THE KEY TO YOUR ONLINE PRESENCE
Customers are more tech-savvy than ever and the number of consumers who grew up interacting online is growing. Businesses have been flocking to the online world to spread their message and look for new buyers, but all too often the message is fake, forced, or just not relevant to modern customers.
Perhaps the most important orthodoxy underlying a brand’s online presence should be authenticity. Being online isn’t enough; you have to be real. It’s what people expect today, and they know the difference when it’s forced.
“I just met you, and this is crazy, but here’s my business card, so pay me maybe?”
The Internet IS the public sphere, especially in the area of social media. It’s where people gather, exchange comments and ideas, and network. But just because this is taking place online instead of face to face doesn’t mean common rules of personal etiquette don’t apply, even for a business
If you go to a dinner party or industry networking event, do you walk around introducing yourself to people, hand them your business card, and brow-beat them with information about your services and company? No. You try to have a real conversation with equal parts speaking and listening. You begin to build real relationships. And so should any authentic business looking to create a positive presence online.
Luckily, there are more tools for businesses to do this than ever. Don’t worry about being everywhere; no one belongs to every social club in town. Pick the ones that work best for your business and be real.
Authentic People Are Aware
Another key to online authenticity is awareness. Authentic people are aware of what’s going on around them. They follow up with friends and ask how their recent vacations are or how that big meeting went at work last week. Unaware people are sloppy. An unaware person forgets names. An authentic business has the same awareness about their community of online followers and the general world around them.
Unfortunately, there have been quite a few examples of brands online who haven’t made awareness, and therefore authenticity, a priority in their online presence. Take the National Rifle Association, for example. The morning after the tragic shootings in Aurora, CO, earlier this year, the NRA tweeted, “Good Morning, Happy Friday! Weekend plans?” While the NRA commented that the tweeter wasn’t aware of the shooting, the tweet stayed on their page for hours. A more aware online presence would have addressed the issue, or at least deleted the tweet, much more quickly.
Compare this with episode with Kitchen-Aid. During the first Presidential debate of 2012, the Kitchen-Aid twitter account posted: “‘Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! ‘She died 3 days b4 he became president’.” The tweet instantly went viral, and was almost immediately deleted and followed with a swift succession of tweets explaining that a staffer posted to the wrong account, apologizing for the comment, and reaching out to press outlets offering official comments. That is an aware brand.
Now, this brings up the situation of allowing others to tweet on your company’s behalf or scheduling posts ahead of time. There’s a lot of conjecture about both of these practices, but long story short, if the underlying principal of authenticity is maintained, neither are “wrong”.
Penguin And Panda Will Get You
Thanks to Google, we’ll never look at cute penguins or cuddly pandas the same way ever again. Penguin and panda are code-names for recent updates Google made to their algorithms that return search results, with Panda targeting online content and Penguin focusing on links. Google is always working to show the most relevant and legitimate search results, so it wants to weed out spam and bad content as much as possible. That means Google is looking to reward authentic content and punish bad or unauthentic content.
Websites with weak content, content that doesn’t relate to the purpose of the website, or was copy and pasted from another source, will face the wrath of penguin and panda. However, websites that have original, thoughtful, and engaging content are rewarded.
There’s more online content being generated by businesses than ever. It’s a lot to sift through. And while most businesses won’t ever have the great viral video that the whole world sees, having an authentic presence online will help ensure that when you’re brand is found online, potential customers will want to spend time with/on what you have to say.
SEPTEMBER SEO UPDATE
September Monthly Summary
Google Updates
On September 27, Google released a Panda algorithm update and an Exact Match Domain (EMD) Update. The EMD update targets domains that exactly match the search terms they hope to be found with and devalues those domains. For example, domains such a playscrabble.net and purses.com which previously ranked #3 for their respective exact match phrases (“play scrabble” and “purses”) have now been dropped out of the top 10 search results. The following graph illustrates the effect of this update.
