to rank quickly on particular terms by going where others aren’t competing. Very Sun Tzu.”
- “Create your keywords tag using your master keyword list and the visible words in your page. Although you can separate keywords with a comma or space, omitting commas will give you more proximity hits between adjacet terms.” King recommends using up to 30 words, with specific key words repeated up to four times.
- “After title tags, headlines are the most important component of web pages for search engine rankings…Include the primary keyphrase of your web page in the first-level header…The main header should describe the content of the page succinctly in 40 to 60 characters.” Use real header tags (h1 through h6) rather than “fake” p-class tags in your CSS files. And keep in mind that h2-h6 tags are just as important, possibly even more important, than h1 title text.
- Bake in your most important key phrase to your home tab, so
What is Webbiquity? How to Be Everywhere Online
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010Welcome to Webbiquity! What exactly is that? Briefly, Webbiquity, or web presence optimization (WPO for those who prefer TLA’s), is the fusion of SEO, social media, interactive PR, online reputation management and other disciplines to make an individual or organization ubiquitous on the web for their name/brand and unique descriptive phrase. If SEO is about getting your website onto page one of Google, WPO is about owning that page.
For example, Jill Konrath is webbiqitous for the phrase “selling to big companies,” holding all 10 spots on the front page of Google for that phrase. The results include her website, blog, a link to her book
of that title on Amazon, and articles she’s written. Ardath Albee is almost as dominant for her unique phrase, “marketing interactions,” placing in 7 of the top 12 spots on Google, including the top four. And if you Google “sales management thought leader” in quotes, six of the top ten spots belong to the same sales leadership guru. Interestingly, a Google search for “world’s largest online bookstore” doesn’t display the most obvious result
anywhere on page one. Maybe a company with $20 billion in sales and a $600 million annual marketing budget doesn’t need webbiquity, but smaller enterprises without Super Bowl-size advertising budgets can certainly benefit from it.
From a historical perspective, the web a decade ago (or even a bit less) was still primarily a broadcast medium with limited inactivity. Although in theory anyone could own a website even then, the web presence of most commercial organizations was limited to their own websites and whatever had been written about them by professional publishers and analysts, plus a few directory listings. The last few years have, of course, seen the emergence of social media and an explosion of user-generated content. A company’s website is now only one of myriad places where customers, buyers and other interested parties can find information about it.
This new environment has created the conditions for web presence optimization: using all of the tools now available to make a company as “findable” as possible not only for branded searches but also for key phrases that uniquely describe the enterprise and its offerings. Using these tools properly means not only dominating search, but also presenting a clear and consistent message across channels, wherever buyers or industry influencers may find you.
Specifically, web presence optimization is about achieving webbiquity using the tools show in this diagram, including social networking, social bookmarking, blogging, interactive PR, video and content marketing to disseminate the company’s message as broadly as possible. Just as importantly, companies need to maximize the search value of these different tools and platforms by taking advantage of the linking and cross-linking opportunities they provide.So, for example, social media releases–part of interactive PR efforts–point readers to company microsites and its media sharing (images, video, presentations etc.). Media sharing accounts are connected to Twitter, which is also used to promote content marketing. Reputation management sites point the organization’s Twitter account as well as social networking profiles. And everything links back the enterprise’s website and blog.
The end result is that when customers, prospects and influencers (bloggers, journalists, analysts etc.) are looking for information on your industry, they find you everywhere. Your story and messages are bolstered by your webbiquity. You have the opportunity to become a valued resource in your industry. Further, the interactions you have with these various constituencies across social networking and other media platforms demonstrate that your people aren’t just smart, they are also helpful and responsive.
This is obviously a high-level view of the elements of webbiquity. Future posts here will delve more deeply into the tools and tactics that can help you and your company “be everywhere online” for your brand and industry discussions.
Surveying the Social Media Landscape
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009In “The Four C’s of Social Media,” I noted that coming up with a concise definition of social media, like defining “art,” is challenging. Describing it through the four C’s—content, context, connections and conversation—was one approach. Another is to look at the different types of websites and tools that comprise the social media landscape. The intent of the lists below is to categorize the landscape and show the most prominent sites in each category. They aren’t intended to be comprehensive, but rather to identify the high points in the social media topography.
Social Networking
Sites where you can post your profile, promote links to your company site / blog / etc., join groups based on various common interests and traits, ask and answer questions, provide updates and engage in other online networking activities.
