Phil Bucklet at 1918.me

The Calculus of Social Media Theory

September 30, 2010 by Phil Buckley 4 Comments

During my commute this morning, I was listening to Professor Marcus du Sautoy‘s BBC series on A Brief History of Mathematics. The first episode dealt with two late 17th century mathematicians who worked on the same problem at the same time – the calculus, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. Professor du Sautoy declares that calculus is the mathematics of things on the move.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — Gottfried Leibniz

There is nothing more “on the move” than 21st century social media theory.

Calculus is used in every branch of the physical sciences, actuarial science, computer science, statistics, engineering, economics, business, medicine, demography, and in other fields wherever a problem can be mathematically modeled and an optimal solution is desired. It allows one to go from (non-constant) rates of change to the total change or vice versa, and many times in studying a problem we know one and are trying to find the other.

The Internet, the world wide web and social media are all moving at non-constant speeds. Smartphones and location-based services are are causing a change to previous social media theorems.

There are players from the ruling royal families that are involved and young upstarts that are struggling to get their ideas heard.

There are people who fear the new science and people who claim it will revolutionize the entire world. It has the ability to reshape the way people deal with problems. It will continue to be refined by those who come in the future.

The giants of today’s social media scene must have broad shoulders to accommodate the brilliant minds that are sure to follow. Who will build on the brilliance of Chris Brogan, Lisa Barone and Damien Basile.

I think powerful social media agencies will become like the Bernoulli family was to early mathematicians? Mentoring young but promising social media experimenters. Giving them a safe space to hone their craft and apply scientific rigor to their ideas.

The visionaries of tomorrow are all around us. They have great ideas and insights yet no single powerful place to showcase them. There is no Academy of Social Media in one of the world’s great cities where the best social media minds gather. Instead there is the Internet – where all the great minds of every discipline gather. The Internet requires you to not only be great, but also to make yourself heard. It’s the second part where the newcomer will show their brilliance.

There seems to be a new tool to measure social media influence introduced every week, Yet there is no one way to quantifiably measure it yet. There has been no Gottfried Leibniz to finalize the equation for us to compare Gary Vaynerchuk to Ashton Kutcher.

How do you define social media greatness? Is it different for everyone? Is it like asking what’s the best ice cream flavor?

In-House Link Building Survey

September 25, 2010 by Phil Buckley 7 Comments

BEN FINO-RADIN'S Hyperlink — Hand embroidered yarn on plastic canvas

I’m lucky, I get to chat with one of the best link builders in the world pretty regularly. Garrett French is one of the founders of Ontolo, which has become an industry leader in competitive link building. He sent me a link the other day to participate in a In-House SEO survey about link building. There’s 14 questions, here’s my answers from time as the in-house SEO at Sinclair Institute.

First was the Day-to-Day Link Building Questions

Q. As an inhouse SEO, what are your top 5 most important link building tasks and responsibilities?

Because the Sinclair Institute’s flagship site is perceived as right on the edge of adult content, links were hard to come by. Since getting a link from whitehouse.gov was out of the question we had to aim differently. We tried to build relationships with top bloggers in our niche, and that usually worked well. We also tried to get links from our suppliers, which was hit and miss. Leaving comments on widely read industry blogs that linked back to us was time consuming, but often worked well. Also commenting at our top competition’s site.

Q. What, if any, link building tasks would you be comfortable outsourcing?

Personally? All of them. Link building is difficult and time-consuming, but we all do it because it’s worth it.

Q. How much of your time is spent on link building related tasks on a day to day basis?

Not enough. Probably about an hour a week.

Next was the Link Building Tool Questions

Q. What are your top 5 most important link building tools?

I’ve always loved the tools offered by seomoz. I have used open site explorer, the competitive link finder and the Juicy Link Finder. I have not yet tried the Link Acquisition Assistant from them. I also use Yahoo Site Explorer to see what links my competitors have.

Q. What are the most valuable tasks or functions of existing link building tools that you couldn’t live without?

I love the automation in the new & improved PRO Dashboard. It allows me to just check in when I need to. It keeps working in the background.

Q. What are the biggest let-downs of link building tools you have used or currently use?

It still comes down to a manual process of building links.

Part 3 is Inhouse Link Building Campaign Design Questions

Q. If a fellow inhouse SEO asked for help in developing a link building campaign, what questions would you ask them?

What are the key terms you want to be associated with your site? Who is the industry leader for those terms. Can you long-tail any of those terms? What is your budget?

Q. What link building tactics work better for inhouse SEOs than agency link builders? Why?

I think working in-house gives you the advantage of living within your niche. Because your entire company is always immersed in it, you have a deeper understanding of the nuances. With that said, sometimes that understanding can make you attempt things because you assume it’s not possible.

Q. As an inhouse SEO, what link building techniques have you found that scale (if any…)?

Link building that scales? Is that actually possible?

Finally is Internal Credibility and Influence Questions

Q. Can you describe techniques or tactics you’ve used to grow your internal trust and credibility with colleagues?

Maybe I’m lucky but I didn’t have to win anyone over. My old boss did all the heavy lifting for the past 5 years.

Q. How do you get colleagues to perform tasks related to link building?

I show them results. Once someone gets a taste of success, they’re happy to continue.

Q. How have you grown your colleagues’ ability to identify and act on link opportunities?

A constant update of where we are, what phrases we need to work on, and asking their advice about where else we can look. I learned long ago that asking someone for help really works.

