by Susan Carroll | Oct 8, 2011 | Random
Need to know of what’s hot, but don’t have time to cruise the web. Value journalism? Not just the buzz, but a thoughtfully edited compilation, organized by your business interest? Then check out SmartBrief. For example, here are the top five most-clicked links in SmartBrief on Social Media:
by Susan Carroll | Oct 7, 2011 | Random
Steve Job’s baby was totally awesome. Not to date myself (as much as I enjoy that), but my dad had one of these: a Macintosh 512 K. It may not have been the first Apple personal computer (the Lisa came before it), but it was the first PC to have WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) and a GUI (graphical user interface) if I recall correctly. The programs it ran are still the bones of today’s robust graphics programs, like MacPaint. And not only did it talk, but you could choose different voices.
by Susan Carroll | Oct 2, 2011 | Random
10 Facebook Timeline Designs That Will Blow You Away [PICS]
Facebook app called Timeline lets you “easily” rearrange your profile page. I couldn’t find any information when I searched on Facebook itself.
But for the FB geeks and designers out there, this looks like it could be a lot of fun.
by Susan Carroll | Sep 30, 2011 | Random
Sometimes it’s a good idea to review the basics — whether it’s SEO or watercolor painting. I remember when I was finishing up my art school courses at School of Visual Arts, and decided to take a drawing class at my local night school. I learned as much there as I had in college. Below, you’ll see what I’ve condensed from SEO authority, Seomoz. And whether you’re an SEO pro or new to the whole idea of search engine optimization, I hope you’ll either learn from or get refreshed by these handy guidelines.
Indexing
HTML is good. Flash is bad.
By using tools like Google’s
cache, SEO-browser.com, the MozBar or Yellowpipe you can see what elements of
your content are visible and indexable to the engines.
According to Seomoz, they
have “a nifty tool called ‘Term Extractor’ that will display words and
phrases ordered by frequency.”
Keyword Density and Page
Optimization
Contrary to popular belief,
keyword usage and targeting are only a small part of the search engines’
ranking algorithms according to SEOMOZ.
However, they recommend that you:
·
Place your keyword close
to the beginning of text.
·
Use the keyword at least
once in the
o
Title tag
o
H1 header tag of the
page
o
alt attribute of an
image
o
meta description tag
o
URL
·
In the body copy, use it
at least 3X, bold it at least once.
Title Tags
Experts agree that the title
tag is the most important place to use keywords to achieve high rankings
(afterall, it is the summary of the site that comes up in search).
Keep your most important copy to 70 characters or less, as
that is all that shows on the page.
Meta Tags
The meta description tag serves the function of advertising
copy, drawing readers to your site from the results and thus, is an extremely
important part of search marketing. Crafting a readable, compelling description
using important keywords (notice how Google “bolds” the searched
keywords in the description) can draw a much higher click-through rate of
searchers to your page.
Redundancy confuses search engines
Give each page unique copy. If that’s not possible, say you
have text and a PDF download of that text on the same page, you can use a “301” redirect
in the PDF’s URL. Alternatively, you can do a “Canonical URL tag” in
the HTML description of the page. You’ll have to look up what canonical means for yourself 🙂
by Susan Carroll | Sep 28, 2011 | Random
You can write for people and search engines, too.
Recently I wanted to test my instincts and show the client how well I was writing copy for search-friendliness.
Writers have a natural tendency to make up terms like the one I just used. But when writing online, you need to think quite literally: keeping the intelligence level of your search engine robots…not not to mention the 6th-grade level literacy of your readers… in mind. That doesn’t mean you have to publish the same copy over and over again (in fact, duplicate content on different pages will confuse the search engines) or dumb everything down. But you do need to think what is the person looking for and what would they type into the search engine. In this case, I was appealing to high-level managers to attend a marketing course.
Since this course costs more for 4 days than I make in the month, I figured I’d appeal to a 10th grade reading level. Then I tried to instill some emotion into the writing, as I usally do. What I tested (using google search) and found, was that a colloquial terms outranked the business terminology. See below (in bold) how the marketing term “customer-centric” performed compared to “give the customer what they want”, outranking it by about 500 to 1.
Here’s how some of the terms used stacked up.
- customer-centric marketing 1,360,000
- customer engagement
marketing 5,530 M
- customer engagement
7,610,000 results
- customer centered marketing
2,130,000
- customer experience
82,400,000 results
- marketing innovation 102,000
M
- what the customer wants
196,000,000 results
- giving the customer what
they want 106,000,000
- give
the customer what they want
521,000,000 results
