SEO Archives - Page 3 of 7

Caught Off Guard

June 23, 2010 by Phil Buckley 13 Comments

I tried to share some SEO knowledge today at a Food4Thought luncheon. After my presentation, two of the organizers asked me to have lunch with them.

Lorana Price of Holy Cow Branding

Lorana Price, Holy Cow’s CEO and brand strategist and Lea-Ann Berst, lead strategist for Sleddogg Marketing Management sat down with me and we talked about the presentation. We ordered lunch and talked for a while. After the check was paid, Lorana turned to me and asked, “how can I help you?”

I haven’t been asked that question very often in my life. I was totally unprepared for the question and the sincerity with which it had been asked.

It’s a beautiful question when it doesn’t come at the end of a strained call to AT&T or Time Warner Cable.

What would your answer be to that question?

Latent Semantic Indexing

June 18, 2010 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

Sometimes when you are trying to explain a simple idea, people zone out because they think they already know it all. That’s when you whip out a phrase like Latent Semantic Indexing.

semantic web think tank — Sign on door to Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambrige University

It’s a great phrase because it sounds like a super complicated scientific method for… well, something. In reality, it’s sort of what good search optimizers have been talking about for a while.

Latent Sematic Indexing can have a very technical sounding definition:

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is an indexing and retrieval method that uses a mathematical technique called Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to identify patterns in the relationships between the terms and concepts contained in an unstructured collection of text.

I usually only throw out LSI when I’m losing people while talking about simple semantic document structure as a “best practice”. When I explain the the title tag should encompass the main thrust of the content of the page, it seems almost silly to say that out loud to a room full of adults – but sometimes titles and headlines seem barely thought through.

When I explain that the header tags should be used in a nested fashion people roll their eyes, until I show them they their sites are doing the opposite. Header tags are not a style, they are a semantic queue about what is important on your site.

I actually use a cocktail approach to semantically related phrases and real LSI. If you have a page about Sesame Street, you wouldn’t just stuff it with the phrase “sesame street”, you also want to include oscar the grouch, elmo and big bird.

Learning what words Google thinks are semantically related can help you. Try using the tilde operator, for example: ~bbq and you get a slew of relationships: barbeque, bbq grilling, grilling, bar-b-que, grilled.

What that would tell me is that if I had a website for the best bar-b-que in downtown Raleigh, I would try to get inbound links around all of those semantically related phrases.

You may have heard people talk about a site, or a page being “over-optimized”. Usually in those cases the content is focused on a single term that ends up looking spammy and forced rather than a semantic mix of phrases.

Photo by: pshab

Bring The Hardcore Data

June 17, 2010 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

Next Wednesday I’m speaking about search marketing at Food4Thought, an invitation only professional series in Raleigh. I was recruited by Lorana Price CEO & Brand Strategist at Holy Cow Branding after one of the SEO Meetups.

I’m not sure how search savvy all of the members are, but I know that if I try to softball it, everyone loses. My goal is to give the attendees at least 3 memorable things that can go back to their offices with that afternoon and start making positive changes. That’s impossible to do by giving a broad overview.

I have to bring the data. A lot of people already think that SEO is smoke and mirrors so more fluff won’t help.

Think about the conferences and speakers that you’ve liked the most, usually they hit you with facts and data.

What Happens When You Let Others Define You

June 4, 2010 by Phil Buckley 14 Comments

This week there was a online reputation management crisis that hit a local bakery. The online reputation management part of the equation was handled so poorly that now all that exists is the digital tire tracks.

There’s a lot of talk about how the bakery handled their problem poorly and how Twitter and Facebook filled up with comments from people saying they’ll no longer support them. But what about someone who moves here tomorrow, how does today’s blowup transfer?

Here’s how Google answers a query for crumb bakery raleigh tonight:

Google search result for crumb bakery raleigh

Bear eating a fish in a river — Bear Food

This means that eventually the “bad press” will overwhelm their other run of the mill search results. Since they have basically gone silent since the shit started hitting the fan, they have allowed others to totally define the entire event, including how they should respond.

I love the advice Lisa Barone gave LeBron James during his reputation management problem.

Here’s my advice. Constantly feed the bear. If you aren’t the one feeding the bear, someone else will feed him for you.

Awesome Alaskan Coastal Brown bear photo by: Alan Vernon.

Here, take this $60,000 and use it however you want

May 26, 2010 by Phil Buckley 7 Comments

Last night I sat in a slightly over crowded room in downtown Raleigh while Ashley Berman Hale held court at this month’s Raleigh SEO Meetup.

I’m not sure people are aware of the value of the Raleigh SEO meetup so I want to take a minute to put it into perspective. When I started at my current job, my boss was on the verge of signing a contract with an SEO firm in Boston who was going to perform an audit of our site for $60,000.

No doubt their audit would have been in a cool binder with lots of white-labeled charts and graphs, but at it’s core, it would have contained the items that Ashley spent just under 90 minutes last night outlining for the 65 people who attended. Having the knowledge of how to comb through your site and find it’s problems means you don’t have to pay $60,000 for someone else to do it for you.

If you missed the awesomeness last night then you missed one of the best SEO meetups of the year. But I have good news. Even the beautiful and talented Ashley Berman Hale couldn’t force feed all of the information in one session, so next month is part II. If you’re already a member of the meetup group, you can go grab the handout from last night and marvel at a document with over 40 links where you can test almost every aspect of your site.

The most important thing that I took away from last night was a quote from Einstein that Ashley mentioned early on, “Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination.” A website audit requires real brain work. There are tools available for gathering data, but it’s what you do from there that matters.

