Tag Archives: Search engine optimization

How To Follow A Social Media Road Map

As Chris Brogan said recently, having a social media strategy is no easy task.  It takes a lot of hard work.  But  if one follows a proven path, some of the difficulty falls away, and the process becomes easier.  One still needs discipline and consistency, but the path to success is clear. Social Media and SEO: 5 Essential Steps to Success provides, among other elements, a social media road map:

“However you look at it, SEO and social media work well together as long as there is a framework for doing so. One way to build SEO and social media programs efficiently is to follow a social media roadmap:

social media seo roadmap1. Find the audience; understand their behaviors, preferences, methods of publishing, and sharing. Most companies that are involved with the social web in the channels where their customers spend time have a good sense of where to start. Many companies are ahead of the game by tracking their audience via social media monitoring software that identifies keywords, conversations and influencers such as those pictured in the Radian6 screen shot below.

radian6 influence image2. Define your objectives. Objectives are often driven by marketing or sales, and SEO has long been directly accountable to substantial improvements in web sales. Social media is not direct marketing though, so different objectives and measurements apply. The role of SEO in a social media effort is to directly influence discovery of social communities or content via search. Do a search for Zappos on Google, for example, and you’ll easily find more than shoes: Twitter, Blog and a YouTube (YouTube reviews) channel are all on the first page of search results.

zappos imageIndirectly, social content can boost links to website content, improving search traffic and online sales.

3. Establish a game plan. The game plan for reaching objectives in a combined SEO and social media effort will often focus on content and interaction, since it is content that people discover and share. Whether a keyword-focused strategy for reaching goals means publishing new content or creating an opportunity for consumer-generated content, it must involve proactive promotion and easy sharing amongst members of the community.

4. Create a tactical mix. The tactical mix for a social media marketing effort is based on doing the homework of finding where the desired audience spends its time interacting with and sharing content. Whatever the tactical mix is, it’s an investment in time and relationships – not a short term “link dump” to promote optimized link bait. Much of the content creation and promotion for a social media marketing effort happens within the tactical mix and, of course, that means optimizing content for keywords.

keyword focus imageWhether content is created by marketers as part of a social destination like a niche community or a promotion vehicle such as an interactive ad, keyword glossaries become useful for writing headlines, deciding on anchor text for links and outreach activities like blogger relations.

5. Measure your goals. Goals measurement should roll up to the specific objectives, both direct and indirect. Leveraging both social media monitoring services as well as web analytics can provide marketers with the insight to improve results. Radian6 and Webtrends have recently announced a partnership that will bring web analytics and social media analytics together all in one interface. In the meantime, marketers can use specific measurement tools to monitor the effect of their social web participation as well as the search engine performance of SEO efforts.”

It’s all about results.  If you don’t measure you won’t know what your results are.  If you try this, let us hear how you do and what you’ve learned you’d like to share.  In social media, we’re all in this together

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How To Build An Attractive, User-Friendly Website Any Non-Techie Can Update And Maintain

We are well past the days when WordPress was only for blogs.  Now WordPress is considered a full featured content management system (CMS).  And the beauty of it is, once set up, absolutely anyone with 15 or 20 minutes of training can go in and update and maintain the content.  It’s a simple matter of opening the site in the right place and inserting or updating whatever you want.  I have trained students and admin assistants who were able to master this in no time.  Of course, someone web savvy has to be available for the occassional question.

What I’ve found to be the trickiest part of creating websites for others is determining how much the site owner really wants to update their own system.  Some like to do it all, or have an intern or assistant who is happy to do it.  Other professionals don’t want to touch it with the proverbial 10 feet pole.  I’m not sure why that is.  I don’t know if they are tech phobic or are afraid of it or think their professional station puts them above that kind of work.  Although why some professionals are willing to pay webmasters to do clerical work is something I don’t quite understand particularly when I explain their assistant can probably do it, or they can pay someone $10 an hour to do it. But, be that as it may,  it’s the job of the service provider to keep the client happy, so if someone doesn’t want to update their own system, that’s fine.  But the fact is, anyone with 15 or 20 minutes training can update and maintain a WordPress website.