Q. What metrics do you use to convey link building success to upper management?

Great question. The only metric they generally understand is conversion and revenue. I work with charts to show how better ranking means more clicks, more conversions and finally more revenue. A graph that shows things getting better will always get more buy in.

Are you like Joe DiMaggio?

September 24, 2010 by Phil Buckley 1 Comment

As a Red Sox fan, I was bred to dislike the Yankees. But when I was 9 years old my Little League team was the Yankees and it was my first uniform that had a number on it. Although I never saw him, I chose number 5 because that was Joe DiMaggio’s uniform number.

My knowledge of DiMaggio at age 9 was limited mostly to the old guy selling Mr. Coffee on television, but even as a kid I knew DiMaggio was one of the greats – also, the smaller the number, the smaller the size, and I couldn’t squeeze into #3.

As I got older I found more to admire in DiMaggio the ball player. I love the stat from 1941. That was the year he hit in 56 straight games. Then the day after the streak was broken, he started another 16 game hitting streak . Even more amazing to me about that year is that he only struck out 13 times in 621 plate appearances.

But my favorite DiMaggio quote comes from 1947. In 1947 DiMaggio was already a God like figure, in fact he only had 4 season left before he retired. In September when the Yankees had again wrapped up the pennant, DiMaggio was still out there everyday even though the games didn’t mean anything. New York sports writer Jimmy Cannon asked him why, to which DiMaggio responded, “I always think, there might be someone out in the stands who’s never seen me play.”

That’s a great thought. If the grandstands were filled with people watching your today, would you be remembered like Joe DiMaggio is, or would you be more like Minnie Mendoza?

Why I’m Joining Media Two Interactive

September 21, 2010 by Phil Buckley 30 Comments

Media Two Interactive Advertising Agency

Over a year ago I first ran into Michael Hubbard. He was offering his office as a last minute venue to hold the Raleigh SEO Meetup.

I had never met Michael before, but he immediately made me feel welcome and did everything he could to make the event a success. We chatted a bit after the event and started an easy friendship.

Within weeks I was dragging him over to lunch at The Pit to pitch an idea for SXSE. There’s not a lot of CEO’s that will take a lunch with a web developer with a dream, but not only did he accept my invitation, he listened to me and even grabbed the check.

I became friends with his new social media strategist, Morgan Siem and others. It seemed that Media Two was everywhere I wanted to be. Eventually we began to talk in passing about working together. Then a few months ago, it seemed to take a serious turn. Media Two had brought in some new high level clients and I was at a good point to make the transition.

I love that most of the “formal” back-and-forth took place over Twitter, but we actually had very little to work out.

So in a couple of weeks, I’ll officially get a desk at Media Two. It will be somewhere between social, search, copywriter and analytics as the Director of User Experience.

For me, the chance to work with the super talented people who inhabit the Media Two offices is a dream come true. Media Two may not be the biggest ad agency in town, but they are certainly doing some of the best and most creative work.

For me, the chance to work someplace that values its people, encourages discussion and idea generation is exactly what I’ve been looking for.

Original Content, Plagiarism and In-Between

September 10, 2010 by Phil Buckley 13 Comments

I gave a very brief talk at Real Estate BarCamp today about SEO. The entire talk was about 30 minutes, which is barely time to scratch the surface, but one line garnered the wrath of a couple of the attendees.

If a you come across an awesome piece of content, grab it, tweak it and publish it on your own site. (I can’t remember exactly what I said, but it was something like that).

Margaret Woda was horrified on Twitter — Margaret Woda was horrified

If that came across as “steal content”, that’s not what I meant. I went on to try to explain that if you can write a 500 word blog post 4 or 5 days a week, then God bless you, but I doubt most of the realtors in the room have that kind of time, motivation or writing chops. Many may have no desire to spend 2-3 hours every night writing, so I offered a very popular short cut.

The fact that most of the people in the room raised their hand when I asked who never really updates their site was depressing, but not unexpected.

If I could wave a magic wand and get every person attending to write an additional 3,500 words every week for their website I would. Original content that is thought provoking, emotional and creates action is always the first choice – just like eating healthy at every meal and flossing twice a day, yet McDonald’s and gum disease flourish.

One woman in the back who was also “anti” said as a former journalist she was morally opposed to my idea, but I won’t get off on a tangent about how often journalists steal content from other sites.

I went on to try better explain what I meant. If you just copy and paste content, it won’t help you. But if you take an article and rework it so that it is at least 20% or so different than the other article, Google will probably view it as a new document. I explained that it doesn’t mean you change the “her” to “him” and call it a day, you basically have to give it your voice. This type of editing can still take some time, so it’s not a panacea.

I didn’t bother bringing up wp-robot that automatically scrapes and reassembles other peoples work into a brand new piece of content, but with content creation becoming the backbone of most search marketing efforts , maybe I should have.

What I tried to leave the group with was:

Get more and better links
Write great content so that you become an authority
Listen better in the social networks

Here’s my slides from the presentation.

SEO Real Estate BarCamp RDU

View more presentations from philipbuckley.

WordPress Permissions

September 8, 2010 by Phil Buckley 3 Comments

I was helping a friend with some small items in a WordPress install when I noticed that it was prompting me for a username and password to FTP in files.

That’s a pain in the neck that is caused when WordPress is installed in a way that doesn’t allow the webserver to directly access the installation. A great hosting company will always make sure that you don’t have that additional hurdle.

I use Tiger Tech (affiliate link) as my host for just that reason, they totally kick ass as a WordPress host.

