Credit: Photospin.com

When website projects involve web designers and SEO’s, it’s almost a sure fire recipe for conflict. However, it doesn’t have to be that way if both sides are willing to communicate and understand each other’s point of view. In an effort to help designers, I’ve written down some of the most important and easiest to implement aspects of SEO that all web designers should know about and use in their projects and work flow.

Masthead – The masthead is one of the first things people see when visiting a website. It can create a powerful dramatic impact, impart a sense of trust, and create a lasting impression. It’s also one of the spots most abused by web designers. Not to stereotype, but let’s be honest. Most designers work on big monitors, double monitors, or, worse yet, big double monitors. This has a tendency to distort their sense of proportion. Lots of designers produce mastheads that are 200-300 pixels tall. Once I even worked on a website with 450px masthead. My recommendation: stop wasting so much screen real estate. When I build a website for myself, I have a limit of 100px. Why so small? A masthead almost never produces any revenue. Unless you are putting advertising in it, keep it small and let people get to the page so they can “do” whatever it is you want them to do when they reach your website.

Image Replacement – No discussion of website mastheads would be complete without talking about talking about links, CSS, and image replacement. For usability, your masthead should link back to your homepage. That’s standard operating procedure at this point. The image should also have an ALT tag with the company name and logo. Don’t try and be tricky and add extra keywords in here.

Here’s where things get a little controversial. Google is never going to recommend using an image replacement technique to get anchor text keywords in your masthead. They have said it multiple times, and IMHO they are doing this because they know that, if they open the door a crack, people will take advantage. However, in my experience, it’s just not a real world solution. Using anchor text works much better than an ALT tag. So my recommendation is to use a well known image replacement technique like Leahy/Langridge Method or Gilder/Levin Method. Avoid the -9999px type of things and stay away from adding in “extra keywords” or “helpful keywords.” If it’s not in your masthead logo, don’t use it … period.

Drop Down, Fly-Out, Rollover Menus – This is another one designers love to use, but remember to be careful. If you are going to use it, make it so that search engines can crawl through the URL’s. Generally this means avoid Javascript (even though Google can understand some Javascript) and use a CSS solution. If you’re unsure, use a text browser or search engine spider simulator.

Flash and Ajax – If I had to name the two biggest obstacles people build into their websites, Flash & Ajax would be near the top of the list. It’s not that they are bad by themselves, but people use them in all the wrong ways. Using Flash, Ajax, videos, or any rich media in your pages is helpful and sometimes necessary. And let’s be honest–it’s a lot easier to sell a big ticket item like a sports car with Flash or a video. Using Ajax to change the contents of a page based on user actions absolutely can make a better user experience. However, if you design navigation or links to your website–especially mission critical parts of your site–using only Flash or Ajax, it’s unlikely a search engine will find it.

Page Titles & Meta Descriptions – Make them different for every page. Really, it’s worth the effort. Having the same title and meta description site wide is like wearing the same outfit to every singles event or date you go on. Google finds it just as appealing as the person you are trying to date. Also, don’t put the name of the website at the front of the page title; instead, put it at the end. It’s a very simple thing that really improves rankings. The title tag and meta description are what usually appears in a search engine listing, so try to make them interesting and click enticing.

H1 and Hx Tags – Put an H1 tag on every page. I know it’s ugly by default, but use CSS to make it look any way you like. Your H1 can match your page title but it doesn’t have to. It can be slightly different or completely different if it needs to be. Use H2, H3, or other Hx tags in your pages and navigation when it makes sense.

Breadcrumbs – Breadcrumbs can be a powerful tool. They can help with usability and SEO. They help the user know where they are and can help them move “back up” the navigation tree. Make the breadcrumbs links if at all possible. The actual links should closely match or be identical to the page title for maximum SEO value.

URL’s and File Names – Try to keep file types out of the URL if at all possible (http://example.com/directory/page/). Moving from .html to .asp, .php, .jsp or any other technology becomes a huge pain in the butt after the fact. Yes, there are ways to work around it using htaccess or other tools, but if you do it right the first time, it’s a non issue down the road. Keep file names and directory names as short as possible. Include as few keywords as possible. When you get beyond four or five words in a URL, the value drops off dramatically.

Mobile Websites – Don’t create a separate mobile website. Using m.example.com or example.com/mobile/ will just lead to problems down the road. Even if you can detect user agents and redirect, it creates problems. Instead detect for mobile browsers and serve lighter content and use a different CSS file.

Canonical Issues – The website should only work on http://www.example.com or http://example.com, not both. If it does, you need to fix that problem.  Here’s a tool to help you generate the proper htaccess file.

Duplicate Content – Website content should only exist on one page or URL. If it exists in more than one place, you are leaving it up to Google to figure out which one they think is best.You can help Google by using the rel=canonical tag, but don’t rely on that to solve problems you shouldn’t be creating in the first place.

Moving Files and 404 Pages – Make sure your website has a 404 page and serves a 404 header response when someone looks for a page that isn’t there. Serving a 200 header response is called a “soft 404″ and is bad. You can check with a page header checker. If you need to take down or move a file, set up a 301 redirect. Again the htaccess generator can help you if you don’t know how. Use the header checker to make sure it’s a 301. Using a 302, meta refresh, javascript redirect can lead to problems with search engines.

