Dec
31
The Year In Review 2007
Filed Under Social Network Marketing | Leave a Comment
Everybody that has a marketing blog has written or will be writing a “year in review” article and even though I am something of a non-conformist, here is mine. From a business perspective 2007 has been a very good year for me and Get Found Now. I am not referring to financial success, which we had, but success that led to vindication of my ideas and techniques.
2007 was a year that many of the theories I had about using community based strategies for my client’s Internet presence management were proven. I have been using social network marketing type strategies for a long time, starting off with PHP Nuke and phpBB as integral parts of Internet web site strategies. It was mainly due to security issues that I got away from these forums to a more secure system - WordPress.
Even though I always knew that having social aspects to a website was a great way to interact with site visitors, the forum system wasn’t really search engine friendly. That is what makes WordPress special, the way it interacts with search engines, and how it can be a powerful stand-alone system or better yet, a part of a larger web site structure.
WordPress has 2 things that make it so powerful:
- XML-RPC - it automatically updates search engines and other directory or news sites every time your site is modified. This is vital to keeping your site fresh in the eyes of search engines. Having spiders crawling your site 2 or 3 times a day is mighty powerful mojo. My post Search Engine Optimization and Social Network Marketing has a lot more info on XML-RPC including the directories you should be using.
- RSS - it is meant to be syndicated. RSS syndication is going to be the next big thing. Most of my readers already know all about RSS, but the general web user doesn’t fully understand or use RSS. This is even more apparent to site owners and companies that use the Internet. Now that social network marketing is seen as a legitimate marketing tool in the business world, the next big step is RSS integration. See my post RSS Syndication Explained for more details.
I have to say that the best part of 2007 for me was the legitimizing of social network marketing and seeing my theories about RSS connectivity work for me and my clients. Now lets take a look at what happened in 2007 that made these things possible.
Social Network Marketing Takes The Stage
The absolute popularity of sites like FaceBook, Digg, MySpace, You Tube and Flickr pushed social network marketing into the spotlight, but even more important was the way mainstream industries like real estate embraced it. 2007 will be remembered mostly for the amount of money spent by major companies like Google and Microsoft on social network marketing ventures. All the big online players threw their hats into the Web 2.0 ring spending billions of dollars on social media sites that have yet to have a substantial plan for monetization. To me this is reminiscent of the “dot bomb” spending debacle of the 90’s, but then what do I know?
For those of you new here, I am going to digress and give you a quick insight into just what Web 2.0 is. In 2004 Dale Dougherty, an O’Reilly executive, coined the phrase Web 2.0. He and Tim O’Reilly explain Web 2.0 as opposed to what the World Wide Web used to be (Web 1.0):
Web 1.0 –> Web 2.0
DoubleClick –> Google AdSense
Ofoto –> Flickr
Akamai –> BitTorrent
mp3.com –> Napster
Britannica Online –> Wikipedia
personal websites –> blogging
evite –> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation –> search engine optimization
page views –> cost per click
screen scraping –> web services
publishing –> participation
content management systems –> wikis
directories (taxonomy) –> tagging (”folksonomy”)
stickiness –> syndication
Here’s a graphic from the page as well that is a good visualization:
For those of you that prefer a video explanation there is an awesome video on my Social Network Marketing Web 2.0 Explained post that visualizes Web 2.0
The fact is Web 2.0, social network marketing or whatever you want to call it, is here to stay and 2007 has proved it.
Search Engines Expand Their Results
The other major event of 2007 as far as I am concerned is related to search engines. The major engines changed the way that they display the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages) to include more media and other goodies. This can actually be put in the Web 2.0 category since the changes in the SERP’s put media in the top 10 results and certainly gives even more credence to social network marketing.
All the major search engines added what is now referred to as blended searches to their index results. It all started in May when Google launched Universal Search (Read The Changing Face Of Google). The next major search engine to jump on the social search bandwagon was Ask.com with their Ask3D. Live Search joined the party in September, and Yahoo added its blended search results in October along with the useless Search Assist.
These changes have had and will have a major impact on search engine optimization. SEO guys are going to have change their game and actually think about marketing! I had a feeling this was coming as you can see in SEO is Dead Long Live SEO. The fact is that blended search is a good thing for me and my clients and for all of you that follow our school of thought. You just have to make content the king of your site, have a means to stay in touch with the search engines through XML-RPC or XML site maps, and use WordPress! If you don’t have these things and want to get cracking visit my page Internet Presence Management to find out how Get Found Now can help you out.
I hope that 2007 was as good for you as it was for us. Happy New Year!
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Nov
5
Technorati Tags A No Go
Filed Under Social Network Marketing | 2 Comments
A lot of webmasters, especially bloggers, use Technorati Tags as a means of site promotion. I have been testing them on several site for a few months now and have found that they are worthless. While the tags might have some use from a usability standpoint, that is only the case if Technorati actually serves your pages on their site when one of YOUR visitors clicks on the tag. They have had many technical issues including inbound link tracking and now they are having issues serving up relevant results from tag clicks.