Site Alexa Rank (March 2009) Compete Traffic (February 2009) Compete 1-Year Traffic Change Google Pagerank Facebook 5 73,787,766 +159.0% 8 LinkedIn 14 11,246,726 +137.4% 8 Plaxo 1,440 2,629,043 +144.7% 7 Friendster 47 1,454,029 -20.0% 7 Naymz 12,476 522,953 +93.2% 6
Social BookmarkingSites where you can post links to articles, blog posts or other content that you find interesting or want to promote, search for what’s being posted on a particular topic, and, depending on the site, do things like join special interest groups, see what others are linking to, view the most popular links, vote on your favorites, promote content, and comment on links posted by others.
Site Alexa Rank (March 2009) Compete Traffic (February 2009) Compete 1-Year Traffic Change Google Pagerank Digg 243 33,433,760 +51.2 8 Reddit 3,777 4,908,990 +114.6% 8 StumbleUpon 832 4,418,609 +38.6% 8 Delicious 2,735 1,623,083 +2,176.8% 8 Propeller 3,340 1,164,549 -12.1% 8 Mixx 589 879,108 +341.2% 8 Furl 19,326 164,949 +10.7% 7 Searchles 39,385 67,406 +25.7% 5
Blog TrackingSites where you can promote a blog, search blogs for specific topics, evaluate the popularity of various blogs and track selected blogs.
Site Alexa Rank (March 2009) Compete Traffic (February 2009) Compete 1-Year Traffic Change Google Pagerank FeedBurner 522 3,581,957 +42.3% 9 Technorati 599 3,309,174 +25.2% 8 Bloglines 9,182 435,118 +2.6% 8 BlogPulse 58,521 51,229 +89.7% 7
Media SharingSites where you can upload, promote, search and share non-text media such as video, photos and podcasts.
Site Alexa Rank (March 2009) Compete Traffic (February 2009) Compete 1-Year Traffic Change Google Pagerank Video YouTube 3 69,110,425 +16.9% 9 Vimeo 537 2,648,778 +848.1% 7 Viddler 5,653 688,155 +669.4% 6 Photos Photobucket 36 24,470,242 +5.8% 7 Flickr 33 23,769,885 +8.2% 9 Picasa N/A 1,023,139 +48.2% 8 Podcasts iTunes 94,360 889,156 -10.3% 8 PodBean 21,456 119,812 +82.5% 6 Podcast Alley 27,962 79,007 +15.1% 8 Presentations SlideShare 1,100 1,008,754 +250.0% 7
Reputation ManagementSites that help you establish your “personal brand” and can also drive traffic to your site or blog.
Site Alexa Rank (March 2009) Compete Traffic (February 2009) Compete 1-Year Traffic Change Google Pagerank ZoomInfo 2,702 1,864,047 -6.5% 6 CrunchBase 24,789 430,057 +116.1% 7 VisualCV 51,989 85,993 +174.0% 6 LookupPage 74,220 16,525 N/A 4
WikisSites where you can conduct research, create new topic pages based on your expertise, edit existing content pages, and—in the case of Google Knol—rate the contributions of others. These sites use the insidious “nofollow” tag, so they have no SEO value. They are useful, however, for establishing the expertise of an individual or organization on a specific topic, and can drive referral traffic. Wikipedia is the most difficult to edit due to the tight control maintained by the site’s primary editors and their hostility to any content that can be construed, however remotely, as promotional. Knol may lack Wikipedia’s cachet, but it’s a much friendlier place.
Site Alexa Rank (March 2009) Compete Traffic (February 2009) Compete 1-Year Traffic Change Google Pagerank Wikipedia 7 62,228,655 +11.4% 9 Knol N/A 386,772 +22,303.6% 7 Freebase 22,726 206,489 +1,132.2% 6
OtherSites that are difficult to categorize. Yes, Twitter is a micro-blogging platform and there are others, but does anyone use them?
Site Alexa Rank (March 2009) Compete Traffic (February 2009) Compete 1-Year Traffic Change Google Pagerank Twitter 314 7,935,441 +964.5% 9 Squidoo 483 4,324,281 +43.3% 8 FriendFeed 4,771 876,616 +984.5% 7 What did I miss? I’d like this to be a “living” post, so let me know of any sites that should be here but aren’t and I’ll update this list periodically. Note: This post was originally published on the WebMarketCentral blog in March 2009.