WordPress  as  a Content Management System –  a state-of-the-art publishing platform which is  feature rich, continuously updated, with thousands of man hours in development time and a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.

Features which extend the already deep functionality, include the following:

•    Plug ins which automate hundreds of the most useful tasks from SEO (search engine optimization, so your website can and will be found) to placing advertisements, should you want them, on every post. New plug ins are offered almost daily

•    Widgets, individual pieces of code which provide a single interaction to frequently used functions such as clocks, calendars, news aggregators. Widgets have the capability of automatically updating content areas of your website. For an example, a widget might be used to automatically update the navigation sidebar as new pages are added.

•    Themes control the look and feel of the website in this system.  The site owner has access to a choice of hundreds of themes, which are constantly updated and to which additional themes are added continuously.  A theme may be changed with a single click.

•    Support – Because of the popularity and widespread use of this platform, it is supported by extensive developer communities, experts, technicians and web hosts, so there is ample support for whatever your needs are or might become in the future. This eliminates the potential for a site owner to be marooned with obscure or little used software and platform and consequently face the difficult task of finding support to fix technical issues or adjust to changing needs.

Training, Continuous Updating and Maintenance

As web developer or webmaster, or if you hire someone to do this work, you may want to add the following services…. the first is a necessity but, as mentioned, usually only takes about 20 minutes.
•    Provide whatever training is needed to adjust to the new system.
•    Provide a monthly review and audit that both identifies trouble spots and recommends improvements and also assures continuous smooth operation of the site owner’s system
•    Upgrade the website’s software and plugins monthly, as needed or required

Trust me, this is easy. If you have any trouble or issues, give me a shout at gretchen@ggwebgroup.com. And…..good luck!

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4 Top Benefits Of Blogging for Business

We are already on record as pointing out that if you want to raise your visibility and get in touch with your audience, it’s a good idea to blog.  It does take a little chunk of time out of your day, but it’s probably no more than you should spend on marketing, anyway.  Also,  I’ve seen many outstanding blogs….most notably by Guy Kawasaki… that are all photos and captions.  But then Kawasaki goes to really interesting places like a battle ship or Red Square.  And if he photographs something ordinary like a tech company office, you can rest assured it is no ordinary office but an incredibly creative, way out there, in a class of its own, office.

My point is, blogging can take as much or…almost… as little time as you want it to.  And if you aren’t doing it yet, perhaps you should take a look at the following:

Blogging for Business – Small Business Tips by One SEO Company has this to say about the basics of blogging and its benefit:

1) Blogs initiate dialog with web visitors

Blogs start a two-way traffic with web visitors. When you write about your products and services and write with authority, as though you are the master of your business and with in-depth knowledge about your products and services, you not only create awareness of the benefits and disadvantages about the product and service you deal in, you engage people’s attention. Your blog should also have a call to action, to make the readers of the blog interact with your website.

A call to action can mean asking them to leave comments, encouraging them to speak out. Comments left by the readers of blogs might include inquiries and leads that could lead to sales.

Blogs generate a prospective about your company. It silently speaks about the culture and vision of your company and even helps in building a brand image.

2) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Benefit of blogging

Blogs peppered with targeted keywords, keyword phrases and search terms related to your business puts blogs in plain sight whenever web visitors use related search terms. Instead of using long-tail keyword phrases, targeting niche keywords will help in attracting more qualified web traffic.

3) Blogs attract more links

Blog are meant to be informative and not advertisements. Informative quality, industry related articles that provide insight or a critical analysis of product and services you deal in helps you to get more links.

Links will get better search engine rankings for your website and will help in generating more traffic.

4) Fresh, original content for blogs

Fresh and original web content is the feed for search engine spiders. Websites that are updated frequently get crawled by the search engine spiders more often. Your website gets more authority and better search engine ranking.

By now, you should have enough reasons to being seriously considering blogging. For your interest and for the interest of getting more visitors to your website, blogging is the way to go. Don’t wait to begin blogging right away.

Start writing blogs, use targeted keywords and keyword phrases, generate qualified web traffic and get better search engine positioning and ranking. Fresh content and informative articles with SEO are best for search engine marketing.”

