How Pinterest Is Kicking Up A Dust Storm
There’s a new social media site in town. It’s called Pinterest. And in the last month the site has gained 7 million new visitors.
Pinterest is an interesting social media experiment. And it looks like it could become one of the powerhouse websites, especially for women, its largest set of users.
The cool thing about Pinterest is that it is highly graphic. Take a look at its home page and you’ll see all the photos and images, and it isn’t cluttered.
The way it works is you set up your own pinboard. You can have one for your company just like Mashable has. And just like Mashable’s, it can be branded.
Notice how Mashable’s pinboard has the Mashable name in it. That’s great for reputation management and branding. Then, on the left, you can see the big Mashable logo with the website URL underneat. Again, that’s great for branding, but the URL back to the website provides a useful inbound link for SEO purposes.
If you look at the pins that Mashable includes on its pinboard, they’re not all self-promotional. They spend a great deal of time promoting other items around the Web. That’s great stuff. It’s the way that it should be done.
You don’t have to be a rabid self-promoter to be successful in social media generally or at Pinterest in particular. You just have to have a solid strategy for your online content, a strategy that includes promoting others while branding yourself. That’s the best social media strategy in the world, and your company can make that happen.
SEO And Great Content Go Hand In Hand
There is a misconception among many search engine optimization specialists that SEO must be a focus of content or the content just isn’t good. The truth is, great content and great SEO compliment each other. They can co-exist without hurting each other.
The key to this SEO philosophy is in the use of keywords and links. Keywords are the fuel in every search engine optimization strategy. You don’t want to overdo it, but you must do it.
What does that mean, exactly?
Keywords are a matter of targeting the right phrases for the right audience. If you are trying to reach people who purchase automobiles, then you have to target the right key phrases that attract automobile buyers. If you sell Ford vehicles specifically, then target your phrases to people who buy Ford vehicles. Sounds like a no-brainer, right?
It is, but you’d be surprised at how many SEOs target the wrong keywords for their audiences.
When it comes to links, you want your links to compliment your keyword phrases. They shouldn’t dominate. Anything in moderation is better than the same thing in overdose. Use links that compliment your keywords by incorporating the keywords into the link anchor text and pointing them to relevant pages on your website. Title attributes can also compliment your anchor text.
By complimentary title attributes, I don’t necessarily mean repeating your anchor text key phrase. I mean use a phrase that compliments it and is a more nuanced way of using your important keywords.
SEO is not a science. It certainly isn’t rocket science. Your first concern should be in creating great content. Make the SEO compliment the content.
Should You Link To Your Google Places Page?
A reader asked Mike Blumenthal if linking to her Google Places page would make it rank higher in the search engines.
The question has its basis on the longstanding practice of many SEOs to build inbound links to pages on their websites. Such inbound links have often increased the rankings of their web pages in the search engines. But there are flaws in thinking the same practice when applies to a Google Places page would have the same effect.
First, a Google Places page, as Mike Blumenthal points out, is a search result. Linking to it would be like linking to a search results page for a query that is related to your business niche. That wouldn’t boost your web pages any and it wouldn’t make any sense.
Secondly, linking out from your website to an external page would drain link juice that you could put to better use on your internal pages.
While such linking might be detrimental in terms of your website’s SEO, there may be times when linking to your Google Places page constitutes good marketing. For instance, if you want your website visitors to see all the rave reviews your business gets on Google, then you could link to the page. But I wouldn’t do that from your home page and I’d recommend that you do it using a no-follow link.
Sometimes, detrimental or harmful linking practices can be good marketing practices, and vice-versa. This is where you have to do some weighing of pros and cons. Choose a value that is most important to you and perform the action that makes that value work for you.
5 Timeless Internet Marketing Tactics
When it comes to marketing online, you can’t go wrong with what works and what continues to work. It seems that there are only a few tried and tested tactics that continue to work over and over again. Don’t listen to the gurus who try to sell you on the “latest and the greatest.” Instead, focus on what has been proven to work.
Here are 5 timeless Internet marketing tactics. They worked ten years ago (or five) and still work today.
- Pay Per Click Advertising – PPC advertising is the paid advertising part of online marketing. Google was the first company to champion PPC and it’s still going strong. As long as PPC ads continue to work, savvy Internet marketers will continue to use them.