Number of Images and Image Size – Images may look nice, but never use an image where text will do. Search engines can’t actually tell what an image is. They use the surrounding text and filename to make a best guess. Size images properly. Don’t have a 1000px image and size it down to 200px using CSS. If you have a page with lots of images, use thumbnails and link to larger images.

File Size – File size has recently become a factor in search engine rankings. The faster you can make files the better. Remove superflous images whenever possible, use image reduction tools, and limit third party scripts, widgets, or tracking tools whenever possible.

Navigation – Try to keep the navigation as easy to understand and clutter free as possible. Once you start getting over 100 links on the page, it becomes harder for search engines to crawl through them all. Using navigation that changes based on user input (via ajax or javascript) is a bad idea: search engines will never “see” the secondary links.

Page Footers – Don’t clutter up a page footer with lots of links. It becomes hard for people to find/use them. Search engines don’t pay a lot of attention to footers anyway because people have abused them too much in the past. Don’t assume it’s ok to link to yourself in the footer of website. Ask the client first. If it’s ok, rather than linking to yourself from the whole site link, to yourself just on the homepage or, better yet, have a single page or popup page that links to you. It’s much better for you in the long run to have one strong link than hundreds of weak ones.

Sitemaps – Unless the website you are building is large, you don’t need a sitemap. But having one helps. Ideally you want an HTML sitemap and XML sitemap. There are plenty of free tools to generate them for you if you don’t know how. Keep them up to date and submit them to the search engines through webmaster central when you make a change.

Social media is truly one of the most powerful and most popular tools in the arsenal of every site owner, publisher, and Internet marketer today. In fact, I recently wrote a post about developing a holistic social media strategy. However, with every positive, there is a negative. Social media may be hot right now, and I don’t think it will ever disappear completely, but at some point it will diminish in popularity. Its traffic-generating potential will shrink as well. The question you need to ask yourself is what are you doing to prepare yourself for that day.

Facebook – While there may be some sectors and niches where Facebook isn’t the largest social media website, if you are interested in reaching the “general population,” it’s hands down your best bet. However, Facebook uses something called “edgerank” to determine what appears in each person’s news feed. Edgerank is complicated and always changing but, in simple terms, if you keep clicking links from a person or brand’s page, Facebook will continue to show that person’s item in your newsfeed. Stop clicking or commenting and the updates will stop showing. Some studies have shown that only 3-8% of a company’s updates are ever seen by their fans. Another danger is that Facebook has a track record of changing policies as to what they allow companies, brands, and marketers to get away with. Facebook can shut you down at a moment’s notice and, if that’s how you primarily reach many of your customers, you may be in trouble if the wind changes direction at Facebook.

Twitter – Twitter is another darling of social media websites. The biggest advantage it has over other sites is it takes very little commitment to get started and keep running. Let’s be honest–writing 300-400 word blog posts on a regular basis gets to be work. Writing 140 character tweets a few times a day, or using scheduling tools to do it for you, is a lot less work. Twitter also can give you access to a huge audience. Popular accounts can build 50,000 to 100,000 followers pretty easily if the niche is large enough, and celebrities will often have millions of followers. But there’s the catch. How many of those followers are actually readers who see, read, click, and act on what you tweet? Having a million followers is great, but if less than a 1,000 are the only ones who read and interact with you, they are all that matter. Twitter may be hot now, but when something cooler, faster, easier, or better comes along, some people will leave. Don’t believe me? Look at how many people gave up blogging to tweet. You may have 50,000 Twitter followers now, but if Twitter were to shut down 3 months from now, would you still have access to those people or would they vanish in a poof of smoke.

Blogs – While blogs and RSS may be past its prime, it’s still an effective medium. Facebook is designed to keep you on Facebook. It’s not the ideal platform to make purchases or to communicate your message or information the way you want. In most cases, you don’t have to blog daily or very frequently, but if you want complete control over your message, how it’s displayed, and in what context people see it, a blog is still your best option. Blogs are free from the limitations of character counts and content type that sites like Twitter have. You can embed videos, pictures, PDFs or other media without linking people to another website the way Twitter does. The real key to blogging is to blog at a regular, predictable interval with quality posts instead of quantity. Some posts will always be better than others, but you need to blog often enough so that people remember you, and with content that’s good enough to make them want to come back and read more.

Email – Naysayers have been predicting the demise of email for years, but the simple fact is that it’s still around.  It’s also the primary way most services use to verify you are a person and to validate your account. Those two things together means it’s not going anywhere. Email may not be the preferred method of communication for everyone (in fact, the real takeaway from this post is that you need multiple channels for distribution if you want to remain effective), but it’s still a very viable and effective option. Having a good email list and using it to reach your fans, audience, and customers on a weekly, bi-weekly, or once a month basis should be a part of everyone’s overall strategy.

Mobile Marketing – mobile marketing is interesting. It allows you to reach into someone’s pocket, purse, or briefcase and interrupt them with a message. It’s probably one of the most intimate forms of permissive marketing there is, and that’s why it’s so dangerous. The more often you do it, the better the content should be. For example, there is a local yogurt shop near my house who uses SMS marketing. 1-2 times a week, they will send out a coupon for a discount or letting me know that they are having a special flavor available for only one day. If they sent me a text message every day saying they had vanilla yogurt, I would lose interest and opt out. However, a once a week notice with a coupon or discount for this Wednesday, or that tells me red velvet flavor yogurt will only be available this Friday makes it worth staying subscribed.