According to a tweet from Matt Cutts, “New exact-match domain (EMD) algo affects 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree.” This update is extremely important because exact match domains used to be a very common SEO tactic and after this update it is clear that this tactic/shortcut to rankings is no longer effective. As an agency, we are following this update closely and are continuing to use proven effective strategies like great quality content and link building for our clients.
On October 4, Google announced 65 changes to their search algorithm. As usual, we have highlighted the updates we are most interested in.
- #82862. [project “Page Quality”] This launch helped you find more high-quality content from trusted sources.
- #84394. [project “Page Quality”] This launch helped you find more high-quality content from trusted sources.
- #84010. [project “Page Quality”] We refreshed data for the “Panda” high-quality sites algorithm.
These updates are all concerned with making sure the highest quality pages are listed first in Google’s search results.
- #83761. [project “Freshness”] This change helped you find the latest content from a given site when two or more documents from the same domain are relevant for a given search query.
- Imadex. [project “Freshness”] This change updated handling of stale content and applies a more granular function based on document age.
Fresh high quality content is continuing to be extremely important to Google search results. The more relevant and interesting the content on your site is, the higher the algorithm will rank your pages. These updates should also begin to move down those old, entrenched pdfs that sometimes rank third or fourth for a keyword, even though they were written years ago.
- #82279. [project “Other Ranking Components”] We changed to fewer results for some queries to show the most relevant results as quickly as possible.
- LTS. [project “Other Ranking Components”] We improved our web ranking to determine what pages are relevant for queries containing locations.
- #84586. [project “Other Ranking Components”] This change improved how we rank documents for queries with location terms.
- #83406. [project “Query Understanding”] We improved our ability to show relevant Universal Search results by better understanding when a search has strong image intent, local intent, video intent, etc.
Last month’s summary mentioned that Google is now sometimes only displaying only 7 results for certain search queries as opposed to the usual 10. Google’s latest updates confirm that this will continue and that we can expect to see fewer results but an increased relevancy of those results.
Just For Fun
The holidays are right around the corner and if you are going to be flying to visit family this year, you might want to check out Google Flight Search. As of Sept. 28, you can now search for flights from your tablet. What is unique about using Google to search for flights instead of Expedia, Hotwire, or Priceline is you can search all airports near a city at once. For example, a search from Dallas, TX to New York, NY shows you a comparison of flights from both DAL and DFW to JFK, LGA, and EWR.
Resources
WHAT IS DIGITAL RETAILING? PART ONE: ORGANIZATION
Somebody who works in the E-commerce industry recently told me they have trouble explaining Digital Retailing to others. Because it’s still a fairly new concept to consumption, I, too, used to have trouble explaining Digital Retailing to others. Of course, when somebody hears the phrase Digital Retailing, they think online sales, and that’s pretty accurate. However, I’d like to speak about Digital Retailing at a higher level, as though I had to explain strategies to the Shark Tank.
I started to think about what exactly it is that I’m doing to help businesses succeed with a digital presence. I know having a proper Digital Retailing strategy is a must. And I know that my effort, skills, and knowledge provide results such as increased ROI and leads, but for a while I couldn’t explain how these elements help in an easy phrase. Then, I came up with a sentence, somewhat of an elevator pitch, that I feel clearly explains how I view Digital Retailing:
Digital Retailing involves creating a properly organized, efficient, scalable, and engaging digital presence.
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to break down each element from the above phrase and explain why I feel they’re important to every company’s Digital Retailing presence. Please keep in mind that a majority of my experience and skills have been developed from Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Online Merchandising.
Organization
Working with SEM has made it clear to me that a digital presence must absolutely be well organized. Because I work at an agency, I get the incredible opportunity to work closely with a variety of departments, allowing me to get hands-on experience with how research and tasks are completed across all departments. My favorite department to hover around is development.
A partnership between search marketers and web developers works in everyone’s favor. Developers have shown me how important the organization of a project architecture must be in order for the project to function properly, ideally, and to be prepared for future updates or progressions in technology. Working with developers also introduced me to a better and more organized workflow, utilizing Version Control Systems and regular expression to make my life easier as a technical SEO (and probably so I don’t have to bother a developer for a simple change to a .htaccess or robots.txt file). In my experience, digital marketers commonly make the decision on what the hierarchical structure of categories and navigation should be, along with addressing canonical decisions and proper content organization and strategies.