If you’re currently being asked for FTP login information, you may be able to fix the problem so that it all just works. The key is getting file and folder permissions correct.

Different files and directories have specific permissions that specify who (or what) can read, write, modify and access them. You need to know this because WordPress will need access to write to files in your wp-content directory to make the magic happen.

If you are already lost because you have no idea what file permissions even means, stop reading this post, go read this, then come back.

Some of WordPress’ coolest features come from allowing some files to be writable by your web server.

All of your WordPress files should be owned by your user account, and should be writable by you. Any file that needs write access from WordPress should be group-owned by the user account used by the webserver.

In some cases your host will run the webserver as your account, so you can really lock down the files, but often the webserver runs as a special privileged user (www, apache, nobody).

All folder permissions should be set to 755. Files should be set to 644. Files that you want to edit in the WordPress Theme editor should be 666. Never use 777 for WordPress permissions.

If all this sounds like Greek, come join us at the Blogger Roundtable so we can get you straightened out.

Photo by: Transguyjay

Check Your Domain URL For Canonicalization Problems

September 6, 2010 by Phil Buckley 1 Comment

If you have your own domain, this is a simple test to see if you might have a canonicalization problem…

Go to Edward Lewis’s great header checking tool at his SEO website. Put in your main website address as you think of it. For example, my website address that give out is http://www.1918.com – change the User Agent to “Googlebot”, then click Check Headers.

What you want to get back is something like:

1. REQUESTING: http://www.1918.com
GET / HTTP/1.1
Connection: Keep-Alive
Keep-Alive: 300
Accept:*/*
Host: www.1918.com
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

SERVER RESPONSE: 200 OK

What that tells me is that my web server is responding exactly how I want it to.

But what about the multiple other ways people may try to get to my site? Without the www, with or without the trailing slash, with or without the filename index.php

Let’s check in order of common problems:

Without the www in front of the domain:

1. REQUESTING: http://1918.com
GET / HTTP/1.1
Connection: Keep-Alive
Keep-Alive: 300
Accept:*/*
Host: 1918.com
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

SERVER RESPONSE: 301 MOVED PERMANENTLY
Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2010 02:04:30 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2
Location: http://www.1918.com/
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 190
Keep-Alive: timeout=2, max=10
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Redirecting to http://www.1918.com/ ...

2. REQUESTING: http://www.1918.com/
GET / HTTP/1.1
Connection: Keep-Alive
Keep-Alive: 300
Accept:*/*
Host: www.1918.com
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

SERVER RESPONSE: 200 OK

Perfect. What I want to happen is that any request that comes in without the www, I just want to re-route it to my one canonical url. The reason is, I don’t want links to be split between 2 different pages that are actually identical.

Now let’s check to see if the trailing slash causes any problem – there wasn’t, same as first test.

Finally, with index.php appended to the main url:

1. REQUESTING: http://www.1918.com/index.php

GET /index.php HTTP/1.1
Connection: Keep-Alive
Keep-Alive: 300
Accept:*/*
Host: www.1918.com
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

SERVER RESPONSE: 301 MOVED PERMANENTLY
Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2010 02:19:18 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
X-Pingback: http://www.1918.com/xmlrpc.php
X-Powered-By: W3 Total Cache/0.9.1.2
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=4c36183d09e3acaecef7c7e1ca7a13a7; path=/
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Location: http://www.1918.com/
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 20
Keep-Alive: timeout=2, max=10
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Redirecting to http://www.1918.com/ ...

2. REQUESTING: http://www.1918.com/
GET / HTTP/1.1
Connection: Keep-Alive
Keep-Alive: 300
Accept:*/*
Host: www.1918.com
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

SERVER RESPONSE: 200 OK

Again, exactly what I want to happen. For the same reason as last time, I want any link to my homepage to point at one page, not one of it’s cousins, so I make sure all doors lead back to the main entry.

If you did this test and your server answered for some of these variations, you may have a dreaded canonicalization problem! I’ve talked about one quick way to fix canonicalization but if you need more help, let me know.

Real Estate BarCamp, the Raleigh, NC edition

September 5, 2010 by Phil Buckley 2 Comments

I was excited when I started talking with Meredith Morgan about speaking at this years RDU Real Estate BarCamp. I’ve long felt that there are a few industries that have had to figure out the Internet fast, or perish. One is the newspaper industry which I recently left, but another is real estate.

I remember back in the stone age (1990’s) when you would go to a real estate office and flip through giant binders and then the agent would take you for a drive to see them, chances were about 50/50 that she had never been to that property before. You learned to lean on the agent for almost everything.

Buying and selling a home will never be that way again. People have changed. The culture has changed. If you are web saavy you start your search at someplace like homes.com or realtor.com. The reason you start there is because when you search for houses for sale in Raleigh, those are the first two organic listings. Smartly Howard, Perry & Walston has decided to spend some money and grab the top paid spot for that query on Google.

Rounding out the top of the search results are Trulia American Homeguides and Zillow. Did I mention Google now incorporates listing into their super popular Google Maps platform?

How can John Q. Agent possible compete with that? It will require a change in the process. Marti Hampton competes by buying a sponsored listing at the top of the search results. The first organic listing for an agency (on page 2) is FMRealty, which goes about it the old school way – putting the phrase Raleigh and Real Estate on the page a zillion times. Paul Setliff also shows up doing a good job of putting a good blurb about all his properties on a page that is HIS page, not an iframe’d MLS page.