- Search Engine Optimization – Despite rumors that Google+ has killed SEO, search engine optimization is still going strong. It changes every day, of course. But it still works today.
- Social Media Marketing – Social media is still young. It’s good and it’s only going to get better. With the rise of Facebook and now the introduction of Google+, you can’t ignore it any longer.
- Video Marketing – Video marketing just keeps getting better. Don’t give up on this new tactic just yet. Now should be when you start adopting it.
- Mobile Marketing – I know, I know. A lot of people still haven’t started doing it yet, but are you going to wait until they start. Now is the time to hop onto the mobile marketing bandwagon – before your clientele jumps on and starts looking for you.
When it comes to Internet marketing, stick to what you know works.
Is Google In Trouble?
Perhaps one of the most controversial moves Google has made in its history is the introduction of Google+. Since its inception, Google’s social network has been the subject of a lot of talk – some good and some bad.
It has its fans, to be sure. Among them are some of the Internet’s biggest voices.
On the other hand, there are some pretty big voices that have criticized it sharply. And they make some good points.
One of the things that has people concerned about Google+ is Google’s policy of favoring Google+ results in its search engine index over its competition. Until now, there has been no real solid proof that is happening. But a new bookmarklet titled Don’t Be Evil is showing the proof in a very uncanny way. You can preview and drag and drop the Don’t Be Evil bookmarklet to your web browser by visiting the Focus On The User website.
The interesting thing about this bookmarklet is its development team. The Focus On The User website says it was built by engineers at Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, “in consultation with several other social networking companies.”
John Battelle, one of those sharply critical voices who is also an Internet journalist, writes about it on his blog.
So here’s the million dollar question: What does this new information in this social media war mean to Google’s, and the Web’s, future? Will the U.S. Department of Justice see Google’s ranking practices as a violation of antitrust laws?
It would be interesting if they did. The result would likely be, at the very least, a forced change in Google’s ranking policies that cause it to rank websites without a preference for Google+. The question is, would that be better for searchers or worse? Google already claims to be doing what is best for the user, but their competition disagrees. What do you say?
Why YouTube Is So Important
The search engines are in a constant state of change. Every day, Google makes about 500 algorithmic changes meaning that’s how many times they change how their search results work. That doesn’t mean that every change will affect every query or that they affect every website on the Internet or every search engine result. Some are very specific and address very specific issues within particular niches.
Still, when you look at how search engine marketing has changed over the years, it’s easy to see why video marketing is becoming more and more important. And that’s includes YouTube.
More and more online marketing are using videos every day. But not just videos in the sense that they throw together a two-minute gig and throw it up online. Many of these videos are very professional.
YouTube has several advantages for video marketers. One advantage is that you can start up a video channel on YouTube and post regular video updates that are entertaining as well as informational and that market your website.
Another advantage to YouTube is that it is a very popular social media website. You can meet people on YouTube that you might not meet anywhere else. By developing a relationship with people on YouTube you can send them to your website to buy your products and services.
Finally, YouTube is the second largest search engine online – right behind Google. That is perhaps the biggest advantage. If you have a presence there, then people will likely find your videos.
Video marketing is getting to be more and more attractive every day. YouTube is one good reason why.
What A Search Engine Marketing Company Does
If you are new to search engine marketing and you’re wondering just what a search engine marketing company does, go no further. I’ll give you the nitty gritty, and the down and dirty, right here.
There are several Internet marketing strategies a search engine marketing company can perform for you. Let’s start with web design.
A good search engine marketing company doesn’t just design your website. They help you plan it. What language does it need to be coded in? Would ASP best suit your website? How about PHP? What kind of server should it be on? Windows or Linux? What is the best way to incorporate the social media experience into your website? These are some of the questions a good web development firm can help you answer as you make your mark on the web.
Beyond web design, your search engine marketing company should help you determine the best promotional strategies for driving traffic to your new website. Some of those methods include:
- Pay per click advertising
- Article marketing
- Search engine optimization
- Display advertising
- Link building
- Social media marketing
- Directory submissions
- Blog marketing
- Video marketing
- Forum marketing
And that’s just to name a few. The methods for driving traffic to your website could be quite different than the methods used for another website. Since every web business is different, every online marketing strategy should be different. A search engine marketing firm knows that.