Now go make your site better before next month, you don’t want to get called out as the site with problems right? Better is you are called out as the best newspaper in Garner with only 1 css warning!

Getting Better Data From Your Links

May 20, 2010 by Phil Buckley 2 Comments

jQuery- write less.do more

It’s late, but I just finished up a fun little web analytics project that I think a lot of people could use. It’s not very sexy, but especially if you use Google Analytics, read on.

I wanted to track traffic from two sister sites that link back to the main e-commerce site more accurately. I decided that appending some traffic parameters to the links was the way to do it. So instead of having a link that looks like this:

Awesome Page

it would look like this:

Awesome Page

The advantage to having links like this is that they will allow you to collect more and better data. You can learn about building smarter links here.

So the down side was, nobody wants to have to write all that junk after every link. So as usual, my go-to javascript framework jQuery saved me. I’m no jQuery guru like my friend Lucas Myers (who runs an awesome javascript meetup), but I can usually get something working.

So I added this to my global footer of the site:

Those 6 lines of javascript is actually a jquery call, that waits for the dom to finish loading, then walks through the page, finds only the links that begin with http://www.example.com, and appends our super-duper tracking code to them.

Done!

Easy solutions like this make web development a lot easier.

Note: you need to invoke the jquery framework up in the head of your document.

How Are Your Influencing Skills?

April 22, 2010 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

I saw a question in one of my LinkedIn groups this morning from a Sr. Marketing Manager about where she could find “a good training course offered locally on influencing skills?”

Steve Jobs with the iPad — The King of Influence

This was the first time I had heard the term “influencing skills”. It’s one of those terms that sounds made up, but it’s not. The more I thought about it, I realized that your influencing skills are your most important weapon in the modern always-on, social-media, follower, fan, comment rich world.

If you have a job that you don’t love, you should be trying to use your influencing skills to make it better. You start with the guy in the next cube over. You convert him and now there’s 2 of you. You have leveraged your influence to double the size of your tribe. You talk to your team leader about your idea, and win her over with your smart idea, but also the way you presented it. The fact that you bought her lunch while pitching her doesn’t hurt either. Now you can approach the manager with some momentum behind you, which gives you confidence, which helps you influence the boss.

If you don’t have a job, you need to polish your influence skills to land one. Think about the company you would like to work at. Do they already know about you? If they don’t, why not? If they do already know you, and like you, how much of a leg up is that?

What are influencing skills?

Communication skills: If you aren’t sure what good communication skills are, you probably don’t have them. Here’s two simple ones to keep in mind. 1. Listen intently to the other person and try your best to grasp the entire meaning of what they’re saying. If you are unsure of something, ask them to clarify that point. 2. Do not multi-task while you have the privilege of getting face-time with someone. Let the phone and email buzzes go.

Presentation skills: I don’t just mean PowerPoint, although that helps. A presentation can take place anywhere, any time. Maybe you’re out grabbing lunch and your boss asks you something about the pending MacGuilicuddy account. You whip out a napkin and explain it clearly and briefly. What you’ve really done is calmed you boss. You’ve allowed him to not worry about it and enjoy lunch.

Interpersonal skills: You are not an island. There are people around you that can help you achieve your goals, if they love you, they will want to help you. Interpersonal relationships are often based on just two things. 1. Trust. 2. Generosity. Those two points almost always seem to be tightly connected. I probably won’t spot you $10 for lunch if I don’t trust you, and I probably won’t ask you to help out on a cool new project that could get us big bonuses if I don’t trust you.

Seth Godin had a great post today that asked people who were ready to quit, to spend their last little bit of effort quilting.

Spend hours every day integrating the people you work with into a cohesive group. Weave in your customers as well. Take every scrap, even the people you don’t like, and sew them together. Spend far less time than you should on the ‘real’ work and instead focus on creating genuine connections with the people you work with. Including your boss.

Generosity extends far beyond money and time. Are you generous with your emotional labor?

The last, but most important part of becoming a true influencer is to be real. Growing your influence doesn’t happen in a day or a week. It grows stronger the longer you put forth the effort.

Best Newspaper In Garner – an experiment [updated]

April 17, 2010 by Phil Buckley 8 Comments

The Garner Citizen is a small, locally owned and operated newspaper just south of Raleigh. It has competition from two other papers, both owned by large news concerns not based in the area.

There are words and phrases that any business likes to rank for in search results. One of the most satisfying is “best so-and-so”. As of today, I’m going to start an experiment and see how long it takes for me to get the phrase best newspaper in garner to pull up The Garner Citizen as the #1 organic result.

garner citizen search results from 2010-04-16 — best newspaper in garner search results from 2010-04-16

Consider it a mini test case.

I’ll update this post with tactics and results as the become available.

June 2nd 2010 Update: Well, it’s now at the #1 spot from a variety of locations. I saw that my handy SEOmoz rank tracker showed that it had jumped seven places since the previous week.

best newspaper in garner in SEOmoz Rank Tracker

So let’s go over the gigantic amount of work it took to accomplish this.

1. I wrote this post with the key phrase in the title tag, the meta description and in the body of the post.

2. I tweeted about it 4 or 5 times over the past month and a half.

3. I wrote one additional article using the same “secrets” I used in step 1 at another site.

Garner Citizen Google Rank Twitter Stream — social reinforcement

When I asked for some help from my Twitter friends yesterday to see what result the Google query: best newspaper in garner was showing at the #1 spot – it socially reinforced the result.

That last part is an increasing important part of what the search engines are considering important. Lots of chatter and linking on Twitter and Facebook will help your site rank better.

The great response to my request for help got me thinking about general social reinforcement of a phrase or keyword by asking people on your social networks to chime in when needed.

