Use Flickr For Your Wordpress Blog Images - Flickr Photo Album Plugin
September 29, 2008
Reasons to use flickr instead of the built-in wordpress imaging tools:
1. Flickr’s website gets a lot of internal traffic and you could increase your page views and website traffic just by putting all your images on flickr. I personally have images with over 20,000 views that generated at least 1,000 click throughs (you can put live html links in the image descriptions). Not bad considering it’s traffic I would have missed entirely. Additionally flickr has been expanded to become a full fledged social network to include friends and messaging.
2. Flickr offers a wide variety of image tools, like resizing, resamplling, and ajax grouping that completely rock and are far superior to anything built into wordpress. IT’s fast too. Upload a large image and flickr automatically provides multiple sizes and allows your visitors to do everything from favorite it to order prints. Read more
Plugin Free Wordpress Profile Gravatars - Enable Them In Your Blog Comments Now!
June 18, 2008
As a web designer, I’ve long held the stance that it was better to have the visitors of your website upload the photo / picture of themselves to use for profiles and comments directly on your site ( local avatars). I knew of many third party websites that with plugins allowed you to use a universal avatar, but making each of your visitors leave your site and sign up it’s own set of problems. Plus there were lots of competing ones to choose, which third party service should you use?
With the new release of Wordpress (the most popular online publihsing platform in the world) support for an globally recognized avatar (gravatar) is built right in. Read more
Should You Use Wordpress To Build Your Next Website? Beginning Wordpress Basics
June 12, 2008
photo credit: Sicos
Wordpress is web software for online publishing. Notice that I didn’t use the word blog, even though wordpress is blogging software. It has been expanded to be A LOT more then that and shouldn’t considered in the same class as most blogging software. It’s a robust CMS (content management system) that empowers every type of website with users that include CNN, Playstation and the New York Times.
With website technology changing daily, choosing the right content management system or simply the actual software that organizes and runs a website is absolutely crucial to your success online. For most websites I’d highly recommend building with Wordpress and here is why: Read more
Online Video Distribution And Syndication – Veoh, Youtube, Google, Myspace
November 12, 2007
Video discusses online video sharing sites and syndication.
Social Networking Profile Rant - Personal Vs Business Vs Publicity
November 12, 2007
This is my personal commentary on what I think would make a more versatile social networking profile which would combine business, personal and publicity profiles.
Social Network Growth Strategy - Content, Concept Or Both?
November 12, 2007
This video is a rant on what drives members and traffic to social networks.
Facebook Pages And Social Networking For Businesses
November 12, 2007
I give my take on Facebook pages and how they’re another setup in the right direction.
Business Blogging Tips For Non-writers
November 12, 2007
I run into a lot individuals and companies afraid to jump into blogging, because they aren’t natural writers. Here is a video with some tips on how you can use blogs to increase your business even if you’re not a natural writer.
Radio Head, Madonna, And Nin – The Power Of Social Media Marketing To Reach A Vast Audience
November 2, 2007
Social media technology is changing the face of the relationship between the content producer and the content distributor. More and more they will merge into the same group, due to the incredible cheap cost of reaching a mass audience online. This month the first major music artists have decided to drop their labels in favor of self distribution. First Radio Head, then Madonna and Trent Reznor followed suit.
Google’s New Open Social Api Will Transform The Web Sooner Than You Think
November 2, 2007
My take on Open Social:
Open Social is a revolution and I’ve already signed up on the dev list to gain access to the orkut sandbox. Soon everyone will have full access to the social graph across a vast number of networks (everything from linkedin to myspace or plaxo), the difficult task becomes creating widgets and server-less applications that use the social information in a meaningful way to spread virally, promote services, and provide value for the largest number of users.
Early adapters (as with all technology) will see HUGE traffic gains and increase their reach / user-base. I recommend moving VERY quickly and producing widgets and applications which use the social API as soon as possible.
7 Places Yahoo Is Winning The War Against Google - Search Engine Wars
October 15, 2007
It’s common knowledge that Yahoo comes in a distant second place to Google in terms of search traffic, but Yahoo and Google represent a lot more than just search. Here is my list for the web services and properties where Yahoo has effectively out maneuvered Google and is ahead is both market awareness and user experience.
