Internet Marketing Blog From Wolf21

Every so often while I am reading SEO news, I find something that tickles my funny bone. This morning, it was an article about Bill Gates’ blog and the SEO tactics that are either missing or need improvement on his site. I love this kind of tongue-in-cheek commentary, but better still, Danny Sullivan, author of “Some SEO Advice for Bill Gates” brings some good tips to light by using Gates’ site as an example. Although Sullivan digs much deeper, today I’d like to highlight two aspects of web page design that can increase your search ratings if they are improved: titles and meta-description tags.

Like many blogs and web pages, Bill Gates’s blog does not come out on the top of the heap when searched through Google. Shockingly, Bing doesn’t even rank this site in the top 10. Sullivan points out that although it is in the top 10 on Google, there are parody blogs ahead of him in the rankings.

Here are some of the main points I’d like to bring to your attention about titles:

1. Include the most obvious title for your page in the title text. In Gates’ case the sites that outranked him in Sullivan’s search did so because they had titles that said “Bill Gates Blog”. You might think that this phrase is too obvious to put in the title text, but it will drive up the site’s rankings. Sometimes it is about the obvious.

2. Each page on your website should have its own title, as this will provide another opportunity to be found by search engines. A little research on keywords can go a long way to increasing your site’s ranking if you include the top keywords used to get to your site in your title text.

3. Think of your website’s title as another opportunity to brand yourself and your business, but remember to combine branding with the top known keywords for maximum results.

4. Adding the word “official” to a website or blog can help rankings in certain situations. In the case of the Bill Gates site, it could make his blog stand out in the crowd of search results if he includes “official” in his title.

Sullivan’s information on meta description tags is also valuable. He points out that if you do not fill in your own information for your website, then “what shows is likely to change depending on the exact search someone does that brings up your home page. Usually, Google and Bing will try to automatically form a description based on what someone enters.” Meta description tags – which are done by – are another way for you to brand your own site and speak for your site, business, or person.

These are small things that can increase your site’s visibility, but small things do add up in SEO. If Bill Gates doesn’t have a handle on them, then there is a chance that your own website could do with a little tweaking too.

Late last week women on Facebook began posting their bra colours. The aim of the game was supposedly to raise awareness for breast cancer. And, indeed, the creator of the Facebook group called What’s Your Bra Color??? promised to donate $500 to Susan G. Komen’s foundation for the Cure if that group had more than 1,000 members by this past Monday. The casual campaign to post bra colours has garnered media attention and netted the What’s Your Bra Color??? Facebook group 4,500 members.

Some critics claim that the meme is only a pointless flirtation device, aimed at teasing men. Others claim that we are all already aware of breast cancer. While still others, including Susan G. Komen, praise the action, saying anything that gets people talking about and thinking about breast cancer is a boon. And it did get attention! The fact that the colours have vanished from Facebook statuses, but there is still talk about whether it worked or not is proof that it got people talking.

Regardless of your stance on this particular rash of Facebook posts, the deeper awareness for SEO and internet marketing gurus is a reminder of the deep reach that social media now employs in our society. If a post about bra colour has received this kind of attention, both on Facebook and from the media at large, it is worth talking about social media as a tool for attention for your business.

We’ve talked about the importance of social media within your marketing campaign before, but it bears repeating with this kind of example of its potential impact at our feet.

One big aspect of social media is that it is a new spin on the old adage about word-of-mouth being the best sales tool out there. Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are the electronic versions of word-of-mouth. Although there is some time and energy taken in setting up and maintaining accounts, when your business takes off in these electronic spaces the word-of-mouth rule begins to apply. The bra colour campaign is a perfect example of how well a focused, fun idea can capture the attention of a social media group, sell that idea, then result in action. It’s a perfect business marketing model. The next time a business tells me that they are hesitant to employ social media in their marketing plans, I am definitely going to use this example to show them that social media can get people talking about your business and products.