I will blog more about that idea after I test out a few more things related to it.

Now the question is, can the Garner Citizen hold on to the phrase “best newspaper in garner” or will their competitors come after them – stay tuned.

Cross Domain Canonical Tagging

April 17, 2010 by Phil Buckley 3 Comments

Duplicate content has long been a problem on the web. Not just a problem for content producers – who create great content only to see places like Mahalo come scrape your content and use it on their site to generate income for themselves.

Sometimes it’s a problem for a normal company. At McClatchy newspapers, they used to publish the same story into multiple sections because it fit in both “local” and “business”. Bingo – duplicate content.

On February 12, 2009 Google and Yahoo announced support for a rel=canonical tag.

That tag allows a web page to tell the search engine spiders, “I’m not the real page for this content, I’m just a cousin, the real page is located at…”

Using the newspaper as an example, they would designate one of those story versions as the canonical version, and the other page would have a meta tag in the head pointing at it.

As good as that was, it still left a big gap that people asked about the minute the original announcement was made. What about cross-domain tagging.

Some cross-host canonical tagging works. I can say that www.1918.com/foo.html is the canonical page even though backup.1918.com/foo.html has the same exact article. Intra-domain canonicalization works now. What doesn’t work is true cross-domain rel= canonical tagging.

That may be changing soon. During his April 13th Webmaster Help video, Matt Cutts says “…we are very far along the path of being able to look at rel=canonical and apply it across domains.”

If you syndicate content, make sure you include the canonical tag pointing back at the original source.

Photo by: Sam

Speeding Up Your Site

March 20, 2010 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

I’ve written about the Yahoo and Google tools available for helping you find ways to speed up your site. There are lots of good suggestions that are easy to understand, but there’s one that isn’t so well known.

If you are getting an warning about The following resources are missing a cache expiration, here’s what that means, and how to fix it.

What that means is that those resources (images, javascript calls, css files) are missing a cache expiration. Resources that do not specify an expiration may not be cached by browsers. Caching improves performance by transparently storing data on your computer so that future requests for that data can be served faster than requesting it from the server.

You can modify your .htaccess file to make sure that the right type of things get cached on your site.

Here’s what I usually use:



	ExpiresActive On

	#Add Cache-Control Headers

	Header set Cache-Control "max-age=3153600, public"

	#Add Cache-Control Headers

	Header set Cache-Control "max-age=86400, public, must-revalidate"

	#Add Cache-Control Headers

	Header set Cache-Control "max-age=3600, must-revalidate"

Adding the above to your .htaccess file tells visiting browsers that if they request an icon, pdf, image, javascript, stylesheet or flash resource to store a temporary version of it for 60 days (5,184,000 seconds). That way, if it is need again it can be accessed quickly. The reason we can do that is because those files rarely (if ever) change.

In the next block, xml and txt live slightly shorter before having to be requested again, and finally html files only live for an hour before needing to be requested.

Putting the code inside of the <IfModule mod_expires.c> tag allows you to trap and test if mod_expires.c is included in your Apache build. If you try to insert the code and mod_expires.c isn’t included, you’ll usually see a 500 error displayed.

Speed of Light photo by John Talbot via Flickr

Why The Raleigh SEO Meetup Is So Popular

February 14, 2010 by Phil Buckley 8 Comments

In December of 2008 I had become the defacto search engineer for McClatchy Interactive. I wanted to meet other people who had more experience than me and hopefully had better ideas and perspectives. I quickly found Ashley Berman Hale’s Raleigh SEO meetup. I didn’t have any idea what to expect as I walked into the offices of Triangle Direct Media for the groups’ 7th meetup.

Ashley greeted me and welcomed everyone warmly. Within a few minutes she had us all telling who we were and why we came. It was a great ice breaker. Then out came the handouts. Chuck full of useful bullet points and links to more information. Ashley then talked for about 30 minutes about whatever was the subject that night, stopping to answer questions that popped up, and finally finishing up by taking more questions at the end.

I hung around a little while after and talked to someone else that I knew there, and noticed that a lot of other people also hung around after. It was already a pretty tight group that feed off Ashley’s energy and warmth. I knew I’d be back the next month.

The meetups continued to be rock-solid and eventually my chatty ways made Ashley ask me if I wanted to be her assistant organizer. I tried to side-step it, but she suckered me in with tales of great meetup fame and fortune that awaited (ok, not really).

Once I started helping Ashley, I realized that she put a lot of time into her meetup preparation. Each month required about 6-10 hours of prep time. She’s driven to help small business owners who just needed the straight story, no crazy black-hat stuff or learn more by paying. She answers questions from members between meetings and even still finds time to be a Top Contributor with the Google Webmaster Forums. She is a breath of fresh air.

Every month the people who were there the previous month tell a couple of friends or co-workers about it and it grows. Last month we had to cap the number of people at 80 because the room we had booked at the 101 Lounge downtown turned out to be too small.

This month we have space at Issac Hunter’s Tavern which can hold 200. That seemed like overkill when we decided on it, but as of tonight we have 111 people who have confirmed they’re coming and 17 more listed as “maybe”.

So let’s get back to why the meetup is so popular.

I think there’s two main reasons. The first, is it’s founder. Ashley Berman Hale is a phenomenal speaker and leader. She puts everyone at ease while being so clearly in-charge that everything just seems to flow.

The second reason is the high quality of the people who attend. Every week the questions get better and better because the group becomes more diverse and feeds off itself.