What’s A Quora Board?
Quora, the question & answer website that has developed quite a following, now has a new tool for serious web promoters. It’s called a Quora Board.
So what is a Quora Board?
The concept is really simple. You set up a board around a specific topic that is associated with your business. Then you post links to that board and promote it to your followers.
It’s important to note that you can go through your Quora account followers and add as many of them as you want as followers of your Quora board when you set it up. Your followers then have to opt out if they don’t want to follow your board. That’s makes it a really easy marketing tool.
But keep your board focused. Don’t post spurious links are off-topic posts. If you blog often, post your blog links. You can also post other relevant and interesting third-party content (and you should) relevant to your board. Make your board a place where people interested in your topic will want to hang out and get the latest information from.
Quora boards are yet another social media tool that you can use for your business benefit.
Is Tablet Marketing The Next Big Thing?
Remember when everyone went ga-ga over video marketing? The talk of the town was it’s the next thing. Remember?
It happened right after YouTube started to climb sharply in popularity.
Then, remember when mobile marketing was the big thing? When did it happen? Right after everybody and his dog decided that you could Facebook on your phone. Now mobile phones are supposedly smarter and marketers are trying to figure out a way to get into your ear through them.
That’s cool.
Well, it seems that now nearly 20% of consumers have e-books and another 19% have tablets. So it’s time to start on the tablet marketing bandwagon, right?
Hold on before you start mocking me. I’m not being facetious. Not entirely anyway.
What can a tablet do? Play music and other audio files. Broadcast videos. Display e-books. Think any of those could be useful in promoting your business? How about that Internet radio show you wanted to start last year? Or that YouTube video channel? Maybe that e-book you’ve been putting off writing?
Yep, all of those can be marketed to tablet owners. So maybe now is the time to start looking at tablet and e-book marketing.
There are other benefits to promoting you and your business through these media. It also doubles as reputation management. That is, the more you publish and the more you promote yourself in a positive light the bigger and better your reputation will be online and off line.
Don’t just take up tablet marketing because it becomes a fad – it will. Do it because it delivers on the benefits.
5 Types Of Social Networks
Social networking has become so important today that you’ll hardly find an Internet marketer not doing it. If you do, they probably aren’t very effective. But you can get a leg up on your competition by spending some time doing a little social networking. To do it correctly, it’s important to identify the right type of social network for your need.
Here are 5 types of social networks you might consider for your online marketing needs:
- Plain Old Vanilla – If you haven’t heard of Facebook, then you probably live under a rock. It’s not the only plain old vanilla social network online, but it is the most popular.
- Social Bookmarking – These sites, like Delicious.com and countless others, allow you to save a link with a summary of your favorite web pages.
- Question & Answer – Getting more and more popular every day, sites like Quora and Yahoo! Answers allow users to log on, ask a question, and get an answer from the crowd. Sometimes you’ll get several answers that you can choose from. And the community can often vote on the best answers.
- Video Sharing – These sites – sites like YouTube and Vimeo – allow users to upload videos that others can view online. And you can use them to drive traffic back to your website.
- Blogging Communities – Blogging has become the trend of the decade. So why not join a blogging community. There’s one for women called BlogHer and then there are more generalized communities like LiveJournal. They are places for bloggers to meet, share their ideas, and network over conversations.
There are plenty other types of social networks as well. Pick the type that best suits your needs and jump right in.
Why Reputation Matters
I’m surprised at the number of business owners who will go out of their way to jeopardize their reputations all for the sake of getting a few notches higher in the search engine rankings. Many webmasters will spend a couple of hundred dollars a month to buy links, then when Google slaps them down they wonder what happened.
What happened is they didn’t respect their own reputation.
Google Panda is the latest major update to get a lot of webmasters. Many of them thought they were following Google’s guidelines, but they failed to understand the real purpose of the guidelines. They went about their link building practices as if following the letter of the law while ignoring the spirit of it. Namely, that searchers (and search engines) are looking for natural patterns.
Don’t ever forget that the search engines just want your content to appear naturally – to searchers and to their robots.