Now, I have to go and find an old picture to post, pick up the closest book and pick a sentence to post in my status, and make sure my settings are set properly. Social media really is all what you make of it!

As someone with a vested interest in SEO tactics, I’m always interested in what the official word is from the biggest players on the scene. Namely, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo. Every so often their officials put information out there that especially catches my attention.

I like the way linking works. It fascinates me that linking can help to build your ranking on Google. As much as I try to wrap my brain around it, there is always another caveat and always something new to learn about this technique. It’s a little like editing the English language: just when you think you have all of the exceptions and rules figured out, something else crops up to dig into and to consider. Basically, I like it because I learn something new all the time and there is always a curve ball somewhere. Not everyone finds these sorts of things entertaining, but suffice it to say that those of us who do are incredibly entertained by Google and linking.

Here is Matt Cutts from Google, answering the question: “Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?”

Chris Crum covers this video in his article “How Google Rates Links from Facebook and Twitter”, and he and Matt both basically tell us that Facebook and Twitter links are ranked the same way as every other link out there. Matt Cutts goes so far as to pointedly say that Google’s search criteria does not discriminate based on platform. A link is a link is a link in the world of Google searches.

This claim does have a bit of a caveat to it (it’s those exceptions that tickle me so much) in that Facebook pages can have private settings. When a Facebook page is not public, Google cannot crawl it or rank it. And most links on Twitter are nofollowed anyway, which changes their interaction with Google.

So, if you thought that a .ed or a .gov website would carry more weight in the rankings, you’ve now been reassured straight our of the mouths of Goggle that their search techniques just don’t work that way.

We’re a household that loves gadgets. I work in SEO and my husband is a programmer. Gadgets are the backbone of our lives. Our kids were barely upright when they began trying to poke at our computers and bang on the laptop keys. So you can imagine that the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has been a hot topic in our world.

Chris Crum gives a nice overview of the gadgets of the year in his article “A Glimpse of this Year’s Upcoming Gadgets”. From new products in televisions and blue-ray players to touch notebooks and e-readers, there really is something to appeal to everyone at CES. I know a number of non-technical people who will be excited about the developments in television related products, while the more technically oriented are drooling over the latest and greatest computer gadgets. It’s a wide range.

As an SEO aficionado, there were a few releases that caught my eye on Chris Crum’s list:

- Microsoft and HP combining their efforts and providing Bing as the default search engine with MSN as the default homepage for HP PCs in 42 countries.
- Intel’s new family of processors.
- Palm’s updates to their webOS platform.
- Yahoo’s announcements of their new hardware partnerships.
- The availability of professional service options for the Cisco Eos social entertainment platform.
- A new browser release for Opera.
- RIM’s newest BlackBerry achievement: a presenter that can show PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, etc straight from a BlackBerry device.
- Ford’s Internet-ready vehicles.

Some of these announcements are changes in the way computers work. Updated webOs platforms, new processors, and bigger and better BlackBerries can change how much we do online, how fast the experience can be, and the flexibility of our computers, regardless of their size. SEO takes interest in these developments so we can try to predict the next big changes in the way we use the Internet and how businesses access the Internet.

Other announcements, like Internet-ready vehicles, provide opportunities to expand our Internet usage and provide growth in markets like the developing mobile website marketplace. And still others have the potential to shift search engine market share, like the deal between Microsoft and HP that will expand Bing’s exposure, or swing social networking to a newer forum; both of which can have a big impact on SEO strategies.

Of course, while all of these new gadgets and releases are fun to look at and speculate about, only time will tell what will take hold of the marketplace and what will fizzle out. Right now, we’re all just looking and making notes to keep an eye on some of these developments

Now that the presents are opened and the left-over turkey is being made into sandwiches, we’re all slowly moving on to preparations for the New Year. Although resolutions are sometimes done alone, they can be done on a bigger level. In our family, we often take time to talk about what we would like to do and see in the coming year as a family.