I ran seven tests on seven sites last month and more than half the time Technorati failed to show results from any of the sites. In fact they show an error message that states there are no pages from the blog about “search engine optimization”. It would almost be funny if you didn’t take into consideration the time wasted with Technorati widgets and plugins.
From an SEO standpoint I have seen 0 inbound links credited from Technorati in either Google or Yahoo. This is from seven sites that each have over a thousand inbound links from other sources. There were no other tangible benefits from Technorati tags from SEO or traffic. As far as the authority, the highest number I was able to achieve was 75 on a site that is in the top 125,000 in Alexa and has a 7 PR. The site gets over 1500 unique visitors a day and not 1 came from Technorati last month.
I have removed the simple tags plugin as well as the tags code from all the sites. The next test will be using the full features of WordPress tagging. I will keep you all informed on how that goes.
For now the conclusion is Technorati is a no go from all 3 standpoints:
- SEO - no benefits in search engine placement from Technorati Tags
- Usability - there is no benefit from having visitors leave your site and go to Technorati.
- Linking - I have seen no inbound link credit from Technorati in either Google or Yahoo.
My recommendation is to loose the Technorati widgets and not waste any time with specific plugins for their tags. I will still ping their system when my blogs are updated, but will no longer go out of my way to incorporate their stuff into my sites.
Jul
22
Search Engine Optimization And Social Network Marketing
Filed Under Search Engine Optimization, Social Network Marketing | 11 Comments
Search engine optimization used to be the only other option for Internet Marketing outside of Pay Per Click or other paid search advertising. There are two other ways to build solid traffic and help out your SEO efforts:
- Social Network Marketing - Web 2.0 and everything that comes with it. The most powerful marketing tool in existence that is pretty much free to exploit, social network marketing and particularly RSS is a new and improved Internet.
- Affiliate Marketing - this is only useful for e-commerce and product oriented sites. I mention it here only because it cannot be ignored in any online marketing strategy. I will be writing a whole series of e-commerce related posts in the next month and will be going into detail about how to set up and run affiliate marketing campaigns.
So we have established that traditional SEO now has a very powerful companion in organic or non-paid marketing campaigns. The question is, how do you use it?
SEO and Web 2.0 Optimized Social Network Marketing
Search engine optimization is a big topic. There are many techniques that are involve traditional search engine optimization. They revolve around common sense tactics and link gathering. If you follow the SEO newsletters you have been reading about link popularity and how many experts believe that high inbound link counts no longer have the same positive effects that they once did.
This is something I have been saying for quite a while. I have proof that inbound links, particularly reciprocal links have no where as much weight as they once did. So what is a webmaster to do? Get on the Web 2.0 bandwagon and invest all your organic strategies into blog, feed and article planting.
Most online businesses use blogging as their means of social network marketing. If you are in the process of getting into Web 2.0 for your website, I have some quick guidelines that you should follow:
- Place The Blog In Your Site’s Relative Path - don’t use any type of outside blogging system for a company blog. Blogger for example will do NOTHING to help your website in the SERPs. You will only truly benefit by installing a blog system as part of your domain. For example:
www.domain.com/blog. This can be difficult if your web server is on a Windows platform. Ideally you are using Linux hosting. If that is the case then WordPress is by far the best solution for a blogging platform. Make sure that you install the blog in a sub-directory of your websites root folder. I use a keyword for the blog folder. Here it is:
www.getfoundnow.com/internetmarketing/ I installed WordPress into the internetmarketing folder. - Use An Optimized Theme - WordPress comes out of the box pretty much optimized for search engines, but there are definitely themes that are more optimized than others. The issue is in how it displays the meta tags, particularly the meta description. With a fancy looking theme, you can install special plugins for the meta tags. I use Tag Warrior, meta head description and a few others that I created myself.
- Utilize XML-RPC - a very powerful updating system called pingomatic is default installed within WordPress. If you go to manage>writing, at the bottom is a list of directory services. I used Robin Good’s top 55 as a starting place of RSS directories to ping. This basically notifies RSS directories and blog directories when your site has been updated. I put a list at the bottom of this post of the pinging services I use.
- Utilize XML Sitemap Plugin - I use a cool plugin that not only creates xml sitemaps, but notifies Google, Yahoo and Ask when your site has been updated, in fact it is a dynamic plugin that will re-build your sitemap every time a comment is added, a post is written, etc. I have a link to the plugin page on my RSS Syndication Services post.