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Squidoo- A Great Business Model And A Good Way To Market

Seth_Godin,marketer extroidinaire, is the founder of Squidoo, which makes perfect sense because it is a very smart site.  More accurately, it’s a very smart business model.  One of the holy grails of the Net is to manage to get user generated content.   In other words, you, the owner, are not having to produce the content or pay someone else or a team of people to produce the content.  Your users do it for you.   And Squidoo is based on that model. (The other other holy grail is having a transaction site where something….. goods or money, possibly information, is exchanged between users and you just provide the platform, stand in the middle, and collect on every transaction.  Ebay is a transaction site.  So is Paypal.  They are a great thing to have if you can figure out how to build on and get people to come.  But that’s another post.)

But, even though Squidoo is a very good thing for Seth Godin, it can be a very good thing for you too, if you have something you want to publicize.  Squidoo is a very popular website with millions of visitor.  Think in terms of diverting a small percentage of that traffic to your website by building links into your lens. Which brings us to….

Why Build A Lens?

Seth Godin explains:

Squidoo is a website hosting hundreds of thousands of handbuilt webpages (just to be difficult, we call them “lenses”). Each lens is one person’s look at something online. Your take on football or business or the best thai food in town. (Jane Goodall has a lens about chimps–to spread the word about a cause she cares about. Martha Stewart‘s company built a lens about cookies–to drive traffic to their site.)

Lenses are free to set up.

Lenses are easy and totally non-techy.

Lenses pay a royalty to hundreds of great charities. (Or straight to you! Lots of lensmasters earn hundreds or thousands of dollars a year).

Lenses get you credibility and traffic… and lenses only take a few minutes to build.

Quick! All the reasons ( at a glance)

The people who hope to do well on Squidoo build hundreds of lenses.  Is this a good use of their time?  Well, that will be determined by the results.  It seems to me you would really have to build a lot of sites to generate much revenue.  But it does seem to be a piece of the puzzle as far as driving traffic to your blog or website. Squidoo lenses can be picked up by search engines. You can place links to your site on the lens and then the Squidoo traffic, or at least some of it,  clicks through to your site.  I’m going to give it a try and will report th resuts back in a later blog.

If you build a Squidoo lens, please write to us and share the results.  We’re all learning this together!

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Blow Your Own Horn: Increase Your Visibility Using LinkedIn

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Image via CrunchBase

Even if you have demonstrable skills and great results, what good will it do you if too few people know what a valuable asset you are to any company or any client?  Zero, or close to it, is the correct answer.  Remember that question: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one’s there to hear it does it make a sound?” Answer: no, it makes sound waves; someone has to hear the sound waves for them to be perceived as sound.  And someone has to hear about your successes, achievements and accomplishments for you to  be perceived as effective and successful. There is real currency in perception. And it is up to you to shape those perceptions.

A membrane of drum makes vibration

I just Googled my name, Gretchen Glasscock and it returned 9,350 results.  It’s kind of scary, when you think about it, how much information is out there about you.  There’s a profile of me on Amazon.com from when I reviewed a book on the Net for them.  One of my Internet providers, of many moons ago, has a profile posted of me with nothing but my name.  Which makes it all the more important for you to write your own profile, which is accurate and which you have control over, so that is the first place potential clients and colleagues go when looking for information about you. ( Not the website with you wearing a party hat or your nieces and nephews climbing on your shoulder as your dog is kissing your ear and you are struggling for balance.)

First, let’s focus on Linked In

Guy Kawasaki, the popular VC and entrepreneur has provided us with Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn. I’m going to point out a couple of his tips, but I’d also like to say how much I’ve learned from Guy who is probably one of the most popular personalities on the Net.  It’s easy to see why, when you read his linked in profile.  He comes through as very engaging and personable. He says of his first degree from Stanford, before he went for his MBA:

“These were some of the happiest days of my life. I loved Stanford. Sometimes I wish I could go back to school there. By the way, I majored in Psychology because it was the easiest major I could find.

