June 10, 2013 in SEO/SEM
Google has said Penguin 2.0 will target websites with low-quality backlink profiles. In preparation for Penguin 2.0, Brafton, North America’s largest news and content marketing agency, put together a guide to help you fend off potential PageRank downgrades. After all, no one wants to be in a fight with a Penguin.
May 20, 2013 in SEO/SEM
If you were not aware, here are some of the best kept search secrets that make Google a highly useful to power users and SEO specialists.
First the basics
More advanced tricks
Additional features include anything from currency and math to tracking packages and using your mobile phones camera to learn about your surroundings.
April 25, 2013 in Content Producer, SEO/SEM, Social Media
April 15, 2013 in Social Media
Social media could be very overwhelming to a journalist, but not only are social networks a great way to publicize articles, they can be an integral aspect in getting “the big scoop” or developing a successful package.
Get to know the marketplace
By observing on social media, reporters can see what’s trending now. While Google Trends can be a useful tool, Twitter is also a great tool for trends, and LinkedIn’s Company Pages for getting insights into particular companies, including recent hires.
Discover story ideas
LinkedIn groups are another way to find out what people are talking about in an industry. Many publications and industry verticals have their own dedicated group on the network. A reporter can follow a discussion and related comments, and a story might take off from there.
Find sources
LinkedIn’s advanced search a “phenomenal tool” for B2B journalists. Its search tool is robust; journalists can search by current or past title, company, geographic location and more.
Crowdsource
Social networks allow reporters to get real-time reactions from readers during a breaking story.
Monitor the competition
Reporters should follow other journalists and publications that cover the same beat, as this will give a journalist insight into new potential sources, events and reader demographics.
Share unpublished content
Some content won’t make it to print or on the web, but it doesn’t have to go to waste. Great photos? Tweet or Instagram those!
Boost SEO
Google+ Authorship tool can improve how content is found through search.
Covering events
Live-covering an event allows readers who missed out on the show to stay informed. It also builds a reporter’s reputation as a trusted brand. Using show hashtags, publicists can directly contact a reporter for exclusive information.
Connect with readers
Social media breaks down the wall between reporter and reader. Google+’s Hangout feature can increase transparency even more. With Hangout, up to 10 people can video chat live.
Build credibility
Constantly posting relevant information can improve a reporter’s standing in the industry. Reporters should list their current publication and covered beats in their Twitter bio and allow readers to subscribe to their public Facebook postings.
Support the community
Trade publishers are an important part of an industry, and it is their duty to keep conversations active. Reporters must be a good community member – that means re-tweeting other people, asking questions, responding to them.
As a rule, one-third of content posted on social media should be a reporter’s stories, one-third should be conversing with followers and one-third should be interesting, relative information from other sources.
April 8, 2013 in Social Media
Focus on the 1-3 metrics that drive the bottom line: In the boardroom, the brass want to see how social media contributed to the health of the business, provides new sources of prospect traffic, collects valid leads and drives money. Consider measuring key performance indicators such as subscriber growth, share of conversation, inbound prospect traffic and offer conversions.
Measure what matters and analyze changes: Measuring share of voice, for example, which shows where you stack up against competitors, can provide value, but Payne stressed that it’s important to delve into your numbers. Why has your share of voice—or your competitors—increased? Do that extra bit of homework to actually understand it.
Measure and plan social activities within the media mix (not in a silo): Campaign success can be measured and reported by closely analyzing both quantitative and qualitative results on a monthly basis, ranging from traditional media and blog impressions to tweets and group participation.
Be disciplined and consistent reporting progress against goals: When the goal was to double Salesforce.com’s subscribers year over year, the goal was broken down to a less-daunting and consistently measurable goal of increasing subscribers 6% mother over month. Give really direct guidance to teams to tell them what direct success is.
Fix any leaky plumbing to measure the pipeline from social offers: Salesforce uses campaign IDs—anything that gets pushed out via social can be tracks back to pipeline using campaign IDs via bit.ly.
Track each content offer with a unique ID: Salesforce uses a four-part measurement strategy:
Create your own social ROI executive dashboard: Today’s social scorecard has fans and followers, social mentions, prospect traffic and valid leads.
Don’t forget the human side of analytics: The tools are only as effective as the person using the tools.
April 1, 2013 in Marketing
People visit websites for information, entertainment or engagement with other people, not to click on ads that send them somewhere else. This is the very reason that Display advertising on networks like Facebook or even niche sites experience exceptionally low click through rates. But do you need clicks to have a display ad be effective?
I’m going to suggest that when it comes to display advertising, one needed attempt to optimize their campaign for clicks, the way you would do with search or text based ads, but rather optimize for conversions.
Why?
Many online advertisers gained experience in the years of the world wide web before Google and Smart Phones existed. The metrics we used in the past are what we’re attempting to use today, unfortunately the landscape has changed and requires marketers to change as well.
