The difference between SMM and SMO - who knew!
Posted on February 26, 2008
Filed Under Social Media Marketing | Leave a Comment
Lately, there is alot of new terms turning up and two of the most common are social media marketing and social media optimization.
What do they have in common? Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Social Media Optimization (SMO) are two terms that really trying to define marketing through social media websites.
Ok what’s the difference?
Well they are two different marketing tactics. SMM is when a marketer actively creates content or buzz through using social media sites. For example if someone writes an article for the distinct purpose of receiving traffic through one of these sites, whether it be Digg or Stumble Upon.
Now here is where the difference starts.SMO is the act optimizing a website to allow user/others to share the content via social media sites. One thing that a webmaster5 might do to optimize one’s sites is add the”Digg This” button to the bottom of articles etc..
I hope this clarifies the confusion between the two. If you disagree please comment.
Off to Northern Voice 2008
Posted on February 22, 2008
Filed Under Professional Development | Leave a Comment
Northern Voice 2008 is a non profit conference held here in Vancouver, BC tomorrow and Saturday. First day is the unconference with Moosecamp ( not quite sure what that is) but I am going to find out and Internet 101.
On Saturday they are hosting a more formal conference for us regular people who like structure.
What’s the great thing about Northern Voice? Well for one they are holding it on a weekend for those of you who have a day job and can’t get away from work. Two they have Internet 101 for those people who are new to blogging, SEO and podcasting.
Want to learn more about the conference? Look for my posts on Xemion.com tomorrow
Your logo must … 5 things
Posted on February 22, 2008
Filed Under Design | Leave a Comment
Before I start going on about how simple logos should be I have to mention that logo design is the most simple yet the most difficult part of design. Ok that and icon design!
We all have heard that logos are used to identify your business. They are not used to sell anything. Coupled along with branding the right logo can make your users remember your product/service.
Here is my quick list of the five things you need to remember when designing your logo or having some else design it.
1. Your logo must be simple
That’s right I said SIMPLE. If your logo has too many elements, it looks like chicken scratch. It needs to quickly show your business name and what you offering in a small simple image. Sounds easy right? WRONG. Logos are difficult and they take time and planning before even beginning to design them.
2. Your logo must be easily recognizable
If people are squinking to see if your logo is a box or a book, it’s not doing it’s job. If your selling books, you must use an image that represents book or reading. Make sure your business name is easily readable as well. It makes it easier for people to put two and two together.
3. Design the logo for use on everything
Plan ahead. Imagine your logo on your website, on mouse pads, letterhead, brochures, large signs, etc.. Also make sure it’s easy to make a logo in black and white. You never know when you are going to be using it or where you will be using it. The worse thing you want to do is create a logo and then find out it doesn’t work on a brochure because it’s too complicated. It’s best to take the time and spend the money initally and design it right. I recently had a client that wanted their logo redesigned.
The original was very tiny, unscalable and very very confusing. It was definitely one of the worse I have seen. The downfall on having it redesigned is that people might not recognize it after it has been re-designed. This client, they had their original logo for 10 years. After 10 years it is very hard to change their logo too much.
4. Your logo must fully represent your company
If you are a commercial bank, don’t use little cartoon characters for your logo. You get where I am going with this? Your logo should have the same feel that your company has. If you company is a full loving, laid back, partying place - you can do something fun. If your company is a big import/export company then you need something will a little more professionalism in it. I think you know what I mean.
5. Your logo must keep colors in mind
The colors you choose with your logo will also presumably be your business colors. You must keep in mind the feeling that each color communicates to customers. As with corporate logos most are red, blue or grey and very corporate colors. With those colors it tells us something about the company.
Keep this in mind when choosing logo colors.
Good luck on your logo design and if you have any questions or comments - please feel free to leave them.
Getting your definitions into Google.
Posted on February 17, 2008
Filed Under General Marketing, Link Building, SEO | Leave a Comment
I just finished reading a post by Esteban Panzera over at SEOmoz.org about how to get your definitions in Google. I thought this was a very good topic and is something I use at Be Seen Web Design as a way to set our site up as an authority.
First I created a glossary of terms, that are used in SEO, web design, internet and social media. Over time, I have continued to add to the glossary and we have been getting traffic from the terms. In my eyes a good idea if you site can work with having a glossary.
How do I know I am getting traffic?
It’s easy I see many of my keywords are define:ftp or define:absolute link, in Google Analytics. On average per month, I get about 400 visits and many more page views from this. The question you should be asking yourself though is are these people who are visiting actually converting to visitors. Honestly, only one of my definitions is actually converting to visitors and with that 33 % are converting. I can also tell you that the people who are coming into these pages are viewing 2 or 3 pages on my site and my bounce rate is actually lower on these pages.