- Yahoo Answers launched in 2005, after Google Answers had been a poor performer for a long time, Yahoo took their new service and pushed and promoted it on their main site. Yahoo Answers worked over Google, because of the user experience - it turns out people really enjoy voting on the “best answer” as well as surfing through the train wrecks. In addition the site has wonderful SEO in the other search engines (Yahoo’s answers tend to rank very well). Overall Yahoo Answers was so successful that Google ended it’s Answers service shortly thereafter.
- Unique title tags – this tag is what displays in the top of your browser bar and in the search engine results pages; it’s in between the <title></title> tags in the top section of your website. Put your target keywords in the most intelligible way possible (you need to encourage clicks as well) in your titles. Do not spam these; a 5-7 word phrase incorporating your target keywords is all that’s necessary.
- Unique header tags. Your site actually needs to have an <h1> title with keywords </h1> tag on every page and it needs to be unique to each page. If you’re using Wordpress, one of the nasty habits of the default installs is to give you the same h1 on every single page and change the h2s to reflect the actual post names. There are plug-ins and themes which correct this. Make sure the keywords in the title and h1 tag match for each page; they don’t have to be identical, but they should target the same keywords. If possible, add other header sections to h2 or h3 tags.
- Additionally it would be beneficial if each page contained a 4 word exact keyword phrase in the title tag and also on the page in the h1 tag. Use any keyword research tool to find exact phrases. A free one that also gives information on Google’s searches is located here: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
- Meta description tag – this tag is what actually appears in the search engine results pages (Google gives snippets from the page depending on what you searched for, e.g. <meta name=”description” content=”” />)
- On every page put a link to your main index page that contains the EXACT keyword phrase you’re targeting (typically a footer link works well). It’s important to use the anchor text you want to associate a page with in the internal links on the site.
- Run your site through an html validator. Don’t worry, it probably won’t pass, and that’s not what we’re looking for anyways. We’re just looking to correct any major errors and, if possible, get it to valiadate or come as close as we can without spending too much time (remember from the step 1 SEM article - its all about ROI).
Jumpstart Your Seo Campaign - Old Domains Improve Search Engine Rankings
October 15, 2007
Within the Search Engine Optimization community it’s well known that it’s much harder to rank a brand new domain / site than one that’s been around for a little while. Now, much harder does not mean impossible. We’ve ranked sites in 2 weeks to a month for 2 and 3 word searches (see distressed real estate), but that usually involves acquiring an excellent domain name in combination with an extensive online marketing campagin.If you start with an old domain that already has page rank links and traffic it makes building a powerful online presence and outdoing your competitors that much easier. Everyday people are trying very hard to spam, spoof and fool Google in everyway they possibly can.
For this reason. It’s often called “the sandbox”, but more accurately it just involves Google not having enough information about a site to trust it, so it delays ranking it for the really competitive and highly sought after terms.
So if your revamping your website try to stay with the same old domain name you’ve had for years, it will lead to faster rankings or if you’re starting a new web venture considering buying an existing site or domain that already is “out of the sandbox” or more specifically has some links, is in Google’s cache and will be easier to rank.
We recently re-branded and launched adsforfree.com where we’ll be selling aged domains with prepaid hosting, existing traffic, pr and content. We’ve got over a hundred domains and websites there, and even adsforfree.com itself is for sale!
Now these domains are in addition to our regular packages and start at just $200 with 1 year of hosting included, if you buy them by themselves they come as is, with no support of any kind. We’ll send you your login info and give you full access to a separate hosting account (with FTP, Cpanel etc) and then you’re on your own. If you’d like social media marketing, advice, support and the other services we do as well, consider the cost of the old domain (which is cheap) an add-on to give you a kick start.
Video Seo And Traffic - Early Adapters See Larger Results
September 24, 2007
The earlier you make the jump to video the larger your initial gains in traffic will be. Eventually, not having video will kill your site - by making it appear to be very old fashion, in the same way looking at a static website of 7 years ago looks now.
We recently added a lot of streaming video to our website and incorporated it into our main services page. I thought many of you would be very interested in knowing what happened to our stats since we did this. Read more
Why Your Business Blog Should Absolutely Not Be On Blogger!!
September 24, 2007
Here are just a few reasons why your main business blog should absolutely not be on blogger.com or really any of the free blog sites.
• Blogger is notorious for spam blogs and blogger has a (next blog) by default
• Can’t upgrade or add features because you don’t control the software.
• Splits link popularity
• Everyone knows it’s free, harder to attract links with a free blog or something that shows less commitment.