Branding – the ultimate goal of all this marketing activity is to build a brand that customers remember when they are looking for a product, service, or information. When I ask you to name a soda, most people think of Coke or Pepsi because of their strong brands. By building your brand in your niche as the recognized authority, you become immune to the fickle changes in social media and search algorithms. People will seek you out directly.

So what are the takeaways from this article:

• Understand that all marketing channels have a limited lifespan and that social media interest and participation can change on a dime.
• Look for more permanent ways to keep your fans and customers engaged through social media, blogs, email, physical mail, or mobile marketing.
• Understand that each system has its limitations and that the more ways you can reach someone, the better.
• Know that some channels are more intimate and sensitive. Know where the boundaries are and take care not to abuse them.
• Be on the lookout for new channels as they emerge. Reserve your namespace to prevent someone else from cyber squatting, but don’t invest too much time and resources until you see signs that it’s approaching critical mass with your customer base.

photo credit: Photospin

For many website owners, the Panda Update has come as a wake up call that they need to make changes to their websites. While the Panda algorithm will change and fine tune over time, the signals it looks for will always focus around quality.  There are two important points to understand about the goals of the Panda update: 1. Google is looking to remove lower quality websites and 2. many of the ranking factors computed for Panda are done “offline” and “over a long period of time.” What this means is that, if you want to come back, the sooner you start identifying problems and fixing them, the sooner your traffic and rankings will return. But enough theory. What are some actionable items site owners should do to come back from Panda or prevent being caught in the future? Here is my top list …

Identify Low Quality Content - Everyone has a different idea about what “low quality” content is and how Google might define it. I think the real key is understanding it’s not just one thing. It’s a combination of different factors. Here are my top actionable steps for identifying and fixing low quality content.

• Look at all of your content. Make sure it doesn’t exist elsewhere on the web. If you are using duplicate or near duplicate content, rewrite it, remove it, or block it from search engines.
• If other websites are scraping or stealing your content, report them for a DMCA violation. Report them to both Google and their hosting company. If they are using your RSS feed to scrape you, embed links back to your original content. Doing so will help Google identify the original source.
• Make sure you don’t have duplicate internal content. Try to not put the same content on more than one page or URL (especially with parameters) if you can avoid it. Use the rel= canonical tag to help Google understand duplicate content you can’t avoid.
• Look for pages with low engagement. Bounce rate and exit rate by themselves aren’t an indicator of poor content. If people are spending minutes on your page and then leaving, that’s usually OK. It means you answered their question. A high bounce and exit rate with only several seconds per page can be an indicator of low quality. Update or remove those pages.
• Identify your weakest linked pages. Services such as Open Site Explorer will provide you with strength numbers for your internal pages. Look at your lowest pages to see if they should be removed, updated, or need a link building campaign.
• Flatten out your hierarchy as much as possible. If you have pages that are more than 3-4 clicks from your homepage or an internal link concentration, your website has architecture issues. Depending on how bad, you may have serious work fixing it. The easier it is for a search engine spider to crawl your site, the better. HTML and XML sitemaps can help, but they should be a secondary solution. Being naturally crawl-able is a primary goal.
• Infinite websites are a bad idea. There was a time where the goal of many publishers was to put up as much content as possible and hope some of it ranks. Google has changed since then. They are looking for tight quality, not mountains of crap.

Improve Your Link Profile – Having a strong link profile has always been a hallmark of good website; however, in the past it was possible to keep a site alive with a lot of low quality links. IMHO this has changed. Low quality links can work against you if that’s all you have, so here are my tips for improving your backlink profile …

• If you are engaging in any shady link buying, link trading, or link schemes, stop sooner rather than later. I wouldn’t pull the plug on everything all at once, but slowly stop using the lowest quality things first.
• Concentrate on getting high quality links from educational, government, or trustworthy trade organizations. If you have to create a non commercial section with content that these websites are more likely to link to, do it. It will pay off in the long run.
• Be as press-worthy as possible. Whenever you do something noteworthy, put out a press release and contact the people in the space who cover the news to let them know about it. Don’t blindly spam reporters or bloggers. Try to establish relationships BEFORE you need a favor, not after. If you aren’t doing anything noteworthy, look for ways to start.
• Using a blog to push linkbait or infographics is still an effective technique. Sure, it’s harder, but it’s still worth the effort. Makes sure you are doing it on a regular basis.
• Guest blogs and interviews are still effective tactics. Most of the high quality websites in your area may be saturated with guest blogging requests, so you may have to start on the “B” list. Try to do as many as you can per month, with a minimum of 1-2 if at all possible. Gaining links slowly over time is good signal to send Google.

Branding and Social Media – Once you have your content cleaned up, and you are working on improving your backlink profile, using social media is powerful tool. Providing information, solving problems, using discounts, and providing customer service are just some of the ways you can engage people with social media. You need to experiment and find which is the best use of your time. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are the three biggest websites you should start with.

• Push out the type of information, links and content that is the most compelling to people following you, not the most self serving. Facebook in particular only shows your updates to users who have shown they were “interested” in you in the past (via their edgerank algorithm).
• Use your own custom URL shortener if you can instead of a generic one. It helps people start to recognize your brand.
• Push out your links during the time of day when the most users will see it and are likely to click or retweet it. Don’t be afraid to ask for reweets or repeat your tweets for multiple timezones.
• Do everything you can to set yourself up as an informational authority in your niche. Sometimes it can be hard if your niche is big–like, say, travel. Instead, find a smaller niche like family travel or honeymoon planning. The more people associate you with a keyword and type your company name with a keyword into a search engine, the better.