I’ve written before about bad realtor websites, and they continue to bother me. I’ve talked to a couple of agents about doing something better, but many don’t want to spend any money, which means the money they do spend on a site ends up getting wasted. I think most buyers and sellers would be more impressed with a kick-ass website that is a one time $2,500 investment than with a leased luxury car that runs $700/month.

I’ve talked to a bunch of real estate professionals that mostly get it, but say that they don’t have the time or resources to put towards their website/blog/Twitter/video blogging/Facebook/forums… you get the idea. The truth of the matter is that’s like someone in 1970 saying they don’t have time for talking to people on the phone. It’s just the way more and more people are doing business and leaders will take advantage of it and put even more space between themselves and the also-rans.

You don’t have to do everything, concentrate on channels that are working for you, or that you see working for others in your situation. If you’re selling mainly to retirees then Twitter is probably not going to be the most effective. If you are trying to attract newly married couples looking to buy downtown, the newspaper will not be where they are hanging out. What about the 45 year olds looking to upgrade?

One of the hardest part to teach people trying to expand into the new social space is the idea of listening. You do not have to be a selling machine to get sales.

That will be the hardest sell for me. Teaching sales people that they can take their foot off the gas pedal in social media, and probably get even better mileage.

These are just some of my ideas… your mileage may vary.

Raleigh Blogger Roundtable

September 1, 2010 by Phil Buckley 5 Comments

In a couple of weeks I’m going to do something new. I’m going to bring about a dozen bloggers and make something great happen.

The Blogger Roundtable will be my first event that attendees will have to pay to attend. It’s scary to make the jump from, “I know a little more than you so I’ll teach you at a free meetup” to “I know enough about a subject that I can fundamentally change the way you blog and help you get to the next level.”

The reason I can make such a bold statement is that I’ll have a lot of help. The Blogger Roundtable will take place in a quiet private room where a dozen people will all have the same goal, to make their blog the best. You may be 90% of the way there, or only 10%, but everyone can learn from the group. While we’ll expect solutions to problems can be developed and acted upon, the larger yield will be the learning itself. Everyone’s problems can become the fulcrum on which a critically reflective learning will occur. Fresh questions will pop into your head because some of your fundamental assumptions will be challenged. You will be asked questions that may have never occurred to you before.

I feel that the group dynamics involved in a tightly knit blogger clan offer some distinct advantages:

A new group of friends who will be tied to your success
No one person is as smart as 12 people
Experience from 12 others can help you avoid pitfalls
Experience from 12 others can make smarter recommendations
You’ll laugh more
You’ll think more

The advantages of having a technical marketer helping shape the event offers additional advantages:

Search & Social are huge parts of getting a blog to the next level
Google is now attempting to return results for “blogs” not just “posts” that match a query
Understanding the technical writing requirements for good SEO will make you a better writer
Fixing PHP and HTML will make your blog better
Speed matters. Knowing what is slowing your site down is the first step towards fixing it.

Wondering if you’ll fit in? Check out who is already signed up. If you’re currently blogging, you’re ready.

The 3+ hours are an investment in yourself. If you really think that your blog is something that will help you reach your ultimate goal, what are you waiting for? I bet you could think of something you spent the same amount of money on that was nothing more than a burp and a hangover the next day.

Let’s catapult you and your blog on September 13 at the Blogger Roundtable.

Photo by: Steven Depolo

Wifi 3G and Edge Data Transfer Speeds

August 22, 2010 by Phil Buckley 4 Comments

I use my iPhone for more and more all the time. When I have a good wifi signal, life is perfect. A strong 3G signal is ofen better for me than a crappy wifi signal. I fear an edge connection, or the worst of all “Searching…”

So what’s the difference between these 3 connection speeds?

I did this test while sitting on my living room couch tonight:

The first test was while connected to my home network. I have Time Warner Cable as my ISP and generally have pretty good speeds.

I used the iPhone app from Speedtest.net to do the test.

Wifi Results

Connected to my home wireless network, which in turn is connected to TWC’s cable network I recoded a download speed of almost 3Mbs/second and upload speeds of roughly 350 kb/second.

The ping test (which is shown in the middle circle of the gauge) was 145 ms which is pretty good.

In a perfect world, this would be the baseline for all data transference.

3G Results

Switching off the wifi let me re-run the test, this time making use of the AT&T 3G network.

I know that the connection speed will be affected by the strength of the connection to a certain degree, but again, this is just to give you an idea.

3G upload speed was still impressive although it was less than half the speed of my wifi. Interestingly, the upload speed was twice as fast.

The ping test was twice as slow which makes me think that in general 3G speed will be about half of a good wifi connection.

There has been more than once where I’ve been connected to a public wifi network that was either overloaded or just plain bad and have ended up switching over to 3G.

AT&T’s Edge Network Speed

Back in the old days, pre-iPhone anyway, the edge network was state-of-the-art. Now it’s a dinosaur.

When I went to buy my iPhone a couple years ago, the day I walked in and asked to see a 3GS, the guy said that they didn’t have any in stock, but they did have a 3G and “that there is really no difference”.

That statement caught me off-guard so I called my buddy who told me that an iPhone without 3G was so frustrating it wasn’t worth buying. I told the guy at the AT&T store that I would get my 3GS at another store.

I called around and found one in the next town over, and I’m glad I did.

The speed of the Edge Network was basically pathetic.

The ping was an astonishing 1120ms!

The download speed of sub-100kbps means that tasks like checking in become painfully slow. Walking from the car to the front door probably won’t be enough time to call up Foursquare or TriOut.