I think most of us have a tendency to make these facts too stiff and formal. I know I do.  And I’m going to go back and work on mine, to let my hair down a bit, and be more personal, like Guy is.  The end result is you, the reader, immediately think of Guy Kawasaki as approachable, someone who’d like to help you, which is, after all, what you want when your goal is for people to seek you out for your service or product,

Some of Guy Kawasaki‘s advice for your Linked In page”

  • Improve your connectability.

    • Most new users put only their current company in their profile. By doing so, they severely limit their ability to connect with people. You should fill out your profile like it’s an executive bio, so include past companies, education, affiliations, and activitiesYou can also include a link to your profile as part of an email signature. The added benefit is that the link enables people to see all your credentials, which would be awkward if not downright strange, as an attachment.

  • Improve your Google PageRank.LinkedIn allows you to make your profile information available for search engines to index. Since LinkedIn profiles receive a fairly high PageRank in Google, this is a good way to influence what people see when they search for you.To do this, create a public profile and select “Full View.” Also, instead of using the default URL, customize your public profile’s URL to be your actual name. To strengthen the visibility of this page in search engines, use this link in various places on the web> For example, when you comment in a blog, include a link to your profile in your signature.
  • Enhance your search engine results.In addition to your name, you can also promote your blog or website to search engines like Google and Yahoo! Your LinkedIn profile allows you to publicize websites. There are a few pre-selected categories like “My Website,” “My Company,” etc.If you select “Other” you can modify the name of the link. If you’re linking to your personal blog, include your name or descriptive terms in the link, and voila! instant search-engine optimization for your site. To make this work, be sure your public profile setting is set to “Full View.”

These small changes, which don’t take long to execute can make a huge difference how visible you are on the Net, and that is your first hurdle: Visibility.  We will work on the rest as we go along.

To read Guy Kawasaki’s  entire post go to Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn

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How Do I Do This? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies

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Image via CrunchBase

Ok.  We get it. After posting Shall We Talk? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies, we learned a thing or two about your needs.  Although we know there are bloggers galore on every topic imaginable out there, there are also a number of you who are just stopped cold at the thought of starting a blog.  You might like to, but it seems too complex, too involved, too frustrating, too….whatever.

You’ve probably heard that saying: “To anyone whose only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” (Kind of like tunnel vision or having blinders on when it comes to others’ perspectives.)  To those of us who’ve already taken the high dive off the cliff and into the warm and welcoming waters of the blogosphere, the whole process seems rather user friendly and simple.  We perhaps forget where we started from.

I remember the first time I ever looked at a WordPress page, with no training and no preparation.  I thought “What on earth is this and how am I supposed to learn it”?  ( I think mild panic sets in at the first glance of the unknown, particularly when we know we’re supposed to do something with it…….like produce a published page, but how do your do that?)

I know Arthur, one of our blog readers, commented that he liked the post, Shall We Talk? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies, and thought it was great to challenge women to make their own blog and create a community but regretted that the process was too complicated and long:

“I wonder if a step by step approach wouldn’t have been easier to follow…In a perfect world there will be some videos made from actions on both main platforms (Blogger and WordPress).”

Well, this post is an attempt to make the process easier for Arthur and all the hopeful bloggers, many of them women, for whom he speaks.  If any of you can add to this or enrich it with your own expertise or experience please do. For now, let’s see if we can break this down into bite size pieces:

1.  Free WP installation

There are sites out there which specialize in WordPress and will install and set up or transfer your WordPress site free.  One such site is SiteGround.com You have to get hosting with them at $5.95 a month. But you also get Free WordPress themes and WordPress tutorial. That sounds to me like a good way to get your feet wet.  They say they are the #1 WordPress Host, but there are probably others who offer the same services.

2. Gettting Started With WordPress tutorials

When you sit down, shake off that little twinge of “beginner’s anxiety”, and start to use it, WordPress has extremely intuitive administration: you will be able to compose a post and publish it on your website with just one click! The following are 2 different tutorials, both using screen shots, but the second is video, so also has a guide talking you through the process.