Time is a Factor – Even if you had the resources to do all of these things in 30 days, that might not be the best idea. IMHO part of Panda is comparing your current “scores” to your previous ones. Showing slow and steady growth and improvement is much better than a rapid burst of activity followed by a rapid slowdown. It’s like the tortoise and the hare: slow and steady wins the race.

In conclusion, my recommendations are to first focus on removing the bad factors of your website, both on your website and on other websites. Then work on building up some of the good signals and reenforcing them with natural user data that search engines see across the web. If you do, Panda will be a cute animal that you only care about when you visit the zoo.

If you’re looking for more information about Panda, I recommend reading this Interview with Vanessa Fox.

If you spend any time reading or learning about SEO or link building, you will come across the phrase “build good links” or “build quality links” more than once. But what makes a good link? And how can you tell if a link is worth chasing? In this post, we’ll take a look at some aspects of assessing link quality.

Trust – IMHO trust is the most important factor in getting a link. Why are trusted links more important? Each link passes a little trust on to your website. Once you have obtained enough trust, search engine algorithms will let you rank for more competitive terms. Unfortunately, there isn’t a public metric that you can look at for link trust. Many link analysis services such as Majestic SEO or SEOmoz will publish an estimated link trust score. While not perfect, these are helpful.

Authority – After trust, authority is the next most important link quality. Authority speaks to the number of links you have.

How does trust differ from authority? I’ll use a high school analogy to make it easy to understand. If half the students voted for you for student council president, that would be authoritative. However, if half the teachers said you would make a good student council president, that would be trustworthy. If the teachers said you would make a good president but none of the students agreed, that would give you trust without authority, which is not a good combination. If most of the students voted for you but none of the teachers believed you were qualified, that would give you authority without trust, which is also not a good combination. You want to achieve a combination of trust and authority. At that point, you have what it takes to rank well for competitive terms.

Link Age – Are new links worth less then older links? IMHO yes they are. The longer a link has been around, the more likely search engines are to believe it was given editorially. If you are getting links but people take them down shortly after, that’s not a good signal for the search engines to see. While it’s true that some sites go down, either temporarily or permanently, and many sites do change and update links, if you have a large number of links in your profile that change, it looks bad. It’s in your best interest to get links that will have a long life.

Anchor Text – Anchor text consists of the actual words that people put their mouse on and click to get to you. The linked words–and the surrounding words, to some extant–give the search engines some idea of what your page is about. The more anchor text you have pointing to you for “blue widgets,” the more likely a search engine is to believe that’s what your website is about. However, there is some danger here. If all of your links have the same anchor text, or if there isn’t a lot of variation, it looks manipulated from a search engine perspective. If you try and focus your anchor text too much, it may be counterproductive and actually hurt your rankings. Focus your anchor text to help you rank for the keywords you want, but don’t obsess over it or push so hard that it looks fake.

Destination URL – The destination URL is the page that the link connects to. For most websites, the homepage is the most frequently linked-to page and the one with the most links. Similar to anchor text, you need to have diversity in your destination URLs. It’s natural for some pages to get more links than others; however, it’s possible to have too many links to a page. If you try to build too many links to a particular page, usually a commercial page, a search engine may see this as manipulated, and it will work against you. So try to balance your destination URLs as much as possible.

Topicality – IMHO this is one of the weakest signals. If you are a plumber, having links from other plumbing websites is a good thing and completely natural. It’s also likely you will have links from other local businesses in your area. To some extent these act as signals, telling search engines what you are about and what areas you serve. However, hopefully you get links from other websites that aren’t about your subject matter as well. As long as you have a good mix, it’s not something to worry about. The only cause for concern would be if all of your links were from off topic websites–to a search engine, that would look unusual.

Homepage Links Versus Insite Links – Getting a link from another website’s homepage is going to be the strongest link you can get. However, in most cases, those links are temporary, and they get archived to another part of the website. Again, this is a perfectly natural behavior and not something to be concerned about. As long as the site has a decent architecture and the search engine spiders can crawl it and find it, there’s nothing to worry about. Don’t obsess about only getting homepage links. It’s another signal that would make your website look manipulated.

Number of Links on Page – IMHO Google changed the way they evaluate links and, as long as there aren’t hundreds of links on the page, the number of links on page won’t matter that much. Would I prefer to be on a page with less links? Sure, but only because it makes my link more likely to get clicked, not because it means more “link juice” flows to my link.

Placement on a Page – Where your link exists on a page is one of the aspects I feel is important. In my opinion, Google has the ability to look at a website and tell the template from the content and weight the links accordingly. Weights that are in the content are of more value than links elsewhere, especially in the footer.

Sitewide Links – In my opinion, this type of links is the worst to get and can even be dangerous. Getting a sudden surge of site-wide link from one or more websites might have a negative effect on your backlink profile. If you are a brand new site, getting a site-wide link from a page with 20,000 pages could throw your backlink profile off. For sites that have been around a while or already have lots of trusted links, this is a non issue. The only time to worry is when your website is new or when your backlink profile isn’t trusted and authoritative.

Hopefully this article has given you some insight about how to assess some of the most important qualities of links, and you will have a better understanding about what you are looking at and what types of links you should concentrate on building and working on.