Is it worth it?
From my perceptive - yes - simply because I am creating unique content, something people can link to, and set myself up as an authority. If my only goal was to convert visitors, it might not be worth it.
How can this help you the small business owner?
By creating a glossary, you can set your site up as an authority in both visitors eyes and SE’s eyes and you can gain some traffic.
So it’s a good idea, how the heck do I do it?
Well Esteban Panzera over at SEOmoz.org gives us 11 tips. I have made my own comments as well in italics.
- First, put the word to define, followed by the definition. I don’t actually do this and don’t have any facts to prove or disprove if this works.
- Make the definition unique. This is a very important factor, if you definition is the same as everyone else’s it won’t appear. So don’t bother copying the definition from someone else.
- < p >, < tr >, < li >, and < br > are treated as separators between definitions.
- Put the keyword to define and the definition inside the same paragraph. These have to be the only words in that paragraph, or use < dl >, < dt > and < dd > to specify lists of definitions; these are HTML tags. I use a <p> tag for both the keyword and the definition and I rank well.
- Pagerank of the document where you list the definition will make your definition rank higher than others. This is most very likely true as Google does, use Page rank as a ranking factor.
- Differentiate the keyword to define by using < b >, < strong >, < em >, < code >, or < span >. I use this tactic as well and seems to work.
- Separate the keyword to define from the definition with a : or -. This is not necessary to rank well - I am going to do a little experiment and will let you know if this helps.
- Use the words glossary, definitions, dictionary, what is, and canonical forms of those as Title tag, heading tags, and on the URL.
- Remember to put more than 5 definitions per page; if not, they will be discarded. I am not sure this is true but a page with only 5 definitions would not have much content therefore probably wouldn’t rank well anyhow.
- Don’t start a definition with the word “see” or it will get discarded.
- Don’t capitalize the first letter of the definition. I use this every time as my definitions are full sentences and don’t see any ill effects if you don’t use this.
Creating and using Google Sitemaps
Posted on February 14, 2008
Filed Under SEO | Leave a Comment
This week I have a goal. And goal is to make sure Google, MSN and Yahoo could index all the pages on a larger client’s site.
Let’s first talk about the benefits and drawback of using sitemaps and webmaster tools. Submitting a sitemap to Google has it’s advantages . I believe there are two opportunities in which submitting your sitemap to Google.
1. When you have a very large website and want to make sure all your pages are included. Hint: You actually have to go thru the sitemap and diligently check to make sure all the pages are included. Trust me a pretty huge task for a site with 6,000 pages.
2. When you have a new website and want to make sure you pages are included in the index ASAP or at least know that Google knows they are there.
More details on why medium and small sites should not use Google sitemaps once they are included in index with an article by Randfish of SEOmoz.org
Let’s get to what I did today and how you can do that for your website
My goal was huge simply because the client has 6,000 pages on it’s site and all the free XML sitemap creators only index about 500 pages. And the ones that say they do, don’t always.
So, I started with Google which requires and XML sitemap. I visited XML sitemaps which says they are able to do 500 sitemaps but after just a few I found it stopped and did not continue to index.
Then I moved over to Sitemap Pal which was by far quicker that at last but it only returned 60 results.
And lastly I visited SiteMap Doc and it indexed all 500 of the pages reporting back with some erros, but it allowed me to manually go thru the urls and fix the mistakes. So far this is the best XML sitemap builder I have seen.
After copying the text and pasting it into a word document, save it as a .xml document and upload it to your server.
Then log into Google Webmaster Tools create a website account and add the url of your sitemap. Then you are done.
We will be exploring adding your sitemap to Yahoo’s Site Explorer shortly.
Link Building in 2008 continued…
Posted on February 12, 2008
Filed Under Link Building | Leave a Comment
In 2008, I don’t think people will be as successful with link exchanges anymore and article marketing might some what still work but, not as well as it has in the past.In 2008, I think it’s all going to be able getting mentioned or used as a resource and getting links into your website that way. For example. John blogs about Mike’s article and of course creates a link back to the original source. Once Mike sees that link, he checks out Mike’s site and see he has a an excellent glossary on his site and links to it.
I believe people feel better about giving links out because the websites out there now, are of much better quality. And thinking about it, if people aren’t buying links, aren’t using black hat strategies to get better SERP results and people are linking to each other freely, don’t you think the web would be a better more natural place?
Ok maybe that’s a little far fetched… but I think the power is in getting people to link to you freely. And I guess we will find out soon enough.