- Optimize Your Posts - utilize traditional SEO tactics within your articles. Since most meta descriptions are pulled from the first 100 to 200 characters of your article, make the first couple of sentences a description of the story. You obviously want to use keywords and tags that you are promoting within the article in the fist paragraph as well. After the first paragraph use an <h2> tag to wrap a heading. If you are promoting multiple keywords use 2 or 3 <h2> tags, but always have content after the tags. If your topic has multiple sub categories, use <h3> tags. Again always have at least a paragraph before and after and <h> tags. Since your story’s title is default formatted as an <h1>, don’t use another <h1> tag in the story. Any instances of your keywords or tags, should be bolded, then italicized. If you have multiple instances of the same keyword or phrase, rotate the tags. If you are on Blogger, go into the code and use <strong> and <em> tags. It is important to follow normal search engine optimization practices within your posts. Lists are always a good tactic. Either numbered or bulleted lists give the content within the lists more authority. As you can see by this list I bold the initial statement, another common SEO practice.
- Use Minimal Intra-site Linking - If you are promoting a static page on your main site or trying to build placement for a keyword on your home page, then you want to optimize your content with bold and italics like I just laid out, but don’t link until the last instance of the keyword. Lets say your are promoting a keyword phrase, and it appears in your post 5 times, link the last phrase. This will build authority for that keyword on the page you are promoting.
- Nofollow Outbound Links - if you have to link to an outside site as a reference utilize the:
rel=”nofollow” attribute within the link. You will also want to have the link open in a new window. I always put the nofollow attribute first, before the target=”blank” that will open the link in a new window. If you are referring to a source for statements within your post like Wikipedia, a regular outbound link won’t hurt. In fact I have evidence that an article that has a reference to a site with a lot of authority can help the authority of the post itself. Be careful not to have too many outbound links and that the page or site you are linking to has at least a page rank of 8. - Use Deep Link Navigation - if you are writing about a topic that refers to another post on your blog, link to it. This counts as a comment within WordPress or a trackback depending on how you set your blog up. Default settings for internal linking on WordPress is to make the link a comment which is good for the original post.
These guidelines cover how to take traditional SEO and apply optimization to Web 2.0 applications like blogs. The next article in this series will look at how Social Network Marketing can positively effect your search engine placement.
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XML-RPC Directories
Below is the list of xml-rpc reporting services I use to notify directories about changes to my blog:
1470.net/api/ping
blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
bulkfeeds.net/rpc
coreblog.org/ping/
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.fakapster.com/rpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
ping.amagle.com/
ping.bitacoras.com
ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
ping.myblog.jp
ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
rpc.pingomatic.com/
trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
www.blogoon.net/ping/
www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
xping.pubsub.com/ping/
Jun
26
You see it everywhere: Web 2.0, but what is it, what does it mean, why should you care? There is more to Web 2.0 than meets the eye. While it is true that sites like digg.com, youtube.com and myspace.com are getting the most press and are the examples most people use to explain Web 2.0, they are only examples of the personal aspects of social network marketing, not the commercial side.
What Web 2.0 Is And How It Can Help An Online Business
From a personal standpoint, Web 2.0 can be a powerful and cool way to share your thoughts, pictures, songs, playlists, videos, or whatever you’re into, with your friends and family or even co-workers. This is the underlying structure of Web 2.0, bonding and communicating outside of the normal world wide web. Think about it for a minute. The world wide web is really based upon hyperlinking. Sites get built are linked to by other sites, listed in directories, and found through search engines. It is the same with products and shopping carts, or auction sites like E-Bay. All these commercial applications revolve around users entering what they are looking for in a search engine and then following the results to what they are looking for.
Things are much different with Web 2.0. It started a while back with forums. Places where people can share ideas and information even experiences. These forum threads are then spidered and can be found in search engines so new users are able to find other peoples answers and opinions on products, services or ideals. While forums were once very popular and in some industries still are, especially for technical support sites, the fact is they are hardly a secure solution for most of us. I personally have had quite a few forums hacked no matter how many security updates I did.
Besides hackers, many users also find forums to be hard to follow, update, moderate and maintain. Along comes blogging. At first blogs were personal web logs, online journals used to save and share ideas. They hit the big time when Google purchased Blogger. Now everyone and their mother has a blog. In fact more and more industries are moving much of their organic marketing into blogging. When you look at the commenting feature within most blogging systems again the ability for discussion makes a blog a community portal.
The real estate industry is probably the largest commercial community to fully embrace blogging as a sales tool. My wife Victoria and I both are strong in that industry, bringing social network marketing to the forefront of Internet Marketing campaigns.
While it is true that hyperlinks are still the most common glue that binds sites together, there is now a more powerful tool of communication that is the fuel that drives Web 2.0: RSS. Read my article RSS Syndication Explained for an overview of Real Simple Syndication.
With RSS a whole new way exists for users to obtain information. Through feeds, users can customize their home pages with updates about whatever they are interested in from news to home listings and product updates. RSS is the underlying foundation for Web 2.0.
From a commercial perspective social network marketing is a powerful way to drive traffic to your website as well as communicate with your customers. It is also one of the best ways to maintain support for your products by keeping online support journals.
My next article about social network marketing will go into excruciating detail about the commercial applications of Web 2.0. Below is a great video I found on one of my favorite blogs which is by Lawrence Lessig I think it is the best graphical overview of Web 2.0 I have ever seen.