The upload speed might as well have said unavailable.

What kind of speeds are you seeing?

How about you guys on other networks?

I’d love to get more numbers in the comments.

Twiffiency, Twitter Spam and the Making of Twitter-Awesomeness

August 19, 2010 by Phil Buckley 10 Comments

When I noticed the super silly Twiffiency phenomenon blow up on Tuesday I was struck by how much people love getting graded.

Everyone saw the auto-tweets that Twiffiency sent out on your behalf and quickly tested their own.. ummm, something. See, the thing is, even now, no one has any idea what that score means!

That’s when I decided to make my own Twitter gadget, but mine would be AWESOME!

I realized that it had to be simple and look cool, so I would use big font, use the default Twitter background and present people with a score that would make them proud enough to tweet it out voluntarily.

My Twitter-Awesomeness is 110% — Mike is very, very awesome

The Twitter-Awesomeness Grader page was born on Tuesday August 17th about 11am. Mike Adams was it’s first customer at 11:17.

This was version 1.0. At this point you didn’t even have to enter your Twitter name.

After about half an hour I decided to make it seem more life-like (version 2), and add a “Enter your twitter name” part. That way people would feel like something was actually happening.

Shortly after I added a delay and a spinning icon so that you would be even more convinced that it was doing something (version 2.0.1).

Finally I added a link so people could tweet out their results to their followers.

Hundreds of people stopped by, and it was fun to do some “rapid prototyping”, but what did I really learn?

Making a random number generator is easy.
People will do something if you make it easy enough
Everyone likes to be rated high
Lots of people think any widget is actually doing something valuable.

So here’s the dirty secret: my Twitter-Awesomeness Grader is a simple random number generator (between 99 and 110). In fact, when you land on the page, your score has already been determined. Putting in a name is optional. Clicking the button fires off a javascript call that hides the form and shows the score.

I also created a Client Twitter Grader for companies that need to convince a client that their current Twitter efforts are below par.

Calling Out Bad Realtor Websites

August 13, 2010 by Phil Buckley 6 Comments

One of my very early posts on this blog was about how bad realtor websites are. I wrote that post almost 2 years ago, yet there are still realtors putting up with less than awesome sites.

I was discussing the sad state of realtor websites on Twitter with a couple of friends when @vowconnect asks me to take a look at 2 of their sites.

Okay, so here’s what I think.

The first site is Cara Keys – Parrish Realty. I don’t know Cara or Parrish Realty, but I assume she’s a good realor who wants a good website that will attract new customers searching for a realtor. Let’s see how this site will do that.

Cara Keys - Parrish Realty Website Screenshot

It’s a nice looking website right? Nice colors, professional images and a nice balance.

Bad Sign #1: The only place the word “Real Estate” appears on the home page is in the small text in the footer, which is actually a link back to vowconnect’s website with the phrase Raleigh Real Estate Websites designed & hosted by CONNECT.

Bad Sign #2: There are 2 H1 tags on the home page. One of them is a link to /index.php with no other information contained inside the H1 header tag, the other H1 at line 190 has Cara Keys – Parrish Realty.

Bad Sign #3: Canonicalization problems. I can pull up all of the following pages as valid pages:

http://carakeys.com
http://carakeys.com/
http://carakeys.com/index.php
http://www.carakeys.com
http://www.carakeys.com/
http://www.carakeys.com/index.php

All of those pages produce a status code 200 meaning the server sees each one as a seperate valid file, and that means so will the search engines.

When I grab the cached site (This is Google’s cache of http://www.carakeys.com/. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Aug 4, 2010 05:40:15 GMT), it looks like her old site. Interestingly it looks like her new site went up about 8/11 and still hasn’t been visited by Googlebot (bad sign #3.5).

Her old site has actual content on the home page! Although whatever images were once there are gone, at least it had a meta description.

Bad Sign #4:

Cached meta description: Cara Keys at Parrish Realty of Zebulon, Your local expert on the Eastern Wake County Real estate market, Home Page, Homepage,

Current meta description: none

Cara’s Twitter bio would be a decent meta description, certainly better than nothing.

Contact information on the old cached site is easily available. 4 different telephone numbers, physical address and an email link. All of those features help you appear in Google’s local search box.

Contact information on the new site is nowhere on the homepage. It’s only on 1 page – her contact page. Best practices is to have all of that information on every page, and the phyical address in an <address> tag.

Bad Sign #5: I’m a gig fan of seomoz’s term-extractor. It answers a simple question… Are these the words people use while searching for her site ?

realty
parrish
keys
cara
resources
links
blog
about
skip
login

No mention of Zebulon or Eastern Wake in that list, yet her old cached site’s title was: Your East Wake County NC Realtor

Bad Sign #6: The homepage doesn’t validate. Normally this isn’t the end of the world, especially since there are only a few errors, but in this case, the errors are all in the code that the designers touched. The base Joomla template code was fine.

Bad Sign #7: The blog. I love blogs as a way to add fresh content and keeping the search robots happy. The last blog post is dated Thursday, 25 June 2009 02:02. If that’s the case, don’t label it a blog, and certainly don’t put a date on it. Mark it “Articles” or “Reference” or just skip it all together. This bad sign is more a bad sign of judgment than anything else.

Wrap-up: What drives me crazy is that the fixes I mention are simple and don’t add any real time or expense to a big mass production company, you just bake it in the process early on.

I’d like to thank Connect for offering up a couple of their sites for scrutiny – not every development house has the stomach for it. I think they deserve an “attaboy” for being my test rat today.