Photo credit: Photospin

Social media is definitely one of the most widely discussed aspects of Internet marketing today. However, most companies take a shoot from the hip approach and make it up as they go. What companies really need to do is take a holistic look at social media. They need to ensure that it works with their other marketing efforts and overall search engine optimization plan. In this post, I’ll go over some really easy ways to make that happen.

Company Blog

For most companies, a blog is the key component for all of the SEO and social media efforts. I recommend treating the blog as your “headquarters” or “home base”. Sure, some channels will have dedicated content, but ideally you want to bring people back to your blog or website.

When you set up a blog, the first decision is subfolder, subdirectory, or different directory. Each route has its pros and cons. I’ve discussed these in greater detail in an earlier post: Should Your Blog Be on a Sub-domain or Sub-folder. However, if SEO is your primary concern, a subfolder is still your best choice for distributing link equity and building overall domain trust.

For a blog to be successful, you will need content–lots of content–on a regular basis. You also need to be concerned with the content’s quality. Not every post has to be amazing, heartfelt, inspiring, or life changing, but the quality should be consistently good, with at least 3-4 really standout pieces per month. There are lots of different opinions about how much or how often you should blog, but the simple answer is that you should blog as often as you can and still be good or interesting. If you aren’t a writer, it may be hard to produce an interesting body of work people want to read on a daily basis, so if you can get out two good posts per week, there’s your answer. The only danger to infrequent blogging is that, the less often you blog, the better your posts have to be. If you are only going to blog once a month, the post is going to have to be exceptional to keep people coming back. Otherwise, they may forget about you during the rest of the month.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is really what most people want to have happen with their blog posts, but they don’t know that’s what it’s called. You write a post and publish it … What do you want to have happen next?

Ideally, you hope people will read your post, enjoy it, share it with their friends via email, post it on Facebook or Twitter, submit it to social bookmarking sites like reddit or stumbleupon, or if they run a blog or website, write about your post and link to it. But a lot of people are stuck in the “content is king” way of thinking, and they don’t put enough time, energy, planning, or actions into promoting the content they spent time and resources creating. If you are a well known company that is a household name, are a real world celebrity, or even just Internet famous, your reputation will precede you and your content will market itself. But most people have to take a more active role in promotion.

Social Bookmarking Websites

Social bookmarking sites like reddit, and stumbleupon are where people post great stories they come across so that other members of the community can vote on them. The most popular stories are given extra exposure and get more eyeballs, visitors, and hopefully some links. Again, unless people from those websites regularly visit your blog, it’s unlikely it will get submitted on its own. In the beginning you’re going to have prime the pump and either submit the stories yourself or have a friend submit them for you. The mistake a lot of companies make is that they don’t bother to become members of those communities first before submitting self serving links. If the only thing you have ever submitted are links to your company blog, your submissions probably won’t do well. However, if you are actively submitting links from other websites that people find insightful, funny, interesting, or useful, you will usually have more success when you submit your own links. There is no magic percentage you should shoot for, but as a rule of thumb I recommend that you submit more of other people’s links than your own.

If you want people to submit or vote for your stories on these social bookmarking sites, it’s probably a good idea to put the voting buttons on your website. There are tons of plugins that make integrating the buttons really easy, or you can use your own custom code if you want. While you can include lots of buttons, I would recommend only using a handful of sites that include readers who are most likely to appreciate your content.

LinkBait

Linkbait is a special kind of content that has been specifically created to appeal to the users of social bookmarking websites like those mentioned above. Unless you have an exceptional writer, not all of your posts are going to be exceptional enough that someone will submit them to a social bookmarking website. In most cases, most of your content will never get submitted or will only get a small number of votes or amount of exposure. Linkbait is different. This is content that was created to be shared. It’s exceptional in one way or another. It can be helpful, insightful, introspective, touching, deep, meaningful, funny, or even stupid–it doesn’t matter as long as it’s exceptional. When you publish these types of posts, you want to help guide it towards its desired result without being seen as a spammer. If you have everyone in your office on the same IP give the content you submitted 50 votes in an hour, it’s going to look suspicious. Nudge it along the way, but don’t force it. Do things like asking people to vote for your story at the end if they like it or to share it with their friends.

Facebook

When companies look at Facebook and the amount of time people spend there everyday, they salivate like a lion that has spotted a herd of wildebeest at a watering hole. In fact, a Facebook advertising executive was recently quoted as saying “brands are obsessed with Facebook” . However, what you really need to understand is that most people come to Facebook to interact with their friends and family not with companies and brands. There are some exceptions of companies who have loyal fans but most people become friends or fans of a brand because they are looking for sales, coupons, or discounts.

Facebook populates your newsfeed with something called edgerank: the more a customer clicks on your links, the more often it will show up in their newsfeed. If they never click your links, it will eventually stop showing for them entirely. Some reports estimate that only 3-7% of your fans will ever see your updates. If you want your fans and other people to see and share your linkbait content on Facebook, you will have to find ways to increase the number of links from your feed that they click on. Since most people want discounts, coupons, or sales, give them what they want. If you have old, refurbished, damaged items or products that you can’t sell at full price for whatever reason, here is your opportunity to make them work to your advantage. If your Facebook fans are clicking your discount product links, they will have a very good chance of at least seeing the content links you post.