Reputation is very important. Spam is more than just getting cross with the search engine guidelines. It’s anything that a normal user of the Internet would find unattractive.
If you catch yourself playing around in the gray areas, ask yourself this question: “If someone else was doing what I am about to do, would I think they were engaging in spammy behavior? Would I like it? Would I do business them?”
If you’d answer Yes, No, and No to those questions, then don’t do it.
Reputation matters because without it you have no business. It doesn’t matter how good you are at SEO, social media, or something else. If your reputation is shot, your business is dead. Protect it at all costs.
How Many SMM Accounts Do You Need?
I was surprised to read that the average number of social media accounts for businesses doing marketing online is somewhere around 178.
Really? Do you need that many?
Personally, I think one account at the popular social media websites is enough. If your employees want a personal account at LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, then allow them the privilege of their own personal accounts. You might even give them some leeway in promoting corporate events and products – with some guidelines, of course. But you don’t need multiple social media accounts.
In a word, it’s overkill.
I would add that it is time consuming and costly to manage more than one account at any social media website. If you have 30 Twitter accounts, you’ll need that many employees to monitor and manage them. Maybe – MAYBE – one employee can manage 3-5 of those accounts, but that would be a full-time job. You still have to pay their salary.
A better use of time and resources is to have one account at each social media website. You have your marketing team manage those accounts – one manager per account. And make sure they talk to each other. You want your social media accounts to work in tandem, not against each other. Make it easy on yourself, not more difficult.
Why Is Anchor Text Important?
People and businesses new to Internet marketing often think that if they link from one page to another on their websites, then that will be enough to drive traffic. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Good links do two things really well: Provide SEO benefits and drive traffic. But how?
Let’s deal with traffic first. The best way to drive traffic through links is to make your links good calls to action. That means, they ask the reader to do something – click. That can be a direct asking as in “click here” or an indirect asking as in your link anchor text being enticing enough to say “click here” without saying “click here.”
So let’s talk about that anchor text.
Anchor text is the phrase you use for creating a link. It can be “click here” or “the best apple pie in Frisco.”
Notice how “the best apple pie in Frisco” piques your interest. You want to click that phrase because you wonder who’s got the best apple pie in Frisco and you hope the answer will lie on the other side of that link. That’s a good call to action.
It’s also good anchor text that passes SEO benefit. The benefit is the relevancy of the link to the page being linked to. If the linked-to page has valuable information about apple pies in Frisco, particularly the best apple pie in Frisco, then that phrase becomes valuable and relevant anchor text.
The best links you can create on your site from one page to another use great anchor text that passes the best SEO benefit AND it serves as a great call to action. Do both. You’ll come out a big winner.
How To Make Your Website Ready For Mobile
The best time to start thinking about whether your website is mobile ready or not is when you start developing your site. One tool that comes in handy for a savvy website developer intent on building a mobile-ready website is mobiReady.
So what should you incorporate, or not incorporate, into your website to make it ready for mobile browsers?
For starters, strip your website of all Flash elements. The won’t be visible in most mobile web browsers. Also, frames are difficult to parse for mobile browsers as well, so dispense with them too. And while you’re at it, strip away any code that bloats your website and makes it load slowly. If your website is too large, mobile web browsers will have a difficult time seeing it.
If you’re building your website on a content management system, try to find a module or a plugin that converts it for mobile browsers or makes it easier for mobile browsers to parse. Again, test your website on a mobile test page before making it live.
Mobile browsing is here to stay. And with smart phones becoming more and more popular, it will some day be as common as browsing the web on a home computer. You might as well get ready for that day now.
If necessary, design a separate website for mobile browsers that looks like your company site but is built just for mobile users.
Are You Discussing Or Dictating?
Media today is not what it used to be. For most people, media is a conversation. John Battelle says it’s not TV.
As Seth Godin has been known to say, “Markets are conversations.” Are you discussing, or dictating?
With the rise of social media, websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, marketers now have to get good at holding conversations. Your audience expects a dialogue. Are you providing it?
I like John Battelle’s distinction between dependent media and independent media. He places sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ in the “dependent” category because bloggers and members of a market niche depend on them for delivering their messages. And receiving those of others. “Independent” media consists of blogs, niche communities, and other websites owned by individual bloggers and website owners.
