Today my wife received a certified letter from Casey Movers asking her to remove a negative Yelp review or they would sue for libel in District Court in Massachusetts.
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Your Missed Opportunity on Meetup.com
I organize a fairly popular Meetup.com group about Search Engine Optimization in Raleigh. In the last few years I’ve received hundreds of emails letting me know that someone new has joined. In about 95% of the cases people join the group with little or no additional information added to their Meetup.com profile.
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The Weird LinkedIn Request Prejudice
I hear a very common refrain from LinkedIn users. “I refuse to connect with people who send me the default LinkedIn connection request!”
I never understood that. I’ve listened to their logic, “If they can’t bother to spend two minutes customizing it, then I can’t be bothered to connect.”
[Read more…]
How I Made A Prize Winning Twitter Header
Today I won a fun contest based ostensibly on a cool Twitter header.
Marty Smith dreamed up the contest during a visit from his genius a couple of weeks ago combining the best aspects of vanity baiting, gamification and ego.
[Read more…]
My Personal Internet Conference
While I was out picking up some yard supplies this morning I entered into a Twitter conversation with my friend who asked if I could recommend anyone to help moderate some of the panels at this year’s Internet Summit.
I need a couple of moderators for panels – do you have anyone you can recommend as being Entertaining, Intelligent, Engaging…?
As I started going through the Rolodex in my head it dawned on me that what I was really doing was giving her a list of people I would want to see moderating a panel. People I feel are entertaining, intelligent and engaging. Then it dawned on me that I don’t enough people how much I enjoy their contributions to the whole online/social/interactive scene here in the Triangle.
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Leaving Comment Spam Can Hurt Your Site
You’ve heard that letting your site’s comments fill up with spam is a bad thing right? Google advises against that and comes right out and says it can impact your site’s trustability.
But what about when you leave comment spam?
I can’t speak for all of the search engines, but I can say with a very high degree of certainty that Google looks at spam filtering feeds like Akismet or LinkSleeve to see who is acting in spammy ways.
[Read more…]
The Difference Between Men & Women
Last week I heard Wil Reynolds mention in passing about the instant results when you type “how do I get my husband to…” versus “how do I get my wife to…” in Google.
The results show the giant gulf between men and women and why the two will never understand each other.
I’m not sure what this indicates beyond the obvious, but if you want to kill a few minutes, try out some searches like this where you see what Google instant shows you for the most searched phrases. Another fun one is, “is it illegal to…”
Now, go tell your spouse something nice.
How To Avoid Bad SEO Companies
It’s not always easy to be an SEO. It’s an industry like lawyers and plastic surgeons. There are great ones, but there are so many bad ones that the entire industry has a bad name.
Today I was trying to answer a couple of questions in Google’s Webmaster Central when I saw a thread entitled “Can someone tell me how to qualify to be a Google SEO Qualified company?” I love looking into crazy threads like this because you never know where it’s going to lead you. This on was a guy asking a question because he saw a site that had what he assumed was a valid Google badge for SEO certification.
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Cary Face Painting Experiment
My friend Dina runs a face painting business out of her home in Cary. Surprisingly there is more competition than expected in that niche. She told me this afternoon that she was talking with a young woman who gave her the following SEO advice:
Switch your site over to WordPress because Google likes WordPress and build some links.
The young woman also added, “Just tell me what your budget is and I’ll tell you what we can do for you.”
When she told me that it made me think of a conversation I had this afternoon with a business owner who allowed an SEO to “build some links” for him until he received the dreaded “unnatural links” notice from Google. His organic search traffic fell by 90%.
[Read more…]
We’re from Virante and we’re here to help
When Google rolled out it’s Penguin update to try to discourage sites from building links in an unnatural and spammy way Virante cheered. Virante’s CTO, Russ Jones, has long been a thorn in Matt Cutt’s side asking why spammy sites outrank real sites, usually with a dozen examples to go with his question.
With Penguin though, something changed. Google was not attempting to improve search results, they were only trying to clean up web spam. As websites started dropping in the search results they had to come to the realization that those links they built in 2009 in that directory we no longer just lame, they had become a problem.
[Read more…]
Why YOU shouldn’t be building links
I was reading a fantastic article this morning at SEOmoz by Stephanie Chang about creative link building ideas for ecommerce websites. Stephanie lays out a game plan that includes:
- Creative Category Pages
- Using Products as Linkbait
- Leveraging Sales/Deals Pages
- Personalized Product Giveaways
- Link-worthy Contests
- High-Quality Photos
- Widening Your Audience
- Using Personal Stories
- Taking a Risk and Creating Amazing Content
- Audio Content Marketing
- Utilizing Pinterest
- Taking a Risk and Creating Amazing Content
Are You Tired Yet?