Display ads should be looked at as another touch-point of your brand to stimulate awareness and interest rather than a conversion for an instant sale. While someone who clicks on an online ad to purchase a product often times was searching for exactly that specific item, most users who are viewing display advertisements on Facebook or some other site, are not thinking about shopping. But that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t think about your product later and choose to buy it.
Test this theory out for yourself with these two methods.
March 19, 2013 in Marketing
February 21, 2013 in SEO/SEM
As businesses look to increase sales, they immediately think of the need to increase web traffic, which usually results in them hiring an SEO copywriter or SEO service provider. For smaller companies they may task the SEO functions to a web savvy director or producer. Their goal and assumptions are always the same, increased SEO increases traffic which increases sales – but that’s not necessarily true.
Most companies, and people in c-level positions, don’t actually understand what SEO is or what it accomplishes. In reality many companies will hire an SEO “person” with misconceptions on what they will do, only to find themselves unhappy with their ROI.
The Sales Challenge
Increased web traffic does not guarantee more sales. If you’re a publisher who sells advertising based on pageviews, you may see an increase in sales, however the perception your online assets have will carry more weight than the actual number of pageviews you can generate. Likewise, if you’re a retailer or produce a product, an increase of web traffic does not guarantee that you will increase your sales. While you may cast a bigger net, you still need to rely on a product that people are willing to buy. Bottom line is you still need to “sell” your product or website, increased traffic won’t do it alone for you.
SEO Isn’t Instant
Most search engines will not crawl your site daily unless it’s a news outlet that is updating constantly throughout each day. Reworking your content to target key terms and having new pages indexed takes anywhere between a couple weeks to a couple months worth of time. Avoid any SEO content writers that promise this. Also keep in mind that Google changes their algorithms every so often and what worked last year may not work this year. Also avoid anyone who guarantees your search rankings, that’s not actually possible, as just because you’re number one for a day doesn’t mean you’ll stay top dog forever without constant content production.
SEO is Not Marketing Speak
SEO writers are trained and learned to target their use of wording so that search engine robots can assimilate and organize their content in a relevant way to users. SEO writers are not marketers and will not write flowery description heavy text to appeal to your marketing team. They will however, write content that utilizes your targeted keywords and phrasings to better help search engines understand what your page content is about (or what you want it to be about).
There is No Magic Bullet
Lastly it’s important to note that there is no magic in SEO. Both Google and Bing have put out extensive guidelines on how their engines like to view content. For the most part the basic foundation of matching up your domain to the url path to the title tag to the headings and content on a page – making sure they all coincide with each other will ensure your page does well with those terms. When you start to have a page named dogs that talks about fish and lists links to bird products, it doesn’t make sense to a crawler, and it probably won’t to your web visitors either, which is why it wouldn’t rank well in search engines.
May 30, 2012 in Design
Priority – Guide the user
Good web design isn’t simply about making things look pretty. It’s about the user experience and how quickly they can navigate to their desired location; your goal. Keep your page short, but not too short.
Things to consider: Position, Color, Contrast, Size and Design Elements.
Similar to print, spacing makes things clearer, but it’s important to provide a balance when it comes to the web. What may work well in print, does not often work well for the web.
Things to consider: Line Spacing, Padding, White Text.
Good navigation is critical. Where can I go and where am I now? These are the two questions you should ask yourself as you review your site. Navigation should be easy to use, if it requires too many clicks or drop downs or uses a color scheme that makes it hard to read, users can get lost easily.
Many great print designs cannot be made into functional web designs simply because not everyone viewing a website has the same canvas (screen) size. Keep images small, if they need to be viewed larger create a link to a larger image, be sure to use Alt text for descriptions as well.
Things to consider: Can it actually be done? What happens when the screen resizes? Can it be simplified?
As a general rule, sans-serif fonts display better on screen than sans. You also have to account for the fact that not everyone is using the same computer operating system or web browser. This is why so many website rely on calling several fonts in their style sheets, such “font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif;”
Things to consider: Font choices, Font sizes, Spacing, Line Length, Color, Paragraphing.
Adhere to web standards, w3c.org is a good place to start learning about this. Think about what your users will actually do. What do you want your users to see when they come to your site and can they get there within one to three clicks?
Most websites are now designed with a grid system in mind so that content sits within specific buckets on a page. This can allow you to make use of open space on the page and keep your content readability at its best.
Headings, fonts, colors, design elements should all be consistent. If you’re using more than two different font types on a page, you’re probably doing something wrong. Use appropriate colors, you may even want to consider learning about color symbolism if you’re working on an international site.
To learn more about good web practices visit the World Wide Web Consortium w3c.org to learn about current web standards and accessibility.
March 12, 2012 in Content Producer, Design, Marketing, Public Relations, SEO/SEM, Social Media
The following is a brief outline of the various best practices tactics used for Digital Marketing Campaigns.
First things first, you have to have a roadmap to know where you’re going. Create some goals and a plan on how to achieve them.