It makes sense to think about making resolutions – a pretty fancy word for plans – for your business too. If your business is a small one, a breakfast meeting with some brainstorming and then making a few concrete plans may do the job. Bigger businesses will require input from different groups across the company and several meetings, but the end result of these resolution meetings is the same: brainstorming and planning. Regardless of the size of your company and scope of your SEO resolution project, the beginning of a new year provides an opportunity to figure out what worked in the past, what needs improvement, and what new projects ought to be tackled now.

Duane Forrester focused on resolutions in his article “6 New Years Resolutions for In-House SEMs”. He suggests starting with these steps:

- Hold an internal SEO summit: from a small breakfast meeting to a catered day or two with several speakers, this is the opportunity to talk about different aspects of your online strategy, uncovering the positive and negative attempts of the past year, and proposing projects for the new year. You never know where the best suggestions will come from, so keep an open mind when issuing invitations to this meeting.
- Get Robots.txt and Sitemap.xml docs in place: your business wants to let engine crawlers know how to interact with your site and how to access your freshest content, which is what robots.txt and sitemap.xml docs do. If your company has these documents on your website, be sure to update them. If they are not on your website, now is the time to get them up.
- Open and use Webmaster accounts: Bing, Yahoo, and Google offer contact with their search engines through dedicated Webmaster accounts. As Forrester explains, ”These accounts provide a wide range of services from alerting the engines to updates on your site to feedback directly from the engines themselves around how they are interacting with your website.”
- Establish the ROI on SEO investment: determining your ROI (return on investment) for your SEO strategy is not a straight calculation. Figure out what has been done, what increases your business has see through your web presence, and go from there.
- Integrate SEO and Social Media efforts: link building is a complex effort, which is propelled forward with your social media endeavors, so don’t leave social media out of your resolutions.
- Schedule and hold a senior executive-level SEO review: be sure to get your company executives on board, as they will help you move your SEO strategy across different levels of the company effectively.

Don’t let mobile websites be your business’ telephone banking blind spot.

The other day, I was thinking about how slow I was to adopt online banking. It took nothing for me to go to telephone banking, but my mindset was stuck there for years. I knew about online banking, but my mentality was very much “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it”. I liked telephone banking and it did everything I wanted it to do, so why bother? Then I switched over to online banking and I realizedI had a telephone banking blind spot.

Sometimes the way we use technology is just like telephone banking. It seems like it will do all you want it to do, you’re comfortable with it, and there is no impetus for change. I get that, because I’ve been there. I’ve looked at a new development and thought “Cool, but my (insert whatever you want here) works just fine, so why make the switch?”

Except that in business it is never that easy. Technology is proving that it can make or break a business, especially in tight economic times. And technology can change the way we all interact with each other; Twitter and Facebook have changed how we keep in touch with our friends and they are now morphing into fabulous business tools. As entrepreneurs, we all have to take these lessons to heart. No need to be the last business on the block to take up the mantle of new technologies.

Mobile websites are just such an animal.

With the growth of mobile devices and a growing segment of the population using mobile devices to access the internet, mobile websites promise to grow too. Joshua Odmark wrote about this promise and explains some of the potential for business growth in his article “Top 10 Reasons Your Website Should Go Mobile”.

Here are the 10 reasons he states:

1. Google has a separate index for mobile content.
2. Your regular website is not going to cut it.
3. 1/5 of Americans access the mobile web each day.
4. Mobile web will overtake the desktop within 5 years.
5. $1.6 billion purchased from mobile devices in 2009.
6. 93% of U.S. adults own a cell phone.
7. 5% of the top 500 online retailers have a mobile website/iPhone app.
8. Mobile advertising spending will surpass $6.5 billion in 2012.
9. Users average 13 hours online per week, up from 7 in 2002.
10. There are an estimated 2 billion cell phones worldwide.

With this growing market at your fingertips, your business can adopt mobile website development, and it could even influence how the mobile web scene will grow over the next few years.