Google Website Optimizer
Posted on February 8, 2008
Filed Under General Marketing | Leave a Comment
Google Website Optimizer is a web-based testing tool which helps website owners increase visitor conversion rates. Basically it allows website owners the ability to serve up different pages to the different visitors. It also tracks who saw what page and if they converted.
The great thing about it? It’s free and you can increase your ROI without spending a penny.
I thought as a small business owner, you would be very interested in it. To read more about it, visit my blog post
Google’s Proven Truths about Online Advertising over at Xemion.com. And you should also check out the flash overview.
This is an exciting tool for website owners. Check out all the links and then we will revisit it alittle more in depth.
Linking Building in 2007 - 2008
Posted on February 7, 2008
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In the past, I have been chatting about social media and how to market your website.
Well today, I am going to talk about link building and what we can do in 2008 to help increase our inbound links. First if you want to dig in deep, you should visit an article written by Chris Sherman at Search Engine Watch titled: 131 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies( Note this is a fairly old post - so should only be looked at as old techiques)
If you haven’t noticed there hasn’t be alot about discussion about new link building techniques. Now I read a post a few days ago, unfortunately I can’t remember where that was, but it was a good post. Saying that either people aren’t talking about link building because no one has any new ideas or the people who know are keeping their mouths shut.
Chances are their are some new techniques, although I doubt everyone is able to keep quiet about it.
My opinion ( yes I have an opinion just like everyone else ) is that new linking strategies are getting harder and harder to come up with. For awhile everyone was into PPC. I am not too familiar with PPC simply because I don’t think we should have to pay for links or advertising on the net.
Maybe that’s because I am a freelancer/small business owner. You may notice that most of my techniques are free.
First before we get into what we can in 2008 to increase link building let’s go back and talk about some of the older techniques that were used.
Link exchanges
Link exchange is still a link building technique but as time goes on I believe this is getting harder. Just this week I received 3 requests for link exchanges for my directory - GVRD Horse Directory. Now the GVRD is a niche directory which focus’ on equine relates services in the Lower Mainland of BC. So I choose not to exchange links with sites that won’t benefit my user. So any website outside of my focus area is not included.
There are some benefits to link exchanges still although they are not as popular as before. They should however include a small percentage of your overall link strategy. Why you ask? Because with no link exchanges your linking strategy would seem unnatural.
Article Marketing
A year or two ago, this was the big thing. Write lots - get lots of links. I have personally seen a decline in the actual traffic received from this method, although I do not believe it should be excluded from your marketing strategy. Article marketing doesn’t only get links in, it can be used to gain authority on your subject, get readers to your blog and exposure of your business.
Comments on blogs with website urls
It used to be very popular to post comments on people blogs, and leave a link to your website. This still works on some blogs but for example with some blogs, they automatically add a no-follow tag to your link. . Also, nowadays, bloggers are requiring log - in to submit comments which is meant to keep out spammers. I am not sure if it keeps out the spammers but it keeps me out even for legitimate comments.
I will continue this post tomorrow…
Top 13 or 14 Social Media Sites - My secret list
Posted on February 4, 2008
Filed Under Link Building, Social Media Marketing | Leave a Comment
I have a large list of social media and link building sites. I rarely share all of my secrets. You have to have a few right?
A couple of weeks ago, I gave you a small list of social media sites to try out. I am hoping you did and that you had some positive results. Now the key is to spend the next week or so on the following sites - digging, floating or whatever only interesting websites. That are not associated with you.
This is so that it doesn’t look like you are only interested in promoting your own website. Spend one hour each evening working on the following sites:
http://www.digg.com
http://www.reddit.com
http://www.stumbleupon.com/
http://www.technorati.com
http://www.propeller.com/
http://www.tweako.com/
http://www.newsvine.com
http://www.smallbusinessbrief.com
http://www.digg.com
http://www.designfloat.com
http://www.sphinn.com
http://www.mixx.com
http://www.hugg.com
http://www.slashdot.com
Some may argue that Digg no longer has the authority it used to because of the recent changes to their algorithum but, I ahve yet to see any negative effects therefore I have still included it
Moving the blog….
Posted on February 1, 2008
Filed Under Random Thoughts | Leave a Comment
You may have noticed that I have moved the blog over to it’s new domain. The reason for this?
I have gone back and forth over the actual topic of my blog and I am trying to figure out exactly what I am going to mostly blog about unfortunately because my experience and position in both my company and current employer I am more of jack of all trades. I tend to know more about numerous technologies and numerous things then in depth knowledge of one thing. So for me it’s difficult to niche my services. Let’s just say my blog is about website promotion…. it’s a pretty vague term - right?