Twitter

After Facebook, Twitter is one of the most appealing websites that companies want to be involved on. Twitter can drive a huge amount of traffic to your website in a very short period of time. However the content has a very limited lifespan due to the nature of its rapid updates. Ideally you want people to click on the links to your content, come to your website, and perform an action like enter your sales or lead gen funnel or vote/share your linkbait or other content. The second most desired action on Twitter is for someone to retweet or reword and share a link to your content.

Lots of studies have shown that the retweets come in clumps, and the longer it’s been since someone has retweeted or shared a link to you, the less likely it is to happen. As long as you don’t do it on every post, rewording and tweeting the same link 2-3 times a day should be ok. If you do it every hour, most people will find you annoying, so balance is the key. Asking for retweets is another proven method that works, as does having your friends tweet your links. Again the key here is to nudge things in the direction you want them to go without forcing them.

Another important trait that Twitter shares with other social networks is that, to be successful, you don’t want to be to self serving and ego centric. If the only thing you ever tweet are links to yourself, you won’t have a lot of followers, you’ll get very little action, and you’ll drive very little traffic. However, if you post good quality, relevant links from other people about your subject matter, you will find you will get more followers and have a higher level of engagement. Retweet links that other people post, especially the ones that are important to them, and you will have friends who will likely reciprocate the action. Set up searches for phrases that allow you to help people solve problems, and you will find more friends and followers than you will ever need. The danger is that all of these actions can be very time consuming. To get the greatest return on your time investment, look for ways be as efficient as possible and get as much done in as short a period of time with as little effort as possible.

Special Content

In most cases, your content is going to go on your blog. You have it set up so that new posts automatically post to Twitter and Facebook. Your voting buttons are in place for social bookmarking sites, making it easy for people to share and market your content for you. However, sometimes you need a little more. Sometimes you want to create content specifically for one social network that takes advantage of aspects that website has to offer.

For example, while pictures are part of Twitter via any of the picture services like twitpic or yfrog, pictures are much more tightly integrated into Facebook. The restaurant Houlihan’s created coasters named “Coaster McGee,” created a Facebook profile for it, and asked people to take pictures of the coaster being used or in the picture with them. When people posted the pictures, all their friends saw the funny pictures  and were reminded about Houlihan’s. Anything that you can do that incentivizes your customers to let others know about you or your product is a good idea. You just need to make sure you make it as easy and fun as possible, so that more people will participate and it seems more like a game than like crass, pushy, invasive advertising.

While this post has only touched on some of the larger, more well-known social media websites, the concepts can be easily adapted to work on almost any social media platform.

What are the key takeaway points from this post:

• Set up a home base or central location to act as a “headquarters” for your social media activities and content. A blog is usually the best choice because it’s easy to set up and use. It can also be easily customized and has a library of pre-developed social media tools or plugins you can add on.
• Post content on a regular basis. Strive for quality over quantity. Don’t make your posting intervals so long that people forget about you.
• Create content specifically designed to appeal to social media audiences and give it a gentle nudge to help it get exposure.
• Become a participating member of the social media communities where you will be pushing your content. Have a history of being the person who submits and shares interesting things, not the person who only submit their own stuff.
• Use sites like Facebook and Twitter as satellite for your content. Share content and links, engage in conversations, and post the the types of links and content that the users of these sites want to see or will find the most helpful. This ensures you will have a large group of fans/followers who will see your content.
• Look for opportunities to create specialized content for these sites that takes advantage of the most popular parts of the site. Look for ways to motivate people to interact with you and mention you in their news feeds so that their friends will see it. Keep things simple and fun and with a low entry barrier to get the most participation.
• Look for ways to use each of these pieces in conjunction or to compliment each other as part of your social media strategy

photo credit:shutterstock

As iPhone’s, Blackberries, Palm Pre’s and other smart phones become more widespread should site owners and publishers start to offer mobile versions, and from an SEO perspective what should you be concerned about?

Now that smart phones are common, displays are getting larger, and mobile browsers are able to handle more complex displays, are mobile bare bones text version even needed … for many sites the answer remains yes. First let’s look at the two extremes, if you have a rich media site such as Disney.com in most cases mobile browsers aren’t going to have the technical ability to display that complex or that much information. If that’s the case then you absolutely need a mobile version. This is a strategy that Disney has embraced as you can see from the web based and mobile screen shots below.

At the other end of the spectrum are sites which are have no rich media, or complex displays, sites such as craigslist.org which are primarily text based. For sites like this there’s no need to offer a separate mobile version, as the sites render nearly identical on on both platforms

However as is usually the case most sites, aren’t at either extremes, they lie somewhere in the middle, and the answer as to whether they should offer a separate mobile version is, it depends. Many business owners will make this decision based on whether they do business on;line or offline. However if you are a doctor, dentist, or hairdresser your customers may still look for you on their mobile phone, to get an address or phone number in case they need directions, to cancel, an appointment, let you know they are running late, or schedule a new appointment.

Once you’ve established if you need a mobile website the challenge becomes how you do it, many websites offer a mobile version under a subdomain such as m.example.com, however a more sophisticated implementation uses user agents, and serves out the content conditionally. This approach is not without risks, if you serve content conditionally based on user agent you don’t want to cross the line into black hat territory and cloaking. You want to offer the same content to users as you do to search engine spiders. This is a topic Matt Cutts recently discussed in a Webmaster Central Video:

The one bit of good news is more and more CMS website systems are starting to offer mobile modules and plugins, for example wordpress users can take advantage of this plugin, Joomla offers several choices, as does Drupal .

Does your page title need to match your H1 tag, or can you vary them for increased SEO results?