Of course, having a background in search and definitely a more business oriented individual, I can’t leave out all of the organization that must go into an effective digital marketing campaign. Whether you’re working with SEO, PPC, Display, Social, or other, you’re going to accumulate A LOT of data. I’ve found the best way to handle all of that data is to develop outstanding organization skills. Once you have a solid strategy for organizing and researching, stick to it! That’s the only way you’ll keep your sanity. If you’re working with a team, make sure everybody is using the same techniques for research and data gathering. This will ensure data is kept consistent when passed around between coworkers and clients.
Another commonly overlooked aspect of Digital Retailing organization is brand consistency across channels. This includes displaying accurate content through all areas of the online landscape, including: phone numbers, website address, contact emails, promotions, descriptions, etc. As retailing moves more towards an omni-channel approach, brand consistency and organization will only become more important when delivering an optimal user experience.
AUGUST SEO UPDATE
State of the Search Industry Update
August was another month without a published Google update list so this month’s update is more of a “state of the industry” update. According to the State of Search Marketing Report 2012, search has grown 19% since 2011 and is predicted to reach an estimated $23 billion dollars by the end of the year. This growth is expected to continue at a 13% rate through 2013.
7 is the New 10
Google did make one very important algorithm change this month. Now some search queries are only pulling seven results on the first page. These first seven results may also be less diverse and much more branded. For example a search for “pc tools” returns only seven organic results. The middle of August showed this change dramatically and SEOMOZ reported that almost one-fifth of the SERPs they tracked were showing only 7 results.
Google’s 86 June-July Updates included three updates specifically mentioning site clustering. Site clustering is showing multiple links from the same domain in the search results.
- #82541. [project codename “Other Ranking Components”] This is one of multiple projects that we’re working on to make our system for clustering web results better and simpler.
- NoPathsForClustering. [project codename “Other Ranking Components”] We’ve made our algorithm for clustering web results from the same site or same path (same URL up until the last slash) more consistent. This is one of multiple projects that we’re working on to make our clustering system better and simpler.
- bergen. [project codename “Other Ranking Components”] This is one of multiple projects that we’re working on to make our system for clustering web results better and simpler.
Google’s response to this 7 result change was:
We’re continuing to work out the best ways to show multiple results from a single site when it’s clear users are interested in that site. Separately, we’re also experimenting with varying the number of results per page, as we do periodically. Overall our goal is to provide the most relevant results for a given query as quickly as possible, whether it’s a wide variety of sources or navigation deep into a particular source. There’s always room for improvement, so we’re going to keep working on getting the mix right.
At GlobeRunnerSEO, we are watching these changes very closely and working very hard to make sure our clients continue to rank on the first page, whether there are 7 or 10 results on that first page.
Link Building—it’s about Quality and Quantity
This week we went to DFWSEM, the largest and most important search marketing professional group in the area. We discussed links and how even with the updates to Penguin being termed “jolting” in the near future, both the quality and quantity of links will remain important to rankings.
Social Rankings Devalued?
Google has devalued social signals recently because Facebook and Twitter have blocked Google from crawling their data at different times and as Matt Cutts put it, “We can’t use what we can’t see.” This does not mean that you should give up your social campaigns. Social media is extremely important in branding, reputation, and customer service. A strong brand presence on the web drives traffic and conversions. We and several of our peers at DFWSEM predict that social media will be the fourth pillar of SEO in the very near future, joining the well-established pillars: site architecture, links, and content.
Google+ and Google Authorship of articles and blog posts have not been devalued because Google can see this data. Google Authorship (linking your Google+ profile) to a blog article you have written automatically pushes your article’s rankings higher.
Bing, on the other hand, is incorporating more social results into their search results. Bing announced in September that Quora data will now be included in their search results.