I’m a big fan of finding people. It comes from my rather transient, military childhood. I lived all over Canada, in Europe for four years, and then in Asia for a year. The Asian stay was of my own making, but the rest was part of my childhood. It gave me a global view, before “going global” was the catchphrase of the day. And it means that I like to make friends and meet new people. Essentially, tools like message boards, Facebook, and Twitter are a boon for people like me.

The downside to meeting new people and seeing new places all the time is that inevitably you lose some of them along the way. So I have been thinking about how I can now find people easily online (gone are the days of calling 411 and hoping you have the right city to get a phone number), access pictures and mapping of things I have seen and done, and search for businesses. You can bet that although I love to support a local business, I won’t decide to forgo the pleasure of purchasing the latest gadget if I can get it online or contact the business that carries it through online methods. Sometimes I will find a store online from sheer nostalgia of times gone by.

Lately, I have been investigating Twitter and Twitter related applications. The one to catch my eye is Twellow. Twellow is essentially the yellow pages of Twitter. As they put it:

Twellow is a directory of public Twitter accounts, with hundreds of categories and search features to help you find people who matter to you….[we] allow you to update your Twellow profile and categories, add links to your other social media profiles, create an extended bio with whatever information and links you would like to add, and easily follow other Twitter users right from Twellow!

Twellow is available in the USA, Canada, and Australia. I was poking around online this morning and discovered that Twellow has been released to the UK now too, which follows their trend of increased availability. As Chris Crum said in his article “Twitterers in the UK Can Now Easily Find Locals”: TwellowHood is an incredibly useful tool for Twitter users, because it brings Twitter closer to home. It makes it easier to find people you know or local businesses/organizations you wish to follow.

I’ve talked about mapping and having your business show up on local search factors for Google. The fact that Google and a Twitter offshoot are both promoting this aspect of online marketing is no coincidence, because sometimes location matters. No matter how you look at it, increasing the ways in which your customers can find you – be that by location, keyword, or business type – can only be good for business.

Just like updating your haircut and wardrobe, your website is another good place to do some regular updates. We all know of businesses that never do any updates, some that rarely do them, and then the small percentage who update on a regular basis. Since your website is essentially the first impression many people will have of your business, do you want them to arrive and think that it is still 2001 on your site? Or worse, find broken links and incomplete work? It’s not a great impression, and even worse, it could drive traffic away from your site.

Erica Charney was talking about just this issue in her article “5 Website Tips To Keep Your Brand Image Fresh”. Her main five tips boil down to the following:

1. Fix broken links.
2. Do regular traffic analysis.
3. Do your own site crawl.
4. Keep your keyword list up to date.
5. Continually freshen your web copy.
Some of these tips seem fairly obvious to me, like making sure to fix links, but I know that I find broken links on my own daily run through the internet, so it is not obvious enough to everyone. But a frustrated customer is not a returning customer, so it bears repeating.

Doing regular traffic analysis is another tip that seems obvious to me, but some businesses may need the reminder. The more you know about where your traffic is coming from, the better you can understand what is and is not working in your online approach.

A site crawl can prevent issues from cropping up. Pulling old pages and getting visibility for the newer pages is important. Visibility on the internet is key, so updating your sitemap file and submitting the XML version are important too.

Keeping your keyword list current and freshening your web copy are pivotal activities in SEO. These are the haircuts and new clothes of the web world. Fresh copy gives your clients something new to look at (think about that haircut), but also a good way to get search engines to recognize your site, if done properly. While the keyword list is a bit like your clothing pile: it’s okay to keep some of your favourites, if they still work for you, but new content on your site will need new keywords. Plus, there are tools that show which keywords are being used frequently, so you can align your site’s keywords with popular thinking, allowing better access by the average person using search tools.

Really, search engine optimization boils down to maintaining your image on the internet. You wouldn’t go to an interview in ratty old jeans and a ripped t-shirt, so letting your website’s “clothing” wear out won’t help your business either.