There is also a third reason, but it’s a secondary reason. The group has become a social gathering as well. People who have to leave right after the formal talk ends are missing out on a great secondary discussion that goes on sometimes for hours. I remember after one meetup at the Cameron Village library a group of us standing outside and talking until about 10:30 (the library kicked us out at 9).

If you haven’t check out the meetup, there’s one on Tuesday the 16th at 6:30 in downtown Raleigh. What have you got to lose?

If you’ve attended the meetup, tell me how you feel.

URL Rewriting Using .htaccess

February 9, 2010 by Phil Buckley 3 Comments

I was talking to my friend Steve at Carrot-Top Industries this afternoon about rewriting url’s because of a hosting move. He is a savvy web marketer but was unfamiliar with the power of using an .htaccess file to fix 404 errors.

According the the Apache documentation an .htaccess file (or “distributed configuration file”) provides a way to make configuration changes on a per-directory basis. A file, containing one or more configuration directives, is placed in a particular document directory, and the directives apply to that directory, and all subdirectories thereof.

What that means in layman terms is, the .htaccess file allows you to override the server-wide apache directives for just your stuff.

In Steve’s case, he wanted to do some simple redirections from old url’s that no longer exist to existing pages. Here’s how to do that.

Create a new file in your root directory named .htaccess (yes, the file name starts with a dot).
Make sure the redirects are wrapped within a <IfModule mod_rewrite.c></IfModule> tag. That allows other directives to sit in that file without impacting the rewrites.
Understand that the file is read from top to bottom, so putting things in the wrong order can make very strange things happen.
Understand the flags you can use to impact processing, like [L] for last and [R=301] for a permanent redirect.
Try learning regular expressions if you dare – it makes redirecting via patterns much easier
Save the file and test every change right away. As soon as the file is saved, the redirections will be live, there is no lag.

Let’s look at some examples to make this easier.

You want to change the “About Us” page from /about.html to now be /about-us.php without breaking links that may be pointing at the old url.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
Redirect /about.html about-us.php [R=301]
</IfModule>

The redirect above is about as simple as it gets, the addition of the [R=301] flag indicates that it’s a permanent redirect, and thus, Google will continue to flow PageRank to the “new” page. Without the 301 redirect, requests that come in get a 302 redirect which means Google still thinks the “old” page should be getting any PageRank.

You can also use the following syntax:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
Redirect permanent /about.html about-us.php
</IfModule>

Both versions do the same thing, one just seems a little easier to read.

Here’s one that I had to use recently when I stripped the dates out of the url’s on this blog. Although I am doing this one using the Redirection Plugin for WordPress I’ll still explain it as if it was in the .htaccess file.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RedirectMatch 301 /(d*)/(d*)/(.*) /$3
</IfModule>

So the one above only does it’s redirect if it matches the first part. The first part is a regular expression that is looking for the following pattern: a slash, followed by a pattern starting with a digit, followed by a slash, followed by another pattern starting with a digit, followed by another slash, and finally anything. In this case it was /year/month/title-of-post and I needed to strip out the date part.

So using regular expressions means I can pick and choose what I want, in the above redirect I use 3 parenthesis. so the redirection says take whatever gets caught in the third one, and use that as the new url.

There’s a lot more you can do with .htaccess, and more complicated rewrites, but these two will handle the majority of the rewrites you’ll need.

I’ll stress 3 things: “test, test, test”. It’s easy to break stuff and completely bring down your site, so always test every new rewrite. If you break it, just go back to the previous version and replace it. You did back up the file right?

One final word about .htacess if your using WordPress. WordPress writes it’s own .htacess file, don’t write inside the wordpress specific rewrites, because your changes will get overwritten. Here’s what mine looks like:

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress
RewriteEngine On
more yada yada yada

WordPress looks for the #BEGIN and #END tags, just put your stuff under theirs.

Online Reputation Monitoring

January 17, 2010 by Phil Buckley 8 Comments

This post is by my friend Morgan Siem who is the mastermind of all things social at MediaTwo in Raleigh. You can catch her regularly posting at MediaTwoPointOH! or watch her real time insights via her @mediatwo_social Twitter stream.

I highly recommend monitoring your online reputation, whether you are a person or a company and whether you actively build an online presence or try to avoid the internet. You don’t have to infuse yourself into the online environment to have an online reputation to manage. Anyone aware of your brand can talk about it online. Enough people doing that, with enough of a following, can sometimes have a powerful impact on your bottom line. Therefore, be aware of what’s being said. Once you’re aware, you have the power to:

Thank those who give you good mentions
Provide corrections and accurate details when someone has his/her facts wrong
Try to solve a problem that a customer is having with your product
Apologize for your mess ups

There are a number of tools that you can use to monitor your reputation. There are free tools as well as paid tools, so the ones you decide to go with may depend on both your budget and the size of your brand.

Free tools:

Google Alerts: will ping you when there is a mention of your brand name. This is helpful because it scours the net for your and lets you know when something comes up, which saves you the effort of doing regular searches. The downsides are that it misses a lot of mentions and doesn’t allow you to fine-tune your search terms.
Twitter Search: allows you to track brand mentions in real time. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of the mentions to help you keep track of them.
Social Mention: This tool provides a few bonuses over other free monitoring tools, the primary bonus being that it scans a variety of social networks instead of just twitter (search.twitter.com) or just blogs (technorati.com). It also generates a sentiment score, although I wouldn’t trust it. And, like Google Alerts, it gives you the option to sign up for alerts.