Before we look any deeper at this subject we need to make sure we’re all talking about the same thing. Your page title is the part of the HTML code between the tags and in most browsers, is displayed in either the browser chrome area, or on the individual tab. Your H1 tag is usually displayed on the page as the name/title of the article or post.

From an SEO perspective there isn’t a penalty if your Title and H1 element are the same, however you are missing out on the opportunity to use them to target variations or alternate keywords. Let me illustrate with an example:

Title: How to Choose a Printer for Your Vista Computer
H1: How to Choose a Printer for Your Vista Computer

compared to

Title: Printers: Shopping for a Printer for Your Vista Computer / Laptop
H1: How to Choose a Printer for Your Vista Computer

Notice how by using a variation we were able to incorporate new keywords such as “shopping” and “laptop”. Additionally we were able to get the single and plural version of “printer” and “printers” into the title. Let’s try another example:

Title: Cheap Hotels in Las Vegas
H1: Cheap Hotels in Las Vegas

compared to

Title: Discount Hotels – Las Vegas Cheap Hotel Rooms
H1: Cheap Hotels in Las Vegas

Again in this case we were able to add the hotel/hotels singular and plural variations, as well as “hotel rooms” and “discount hotels”

Of course there is the temptation to go overboard with this technique and add in too many words, such as:

Title: Discount Hotels Online – Cheap Las Vegas Strip Hotel Rooms, Book Online

From a user perspective there are too many words, it looks keyword stuffed, and it isn’t very click enticing. Secondly you break the proximity and position effects. If you can get the words in the exact order of a query that’s the ideal situation, if that’s not possible you to get them next to each other with as few other words and no stop words in between (this is called positioning). In the first example the “discount hotels” and “cheap hotel” were on both sides of the words “Las Vegas” (this is known as proximity). Lastly is the length, Google will start to truncate (chop off) at 66 characters so you want to try and stay at 65 or under whenever possible.

So what are the takeaways from this post:

• Try to use different page titles and H1 tags to introduce singular and plural keywords
• Try to use different page titles and H1 tags to introduce alternate and related keywords
• Place alternate keywords around central concepts to take advantage of proximity
• Keep your page titles under 66 characters to avoid being truncated

Under most situations the optimal architecture for a blog is to use either a subdomain or sub folder structure. There are additional factors to consider from a security standpoint (tk), but a in most cases these concerns alone don’t warrant a stand alone domain. However there are a few outlying conditions when a blog running on a separate domain makes the most sense.

Reputation Management

When your company or your client, is engaging in an reputation management project, using a separate domain is one fool proof way to gain an additional listing in a SERP. In most cases this will be used to rank for the company, or an executive/employee’s name. This is very similar to a microsite strategy, so be sure you are aware of the pro’s and cons of this course of action.

Editorial Restrictions

In some companies any information that is published on the website requires an onerous level of review before publication. In extreme cases, advertising, legal, and executive level approval are required to publish. This just isn’t conducive to good blogging which has a much more off the cuff feel, and publish in the moment lifestyle to be effective. So creating a blog that doesn’t hide it affiliation with the parent site, but exists as outpost can be effective.

Customer Expectations

A third  reason to have a blog on a separate domain, is customer expectations. If having the blog on the main URL would would severely distract visitors from entering the conversion funnel. If the company/brand is well known and the primary goal of most of the visitors are to complete transactions, there might be case for a separate domain. The  company/brand would have to be really strong and not need any of the SEO benefits for this to be the case.
Some good examples of company blogs that exist on their own domain are:

Special thanks to Search Engine Marketing Group who’s post on “When SEO Advice Goes Wrong” was the inspiration for this post.

Microsites are a tool that is seldom used in many SEO’s toolbox. In this article we’ll take a look at some pro’s and con’s of using a microsite, when is the best time to use a microsite and a few examples of microsites.
First let’s define what a microsite is: a microsite a small website that is on a separate domain from a main domain, has narrowly topic or content, that is different from a companies main website. Generally speaking microsites will be in the 1-10 page range, although they can be more. Microsites usually exist as part of a separate marketing campaign, company project or agenda.

Some of the benefits of a microsite are as follows:

• Ability to have a different look, feel, or editorial style from a main company website.
• Ability to step outside of normal production, and approval channels, publish and update content quicker and easier.
• Ability to appear less commercial, and more engaging to social media audiences.
• Ability to saturate SERP’s with additional domains.

However there are also several downsides to using microsite some of them are as follows:

• Starting a brand new domain with no trust and authority, can prove difficult or more time consuming to rank than content on main domain.
• Projects, agendas or marketing campaigns can often have limited lifespan, however the domain must be maintained long term or rolled back into the main domain.
• Controversial or edgy the content that is radically different from existing company expectations, can create negative press.

Next let’s take a look at some examples of microsites. One well known company who makes extensive use of microsites is Burger King. Your results may slightly depending on your location and how close to the time this article was written and you do a search for the term [Burger King] so I’ve included a screen shot from the time I wrote this article. As you can see Burger King has 4 microsites in the first 10 results for its name (BKCareers.com, www.clubbk.com, www.bkscholars.scholarshipamerica.org, www.subservientchicken.com) so you can immediately see the value of controlling multiple positions in the SERP’s. BKCareers is obviously enough about jobs, careers, and franchise owner opportunities with Burger King. ClubBK.com has content that is geared towards children with games and other interactive activities. BKScholars is a scholarship initiative from 2007. What’s interesting about the BKScholars page is it’s a placeholder with a link to where the content has been permanently relocated to, however the placeholder page retains all of its link equity, and still occupies a place in the SERP’s. The last SubsurvientChicken.com is probably a microsite implementation you are most familiar with. The Subservient Chicken website was part of a marketing campaign to introduce a new chicken sandwich in 2004. The page features a person in a chicken costume who tries to do whatever you type in the box.