Just For Fun
We don’t typically talk much about Bing and a client’s rankings on Bing; since Bing makes up only 25.3% of all organic searches (Google processes 68.8% of all organic searches). However, Microsoft is running a blind taste test to see if users prefer Google or Bing search results. Here’s the link to the test www.bingiton.com, let us know which search engine you prefer and we will tell you which engine’s results the GlobeRunner team preferred.
Resources
WHAT IS SEO?
In a world where we are so often identified by what we do as who we are, being in SEO doesn’t always help people draw the most accurate picture of what I do or who I am. So in an effort to provide a frame of reference for our own clients, as well as potential clients, I wanted to take a minute and lay out the basic framework of SEO.
SEO is Search Engine Optimization, or literally the efforts made in helping your web site to appear more prominently in Search Engine results, ie Google. The reality of our world is when people have a need, of any type, they immediately use search to begin to solve their problem. Search, and more poignantly, Google, has changed the way in which the world accesses and judges information, in so much that whatever results are returned for a particular search, are generally viewed as the best or most appropriate results. The bottom line is regardless of the product you sell, the service you offer, whether you are a business-to-business industry or a consumer facing industry, people, your potential clients and customers, are searching for your product, for information about your product, for reviews, for specifications, searching for answers. SEO helps connect your business with those customers searching for you.
SEO is not a fixed concept, nor is it an agreed upon set of rules or best practices. SEO is a dynamic and evolving industry that has seen tumultuous change and redirection nearly every year. What does not change is the fundamentals of where SEO takes place and what Google looks to in order to help “rank” your site. These ranking factors may change in weight, or how google values each factor, as well as entirely new factors arising. When we talk about SEO and ranking factors we talk about 2 main things: On-Site & Off-Site.
On-Site
When we talk about On-Site we’re referring to the actual coding and elements of your website: How your content is structured and organized, the particular elemental tags used to differentiate content on your site, from the way you tag your images to the url structure and page types you employ. Quality SEO is diving into each page, having a clear goal in mind and a coordinated effort for all elements of the page towards the particular page goal.
Off-Site
The other main factor is what is happening in reference to your site, out in the web. So in addition to how you structure your content and label it, Google also wants to see some authority on the web with regard to your content. The best way of weighting the value of a site’s content is by evaluating the number of other sites that link to that particular page and/or domain. This is the essence of backlinks, or other sites that link back to your website. The type of link and value of each type vary widely, but what remains consistent is the need for quality backlinks in order to move the needle. In recent years we’ve seen the emergence of social media as a factor, with Google going as far as creating their own Social Media Network in order to try and leverage the power of search with the power of social.
Bottom line, SEO is an evolving industry, which is here to stay. There were nearly 20 billion searches in the US alone last month, and this number is rising, not decreasing. If you’re currently engaging on SEO, kudos. If you’re not, then do a couple of quick Google searches for a keyword in your industry. Take note of whom appears at the top of those results. While you’re not making the effort, your competitor is.
Look for our next article, “What to look for in an SEO firm”, due later this week and when results matter, GlobeRunner SEO.
IS SOCIAL MEDIA THE KEY TO GOOD CUSTOMER SUPPORT?
A couple of months ago, I had a couple of trees in my yard that needed to be trimmed. I did a quick Google search to find a local arborist and gave him a call. After a quick chat to schedule and discuss some specific instructions, they came to do the work. However, they didn’t follow my instructions or complete the job as we agreed. I called them, but the company didn’t answer. So, I did what more and more people are doing these days: I left a comment on their Facebook page. I have yet to hear back.
Unfortunately, this is still a common problem with social media. Customer service is evolving. The traditional channels: a 1-800 customer service line and a customer support email address are no longer the first choice of today’s tech-savvy consumers. Customers are social, they want to interact with the companies whose goods they purchase.
According to Gartner, by 2014, customers will expect the same level of interaction with businesses through social media as they do through the telephone. Also, according to a recent American Express Global Customer Service Barometer survey, 83% of customers who use social media for customer service abandoned an intended purchase because of poor service or lack of response.