I need your help and advice.
For the past month or so I’ve been talking with a friend of mine that is stuck between a rock and a hard place. She’s super talented, accomplished, respected and sought after. She is a crazy combination of perfectionist, a little bit OCD and a liberal dash of just plain awesome.
She likes where she works mostly because she’s comfortable there and she likes the friends she’s made. She doesn’t see a long and glorious road ahead of her, but it’s paying the bills for now. She is valued there and is known as one of the most valuable players. She no longer wakes up each morning looking forward to work, in fact, the dread of Monday morning has now crept into Sunday.
My friend is not perfect. Although she is about as close as I have seen in her field.
You probably know someone similar. Someone who is a swan in the duck pond. Someone who can do something fantastic if they only took the first step. If they only trusted themselves the way everyone else already trusts them.
I’ve advised her that it’s time to move on. But she’s not so sure.
If you haven’t watched An Invocation for Beginnings, I urge you to. It’s 3 minutes that will probably make you feel something deep inside you twisting a little.
Change is difficult.
My seo/geek/blogger crush Lisa Barone threw me for a loop when she announced that she was stepping down from her founding role at Outspoken Media. It was shocking for two reasons; 1. I think of OSM as Lisa and 2. She has no plan (at least publicly known) for her next step. As Dan Rather would say… courage.
How do you know when it’s time to move on? For me it was when I read The Dip
The old saying is wrong—winners do quit, and quitters do win.
Every new project (or job, or hobby, or company) starts out exciting and fun. Then it gets harder and less fun, until it hits a low point—really hard, and not much fun at all.
And then you find yourself asking if the goal is even worth the hassle. Maybe you’re in a Dip—a temporary setback that will get better if you keep pushing. But maybe it’s really a Cul-de-Sac, which will never get better, no matter how hard you try.
According to bestselling author Seth Godin, what really sets superstars apart from everyone else is the ability to escape dead ends quickly, while staying focused and motivated when it really counts.
Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt—until they commit to beating the right Dip for the right reasons. In fact, winners seek out the Dip. They realize that the bigger the barrier, the bigger the reward for getting past it. If you can become number one in your niche, you’ll get more than your fair share of profits, glory, and long-term security.
Losers, on the other hand, fall into two basic traps. Either they fail to stick out the Dip—they get to the moment of truth and then give up—or they never even find the right Dip to conquer.
Please let me know in the comments how you figured it out in your life.
Google Announces 50 Search Updates – Here’s 6 you need to worry about
On April 3rd Google announced 50 changes to the core search algorithm. Many of them won’t impact you on a regular basis, but there are a handful that anyone working on the web needs to take notice of.
Anchor Text Changes
Better interpretation and use of anchor text. We’ve improved systems we use to interpret and use anchor text, and determine how relevant a given anchor might be for a given query and website.
Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename “PC”] This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust.
FEAR: Google will devalue links with highly targeted anchor text!
PROBABLE REALITY: Google seems to be dedicated to making an effort to sniff out seemingly unnatural clusters of highly optimized anchor text embedded in content that may not seem relevent (wow that sounded like corporate lawyer speak).
[Read more…]
Making it to the Final Four of the @deanshaw 2012 Twitter Madness Tourney
When I first heard about Twitter (early 2008) it was in struggle with Plurk. In fact, I really liked Plurk and the quirky way that you scrolled sideways to see your friends updates. I eventually decided to choose Twitter as my social network of choice. I am a Twitter guy through and through.
As of today I have shared 21,110 public tweets with the world. That works out to roughly 15 tweets a day for the past 4 years – yikes. Buy early this morning I finally got news that it was all worth it.
For some strange reason I was included as a participant in Dean Shaw’s 2012 Twitter Madness Tourney. I was both honored and worried I would be destroyed by the heavy hitters in my bracket.
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Australian Feral Goats
Australian feral goats are now linked to me via the power of Klout (thanks Dan).
So what does it get me? Can I now fly down to Australia and get a job in the feral goat niche? Probably not. Can I somehow turn my new found influence into something interesting? Perhaps.
The best part of being an SEO is getting to try out new ideas and see what works. Today I start on my quest to see if for once, I can outrank the mighty Wikipedia for a term like “Australian Feral Goats”. My idea is that I will attempt to rank this very entry for that phrase.