Getting Better Traffic

July 31, 2010 by Phil Buckley 8 Comments

I was chatting with my friend Fadra last night over Twitter about something I get asked about all the time.

Fadra was asking me about when the next SEO Meetup is and the Thesis WordPress theme, but really her question goes far beyond that to the core of search engine optimization.

It’s the same thing I had just been talking to Rachel Healy, the Garner Citizen’s web editor about earlier this week. We set out to rank for the phrase “Best Newspaper in Garner” and after about a month, they were #1. The reason I bring that experiment up is, that phrase became a stake in the ground that they could drive towards. With a particular phrase in the back of your mind, you can start to see places you can wedge it in. Rachel told me that when applicable, she tries to use that phrase when talking about the business end of the newspaper so that it will be associated with it. They also added it to their footer as a constant reminder of what they are always trying to achieve.

Rachel told me that last year, they didn’t really have any particular phrases they were aiming for. I understand that as a newspaper that’s not their primary focus, but as a business it needs to be in the mix.

Ok, now back to Fadra’s question. Her blog lives at the domain allthingsfadra.com, so obviously she has that phrase locked up, but wanted to rank for other phrases that she was writing about.

The problem with a blog like Fadra’s is that she writes about a lot of different topics. Search engines probably don’t see any real “authority” from her blog. So how does she overcome that?

Focus

That doesn’t mean Fadra can’t write about potty training, falling in love and passports all in one blog, it just means you have to do a little extra work. First off, define a handful of categories you want to write in, not dozens. It will help you stay focused. If you want to go wild, you can use tags. If you are dying to write about the new tires you bought, but they don’t fit in any of your categories, guest blog at a new tire blog and link back to your home blog. Trust me that other bloggers love guest bloggers and it exposes you to new readers.

Think of the keywords you would love to actually rank for, and target them. Write those words down on a yellow sticky note and put it on the wall next to where you write. There’s no reason you can’t keep the fact that you really want to rank for “peaceful moments” while writing about potty training – there is some ability to link them.

You have to decide what stakes you’re going to plant in the ground. SEO is all about focus. Without a plan, you won’t get there.

Technical Details

Knowing some of the technical details will help. Knowing that the title tag doesn’t have to be the same as the headline of your post, or that you can edit the permalink url of the post. All 3 of these items working together can help a post perform better. Look at this post as an example.

Title of the page: Improved Rankings for Mommy Bloggers
Headline of the post: Getting Better Traffic
Permalink:/attracting-the-right-traffic/

Splitting those 3 items up, and using slightly different words helps a little, but it usually also helps me rethink exactly what I’m trying to say in the post.

Aim

Knowing how good your aim is will help you get better. I suggest a great free tool from seoMoz called the Term Targeter. You give it the url, and the keyword you THINK you’ve targeted, it gives to a grade.

I’ve also been very happy using the ScribeSEO plugin from Copyblogger. It helps you do the same kind of aiming BEFORE you publish.

Links

The mother of all SEO factors is still people linking to you. If I link to Fadra’s super sweet love story that will make you smile with relevant anchor text, that helps. If I link it this way, “See part 2 of Fadra and Sean’s great love story here” – not as helpful.

So what’s the big finish to this long-winded post? SEO is a process, and when you move your blog to the next level you need to think more about it.

Why You Hate Your Profile Picture

July 30, 2010 by Phil Buckley 9 Comments

A few days ago, I attended a Better Headshot Tweetup. The idea behind it was simple. A bunch of people get together, network a little, drink some beer and get a few photos taken by a pair of professional photographers from Studio You Photography.

The Tweetup was at MindWorks Multimedia in Durham. It was a great choice because it’s a really cool rehab’d building downtown. Tera Simon did a great job bringing together her company, their awesome workspace and reaching out to Lonerider Beer for FREE BEER!

The photo on the left was taken that night in front of a green screen. I think it’s an awesome photo of Tera. Which is easy because Tera is beautiful. It almost captures her energy and happiness, but not quite.

The thing is, what does Tera think of it? If she’s like most people, she can point to a couple of things she doesn’t like about it.

We all have certain hang-ups about ourselves. Sometimes they are real. For example, I look fat in photos because… well, I’m not skinny. Other times I think I look old in photos, you know why? Right.

Here’s the thing, we usually look better than we give ourselves credit for. When was the last time you looked through a dozen photos of yourself and said, “I look good in every single one.”

How often does someone say, “that’s a great picture of you.” and we then assume they’re just being nice.

That’s the reason I usually tell people to let a friend choose their profile picture. The reason is that your friend/spouse/neighbor can see the real you in a photo instead of just the imperfectness that you zoom in on.

With the growth of social media profile pictures, it’s important that you feel like confident in yourself and the photos you use to present yourself with.

How many photos have you see of yourself where you thought you looked good? Here’s my scale:

I’ve never seen a photo of myself I’ve liked
I’ve only liked 1 0r 2 photos of myself
I can usually find at least one photo from an event that I like how I look
I usually like how I look in photos
The camera loves me

I’m about a 3. How about you?

Listening vs. Waiting To Talk

July 29, 2010 by Phil Buckley 3 Comments

Man listening for incoming airplanes — How hard are you listening?

I was at Qdoba tonight and noticed something we’ve all seen and heard a million times. Nobody is listening!

Customer: “… tacos with no rice and black beans.”

Employee: starts putting rice on the tortilla

Customer: “No rice!”