Paid tools:

Radian6: Probably the most talked-about monitoring tool is Radian6, which allows you to track brand, competitor and industry mentions across a variety of online sources. Some of the cool widgets offered are a conversation cloud, a river of news, a topic trend analysis graph and a list of key influencers.
FiltrBox: This tool is gaining ground in the monitoring industry, but its prices are rising in fast pursuit. This tool also allows you to track conversations across several sources and provides a river of news and a list of top influencers. A benefit of this tool is that it will send you a daily digest of new mentions, and it will allow you to create as many new profiles as you’d like (unlike Radian6, which charges you for each new profile). However, it is not as robust as Radian6. There are fewer options for tagging posts and the conversation cloud has very limited functionality.

There are many other tools out there and many more being created every day. Which ones have you tried? What did you like or not like and why?

Goodbye McClatchy

January 13, 2010 by Phil Buckley 28 Comments

McClatchy Interactive building — McClatchy Interactive

I will be leaving my position at McClatchy Interactive in a few days. It will mean a big shift for me, but one that I’m really excited about.

I’ve worked with some great people, but in the end, I feel that I have to move on. Working in an industry that is constantly contracting isn’t good for my mental state. Being the guy swimming against the tide eventually exhausts you. I finally realized it wasn’t a dip, but a cul-de-sac.

I have an opportunity to do exactly what I’ve been advocating for while at McClatchy, and that’s one of the biggest reasons I’ve made this choice. I’m looking forward to doing search marketing, brand management and social media leveraging as my main tasks everyday.

I’ll still be blogging and tweeting, now all I need is for you guys to keep reading.

Is Foursquare Worth The Trouble?

December 21, 2009 by Phil Buckley 26 Comments

I recently had an interesting talk with Dan London, who one of the smartest search marketers I’ve met. He sees a real problem with most of the geo-locating social media tools, as a consumer you’re often left asking, “what’s in it for me?” As a business owner, you may look at a tool like Foursquare and say. “Why would I use something like that?”

It’s a circle of uncertainty that feeds on itself. Here’s my pitch to both consumers and businesses.

How do I use Foursquare to promote my business?

Here’s how I feel businesses could benefit from an active and sustained use one of the geo-enabled tools: Foursquare/Gowalla/Tri-Out/Loopt.

Bars and Restaurants: This is an easy one for me because I’ve written an entire post about how The Pit BBQ in Raleigh is doing it right. They were on Twitter, and actually listening to what people were saying about them. When they saw people checking in using Foursquare, they jumped on the bandwagon and were the first place I know of in the area to offer a “Special Offer” when “The Mayor” comes in.

In case you’re not a Foursquare user, you can become “The Mayor” of a venue by checking in there more than anyone else. That is the base functionality of Foursquare, but what you do with that functionality is up to you. So what The Pit is really doing is rewarding one of their best customers for always broadcasting to his friends that he’s eating at The Pit. Smart.

The cost for The Pit is a freebie every so often, but the return is a super targeted advertisement sent out by a happy patron to all of his friends who are already more likely to listen to that message than a radio or television ad.

I think any restaurant that isn’t using the geo-tagging services is falling behind more than the other types of businesses. A bar or restaurant need a buzz to stay filled, if I know my friends are always eating or drinking someplace, I’m more likely to go there to.

Realtor: I haven’t seen this yet, but I think a smart realtor will start doing this and gain a large following. If I am either buying or selling my house, I would love to see what else my realtor is showing. A tweet like, “Showing a 3BR 2bath colonial – $249k – twitpic” might get some people who are also selling the house for 249 to see what the competition is. People looking to buy in that range will want to see the picture of the house. Having it geo-tagged also lets everyone know what neighborhood it’s in.

Realtors are everywhere, what else can they do to set themselves apart?

Home Security System and Cable Guys: I thought of this one after talking with my cousin who is a sales/installation tech. How awesome if I was on the schedule for an appointment and I could see that 20 minutes ago my tech checking out from his previous appointment 10 miles away.

All of these examples are just jumping off points. For example when the cable guy leaves one appointment, the customer service guy could call and check in to make sure everything went well.

Why should I bother using Foursquare?

This side of the equation can more complicated. Whereas I think all businesses can see some benefit from using one of these tools, I think a consumer can go either way. I’ll explain the benefit I see from using them.

1. Feeling Special: Last night I decided to go out to dinner with my wife. We decided that we would head to The Pit. At 5:15 I sent out the tweet below.

the-pit-reservation — My lame attempt at making a reservation

We arrived for dinner about 6 and were seated for dinner. First, the waiter remembered me from a Tweetup there a few weeks ago, then the manager came over to say hello. Both of those small actions go a long way in making anyone feel special. If that was the end of it, it would have been fine, but after dinner, I saw this:

The Pit was keeping an eye out for me — The Pit keeping an eye out for me

That was pretty cool. It’s extra work for them to keep an eye out for me, then when they saw me and my wife arrive, to take a minute to send out that tweet.

Let me be honest that I’ve gone out of my way to help build my relationship with the guys at The Pit, but they’ve done the same, and not just with me, but with a large group of social networkers in the area.

Besides real tangible value, I also get some satisfaction from becoming “The Mayor” of places, especially when I can oust someone else. It’s a bragging rights thing.

Another nice side effect is getting the chance to run into friends while I’m out. By broadcasting my location to my friends, it allows them to come by and join up if they want.

I think in the end, it’s all about using tools that help you. I find value from these tools, so I’ll continue to use them.

D0 you use any of these tools? Why (or why not)?

2010 Prediction for SEO & Social Media

December 13, 2009 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

2009 was a really exciting year for people involved in search and social media. A lot of the search excitement came from the launch of Bing, the Caffeine update, Sidewiki and Real-Time search results. Social Media was finally leaving the “shiny object” stage and becoming a real force in driving traffic (online and off).

So what about next year?