How you can help
If you have a website where you can add content, try writing about what a silly experiment this is, but somewhere in there link to this page using the anchor text “Australian Feral Goats”.
I know this will work, the question is how fast. Let’s be honest, you can rank a page for just about anything, so picking a rare and under optimized phrase like “Australian Feral Goats” should be fairly easy.
Social media people – you can help too by tweeting or Facebooking this page all in the name of science!
Want to learn more about Australian Feral Goats, or capra hircus as they are known to the fancy speakers?
So did I, so I started reading about them. Apparently they are a nuisance and the Australian government wishes they would disappear.
By the way, if you could leave a comment, that would also be great!
Thanks for your help in my 8th grade SEO science project 🙂
Google Author Photo Step By Step Tutorial For WordPress
I spent a couple hours this afternoon fixing one of my less popular blogs to include proper markup to have the authors linked to their Google profiles. The reason to do this is so that you can have your photo appear in the search results next to the article you wrote.
While I was modifying the code it got me thinking about how many other people might want to do the same thing. So I’m going to add som additional information to the already good overviews out there on how to get your photo to show up in the Google search results.
Follow the directions that Mark lays out in his post, but when you get to step 2 come back here… I’ll wait.
Ok, now you have to add two specific pieces of code to your WordPress blog to make this work. Each one of your articles has to have an author link back to your author page. That is core functionality in WordPress, just make sure it’s turned on – yes, even if it is a single author blog. The catch is that the link needs to have the rel=author attribute added to the link. You can add a link to your author bio but WordPress will strip out the rel attribute. You can attach it in a parameter like this: https://plus.google.com/107187240364808249726?rel=author
Many better themes now include this capability (or soon will), if they don’t you’ll need to create a filter in the functions.php file. A filter is a way of catching output from the database and reformatting it before it hits the page.
Before we get to filters, let’s add some new fields to the author’s section of each user. I don’t know about you but I’m not really a big AIM Yahoo Messenger or Jabber user, so I can get rid of those, but I’d like to include Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Here’s what I added to my functions.php file.
[php]
function my_new_contactmethods( $contactmethods ) {
unset($contactmethods[‘aim’]);
unset($contactmethods[‘jabber’]);
unset($contactmethods[‘yim’]);
// Add Twitter
$contactmethods[‘twitter’] = ‘Twitter profile URL’;
//add Facebook
$contactmethods[‘facebook’] = ‘Facebook profile URL’;
//add Google+
$contactmethods[‘google’] = ‘Google+ profile URL’;
return $contactmethods;
}
add_filter(‘user_contactmethods’,’my_new_contactmethods’,10,1);
[/php]
Great, now you can go update your blog author profile an make sure you include your Google profile url (which should look something like https://plus.google.com/107187240364808249726 (you don’t need anything after the number).
Now let’s build out that filter!
This is for your author archive page, for example, mine is at http://www.1918.com/author/phil-buckley/. The idea here is to link your name to your Google profile using the rel=me attribute. I accomplished it this way:
[php]
/** Customize the author box function */
add_filter( ‘genesis_author_box_title’, ‘author_box_title_filter’ );
function author_box_title_filter($author_box_title) {
if (is_author()) {
$author_box_title_filter = ‘‘. get_the_author() .’‘;
return $author_box_title_filter;
}}
[/php]
You might have noticed that mine is inside a Genesis child theme, but you can do the same thing with almost any theme.
The addition of get_the_author_meta(‘google’) is what pulls in the new author attribute.
Now you have remember to add your website to your Google profile. Make sure that under the About section of your profile you add the url for the site you just set up under the Contributor to section (in the right rail).
Once that’s done you can test your pages to see if all is well using the Rich Snippet Testing Tool. I suggest testing your homepage, a post page and your author archive page.
You can also fill out this form, it might help.
If you need any help, let me know and I’ll try to give you a hand.
SEO is Dead – Again!
This morning I saw a tweet from the very smart Dean Shaw.
Why SEO will disappear in the next 10 years. What say you @1918 ? bit.ly/yk3xuI
— deanshaw (@deanshaw) March 12, 2012
Since it had been at least 3 days since I had read a “SEO is dead” article, I checked it out. It is written by the CEO of a social media company that says, shockingly, that SEO will lose out to social media!