Employee: starts over and slides down the counter, “black or pinto beans?”

Customer: “Black.”

The thing about the employee not listening is how we no longer even flinch when we are ignored, we just accept it as normal.

There’s a notable exchange in Pulp Fiction between John Travolta and Uma Thurman:

Mia asks Vincent, “do you listen or do you wait to talk?”

His response is that he usually waits to talk but he’s trying to do a better job listening.

There are very few people who couldn’t be better listeners. Dale Carnegie writes about one of the best listeners in his famous How to Win Friends and Influence People book:

It struck me so forcibly that I shall never forget him. He had qualities which I had never seen in any other man. Never had I seen such concentrated attention. There was none of that piercing ‘soul penetrating gaze’ business. His eyes were mild and genial. His voice was low and kind. His gestures were few. But the attention he gave me, his appreciation of what I said, even when I said it badly, was extraordinary. You’ve no idea what it meant to be listened to like that.”

How are your listening skills?

Does Your Community Love You?

July 27, 2010 by Phil Buckley 1 Comment

Ashley Berman Hale has a strong and loving community. She leads the Raleigh SEO Meetup and was kind enough to take me under her wing as an assistant organizer just a month or two after I started attending.

Ashley has been adamant about never charging for any event and always doing as much as possible. It’s clearly the best meetup in the Triangle (yes, even better than the ones you may be paying for). She has also made her self available to answer questions gratis. Ashley has also answered so many questions (7001 as of this writing) at Google Webmaster Central that they made her an official Google Bionic Poster.

Now, she is due to have a baby on Labor Day 2010.

I logged on to the Meetup.com site and sent out a quick email asking people to donate if they felt like they’ve gotten some value from Ashley in the past and would like to contribute to a Babies-R-Us gift card.

Within 2 minutes I had received notification of over $200 in donations. Within 10 minutes we were at about $500.

This post isn’t about the money, but the outpouring of love for a leader who always put her art above herself.

I’ll try to surprise Ashley at the next SEO meetup with the proceeds.

UPDATE: We ended up raising over $750 from the most awesome community in Raleigh!

Craigslist Scams and How to Spot Them

July 25, 2010 by Phil Buckley 4 Comments

Yesterday my brother asked me to help him find a laptop. I turned to Craigslist and found a “too good to be true” bargain. It was a Macbook Pro that retails new for about $1,300 listed for $400.

I sent an email and received back a message saying the owner was a guy in Charlotte. My first thought was, then why are you running an ad in the Raleigh Craigslist?

The more we emailed back and forth, the more worried I got, but I was holding out hope that maybe just maybe it was just a fluke and I really would get an awesome deal. The emails were written with lots of text message types of contractions and typos, but I overlooked them.

He finally told me that he had a small business and could Fedex the laptop to me on Monday morning.

Finally I sent him a credit card number. I decided to use a credit card we hardly ever use, one that has a very low credit limit. I then went to the website of the card and turn on some additional alerts. I then took the extra step of sending them an email asking them to keep an eye on the account because I felt it may be in jeopardy.

About 8 hours later (12:45am) the phone rings. We ignore it because we’re sleeping. It rings again. Now we answer it. It’s Expedia. They ask if we authorized a purchase of $510 for a hotel in Oxford. Uh, no.

I stumble downstairs and get the credit card out of my wallet. Time to call and report it stolen. I dial the 800 number for Household Bank and get a customer service person. The person is difficult to understand, she sounds like she’s trying to imitate a robot. I tell her about the fraudulent charge. She tells me that since it’s only in a pending state, there’s nothing she can do. Then she launches into the script of asking me if I would like to get some type of overdraft protection for $29. Really, that’s the next step when someone calls you at 1am reporting a fraudulent charge?

I eventually stop her long enough to tell her I’m not interested in that, I would like to cancel the card. Which she says she does. I can now go back to bed.

As you can imagine, it was hard falling back to sleep, but eventually I did. I’m glad I’m jaded enough to take proper precautions when gambling on a Craigslist crapshoot.

It makes me think that Seth Godin is right when he advocates for Craigslist to have a $1 fee to post:

Well, the number of bogus listings and repetitive listings would plummet, making the site far easier to use.

The number of scam artists using the site would go down, because it’s more difficult to be anonymous when money changes hands.

I’ve now been scammed on eBay and Criaglist, not unusual, but they have both taught me valuable lessons.

Have you been scammed online? How did it work out?

Update: The next morning…

Around dinner time last night my wife said, “maybe we could go to IKEA in Charlotte and you can get your laptop in person.” So I send a message asking if he could meet me on Sunday. I received an email this morning at 9:48am from the scammer:

husband said he can come to ikea around 5pm

I was surprised to see that, so immediately wrote back and said, sure I’ll meet you. Asked what kind of car he’ll be in and his cell phone number. Let’s see if I can now reverse scam the scammer.

Mad Men Rules – Do they still work

July 23, 2010 by Phil Buckley 4 Comments

One of my favorite shows is AMC’s MadMen. If you haven’t seen it, start watching season 4 this Sunday.

I watched a promo video off of iTunes today that listed the Mad Men Rules and wondered if they still worked today.