A Digital Marketing Plan should consist of:
Analytics are not just important for tracking your progress, but essential to knowing how people view and find your website. Without this information you may not know what is hurting or helping your brand.
Suggested tools:
Suggested Practices:
Improving your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) will increase the amount of organic traffic that comes to your site. Organic being that when someone is searching for a solution that you offer, your page should be one of the first to come up.
Suggested Tools
Suggested Practices:
Social Media is the new “Word of Mouth”, but people online don’t like ads, so make sure your interactions with your audience are human and talk to their interests instead of just directly trying to sell them your products.
Suggested Tools
Suggested Practices
If your website is new or hasn’t been SEO’d, a well-funded PPC campaign can direct a significant increase in web traffic to you.
Suggested Tools
Suggested Practices
Content is king on the internet, the more content you have about yourself or company online the better and more likely people will know and trust you.
Suggested Tools
Suggested Practices
Email is the easiest way to keep in touch with your customers and inform them of new products or solutions for their needs as well as any special promotions you’re offering. However, be cautious you don’t send too much email, or emails that aren’t relevant to your customers as this could drive them to unsubscribe from you.
Suggested Practices
Every company has a lead generation practice that works best for them based on their market, but there are a few key things to think about to improve the amount of leads you gain.
Suggested Practices
After you’ve increased awareness to your site through digital marketing you’ll now want to gather your data and begin planning on how to optimize your initiatives.
Suggested Practices
Take a look at your competition or businesses that are similar to yours and see what they are doing that works well. While you never want to copy others, you can get ideas that will benefit you with your competition’s successes or failures.
Things to consider:
Thinking of having a website makeover? Make sure you do your due diligence and come up with a project scope and timeline and stick to the plan. Also, now is a good time to really evaluate your website’s content and messaging focus.
A project scope should include:
September 27, 2011 in Social Media
Wouldn’t it be great to hear, the FDA issues a social media policy. Though the FDA loves to plan to discuss, to plan to create, to plan to someday maybe act on planning a social media policy and guideline for use by those whose jobs and businesses rely on the FDA’s approval and clearance, the FDA has remained, like much of our government, indecisive.
Currently, the FDA’s site likes to direct users elsewhere. For example, let’s say you were a Medical Device company. You’re redirected to the HHS (Health & Human Services) website. While the HHS has taken the time to create a Social Media Policy, it isn’t actually a Social Media Policy, but instead a link to various other government sites and their social Media Policies.
But wait, what about the Web Content Managers guidelines on the USA.gov website? Great you should mention that as this page directs visitors to find additional information to individual services and references the website Apps.Gov; a government site that lists internet (cloud, social media, etc.) and localized based software applications approved for use by government agencies.
Of course for the many in government who just don’t have a clue about technology, generally anyone who has been in any elected office for more than two years and anyone in office over the age of 28, there is the government ran HowTo.Gov, a hilarious website outlining the common sense practicalities any high school senior has become aware of since the invention of MySpace and Sex’ting.
Of course not all government agencies are inept. After doing some digging I came across this government referenced, but not government ran site offering direct links to many Government Agencies Social Media Policies. It’s great to see that our Navy and other military branches have taken the time to come up with some social media policies and guidelines while fighting several wars, yet the people on Capitol Hill who work mostly at the golf course and behind a desk, can’t seem to find the time.
Shame on you FDA.
July 27, 2011 in Content Producer, Off The Cuff
/rant on
Somewhere out in marketing land someone has been trying to sell people on the idea that installing a CMS, such as WordPress or Drupal, will somehow make all your Webmaster or Web Designer needs go away. If you’ve believed this, I’m sorry to tell you, but unless your site is just text, you’re probably wrong.
While you can hire a Web Developer or Agency to build out a custom theme for your CMS, you’ll still need someone to maintain the site. Even if that person is only plugging in content they’ll need to touch HTML and CSS at some point. If you don’t believe me, try building a complex table with any WYSIWYG editor in Drupal the next time you really want to post that excel data online and you’ll either settle for a simple table or you’ll kick the project over to your web person so they can style it for you, or at the very least add in the proper Class=”blah” tags where needed.
And that’s just for general page information. If you, like most groups, ever want something built out that that requires anything from different links on the side bars to a block or widget of additional information, you’ll probably find that you need someone who actually knows how to work with modules like Views or Panels for Drupal or Widgets and Page Templates if you’re using WordPress.
Unfortunately many business managers out there hear the words Content Management System and they think that their receptionist or office manager will just be able to simply copy and paste the Word documents he sends over into the companies CMS backed website and magically it will look just the way he wants. Sorry, unless it’s text only, that won’t happen. This is why you’ll more than likely need to hire a Content Producer at the very least.
Oh, and we haven’t even gotten to the actual Web Operations part of a site, which is probably the only portion of your website you could most likely outsource to a hosting company.
/rant off
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