If you are still dictating your message to your audience, then you are likely alienating them. This is the age of conversations. Join them or start them, but don’t shun them.
Savvy marketers in 2012 use their blogs as launching pads for conversations. They then invite their audience to engage and join that conversation where it is happening. Sales take place only after the marketer has built up trust. You earn that trust by respecting your audience.
Today’s media is social media. You aren’t on TV any more.
Why Facebook Is At A Disadvantage
A brilliant post at SEOmoz illustrates how Google uses its own SEO guidelines to rank its own pages higher in the search engines.
Consider this:
How has Google won so much real estate on their own search pages in such a short period of time? Do they cheat? No, not really – more on this later. Google wins by employing really smart Search Engine Optimization techniques – the same SEO practices available to any online business.
What Cyrus Shepard doesn’t tell you is that Google knows its own algorithms better than anyone else. It has the inside information. Facebook doesn’t. And that’s one of the reasons that Facebook is at a disadvantage.
On the other hand, the SEO principles that Cyrus shares in his post are pretty much all common knowledge. They’re things that everyone – even Facebook – at this point should understand.
One really telling point is how Facebook blocks Google from crawling its profile pages. As Cyrus points out:
Facebook actively prevents Google from crawling most of its content, allowing big G to access “Fan” pages, but limiting information from regular profiles. Now that Google+ has entered the social game, this policy puts Facebook results at risk of dropping in rankings and losing search real estate.
On the one hand, Google+ has an advantage in the search engines because it is owned by the largest and most popular search engine. On the other hand, Facebook doesn’t employ sound SEO tactics anyway, so if you take away the Google+ advantage, Facebook would still be at a disadvantage.
So what’s the lesson here? No matter what business you are in, think about how search engine optimization can help you reach your goals.
Use Blogger For Your Own Personal Article Directory
Now that Google Knol is dead, is there an alternative that you can use for your articles?
Yes, there is. It’s called Blogger. That’s Google’s free blog service.
You can use Blogger as your own article directory and there are two ways to do it.
First, you can start one blog and periodically post your articles there and link back to your company branded blog or website. The second way to use Blogger as an article directory is to upload each article you want to post to its own blog utilizing your primary keyword as the blog subdomain.
Both strategies work well.
Blogger has been listed as the second most trafficked social media website, ahead of Twitter by more than twice the traffic.
Of course, this Nielsen report doesn’t consider YouTube. Still, that puts Blogger into the high traffic arena, and it’s good for SEO as well. Being owned by Google, you’d expect no less, right?
The key to using Blogger as your own article directory is to not overdo it. You don’t want to draw undue attention to yourself as a link spammer, but you do want to use the tools at your disposal to build good inbound links. Blogger is great as a link building tool, and it could send you some additional traffic as well.
Will SEO And Social Media Become Interlinked?
Rand Fishkin is at it again. Predicting the direction of search for 2012. He does it every year.
Two things stand out in this year’s predictions:
- “SEO without social media will become a relic of the past”
- “Google will make it very hard to do great SEO without using Google+”
These two predictions are intricately linked. If SEO and social media go hand in hand, then that includes Google+. If Google forces search marketers to using Google+, then that will enhance the need for social media overall. I agree with Rand. It’s coming.
Google could see this as a way to control link spam. Which brings up another one of Rand’s predictions: “Google will finally take stronger, Panda-style action against manipulative link spam.”
These three predictions seem to be linked in ways that make sense. If you are using Google+ to improve your website’s ranking prospects, then you aren’t out building questionable links. Link building, as we know it today, could be a thing of the past after 2012.
I think a lot of SEOs would welcome that change. A lot more will hate it.
But it could be a way for Google to finally kill link spam once and for all while improving the search results for users – especially users who are also on Google+. What do you think?
Do You Own Your Content?
In the current landscape of search engine marketing, it isn’t enough to get your content published, crawled, and indexed. You want to own it. You want it working for you. But there is a major obstacle to that happening for many webmasters.
It’s called duplicate content.
Duplicate content is a phrase that has scared a lot of webmasters into unnecessary paranoia. The problem with duplicate content has always been scraping, not two articles by the same author that are somewhat similar.
