Meet Your Neighbors
I’m sorry I’ve been totally lax on the Bytes lately. It’s just been so busy. But I ran into a fun tool that I wanted to share:
http://neighbors.whitepages.com/
Type in your address and it will give you the addresses, names and a map of your neighbors. While I have some privacy concerns – I like having access to the info.
I know, short but sweet today – but maybe enough to get me back in the habit.
Facebook Contest Upcoming Webinar
Happy New Year!
Today’s Byte is a little different. First I wanted to send a reminder on a free webinar that I’m doing on Thursday on Facebook Stats: http://tinyurl.com/7m6hccc Please feel free join us.
Then I’m working with a group that is looking for product reviews – one lucky reviewer will win a $100 gift certificate. And you can review some of their free products and still qualify. Learning ZoneXpress http://www.learningzonexpress.com/ creates fun educational products that promote healthy choices – especially nutritional choices. They are running a Facebook contest, So if you write a review (fewer than 400 characters) and post it on their FB page you qualify for a drawing to win the gift cert.
- You can get the rules on their blog: http://tinyurl.com/6o39zxs
- You can check out their Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/learningzonexpress
- You can sample some of their products for free here: http://freemyplate.com/
Good luck!
Facebook page edits
A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation on Creating Facebook Pages for businesses. You can see the slides and access an archive of the webinar here:
http://www.mnrem.com/blog/?p=537
(I’m doing another free webinar on Facebook stats on January 5 – you can get details here: http://www.mnrem.com/blog/?p=548)
An interesting question came up after the webinar. Someone asked why they were able to EDIT someone else’s Page. It turns out that you can edit the location of a Business Facebook Page – or rather you can make suggestions for edits. It’s a new-ish change within Facebook and it helps Facebook and Page owners track anomalies in the address/map and other coordinates for the Page. You can get more into here:
https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=136798409730003
So folks can suggest changes but the changes should not “take” until confirmed by a Page Admin.
Here are some other help pages on Facebook that I thought might be useful:
Interacting with Pages (as a surfer/member)
https://www.facebook.com/help/pages/interacting
Creating/Administering Facebook Pages
https://www.facebook.com/help/pages/admin
SEMRush & Free webinar on Facebook Pages
This week I got a chance to try out a paid service thanks to SEMRush. They track organic search engine ranking and Pay Per Click ads. http://www.semrush.com
Type in a keyword phrase to find the popularity of a term, the cost per click to bid on that term in Google ads, the competition for that terms and related terms. You can also find the top 20 search results for that term. I particularly like the related terms feature. They include variation of term (for example tracking multi-term phrases that include your original term) but also include terms that relate but do not include your keyword terms.
Or type in an address/URL to find how it ranks in Google for its top terms (also popularity of terms, competition and traffic drive by terms), how much spent on Google ads, competitors and links to details about competitors, such as how much they spend on Google ads. It’s helpful to see the competition and learn about how much they are spending (and with what success) on the Google ads.
Also Thursday (Dec 15) at noon, I’m doing a free webinar on Starting a Facebook Page for Business. Everyone is welcome it’s sponsored by MNREM and MIRC – you can get more details here: http://www.mnrem.com/blog/?p=426
LinkedIn for busiensses
I’m totally cheating today. I‘m heavily borrowing tips today from an article I can across:
A Guide to Generating Leads on LinkedIn. http://tinyurl.com/3bcmvpn
The author provides some good reason for folks to go on LinkedIn – and they don’t all revolve around getting a job. As the title implies – it’s a great tool for getting business, especially I think if you’re in a business to business world.
Here’s a quick take on their tips:
- Track who is looking for you – and find a way to reach them
- Research who is coming to your web site and use LinkedIn to connect to them
- Set up a Company Page (not a ton of maintenance is required, which I like)
- Discern patterns – seeing who is connected/connecting to anticipate future move
- Participate in LinkedIn groups to build a rep and meet others
Google Places – how people use it
I’m trying to take time to do more research and I thought I’d write up a quick synopsis of the research when it’s interesting enough to share. Today I read the following: Eye Tracking and Click Mapping Google Places. http://tinyurl.com/3ssqzcc Published by Meditative Research, they tracked click-through rates on Google Places.
Google Places (http://www.google.com/places/) is like Google’s version of the local Yellow Pages – although listings are free. (You can buy ads here too.) Google Places feeds into Google searches – especially when your search term includes geographic term in the search such as [st paul pizza].
The research indicates that searchers have a strong preference for the top ranking result (shocker) – but they also show preference for listings that have images and reviews. Getting to be the top site can be very difficult – but adding images to your listing is very easy. Getting reviews can be easy too.
If you have the time it’s fun to look at the results – they use eye tracking to see what draws attention and it’s fun to see the patterns. In short, there is an F-pattern or triangle where searchers read across the top line, maybe read half of the next line, reading less and less of each line as they go done the page. However the pattern changes when there are reviews, ads or other anomalies in the page. They also show how searchers track the map – but from what I could tell mostly people start in the middle and then glance at the flags.
If you have a business, it’s worth the effort to complete your Google Places profile and encourage reviews from happy customers. If you have some local businesses you like, you can help them out with a review.