I believe next year will be the mainstream rise of mobile optimization, mobile search, and geo-enabled everything. I think it will force three major components to come together – search,social media, development.

If I’m standing downtown wondering where to eat lunch, I’ll need you to have worked with all three departments to have a chance to grab me.

Is your business on Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla, Tri-Out, BrightKite? Are their recommendations for you at those sites? Is the information about your business correct? Can I get your street address so I can map my way to you? If I see your business and click the link on my phone, is your site optimized for me?

I think the days of stand-alone SEO are now way behind us, it’s now an integrated science. Web development without a comprehensive plan for mobile is short-sighted at best, reckless at worst. If you have a premium product or service and don’t have a dedicated smartphone apps, you’re falling behind.

The winners in 2010 will be similar to the winners in 2009, the quick, the nimble, the confident, the risk takers and those not afraid of failure.

The losers will be the companies immobilized by the disruptions in their sector. If your boss is saying things like, “we can ride this out if we just hunker down”, you may be hunkered down so deep, you can no longer see that the parade has already passed by.

If you had to predict one thing for 2010, what would it be?

How Google’s Real-Time Search Will Change Twitter and Facebook

December 8, 2009 by Phil Buckley 11 Comments

December 7th, 2009 – a date which will live in infamy. The World Wide Web was suddenly and deliberately indexed, in real time, by the robots from the Empire of Google.

So how will Google’s latest update change the rules? I immediately thought of one thing specifically – keyword tweeting.

Since Real Time Search (RTS) means that a LOT of twitter updates will flow, if you’re tweeting professionally, you need to step up your game.

No more tweets like “at @peiwei – I love this stuff”, now you’ll start seeing much more targeted tweets like “I’m at @peiwei for lunch – I love the Pei Wei Spicy Chicken #good #value #hungry”.

Facebook will probably also see a move in that direction, especially on Fan pages.

During the press conference, Amit Singhal, a Google fellow who heads Google’s ranking systems and oversaw the development of the new real-time search system, announced that they would be pulling RTS from a number of sources including:

Tweets from Twitter
Content from Google News
Content from Google Blog Search
Newly created web pages
Freshly updated web pages
FriendFeed update
Jaiku updates
Identi.ca updates
TwitArmy updates

In the future, content from Facebook and MySpace will also be included. One thing I missed, but Danny Sullivan caught was, “Google also noted that it is expanding shortened URLs. You’ll still see the shortened version listed (say if it is from bit.ly or another URL shortener), but then you’ll also see the final destination URL. Content from that destination page is spidered.”

Danny has an awesome post that goes into a lot of the nooks and crannies of RTS, you should take the time to read his post at Search Engine Land.

So what does this mean to content producers? If you were half-assing it up until now, you will now be quarter-assing it, and probably be out of a job soon. If you write crappy headlines, it’s time to stop.

If you are Tweeting with a purpose, take note of what words you’re using.

One side effect of this may be that the automated tools that try to figure out sentiment may have an easier time if people start becoming more aware of how their updates are seen.

How is RTS going to effect your business?

Simple Reputation Management

December 2, 2009 by Phil Buckley 3 Comments

At the next Raleigh SEO Meetup, we’re covering Your Brand Presence & Managing It Online. Ashley had this one queued up for at least 3 months, but over the last week or so, some of my favorite blogs have decided to also write about it.

Lisa Barone over at Outspoken Media wrote about Protecting Your Brand From Online Attacks. She sums it up nicely with her 4 bullet points:

Work on claiming your SERP
Ramp up your customer service
Build your listening station
Learn when to duck and when to punch

Don’t over look #4, not every attack or slight needs a response. When you get in an argument with a crazy person, nobody can tell that only one of you is crazy.

Then Chris Brogan gets into a discussion of Timberland and his bad experience with them and then pulls back when he realizes that his powerful blog can do real damage to a company’s online presence. It was a really smart move on his part to pull back and recalculate.

If you or your brand are known by more than a handful of people, you have an online reputation. The more connected you are, the easier it is to see what that reputation is.

Let’s take a quiz, shall we? I’ll say a brand name, you shout out the first word you think of that relates to it, ready?

Toyota Prius

Fox News

Michael Moore

Oprah

AT&T

NY Yankees

Sarah Palin

Well, how did that go? Did you have an opinion on those brands?

Those brands have people dedicated to monitoring and defending their brand, even so, I probably found at least one that you don’t have a positive opinion of . So with that in mind, how is your online reputation?

The other day I was in the Wake County Courthouse watching as the kids that broke into my house last summer and stole 2 laptops went in front of a judge in juvenile court. A couple friends had asked for updates, so I tweeted out some updates.

Now, if you do a search on Google for Derice Utley(who pleaded guilty to felony breaking and entering) this is what you see:

That’s a classic online reputation problem. So what can he do to fix this, I mean besides stop breaking the law?

Well, step 1 would be what Lisa Barone suggests. Get control of your brand on the search result page. If your only footprint on the web is what other people have said about you, it will eventually be something bad. People will rarely write a post about how awesome you are, they are much more likely to write a long rant about how much you suck.

I try to regularly Google my name to see what is showing up. I share a name with a comedian so we share most of page 1, but more importantly I control all of the sources of information that show up on that page about me. Twitter, this site, LinkedIn and my Google profile page are all places I have the opportunity to put my best forward. Any brand can, and should be doing the same thing. If you wait until Defcon4 before starting, it’s too late, start right now. If you’re not a big business, you can do some personal branding to inoculate yourself against future screw ups.