But it’s not just about meeting some customers expectations. Using social media as part of your customer service approach can also save money. By monitoring your company’s mentions on social media sites, you can catch potential problems before customers call in. By catching them early, you save the time and money required to deal with the call. If, for example, each call averages 5 minutes, and you catch 10 potential problems each day, the savings could be hundreds of dollars per day. And all because you met your customers where they’re already gathering online.
Social media isn’t going anywhere. Do you need help building a social media strategy for your business or monitoring your reputation online? We can help. Call us at 972-472-8497 or visit our website for more information: Globerunner.com.
HOW TO AVERT GMAIL INBOX FULL FAILURE – THE ULTIMATE GUIDE
We recently had an issue where one of our inboxes was nearly full. So we reached out and did some research to find the best method of reliably backing up a Gmail inbox and clearing it. We found that the best method is with getmail, a Linux utility that fetches mail through IMAP. It is very powerful and flexible, providing a lot of options. There are several different methods as well (outlined below).
Overall, we recommend using getmail. By trying several different approaches, getmail is by far the best. It is a little confusing at first, but not a hard pill to swallow:
How do you install getmail?
Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install dovecot-imapd getmail4
Arch Linux:
pacman -S getmail
Centos:
yum install getmail*
Here are some resources for backing up gmail with Linux:
getmail:
- Matt Cutts explains how to backup gmail with getmail
- Linode documentation goes over getmail setup
- Getmail documentation
- Configuring getmail
If you don’t like getmail there are several different options out there:
BagoMa:
Fetchmail:
- Life hacker explains how to backup gmail with fetchmail
- Periodically backing up your email with fetchmail
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JULY SEO UPDATE
Google Updates
After a silent June, Google announced 86 changes/updates to their search algorithm this past Friday. As usual, we are going to highlight the changes that we are most interested in because they result directly to how we optimize and grow our clients’ web presence. No matter the changes, we are keeping up with what effects your rankings. There are several updates reinforcing that fresh, unique, and useful content is of the utmost importance to continuing to rank well. These updates include:
- Bamse. [project codename “Page Quality”] This launch helps you find more high-quality content from trusted sources.
- Bamse-17L. [project codename “Page Quality”] This launch helps you find more high-quality content from trusted sources.
- GreenLandII. [project codename “Page Quality”] We’ve incorporated new data into the Panda algorithm to better detect high-quality sites and pages.
- #82353. [project codename “Page Quality”] This change refreshes data for the Panda high-quality sites algorithm.
- #82666. [project codename “Page Quality”] This launch helps you find more high-quality content from trusted sources.
- Hamel. [project codename “Page Quality”] This change updates a model we use to help you find high-quality pages with unique content.
- Lime. [project codename “Freshness”] This change improves the interaction between various search components to improve search results for searches looking for fresh content.
Google also announced a few changes to the way they are ordering search results with this update:
- ng2. [project codename “Other Ranking Components”] Better ordering of top results using a new and improved ranking function for combining several key ranking features.
There has not been a lot of information related to this change released yet, but we will be continuing to monitor how these changes will effect rankings in the coming months.
Press Releases and Penguin and Panda
Press releases are one of the strategies that we use at Globe Runner to build links to your website. We try to write these press releases about current events in your industry and relevant to your business. Our primary goal with these press releases is to gain high quality links. In the aftermath of the Penguin and Panda algorithm updates, this is still a valid strategy, however, it is even more important now that press releases for SEO be written as normal, media focused press releases and not just stuffed with links or as promotional pieces.
Mobile Update
Mobile searches are increasingly popular and have extremely high conversion rates. A study featuring 6000 mobile users stated that 85% of users who searched for a restaurant on their smartphone purchased within 24hrs of the search. Results like these are why we at Globe Runner stress the importance of optimizing our client’s local pages like Google+Local, Yelp, Foursquare, Yahoo, and Bing local pages.
Social Media Update
Social Media is often confusing and many of our customers wonder about the effectiveness of their actions. The following graph, published by MarketingSherpa in their 2012 Social Media Benchmark Report, shows the effectiveness of each tactic to achieve objectives vs. the degree of difficulty to accomplish the task. The size of the circles represents the percentage of companies taking these actions.