My favorite line is, “What the searching user gets is now a good picture and quickly realizes that this first item on the search engine may not be the best. Often it is rejected because it shows up first, which makes many buyers suspicious.” Wait, what? I’ve never seen that data anywhere. In fact in the latest Pew Internet & The American Life Search Engine study, it says just the opposite, “91% of search engine users say they always or most of the time find the information they are seeking when they use search engines” and “73% of search engine users say that most or all the information they find as they use search engines is accurate and trustworthy.”
One of the reasons I follow Dean’s twitter stream is because he’s smart and demands proof from the data slingers on the web.
I do think that SEO is evolving, just as it always has. Social media is playing a bigger part in establishing personal authority as well as link sharing. Things are changing so fast that Google tweaked the main search algorithm over 500 times last year. Google is constantly trying to figure out just what you need when you type in the box.
So now I’m wondering, are you using search engines more or less lately? Do you think the first result in search is some kind of manipulated plant? Please let me know in the comments.
How Gregory Ng Ruined My Morning
Yesterday I attended the Triangle AMA Digital Training Camp where I listened to a lot of smart people speak. I was entertained by the great story telling of Peter Shankman and inspired by Brian Dally of Republic Wireless and his story of trying to fix the broken cell phone industry. But the one thing that really stuck in my head was something Gregory Ng said.
Greg is a friend of mine, but also the Chief Experience Officer at Brooks Bell. Sometimes I forget how good Greg is at both his job, and presenting meaningful data. Near the beginning of his talk on converting your visitors into customers, he mentioned that the average online conversion rate is 2.2%! That’s pathetic.
He went on to explain that many businesses focus on driving more traffic rather than converting the traffic they already have. As bad as a conversion rate of 2.2% sounds, it’s even worse when you flip it – it really means you’re not closing the deal on 97.8% of your visitors!
Can you imagine the general manager of your local Target saying to the staff, “We saw 10,000 people come through here today, and we rang up 220 of them? I’m guessing the store would stop everything and fix whatever was causing the problem.
This morning I walked into my friend’s new kids consignment store and started looking at it through this new prism. Was the store optimized? It really isn’t as well optimized as a Target or Wal-Mart. It could be better. I stood staring at the path from the front door, the high-profit items (for consignment) were not the focal point, what about the stuff way in back? What sells more, girls or boys stuff?
After a few minutes I had to leave because I wanted to start A/B testing her store.
When was the last time you sat and stared at your store/website/house/office and thought about ways you could optimize it?
Not Everyone Wants You To Be A Star
Have you ever wondered what life would be like if you were a well known celebrity? How must it feel when Michael Jordan walks into anyplace in Chicago? Do you think there are companies out there that don’t want someone well-known associated with their brand? Can you imagine a company saying, “I don’t want to use Michael Jordan to sell our basketball sneakers because he used the Chicago Bulls as platform to promote his own talents.”
In regular life, a strong personal brand can sometimes be intimidating for a company. I remember talking with my friend Jeremy Smith when Twine Interactive (now Fragment Labs) decided to hire Wayne Sutton as their social media & community strategist. I told Jeremy I thought it was a nice win-win situation; Twine would get exposure to Wayne’s extensive network and Wayne would get a chance to work through some great strategies. But not every company wants to take a chance like that, and some may even feel the person who put in the effort to build a personal brand is somehow doing something wrong.
My long-standing social media crush has spent her life honing her personal brand to the point that when I think of Outspoken Media, I think of Lisa. Lisa started building her brand while at SEO powerhouse Bruce Clay Inc. Does that mean that Bruce Clay got screwed when Lisa left? I don’t think so, I think they both benefitted from their time together.
I know that Jay Dolan’s strong personal branding, award-winning social media blog and worldwide connections are helping him create better strategies for the clients he serves at his day job.
I can’t think of any examples of people with notable personal brands that haven’t helped the companies that have let them be their best. If you can, please let me know if the comments.
My Million Dollar Twitter Tool
Do we really need another Twitter tool? I think we do.
I started thinking about this tool when I was one of the alpha testers for Argyle Social’s groundbreaking social media tracking toolset. What I loved about Argyle’s tool is that I could finally show the impact of social media to the boss and it made sense.
I know not every company is on the social media bandwagon yet, but I feel like it’s time for a tool that deals with the other side of the social media equation. Argyle Social and their kin have the part to the right of the equal sign all figured out, but what about the people on the left side of the equation?
One of my smartest friends once mentioned that the role of software is to make something easier. Now that showing the impact of social is “easy”, how about the making the curation and management of a social stream easier.