If you are a business, you can do something that can head off a nasty rant, you can stop sucking. I know that even the best companies sometimes have customers that can’t ever be satisfied, but more often, that’s not the case. For example, my wife sprained her ankle really bad this morning so we spent a chunk of the day on the phone with doctor offices and in x-ray offices. In almost every exchange, on the phone or in person, the treatment we received ranged from below average to really bad.

So what happens when you see someone trashing your brand, or your company or even you personally? First decide if it’s worth engaging at all. Sometimes, it’s just not worth the effort, but other times you have to. First, take a breath and realize they are pissed off about something. Is the complaint actually warranted? If you could have done better, say so. Apologize to the person and move the conversation from “I hate you guys” to “how can we fix the problem”.

If the problem is someone who is misguided, enter gently and explain why they might be looking at things differently than you. Personally, I still think an apology doesn’t hurt in this case either.

Sometimes you will just get a situation where someone doesn’t want reconciliation, they want vengeance. This is harder. If a former employee calls you out on Twitter as a liar or says you did something illegal, how do you react? In this case, you have to make a judgment about the other person and if you think there is any way to salvage the relationship. If there isn’t, don’t respond directly where everyone else can see a running transcript of the craziness. In a situation like this, you may want to ask your network of friends to offer up a defense for you. That way, it makes the disgruntled ex-employee just look like a disgruntled ex-employee.

If you want to find out about some of the really cool tools available to you so that you can listen in to what’s being said about you, join us on the 15th, or check back here next week for part 2.

How Writing Bad Headlines Can Cost You Money

November 22, 2009 by Phil Buckley 1 Comment

Sometimes I wonder what some of the people in my own company are thinking. I’m not talking about huge corporate decisions, I’m talking about a tiny little decision that impacts the usefulness of one website.

Not to long ago, the News & Observer’s web team redesigned the newsobserver.com site. The response was good from most people. The problem is that no matter how nice a redesign is, if you don’t enable your site to help people find news, it will ultimately fail.

Saturday was Raleigh’s 65th Annual Christmas Parade put on by the Greater Raleigh Merchants Association. My family wanted to attend, but I wasn’t sure of the start time, so I Googled it.

I was glad to see that I could find the information pretty easily, but then I wondered where the News & Observer’s story was? Surely they had at least a snippet about an annual event that is attended by thousands of people.

I searched Google News but still found nothing.

Finally I decided to act like a normal web user and not use my employee super powers.

It took a little while but I finally found the story they had published because of a map that showed up in the news results during an additional search.

The image showed the route the parade would take down Hillsborough Street, turning at the Capitol and then proceeding down Fayetteville Street.

There is a big fat title on the image that says “Raleigh 2009 Christmas Parade”. There is also an explanation on the graphic again saying “It’s time for the Raleigh Christmas Parade.”

The funny part is that the graphic has all of the information I was looking for.

So why couldn’t I find the story when I searched for it?

It’s a classic case of someone thinking with their print brain instead of their web brain.

The McClatchy CMS allows you to have different headlines, one for print, one for the web, and even a couple others. In this case, only one was used, and it was about as bad a headline as I could have thought up for people looking for information about the Raleigh Christmas Parade –Yule procession at 9:30 a.m. in Raleigh.

Really News & Observer? Yule Procession?

So then I decided to dig a little bit to see what type of numbers there was for choosing “Yule Procession” over “Christmas Parade”

So it appears that no one is actually search for the phrase “Yule Procession”, but the phrase “Christmas Parade” is rising over the last few days in the Raleigh-Durham area.

I can’t say what the actual dollar amount we lost with such a silly headline, but the since our advertising model is based mostly on page impressions, this was a missed opportunity.

Sitemap Best Practices

November 17, 2009 by Phil Buckley 1 Comment

There are two types of sitemaps, and both are important for optimizing your site for search.

Matt Cutt’s from Google explains which one Google likes better.

HTML Sitemaps

The first type of sitemap is a standard HMTL sitemap. It is sometimes a standalone page, or stuck down in the footer of a page, it is totally visible to the users and offers another way for both humans and search robots to access sections of your site.

On a large site, an HTML sitemap will not have a link to every page, but will highlight the most important sections as shortcuts to the good stuff.

Google suggests that your site make an HTML sitemap available. You don’t really want your sitemap indexed by the search engines, so adding a <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow”> will take care of that.

XML Sitemaps

The second type of sitemap is an XML sitemap. XML sitemaps are not intended for human consumption, they are strictly for the search engines. There are a few different types that you can use.

You can give specific information in your XML sitemap that can help the SE’s understand what pages are important. The most basic type of xml sitemap is available for all of the pages on your site. It follows this format:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

The only required tag is <loc>, which is the location of the file. The other fields allow you a way to supply more information. <lastmod> is the last time the file was modified, <changefreq> is how often the file changes (usually you use either lastmod or changefreq, not both), and priority is how important the page is for your site on a scale from 0.0 to 1.0 – So for example your homepage might be 1.0, major sections a 0.9, important sections 0.8, run of the mill pages 0.5 and so on.

When building out your xml sitemap, you can include every single page of your site, but you don’t have to. The search engines will use your sitemap as a guide, and may stop processing urls at some point if the SE feels it’s no longer getting quality results – so order it from most important to least important if possible.

Googler John Mueller responded to a question about timing with the following:

The Sitemaps processing pipeline can be delayed depending on its overall load at any given time. The pipeline prioritizes Sitemaps to be processed based on the best use of Googles resources, dependent on multiple factors. For example sites hosted on servers with slow response times or sites that do not meet the Webmaster Guidelines may experience delays. It generally shouldn’t cause you great alarm.