SiteGround.com offers an Easy Start tutorial with screen shots of every action telling you exactly where to go and what to click, step by step. It very clearly explains and shows a graphic of each of the following:

If you prefer to learn using video goto Ithemes.com Tutorials

NEW! WORDPRESS 2.6 BASICS

I was going to share with you how to start writing posts, the quickest and simplest way I know, again, just to get your feet wet.  But since I promised this would be in simple, bite size pieces, I’m going to save that for the next post : How Do I Do This Faster & Easier?  Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies

I hope this post has helped Arthur and all of you get started with your own blog.  Write and let me know how it’s going and what your experiences have been.  If there’s something specific you want to know, just tell me.  Our goal is to get you up on the Net, blogging your heart out, sharing all your stories with us.  Just remember: You make the path by walking on it.

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Shall We Talk? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies

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Ok. This post is not for all you bloggers on the Jedi Warrior level. We know you know how to blog. This is for all those out there, and particularly women, who have a lot they want to say and just haven’t gotten the hang of blogging yet. ( We’re telling you this because, as you know by now, if you have been reading this blog, we are encouraging women to jump on to the Net and develop their own communities and blogs in support of other women.)

Maybe you haven’t started your own blog yet because you’re intimidated. Maybe you’re just discovering the blogosphere. Whatever the reason, we can almost guarantee there is such an ease and an immediacy and a sense of shared community with similarly minded bloggers, that once you start, you’ll be hooked, like the rest of us.

Whether you want to start a business or a women’s community or a news magazine, you can blog.

The start up is the hardest part – which is probably true of most things – and it is not so much hard as detailed.

If you want to spend a lot of time weighing your platform options and strategies, Choosing a Blog Platform at ProBlogger will walk you through all that. You may want a hosted blog at a company like Blogger or a stand alone platform powered by WordPress.org or MovableType or one of many others. You may want to build your own brand ( highly recommended) , and if you do, you will need a stand alone platform. Personally, I prefer WordPress.org. It is feature rich, continuously updated, with thousands of man hours in development time. It boasts communities of developers offering plug ins which automate hundreds of the most useful tasks imaginable, from SEO ( search engine optimization so your blog can be found) to spam catching to putting in Google Adsense or Yahoo ads on every post. New plug ins are offered almost daily and there is ample support for whatever your needs are. There are many ways to customize the plugins, widgets, and themes or change them with a single click. And did I mention, it’s free?

There are several ways to set up your WordPress.org blog.

WordPress.org offers its own Quick Start Guide, which, incidently points out the advantages of self hosting. It’s pretty straight forward and intuitive, with a well known “5 minute install”, but if you’re not comfortable with mildly techie tasks, such as using ftp, this is probably not for you.

Making A WordPress Blog adds screen shots to the process of walking you step by step through the set up of your blog, using a hosted platform at WordPress.com. Simpler, ( since there’s no ftp or techie tasks involved) but still, possibly not what you want if you are trying to build your own brand, which, one day, you hope to sell.

Paying a pro WordPress guru a couple of hundred bucks to install your blog is simple, stress free and a good investment. We Fix WP Blogs is one example of a provider who can perform this task for you, simply, seamlessly and relatively inexpensively. I just used We Fix WP Blogs for a pretty extensive installation of mine – 3 blogs – so I can personally recommend them. And the bonus is that you will have a WP guru already familiar with your blog, should you ever need help, an upgrade, to migrate servers or simply some quick advice on the fly. There are a number of WP gurus out there, some mentioned on the WP site and others you may have to Google to locate.

Once you’re at this point, you just have to be able to write in plain English ( or French or German or Spanish or whatever language you speak.) Although the program is really intuitive and very simple to learn you can return to Quick Start Guide or Making A WordPress Blog with screen shots, to walk you step by step through the process of writing your content, saving it, then publishing it to the Net.

Whatever moves you or stirs you, motivates or inspires you, we want to see it on the Net, in your blog. When you fulfill yourself, we are all one step closer to fulfilling ourselves and to creating real progress on the Net. So start your blog. And please do share your story and experience with us.

For more, see these:

Yes, Some Blogs Are *Very* Profitable – And Some Of Them Are Women’s Blogs

Community on the Net – The Platform To Network, The Power to Mentor

Women Power: From The Ballot Box To The Blogosphere

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