Encrypted search results – Changes in Google
I’m getting a little geeky today – for folks who don’t lean as geeky, I’m going to just remind you of my favorite handcrafted online store: http://www.etsy.com/. You might want that leading up to the holidays. Now for the geeky set…
Last week Google announced some big changes in how they are going to share info with other web site. If you’re a searcher, I think this is good news. If you are a website owner who checks stats, it’s not such good news.
Google will no longer be sharing keyword data with web sites for folks who perform searches on www.google.com and are logged in on a secure connection. Until today, webmasters could generally see where a visitor originated and if they came from Google, the webmaster could see what search they performed that results in the click to the owner’s site. So if you do a search on [diet dog food] and then click to Tommy’s Dog Food House – Tommy used to be able to see that someone came from Google and searched for [diet dog food]. Now Tommy can only see that a visitor came from Google.
This makes life tough for website owners for a couple of reasons – first you don’t know what terms people are successfully using to find you. Second – website owners often track traffic a step beyond and really like to know if someone who clicks on [diet dog food] goes through to purchase. Now that the keyword is gone – so is a lot of conversion tracking (tracking to see who converted from shopper to buyer). Third – some websites alter their content based on those search keywords. It doesn’t matter if you are using Google Analytics or another traffic tracking software – you won’t be able to get this info for organic listings. (Organic here just means non-paid placement.)
This is only true for organic listings. If you buy an ad on Google and someone clicks on your ad, then you can track the keyword and the conversion.
I will remind you of the caveat that this is only true for folks who use the Google web site, are logged into Google and use a secure connection. They claim that this is true for less than 10 percent of searchers but that seems kind of low to me.
You can get the full story here: http://tinyurl.com/3k3hxlf
Prezi
Last week I had an opportunity to try out a new presentation tool – Prezi http://prezi.com – it’s akin to PowerPoint, but different. I created a Prezi on improving your search engine ranking:
http://prezi.com/fl4ydtu2etnt/top-10-tips-for-seo/
Prezi is free. You use it online. You can post your presentation online and/or download it to access later. Here are some of the things I liked about it:
- It’s different from PowerPoint (not that there’s anything wrong with PowerPoint, it’s just a nice change)
- It’s easy to set up
- You can access it online (no more flash drives)
I did find it a little tricky to use once on front of a group – but that’s because the computer was about 10 feet away from where I was talking so there was a lot of walking back and forth. That probably would have been as true with PPT, but because I was new to the tool I was sensitive to any hiccups.
Prezi does a very nice job of walking you through the tool when you first sign up so I won’t try to replicate that here – but I will say it’s worth a shot. My presentation was brief (25 minutes); it took me 90 minutes to create the presentation – half of that was probably learning to use the tool. So the learning curve – at least for a quick presentation – was quick to overcome.
Definitely worth a test if you’re going to be creating a presentation soon.
QR Codes
Today I gave a presentation on QR Codes. It was supposed to last an hour, it only lasted 30 minutes. That’s how easy it is!
QR Codes are those geometric squares that are popping up in magazine and even billboards. You can scan them with a smartphone – they will store over 4000 characters. So the creators could include a web site address or link to directions from Google Maps.
You can access the presentation here: http://www.mnrem.com/blog/?p=364 It walks through a demonstration of scanning a QR Code as a consumer and creating one. Or you can cut to the quick and check out this free QR Code Generator, which I think does a good job of laying out the options:
New Content Matters for SEO
I’ve always said that search engines look at three things:
- Keywords in content – do you use the search terms your potential clients use on your pages?
- Popularity as defined by links – do other, quality sites link to your site?
- Freshness of content – are you updating your site regularly
I just read a statistic that increased my interest in fresh content. Google’s VP of Engineering recently reported that 20 to 25% of the queries they see are brand new. He was talking about how Google uses context to understand searches. (You can see more here: http://tinyurl.com/2xsaoa.)
I think it also feeds into a popular idea of the long tail search engine optimization. The long tail search focuses on multiple-word phrases [st paul dry cleaning open Sunday] as opposed to single phrases, such as [drycleaners]. (Here’s more info on the long tail search http://strategizer.wordtracker.com/.)
If you are a drycleaner in my town that’s open on Sunday, you could see where showing up for the first search is even more important that showing up for the second if you are focused on making a sale.
In some ways the goal is easier when you just pick the most popular terms and focus on using them, although the competition is getting increasingly fierce. I think the best way to reach those or long tail searches is to provide as much information as possible.
On traditional web sites this can be somewhat difficult as there is realistically only so much space for info. That’s why I’ve been becoming a bigger and bigger fan of blogs. Blogs are easy to maintain. Each blog acts as its own page in terms of SEO – so that if you write all about your adventures in dry cleaning on Sundays, you can do well for the search above. And writing about your industry and what interests you and your clients, I think you increase the odds of using other long tail search terms.
Also each blog post feeds into providing fresh content for the whole site.
Writing blog posts takes time – and sometimes it makes sense to hire that out – but I think in terms of SEO it can be money well spent.
Kind of long this week – I hope that’s helpful.
Ann Treacy