At Globe Runner SEO, we specialize in social media integration with search engine optimization. Current with the industry trends our social media strategy focuses on first optimizing your business’ social sites managing your social campaigns, and encouraging blogger relationships. These strategies ultimately build your brand credibility which builds authority which in turn boosts your rankings.
One final Social update, Google+ is finally rolling out vanity urls for their Google+ and Google+Local pages. At last, Google+ pages will show the name of the place in the url. For example, our vanity url will be google.com/+globerunnerseo. Unfortunately, this is a slow rollout by Google and right now only the biggest players like Toyota, Delta, and Britney Spears have received their vanity urls. Look for this optimization in the coming weeks or months. We are monitoring this update to make sure our clients’ profiles receive their vanity urls as soon as they are available.
Just for fun
At Globe Runner we are tech junkies and love our smart phones and as you can tell, we are very much Google-groupies, following all of Google’s updates very closely. One of the more fun recent updates we were excited about was the update that lets you handwrite your search queries on your smart phone or tablet.
During the Olympics the Google Doodles have been interactive games based on the Olympic sports and these games have been a fun source of office competition before our morning meetings. However, our favorite Doodle was this one featuring our office’s favorite team building activity.
GLOBERUNNERSEO LAUNCHES NEW INTERNATIONAL DRUPAL COMMERCE WEBSITE FOR BLUELINE
How do you promote the use of traditional paper notebooks and planners in today’s digital age? One of our clients approached us with the need to deliver “pen and paper” product in a global digital store.
Blueline Incorporated has thousands of printed products – receipt books, accounting supplies, calendars, and notebooks with unique audiences in Canada, the United States and Mexico. After months of development, GlobeRunnerSEO has launched our most site ambitious to-date.
This project needed a proven Content Management System (CMS) with a commerce solution which could handle multiple currencies, multiple prices for each product depending on the country, and multilingual capabilities.
Since the client also has other branded websites with different product offerings, we needed to import the product catalogs from a single source to all of their brands (www.blueline.com, www.rediform.com, and www.brownline.com).
To achieve this, we used the Drupal 7 CMS (drupal.org) along with over 100 additional modules. Our team optimistically says “there’s a module for that – or there will be soon”. We relied heavily on Drupal Commerce, along with Multicurrency, UPS Shipping, and Feeds to import the products. We used the Internationalization modules to provide language translations to the site and also made every product and image translatable. The Omega theme framework was used as the backbone of the user interface.
To satisfy complex tax calculations, we used AvaTax, an integration provided by www.drupalsalestax.com . Where contributed modules did not satisfy our requirements we built custom modules to fit the business needs and preferences of our client.
GlobeRunnerSEO is primarily a internet marketing company. Obviously, we used a structure and numerous modules to optimize each product for best search results.
In addition to modules, the site required complex configuration to provide GeoIP look-up to ensure Canadian visitors see Canadian products and US visitors see US products. Coupons, Promotional Campaigns, Tax calculations, and product availability conditions all require use of Drupal’s powerful Rules framework.
The primary site launched in April 2012 after 5 months of development. After launch additional changes continued until July. At first, we used Drupal’s Multisite feature – allowing numerous sites to use the same codebase. However, in order to add unique SSL certificates to all three sites, the sites were branched out to three separate servers. And since our developers build sites on their local machines, and also have a staging and production server for each site, at times we had nine variants of the application. Additionally, since the client was adding content and customers were purchasing items, we created a workflow to protect live data while adding new elements. For this, we turned to the best practices of using Drupal Features, Drush, and GIT version control.
Our themes were designed by Alex Fox, our in-house graphic designer. Chris Lee worked on the site planning and built custom modules. Bobby Dean was the lead developer and themer. The project was managed by Sean Freebairn. Customer relationship was led by Hector Hernandez. This project challenged our team on many levels and also helped us learn many new things. We are proud to be a part of the Drupal Association and look forward to using knowledge gained for our future clients.
Blueline Inc knows that paper products are here to stay. And because of this new series of websites by GloberunnerSEO, they can depend on their digital Drupal platforms for years to come.
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