• Your Co0branding your site with blogger which can mucks up your marketing message
• Since you don’t own your blog software, it can’t be leverage and sold the same way custom sites / domain can ( website are just like real estate)
• The default settings are attrocious for search engine optimization and social media marketing, so you’ll have to spend tons of time and have technical knowledge to fix this. Most people don’t, so their blogger blog dosen’t rank very well or spread on social media sites.
• Most of the design templates are overused, so your site will be recognized as a “generic” template which makes it way less impressive.
• Makes achieving any kind of wow factor difficult.
• Your allowing your content to profit / benefit Google.
• You account comes with a default subdomain - whatever.blogger.com
• None of the cool kids are doing it. (ok this one isn’t entirely true 
)
Which Resolution Should Your Website Look The Best On?
September 14, 2007
The answer most web designers will give without even a hint of thought is 1024 X 768. While on the surface that may seem like logical choice since according to most website’s analytics, it’s the resolution group with the highest amount of visitors. The problem with this answer is it doesn’t take into account who the visitors are and what their conversion rate on your site is. It’s turns out that (depending on the site) about 30-50% of your visitors at low resolutions will probably not be from the U.S., which is great if your target market is international, but not especially useful if it’s not.
I’ve also found a correlation between low conversion rates and low screen resolutions. Although 1024 X 768 may be the most numerous group, it may not be the most profitable. I would take a look or have your professional web designer / developers take a deep look at your analytics and help you figure that stuff out, it’s important. We provide analytics and analysis for our customers as we help them try to get the most of their website and target the right visitors.
Ideally I want a website to look it’s best in 1280 X 1024 and above, because those are the customers that are the most likely to convert and are the wave of the future as all resolutions are constantly increasing. It is important though, that a modern website be viewable and readable at 1024 X 768, in addition to working on mobile devices like the super hyped (and super cool) iphone.
Build Your Social Media Site With Open Source Scripts - Don’t Go Proprietary
September 14, 2007
Occasionally I talk to progressive companies that have taken the leap into social media and have implemented full social communities with lots of features that enable users to interact on the site, but when I look at their site I discover a proprietary custom scripted website. In most cases this is a GIANT Mistake.
I simply don’t understand why you wouldn’t build “on top” of an already existing open source content management platform. It’s much faster to develop, and more importantly much easier to upgrade and keep up to date. Things change online everyday, if you have a custom solution you’re spending tons of money to have developers keep it updated and add new features. Also, if you want to change developers, you’re screwed - it’s going to be slow and expensive for them to learn your system and then code for it.
Why not harness the power of thousands and in some cases tens and hundreds of thousands of developers constantly improving and updating possibilities by building on an open source content management system and then customizing it from there. It’s much faster to deploy, is more stables, has more features, and cost 1/10 as much. That’s what we provide. I got a lot of questions about our backend with many of the old school tech people expecting me to say we use proprietary scripts, - we don’t . We customize and modify on top of open source scripts and bundle everything with strategy and promotion which results in faster development and better sites.
Content Mixed With Advertising - The Future Of Internet Advertising
September 14, 2007
Many of the old industry thinkers seem to have a hard time understanding that in the age of filtered information where you can instantly reference what you want and when, it’s becoming less and less effective to force or push ads on visitors. Study after study show that the more savvy a user becomes the less and less they click on PPC or other advertisements. This trend is referred to generically as “banner blindness” and as it increases, I each targeted user who does click / respond tot he message becomes more of a commodity and the price for that response goes up as well.
This has created a situation where the most profitable way to monetize website content is by blending it with advertising or creating some type of a merger where you get both together. I’ve written about this “new” internet advertising model before and I wanted to blog about it again, because it’s so important, yet seems to be overlooked by most of the mainstream media at their peril.
An example of this type of merger is the local news solutions we put together for RISMedia that involved local content authors sponsoring a local real estate area which they live and getting their message out there. We push these advertiser produced content areas with the full power of RISMedia - a real estate authority so the individual content ranks well and instead of banners, visitors get a nice consistant experiene with more content to digest. It’s a win win. The simplest example of content mixed with advertising is publishing a blog where you give away real information and advice while also promoting your marketing message. Your advertising yourself and your services by creating informative valuable content.