Google also reminds you, “Please note that submitting a Sitemap doesn’t guarantee that all pages of your site will be crawled or included in our search results.”

News Specific Sitemaps

Google allows you to submit your freshest news to their spiders via a news sitemap. Recently Google updated the information you can have in your news sitemap to make it even better!

A News Sitemap uses the Sitemap protocol, with additional News-specific tags as defined below. Here is an example of a News Sitemap entry using News-specific tags:

Google allows you to submit your freshest news to their spiders via a news sitemap. Recently Google updated the information you can have in your news sitemap to make it even better!

A News Sitemap uses the Sitemap protocol, with additional News-specific tags as defined below. Here is an example of a News Sitemap entry using News-specific tags:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
xmlns:n=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.org/business/article55.html</loc>
<n:news>
<n:publication>
<n:name>The Example Times</n:name>
<n:language>en</n:language>
</n:publication>
<n:access>subscription</n:access>
<n:genres>pressrelease, blog</n:genres>
<n:publication_date>2008-12-23</n:publication_date>
<n:title>Companies A, B in Merger Talks</n:title>
<n:keywords>business, merger, acquisition, A, B</n:keywords>
<n:stock_tickers>NASDAQ:A, NASDAQ:B</n:stock_tickers>
</n:news>
</url>
</urlset>

A News Sitemap lists only news articles which have been published on your site within the past two days. You shouldn’t include older articles. You can remove articles older than two days from the News sitemap, but they will remain in the News index for the regular 30 day period.

A News Sitemap must contain a publication date for each article, which refers to the date that the article first appears on your site. Please make sure not to set this to the “current” time. There are a lot of errors that can happen, they’re explained in more detail in Google’s Webmaster Help Forum.

Video Sitemaps

Google can crawl the following video file types: .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv. All files must be accessible via HTTP. Metafiles that require a download of the source via streaming protocols are not supported at this time.

Below is an example video sitemap entry:

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
xmlns:video=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/videos/some_video_landing_page.html</loc>
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://www.site.com/video123.flv</video:content_loc>
<video:player_loc allow_embed=”yes”>http://www.site.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123</video:player_loc>
<video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.example.com/thumbs/123.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
<video:title>Grilling steaks for summer</video:title>
<video:description>Get perfectly done steaks every time</video:description>
<video:rating>4.2</video:rating>
<video:view_count>12345</video:view_count>
<video:publication_date>2007-11-05T19:20:30+08:00.</video:publication_date>
<video:expiration_date>2009-11-05T19:20:30+08:00.</video:expiration_date>
<video:tag>steak</video:tag>
<video:tag>meat</video:tag>
<video:tag>summer</video:tag>
<video:category>Grilling</video:category>
<video:family_friendly>yes</video:family_friendly>
<video:expiration_date>2009-11-05T19:20:30+08:00</video:expiration_date>
<video:duration>600</video:duration>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>

Why It’s Called BETA

October 28, 2009 by Phil Buckley 3 Comments

The people who run the Charlotte Observer’s website rolled out a new beta site recently at charlotte.com. It appears that they want to be a one-stop portal for all things in and around Charlotte, North Carolina.

I’d love to hear what you think about it. Here’s where I’m at with it.

They’ve had the charlotte.com domain pointing at their charlotteobserver .com news domain for over a year, and when they threw the switch to split the domains, there was some confusion. They predicted that the switch might cause some confusion, so they had an information box slide down when you hit the home page. The informational box was a good idea, but I think the execution could have been better. They needed 2 sentences in big bold letters, instead we got 4 paragraphs of various font sizes – which I think meant nobody read it.

If I decide to try out the site by clicking on the top “What’s Happening” story, I get taken to an interim page where all I get is the first paragraph or two, I have to click again to see the story I asked for on the homepage.

The reason that’s frustrating is that it’s not the way the stories in the other column respond. Clicking on a story in “Currently Popular” takes me directly to the full story.

So now I decide to tell the webmaster my gripes, so I click on the big blue box that asks for feedback. Nothing happens, I click it again thinking I missed it. Nope, the box is not hyperlinked. I click the next largest graphical element, nope, not linked. Oh, I see it, it’s the smallest text on the page.

The Charlotte team may not have been aware of it, but that is saying to me, “We don’t really want your feedback.”

They use the awesome Get Satisfaction product to manage the customer service part of the site, but they don’t use the default side tab (like on this very site) that has become a standard on so many web2.0 sites. I think adding the default tab and fixing the user-interface problems would be an easy win.

The next step is the actual management of the charlotte.com customer service page. It’s not easy to do community management, especially for the newspaper industry, which is more used to supporting their advertisers than their readers.

Readers are a fickle bunch. They don’t care about problems, they care about themselves. If you’re going to put up a button and encourage feedback, you best set aside resources to engage.

As of right now, this comment has been sitting unaddressed for 4 days.

The comment is actually pretty accurate, it does have a simple generic look to it the first time to browse to it. Letting this comment sit unanswered, while 4 additional people click the “I agree” button is not managing your community effectively.

A missed opportunity on the site is the streamlined login. They allow users to log in a plethora of ways, but I didn’t even notice until someone else pointed it out to me.

Much like the Get Satisfaction default side tab, alternate login methods have a default look, and charlotte.com has decided to ignore them, for no apparent reason.

When I click the tiny Facebook icon in Firefox, I get a warning of 5 windows opening – eek!

Then when you are officially logged in, the site takes on yet another look, and now the default Get Satisfaction tab appears.

There are other minor tweaks, like every page having the exact same title tag, no usable meta tags and almost no searchable content.

That’s what BETA is all about… listening, acknowledging and tweaking.

Let me know what you think.