Look at it this way. You have two articles that overlap. They are both on your website and clearly have you as the author. What’s the worse that can happen? In Google’s world, you could have one of the articles de-indexed. While that could be an inconvenience, it pales in comparison to an article you wrote being de-indexed while the same article with someone else’s byline being catapulted to a No. 1 ranking. That would hurt.
Google’s problem with duplicate content is knowing which version of an article came first. If they get it right, no problem; if they get it wrong, that’s a problem.
When you publish your content on the web, article directories may not be the best place to go to. That’s because you are competing with thousands of articles and if your article appears elsewhere on the web, there’s no guarantee that your article in the article directory will be recognized by the search engines. Send original content to niche publishers that link back to you with a bio. Make sure those article are indexed fairly quickly.
What Online Marketing Methods Are Important For 2012?
If you plan on doing any online marketing in 2012, what are the important methods of marketing that you should focus on? What should you stay away from?
First and foremost, SEO is definitely not dead. You shouldn’t give up on that yet. But it has changed in the last five years.
For instance, if you are out prowling for links and looking for high PR do-follow links, then you are probably wasting your time. But if you are focusing on placing your unique articles on high profile, high traffic websites where they will be seen, then that is a much better way to go about link building in 2012.
Social media is another online marketing tactic that isn’t going away. However, don’t just sign up for a bunch of social media websites and forgetting about them. Stick the large sites with current traction and high traffic. For most businesses, that means Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+. If there are niche-specific sites that you can focus on, join them too.
Whichever social media websites you decide to join, stay active.
Video marketing and mobile marketing are two other online content strategies that are gaining ground and look to be effective in 2012.
Online marketing hasn’t changed much in the last five to ten years, but it has changed. Make note of the changes and keep promoting your content far and wide.
Why You Need A Gravatar
A gravatar can be a very useful tool for online content providers. It does several things for your online identity including:
- Notifying bloggers that you are not a spammer
- Making your name and website more brandable
- Easily identifies you as authentic everywhere you go
- Unifies your blogging, commenting, and social media presence across all channels
Gravatar stands for Globally Recognized Avatar. It’s easy to set up. You just head over to Gravatar.com and upload your photograph or image – the one you want to be associated with a particular e-mail address. It’s important to note that if you own several websites and have different e-mail addresses for managing those websites and often comment on blogs, forums and social media sites under your various names, then you can have more than one gravatar. You can have one for each e-mail address you own because the gravatar is associated with a single e-mail address.
Every time you enter your e-mail address into a comment form, your gravatar will appear beside your name. This makes you recognizable to other commenters while branding you online and shows that you are a legitimate poster, not a spammer.
I highly recommend that you set up your own gravatar – especially if you blog regularly and comment on other blogs regularly.
Google+ Hangout Marketing
Thanks to Marketing Pilgrim for pointing this out. Google is marketing its new social network Google+ on TV. The Muppets have a hangout, which is one of Google+’s best and most popular features, and hold a concert performing the cover “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie.
Awesome!
This makes me wonder whether Google+ Hangouts can be used for marketing purposes. I don’t see why they can’t. In fact, I know they can.
Brands can set up a Google+ page, but to do so they first need to have a Google+ account. That account has to be a personal account.
So let’s say your CEO gets a Google+ account then sets up a Google+ page for the business. As a page, he could start a hangout and invite anyone he wishes. What he invites all of the page’s circles into a hangout and while inside the hangout he entertains a little while providing a bit of an uplifting marketing message?
The hangout could just last for a minute, but during that minute the CEO could field questions from the people in his circles providing for an interactive marketing moment.
Welcome to the new world of marketing and advertising. Social media is getting better all the time.
How Page Compression Affects Page Load Time
Page load time is now an important SEO ranking factor. The faster your site loads the better your chances of ranking higher in the search engines. Google, especially, puts emphasis on page load time. One way to increase your page load time is to compress the pages on your website. And it’s fairly simple and quick to do.
You’ll have to access your .htaccess file. That will require that you go into your server files and pull up the .htaccess file.
Log into your file transfer program and access your web server, then download your .htaccess file to your hard drive. Be sure to keep a backup of this file in case anything goes wrong with the page compression command. Then you can restore the file to its original condition and not miss a beat.