Recently I was talking with a group of friends about hiring professionals and trusting their services. We were talking specifically about medicine. All of us have young children and medicine is high on our list of concerns when it comes to our children. Some parents choose to by-pass traditional medicine entirely, choosing instead to use alternatives like homeopathy. There are others who have researched every issue they can and then make decisions and dictate them to their health care providers. Others take care to choose a doctor who has similar views and practices and then trust them to provide quality care.

Personally, I am somewhere between researching and making my own decisions and letting my doctor decide, because it is her job to do that research. Luckily, I have a doctor who I trust and who I know does do research. Plus, she has young children too, so these issues concern her family as well.

There is nothing wrong with deciding to go with alternative medicine or to do all your own research, other than that this approach is time consuming and may not get you the same results. You may not want the same results.

I was thinking about SEO in the same way. A person or business can choose to do something else. There are other ways to build your website. Will they get you to the same place? Unlikely, but those who choose to go this route aren’t likely to be aiming for the same effect either. It’s not less valid, just a different path.

There are the do-it-yourselfers in the crowd too. This group is a vast one and they vary from people who just program simple HTML websites with little care for their rankings to those who want to save a little money to those who don’t even know that professionals exist in this field. The majority of this crowd does care though, and there are now a pile of books devoted to SEO strategies. Chris Sherman has a great overview of the most recent releases in his article “A Roundup of 2009’s Best SEO Books”. Chris lists 5 books on the subject, with 3 others as his old standby group, but undoubtedly if you browse Amazon or go to a large bookstore there will be several dozen to choose from. With time and effort, you can get to the point where you can implement an effective SEO strategy for your own website.

I am not one to back away from education in any form, but I still ask myself one question when I think about doing this: why? Why invest this time and effort into doing all of this yourself? SEO experts spend their days and weeks keeping up with the trends and educating themselves in everything from social media to SEO to new internet developments that may or may not change the landscape of rankings. If you hire a professional to get the job done, you will get a professional job.

A lot of people and businesses assume that the internet is a place where youth and business professionals work, promote themselves, and play. I have a hard time myself envisioning my 86 year old grandmother exploring the vast expanses of the internet, so if your business hasn’t taken seniors into account, then know you are not alone.

Interesting studies and conversations are cropping up all the time proving that seniors are not only using computers, but are a significant portion of the online presence. Mike Sachoff discusses the presence of seniors online and breaks down where they are going online and what they are doing. In his article, he presents a detailed table breaking down the activities of seniors online:

Even better, he has a list of the top websites they use:

Two of the biggest contributors to SEO and social media rank in the top 3 of this list: Facebook and Google. Ah…now there’s the connection we were looking for in the SEO field! Since seniors have increased their web presence to 17.5 million people over the last five years, according to Nielson, and are now spending 58 hours a month online in 2009 (increased from 52 hours a month in 2004), then they are indeed a demographic to be reckoned with when mapping out your online marketing strategies.

More importantly, it seems that seniors are doing the same things online as other demographics: getting information, visiting blogs, planning travel, and socializing. Only they have more free time available to them than those of us who are in the middle of our careers and raising kids. What will make you think even more are statistics that indicate 8.2% of all social networking and blog visitors fall into the seniors category, which is only 0.1 percent lower than the number of teenagers visiting the same kinds of sites. We know that marketing is aimed heavily at teenagers, so considering that seniors make up almost the same numbers for social networking sites, perhaps our businesses need to consider them too.

Although seniors will likely find most businesses through their general SEO strategies, it is worth noting that a different age group may search under different key words and key word phrases than their younger counterparts, so planning your SEO key words and phrases to reflect a wider audience is important. After all, while my 86 year old grandmother may have more time to spend online, I’d bet that if she doesn’t find your company at the top of her Google search, then she is unlikely to dig any further and your business may lose out to others who have tailored their SEO strategy to include this demographic.