The chicken does things like sing, dance, swim, roll over and so on. As a side note when the campaign launched Burger King monitored the input, went back and added new actions based on user requests, giving people a reason to come back after their initial visit.

However not all of Burger King’s microsites have been successes. If you visit page 2, you’re likely to see some of their more controversial efforts, like Whopper Sacrifice and Whopper Virgins. The Whopper Virgins campaign centered around the concept of giving people who had never been exposed to any fast food marketing, or tasted a fast food hamburger, a taste test to see which hamburger they preferred. Burger King was criticized for feeding fast food to people who had never experienced it before, and where largely unaware of it’s questionable health and nutritional value. The Whopper Sacrifice centered around a Facebook campaign, getting people to remove (IE sacrifice) friends to receive a coupon for a free whopper. The campaign created a lot of debate and was eventually removed by Facebook citing privacy concerns.

Having looked at few examples when should an SEO decide to use a microsite strategy?

• Are you trying to reach social media audiences, and can you create a microsite that has content that is more engaging than it would be on the main domain or subdomain?
• Will the campaign/website be popular enough to generate enough trust and authority, through link equity to support itself?
• Will you be able to maintain the microsite of the long term, or roll it into the main site easily after the campaign is over?
• Do you need a microsite to secure an additional listing as part of a larger online reputation management (ORM) campaign?

If you answered yes to most of these questions a microsite is something you should consider making part of your overall SEO strategy.

Everyone talks about using social media to connect with their customers and fans and engaging in deeper relationships and conversations. When meetings are done and it’s time to put the work, time, and energy where the buzzwords are, few companies are doing it, and even fewer are doing it well. One company who is doing it well is Starbucks. There are several elements to Starbucks strategy and in this article we’ll take a look at some of them.

My Starbucks Idea

My Starbucks Idea is consumer portal where Starbucks customers can share ideas or suggestions they have about how to improve “the Starbucks experience”. While I’m not a coffee drinker, understanding and acknowledging that Starbucks is more than a cup of coffee is a key part of the equation.  If you are going to charge premium prices, the experience is part of the price, and more importantly it’s Starbucks point of differentiation. Lot’s of people have ideas about how they can make Starbucks better, but the key to succeeding is figuring out which of these ideas will make it better for their existing customers, and help them acquire new ones.

My Starbucks Idea takes the concept of crowd sourcing and opens it up to any customer willing to register. This also gives end users the ability to see what other people are suggesting, vote on ideas they agree with and even see the results.

Starbucks Ideas In Actions

Starbucks Ideas In Action Blog acts as a counterpart to the My Starbucks Idea website. This site is written by different Starbucks employees and talks about how they implemented, or are reacting to the suggestions and information from customers.

An interesting aspect of this blog is comments are enabled, many company news/policy blogs don’t have comments. However by turning on blogs and being open to that second level of feedback Starbucks is able to continue the dialog with their customers.

Starbucks on Twitter

Everyone involved in social media in 2009 has a twitter profile, and Starbucks is no different.

The account handles direct and indirect customer issues and complaints, talks with customers who engage them and announces any news. There’s nothing deep or insightful about the account, but it opens up a channel for Starbucks customers who prefer to use twitter as their method of communication. They currently have over 177,000 followers. Looking at one of Starbucks competitor Dunkin Donuts (http://twitter.com/DunkinDonuts) you can see a real difference in style, which probably accounts for why Dunkin Donuts only has 20,000 followers.

Starbucks on YouTube

Starbucks has a Youtube channel, that contains different video assets. They have advertisements and commercials, information videos about some of the coffee blends, their origins and significance. They also have some of their charitable work video assets

Starbucks has chosen to allow these videos to be embedded, many companies don’t take this route, fearing their videos will be seen on sites they might not want to be associated with. While that is a genuine concern I’ve found that more often than not allowing embedding gets much more positive exposure than negative exposure. One area that could be improved is by interacting and favoriting and featuring fan videos, this is a strategy that works well for Will it Blend.

Starbucks on Facebook

Starbucks has a profile on Facebook. There not much here that isn’t seen elsewhere in any of the Starbucks social media efforts, but it does help Starbucks reach it’s customers who prefer Facebook over other social media websites.

Starbucks on Flickr

One of the only areas Starbucks as a company has ignored is Flickr. There are quite a few fan groups such as Starbucks, and Starbucks Coffee. Two of the more interesting groups are Starbucks Tour with photos of all the exteriors of Starbucks and 2 Starbucks which has photos that have two visible Starbucks in a single picture frame.

Photo credit

Conclusion

So what can you learn from Starbucks and apply to your social media strategy

• If you have a large customer base engaging them can have a positive benefit
• Separate the customer/consumer areas from the company area
• You can reuse social media across multiple platforms, as long as you don’t duplicate it 100% across different sites
• Don’t be afraid to allow customers to use your media on their sites
• If you don’t set up an official presence on a large social media site consumers will fill the vacuum you leave open