Add these two lines of code to your .htaccess file:
# Gzip – To compress websites
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript text/x-javascript text/php
Next, upload the .htaccess file to your server again. Be sure to put it right back in the same place again. Most likely, it was located in the root folder (you an actually have an .htaccess file for each section of your website, but you want your page compression command to apply to the entire website).
After uploading your .htaccess file with the page compression command, your website should load faster. Test it by going to http://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php and enter your URL in the space. The tester will tell you if you have add page compression to your website or not. If not, go back and try it again.
Why External Links Are Good
Most SEOs will tell you that the way to boost your rankings in the search engines is to build lots and lots of inbound links. Don’t build external links – those that link out – because they drain your authority juice away. Build your inbound links with great anchor text from relevant high authority websites and you’ll be the golden boy of SEO.
That advice really sucks. I’ll tell you why.
Google has long caught onto the practice of spammy links that follow all the rules of the book. They’ve done changed their algorithms at least a couple of dozen times to prevent those links from helping websites that shouldn’t rank. So do all the crafty link building you can following all the usual rules. It won’t work.
What does work is linking out to other sites within your niche. Don’t worry about draining your authority juice. You probably don’t have any yet.
Rather, consider yourself an authority in your niche and act like it. Would an authority link to a resource off site that would help a reader more than anything else you can post on your own? Of course he would. Then do that. Real authority websites link out promiscuously. They link to websites that are helpful to their readers.
That’s not to say you should link everywhere you can. Be selective about your external links. You don’t want to send your readers to warez sites or sites where they’ll pick up a malicious virus.
Set your standards for excellence based on common sense. Link to sites that add value to your niche for your readers. Become a real authority, not some fake authority based on spammy links that get you nowhere.
Should You Tweet On Behalf Of Your Employer?
It was bound to happen sooner or later. A lawsuit over who owns the Twitter account of an employee (technically, a former employee) who used the account in part to tweet on behalf of the employee. Sidebar: There was contract.
In the absence of case law, a case like this is far from open-shut. In fact, it could get dirty. But I suspect that PhoneDog Media saw an opportunity to bully for money.
Ask any lawyer and he’ll tell you that a business should “aggressively” protect its trademark and other business interests. Otherwise, the company could lose them. It’s a standard line, and its one that is often interpreted to encourage business owners to pursue litigation for even the most extraordinary and awkwardly absurd situations.
I’m not saying this situation is “extraordinary and awkwardly absurd,” but if you read the company’s response to The New York Times, it smacks of legal double-talk.
“The costs and resources invested by PhoneDog Media into growing its followers, fans and general brand awareness through social media are substantial and are considered property of PhoneDog Media L.L.C. We intend to aggressively protect our customer lists and confidential information, intellectual property, trademark and brands.”
When employers and employees begin to make handshake agreements regarding the latter’s social media accounts and using them on behalf of company business, it’s an area of law is very murky. It is in both party’s interest to get a contract. It could save a lot of headache in the long run and spell out the particulars that could make a lawsuit unnecessary and avoidable.
Disclaimer: This blog post is not intended to be legal advice. Seek an attorney before making decisions about your social media accounts.
How Do You Use Competitive Intelligence?
When it comes to spying on your competition, what can you do with the information you gather? There are actually a number of ways you can use competitive intelligence. Here are a few:
- Use it to improve your search engine optimization campaigns.
- Keep abreast of your competition’s developments so you can maintain a competitive posture. Remember when Google+ introduced Circles? Facebook replied with its own version of friends management called Lists.
- Find out how your competition is responding to your developments.
- Use the information to poll your customers to see if you can improve your own products and services.
- Compare the intelligence against developing market trends.
- Identify your own areas of relative weakness.
- Discover new ways of looking at old problems.
Competitive intelligence is a never-ending process. What you can learn from studying and spying on your competition could improve your own business practices. Your core products and services might have some weaknesses revealed by what your competition is doing. Do consumers have a more favorable perception of your products or those of your competition?
If you want to remain competitive, keep tabs on your competitors and use the information you gather to make your company and its products the best they can be.