I tweet a lot. Much of what I tweet is articles that I find interesting and I feel like my followers might find interesting. Some get traction, some don’t. Some I retweet, some I don’t. Some I get a notice from bit.ly that they are getting more than 20 clicks, most don’t. One of the frustrating things is that some I think are awesome don’t get the exposure that I feel is due.
If I had unlimited time I could do the heavy lifting involved in scheduling stuff to retweet a day later, maybe again a week later and seeing what works best. I want a piece of software that does that thinking for me.
Here’s my idea, it has certain features of Argyle Social, BufferApp and a few others.
I have a tweet I want to send out. I add it to my hopper of Tweets that are awaiting distribution (much like BufferApp). There is a process which will deal with items in the hopper according to an algorithm. New tweets have precedence over older tweets that are being retweeted, and more popular retweets have precedence over less popular ones.
The hopper is configured via sliders where you can control how fast tweets are sent out and how often things get reweeted. Individual tweets can override the general settings.
Let’s walk though a quick example…
I have a tweet I want to send out about my super awesome Twitter Awesomeness Score page. This is evergreen content. It will live there forever and each time I give it a nudge it gets pretty good traction, but I only think to tweet about it a couple times a year. I would like to automate that tweet to go out every month. So I set the tool to make sure that particular tweet goes out once a month forever. That’s it – I don’t want to have to put in a time, or day – I want the software to figure it out, because that what computers are best at. The tool will look at what is in my hopper the next time that tweet is due to go out and make an intelligent decision about when it should be tweeted.
I have another tweet that is a link to an awesome infographic on tweets during the Super Bowl. That will only be interesting for a week or two, so I use the sliders to tell the tool to tweet that out a few times on day 1, a couple times on day 2 and after that retweet according to how it’s being received (clicks and RT’s). If it’s still getting love, throw it back in the hopper automaticaly until it dies off.
Now thing ahead 6 months. My hopper gets at least a dozen new links added every day, some will be popular long after their initial tweet and will keep my hopper filled, so then there has to be intelligence about how to quilt together my tweet stream. I don’t want tweets in rapid succession so maybe I never show more that 1 or 2 retweets each hour, and maybe when tweets start to age they only show up in non-peak hours.
This is clearly one of those ideas that can quickly spiral out of control and become a nightmare, but I think the core premise is solid and needs to be explored.
Anyone want to brainstorm this through and see if we can make it come true?
When you can afford not to care about your customer
A couple of days ago I went online to Time Warner Cable and added the SportsPass package to my service level. It was remarkably easy and I thought that Time Warner Cable had finally figured it out. I checked channel 529 to see if my NESN channel was showing up, it wasn’t. Then I noticed an email from Time Warner that said they had received my order and that it should be available shortly.
I checked it the next day, still no access. Today I checked again, still no access.
I log on to the Time Warner Cable website to get their support number and I see they offer online chat. Cool, I fire it up and start typing with Anna. Anna has trouble writing English but I do get that she is going to send a signal to update my cable box. What that really meant was she was rebooting it. While we’re waiting, she tells me I can also call a toll-free phone number for support. A minute or two later it’s up and running again, still no service on my NESN channel.
I ask her to double-check my account to be sure the SportPass is showing up. She tells me that it isn’t. She then asks if there is anything else she can help me with… um, yes. I ask her to add it to my account for me. She can’t do that and tells me to call the toll-free support number.
I dial the Time Warner Cable support number and use a phone tree that asks for my phone number to route the call correctly. After being on hold a few minutes I talk to a pleasant young woman who asks me for my phone number. She then asks for my address which I give her, then she asks for the last four digits of the account holders social security number. I don’t know my wife’s last 4 digits of her social security so I tell her I can’t provide that. She sits silently for about 10 seconds. I ask if I can substitute the account number, which she accepts.
I tell her that I ordered additional service a few days ago online and that it still isn’t working. She informs me that ordering things online doesn’t usually work and that you need to call in to actually add service. Oh, okay.
Before she adds the service I called her about, she asks me if I’m interested in signing up for their digital phone service. I say, “no thank you.” She asks why I’m not interested and I explain that we have 2 cell phones and haven’t used a home phone in over 10 years. She makes a final plea by explaining that it’s only $19.99/month. Ok, but the answer is still no.
A minute later she says that she has worked her magic and it should now be working. I check quickly and it is indeed working.
How many businesses could even think of running that way? Having a monopoly position makes you stop caring about your customers. Cable companies control roughly 60% of the household television access and I have yet to see the cable company that is trying to make their customers the priority.
The story above is why Apple getting into the television market is so damn appealing to so many regular people.
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