You are the product: If people don’t like you, they will do their best NOT to buy from you. Showing some of your personality allows people to connect with you. See Don Draper at his best in this clip from season 1 – The Carousel.
Live like there’s no tomorrow: Don’t let opportunity pass you by. Grab it and live each day to the fullest. Maybe that no longer includes drinking scotch at your desk.
There’s a place to cry – your apartment: You’ll get a lot of advice at work, not all of it is good, but some of it could change your life. You’re lucky if you find a mentor who you can trust.
When God closes a door, he opens a dress: Rule breaking. How does the way you live your life in one quadrant effect how you live it in another. In the end, crime doesn’t pay.
If you don’t want to have a fight, stop talking: Communication is the key. If you don’t let the steam escape in a controlled way, it will eventually bust a main pipe.
Being with a client is like being in a marriage: As many different types of people there are in the world, there are that many types of clients. Some clients you kiss their butt, some need to be scared and some clients you’re better off avoiding all together. See Don Draper explain to a client how it is.
Evaluate your strengths: If you take the time really evaluate your strengths and weaknesses and remain dispassionate and honest, what do you see?
Have a summer house: What kind of company do you want to work at? The kind where everyone has a summer house? How free are you to speak where you are now?
Only boring people are bored: This is one of my favorite lines ever from this show. I believe there is actually quite a bit of truth in it. Are you ever bored at work?
Put your nose down and pay attention to your work: This has been an old standby for many decades. Is the best way to stay creative and motivated at your job? Do you take time to think or do you just “work” all day?

Do you watch the show? What do you think of their rules?

7 Posts You May Have Missed

July 20, 2010 by Phil Buckley 3 Comments

Old floppy disks in the street — Digital storage?

I’ve seen a couple of bloggers respond to ProBlogger’s 7 Link Challenge last week, so here I am jumping on that bandwagon.

Your first post. SEO as an Afterthought was a cry for help. The marketing team at McClatchy was totally disconnected from the web development team. When we reached ou to the SEO, she had no idea how our CMS worked. Her boss had even less understanding. When I tried to bridge that gap I was slapped. My first post isn’t great but I still remember how cathartic it was.
A post you enjoyed writing the most. How You Can Be As Memorable As Morgan Siem stands out. It’s always easy to joyful to write about something that makes you happy. Morgan’s success and the way she’s achieved it should be a roadmap for the social media age.
A post which had a great discussion. Nobody Reads Anymore. Talking about reading always lets people pipe up with what they have enjoyed in the past.
A post on someone else’s blog that you wish you’d written. One of the most powerful headlines and blogs I’ve ever read. It’s Not The Recession, You Just Suck. You probably already know I’m a fanboy of Lisa’s writing style, but this one is a masterpiece IMHO.
A post with a title that you are proud of. How Social Media Can Save The Newspaper Industry. The title says it all. I still believe it to be the truth. Sometimes the straight forward headlines are the most powerful.
A post that you wish more people had read. Can Online Newspaper Sites Survive was one that had been forming in my head for a long time. The ideas behind it got me an official “talking to” at my job. Apparently the ideas are so heretical that they shouldn’t even be discussed.
Your most visited post ever. This one has 2 answers. The clear winner by a huge margin is Why You Should Be Twittering More. It had a little help when Mashable linked to it in a tweet so I sort of discount that one. The next winner combines a good headline and a good write-up: Social Media Case Study: How The Pit Uses Twitter and Foursquare.

This was more fun than I expected. It’s a good excercise to look back through your writing and take stock. Let me know if you’ve done the same.

Photo by: Jonathan Harford

Hiring For Performance

July 14, 2010 by Phil Buckley 9 Comments

The day Martin Smith left his post as E-Commerce Director at Sinclair Institute there was a large vacuum left behind. Martin was a formally trained, pure bred marketer who had a vision of a perfect and profitable future.

Who do you look to when filling a position like that? I think there are 3 distinct options.

A 25 year veteran who has been leading teams of skilled specialists who will cost you a fortune, but you can be pretty sure that the job will get done. This person will be the one guiding the company. They have a lifetime of knowledge and experience to pull from that can help everyone become better marketers.
A warm body that has some experience in direct marketing. Nothing terrible in their past, but nothing remarkable either. Visionary is not a word you normally associate with this person. This person will do the job, probably not do anything really dumb and be in their office everyday.
A person who seems capable but has almost no experience in leading a team and doing the political work that managers and directors are forced to do. They are “too young” and “inexperienced” but have the respect of their co-workers because they’re always doing the hard work. They are first in and last out everyday. They respond to emergencies that need attention even if it’s not their responsibility. They are a 27-year-old linchpin.

Choice #1 is safe, but few choose it because of the up front cost. They will no doubt be twice or three times the cost of choice #2.

Choice #2 is often the choice. She’s cheap and competent.

I’d like to make the case for #3.

Harrison R. Thyng plaque — Harrison R. Thyng - full Colonel at 26 years old

To us old guys, a 27-year-old seems like a slightly advanced high schooler, but at 27 some people are leading hundreds of soldiers in pitch battles, overseeing the largest social media site in the world or writing speeches the entire world listens to. We love the 27-year-old captain or major that comes home from overseas with a silver star pinned on his chest… we just won’t hire him to lead a team in our company.

My advice would be to nurture and take advantage of your opportunity for a win/win situation. You can get #3 for cheap. Instead of $250K for #1, or even $90K for #2, you can probably get #3 for $70K. Give them 12 or 18 months to prove themselves, maybe with a kick ass bonus if everything goes right. If everything goes wrong at month 3, you tell them and they can drop back to their previous position where they were crushing it anyway

They’ll be disappointed, but they’ve also gained fantastic experience, meaning they are more valuable to you.

They’ve been tempered and will be able to withstand more the next time.

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