Not all examples of content mixed with advertising are good ofcourse. Bad examples are literarlly flooding Google blogsearch right now and infesting hte web. Go ahead and see how many blogs on viagra are out there. They don’t really contain any good or unqiue / valuable information, but are more like reguritates crap posing as a real blog or information to lure click to affillaite sites. There are a ton of these out there.
In the last few years we also saw the birth of sponsored blog posts wher ethe author was paid to review a product or service, witch I think works decently nice, except blogs thqat engage in too much of that risk losing their crediblity and reader base, So ideally it would have to be balanced with lots of very organic content.
As many newspapers face extinction they’ve begun to start more aggressive monetizing their online content with afilliate offers. The problem is many of the offers that provide the highest returns also are the most spam / catch 22 / like free credit checks, credit cards and other like stuff. I believe we’re in the infancy to the middle of this trends and it’s only going ot get stronger and strong er with hundreds, then thousands, then millions and more. It’ll be fun to watch and see how slick this content bundled with advertising we plan on slowly unraveling more product offers like RISMedia’s Local program that allow our visitors to take advtange of this trend. If you’re running a large website that creates a lot of content, I’d definitley look into providing solutions that combine content and advertising in a more seemless way than soley banner or ppc ads.
Real Estate Search Marketing Advice From The Rismedia Real Estate Leadership Conference
September 10, 2007
As I typed the first draft of this post in the airport, my head was still buzzing from the wild energy at the RISMedia Real Estate Leadership Conference, where Social Media Systems was an exhibitor. As head of technology and product development at Social Media Systems, it has been awhile since I did face-to-face networking. It was fun to chat it up and pitch pros from the top real estate companies in the United States. Like blogging and social networking, the conference was all about the conversation and we created a large buzz. Read more
Onsite Search Engine Optimization Basics And Keyword Targeting | Smm Sem Seo Strategy Guide - Part 2
August 6, 2007
Onsite SEO basics are simple to implement and can increase your search engine rankings, but surprisingly most websites have even the basics completely wrong.
Before you start you need an automated backend or some type of content management system to build your site on top of; if you have a static brochure website (see this article), fix that before continuing. It’s unlikely you’ll be able to rank for anything competitive for any length of time in the future if you don’t readjust your strategy.
Manually updating pages is a waste of intelligent man power; the first step for onsite is to fix that problem so you’ll be ready to compete.
Onsite search engine optimization basics broken down by page element.
Additional considerations:
The keyword tag (<meta name=”keywords” content=”” />): you may want to add keywords to this, but DON’T overstuff. The only exception is if you’re using a content management system like Wordpress that auto fills this part out.
If possible (at least on the main page) put descriptions in the alt=”" tags on the images.
I’ll be adding more onsite info to this series in future entries. These include: Onsite SEO basics that will be covered in subsequent entries: duplicate content issues, robots.txt files, how to deal with flash and large images, link directories and negative onsite factors, site depth and page importance, etc).
Onsite basics are very simple, but at the advanced levels, you have to think about the big picture and how EVERYTHING on your site will work together with your offsite campaign to create a growing website which will build links and target keywords “automatically.”
You can control how people link to you, how willing they are to link to you, and what text they use when they link to you; you can even control how your site grows or spreads virally on social media sites just by changing simple factors on your website. All of this is intertwined into your onsite search engine optimization which can really be focused on your entire website and its online marketing strategy. As this series progresses, we’ll dive deeper into onsite and how it effects link building and social media marketing.
I should note clients of Social Media Systems receive custom onsite SEO advice on both the basic and advance levels including information on site architecture and how to integrate onsite optimization with your online marketing plan to improve placement and build more, higher quality links automatically.
Rant: Be Wary Of Internet Marketing Secrets Promising Easy Returns Or Huge Do It Yourself Savings.
July 17, 2007
Everyday I run into another “earn 1,000 times your investment” affiliate marketing scheme, touting anyone’s ability to “learn to use adsense and make $1,000 per day in your sleep,” not to mention countless other how-to internet marketing guides that make it sound like a peace of cake.
I’m so sick of them I thought I might diverge into the occasional and always fun blog rant.
First, be wary of people’s numbers. You’ll find that all through the net there are people claiming to have bought this and that site for some low price and then earned 1,000 times their investment. For one, why would they let you know if that was true? Wouldn’t you keep that a secret until the money ran out? And 2, the true “parts” to those stories usually involve some very creative accounting, to say the least. Read more