The One Unbendable Rule Of SEO
If you’ve been around the Web for long and have studied much in the way of SEO, then you’ve likely encountered the countless Internet marketers who have hyped and harped on the idea that SEO is nothing more, or less, than building links. But as many of us have seen, links eventually lose value.
In fact, for every SEO benefit you receive from any action, there will always be a loss of benefit somewhere else. Links get too old and become obsolete, content value is diminished because someone else did it better, social triggers raise and lower your reputation by the minute, etc.
About the only thing you can count on with best SEO practices is change. What works today may not work tomorrow. The action you take today may not show any results for a year. Sometimes, the best thing to do is wait.
Search engine optimization is not some magic pill. There is no formula that can catapult you to instant success, or any success. The best SEOs are the ones that experiment, test, and try something new when all the tried-and-true wisdom has failed. And I can’t tell you how many times a business owner has fired his SEO guru because the business owner read a book and became an instant expert.
The one unbendable rule in SEO is Change is Inevitable. This is not a “don’t rock the boat” industry.
How Integrative Marketing Works
Companies who have been spending money on marketing and advertising off line for years are often reticent to join the online marketing party, especially if their off line marketing is continuing to be effective. That’s understandable. But Reciprocal Consulting has been watching the Internet marketing space for several years now and we’re seeing some interesting trends.
First, more and more companies are moving some of their marketing budgets to online marketing tactics and strategies. Those companies that are already using online marketing channels are beginning to spend more on those channels. There is a reason for these trends. Online marketing works.
However, there are quite a few online marketing channels that may or may not work for your business. It’s important to focus on the tactics and strategies that have the greatest potential.
When you plan your Internet marketing strategy, focus first on the least expensive tactics that historically have the greatest return on investment. Obviously, if you don’t have a website, then you’ll need to focus on website design before anything else. But then what?
Your next step should be to improve your website’s search engine optimization. A well optimized website can give your business a boost that lasts for years.
Pay per click marketing is another online marketing channel that delivers results. It might cost more in the short term than other marketing tactics, but you’ll often see more immediate results, which can be very encouraging if you are new to Internet marketing.
The idea is not to make a big bold leap from off line marketing to online marketing, but to gradually shift your marketing dollars from staid old ineffective strategies off line to better, more effective strategies online. By integrating your online marketing efforts with your successful off line marketing efforts, your overall marketing strategy should be stronger and more effective.
Is Social Influence Real?
Here’s an interesting take on an old saw. Your so-called social influence may be a sham. But that doesn’t mean it has no value.
I like the last paragraph of the article cited above:
If the Harvard Study is right and “peer influence is virtually nonexistent,” that doesn’t mean it’s time to throw in the social media towel. All it means is that you may need to adjust your thinking. Instead of pushing to bring new lambs into the fold, sell to the ones you already have corralled.
First, it’s long been a business principle that it’s easier to upsell to current clients than it is to sell to prospects. Nothing new there.
But the study that says that people become friends because they are already interested in the same stuff more than people interest their friends in new things isn’t really new information, is it? I mean, isn’t that how it works in the real world? You become friends with people who have similar interests. You may, once in a while, talk a friend into taking an interest in something new on the basis of your existing relationship. So what?
The so what here is that, though rare, social influence does happen. While it might be savvy marketing to put some money into that influence, there are more cost effective online marketing techniques. And they’re not hard to find.
The Best Online Marketing Is Local
Here’s a great article on local online marketing. I have three comments to make about the content in the article.
- Paid search still packs a powerful punch – I don’t care where you live, paid search has the greatest potential to drive targeted traffic to your website fast. And then you can reap an ROI that is difficult to match anywhere else. I’d say paid search is better than TV and radio – especially for effective local marketing.
- You can’t separate local from mobile – Mobile marketing has arrived in full force and if you think about it you’ve likely seen people use their cell phones to find businesses to shop in as well as to find products to purchase locally. While people may use the Internet to research purchases, they still would rather purchase locally. Mobile marketing makes that so much easier.
- Localization and local awareness - The big trend is for big businesses to customize their marketing for local geographic markets. Modern online technology makes that possible. A huge part of that effort is with local smartphone apps. Location-based apps make local marketing easier and local shopping better.
Online marketing is getting a lot better for small businesses and making the world a better place for consumers.