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New Manager on the Block!

by on Aug 08, 2008 (1) Comments

With information overflowing from the million sites on the net, finding exactly what one is looking for, is nothing short of finding a pin from a haystack. Say, you have a website or intranet and it has spread its branches over time. While it is very useful, much of the content is outdated, updating the site is complex, and the appearance reeks of yesteryears. Worse yet, you’ve lost track of the pages on the site. Phew!

Thankfully, these problems are what a Content Management System (CMS) has been built to solve. From providing simple tools for creating the content to publishing and finally archiving, it takes care of almost everything on your site. It provides the ability to manage the structure of the site, the appearance of the published pages, and the navigation provided to the users. It is like the God Father of your website, looking into intricate details that may miss the human eye of the Webmaster.  Let me talk to you about some of the salient features: -

  • Freedom and Independence – Dependence on co-workers is reduced, as getting through to a certain department when needing to access a file is easier.
  • Reliability – It stores information systematically, thereby avoiding confusion caused by unnoticed application of conflicting or old documents. Important information is avoided from being deleted with the inclusion of an archive. At the same time, this also makes information that is no longer frequently needed but important in the future, accessible
  • Security – A CMS follows security guidelines like an obedient worker, and ensures that the documents released, edited, created, archived and viewed on multiple levels by authorized users only.

Talking about CMS is like rambling about an entire world. And you thought Duran Duran wrote the song “Too Much Information” for nothing?

Five Search Queries to Find Sponsorship Link Opportunities

by on Aug 08, 2008 (0) Comments

The following is a Guest Post from Everett Sizemore.

The ethics of paid links aside (we all know how Michael Gray feels about that already) the best paid links don’t usually come from a network or broker, and aren’t generally thought of as ‘paid links’ in the first place – though they are. In fact, they don’t even come from someone who knows what a nofollow tag is, or why selling links is against Google’s guidelines. And regardless of the fact that they are paid, Google doesn’t seem to mind them so long as they are on-topic and coming from a reputable website. As the title suggests, this “link buy” comes in the form of sponsoring an event or website. The trick is to find sponsorship opportunities that are in your corner of the web (read: on-topic).

As always with link building, be on the look out for redirects, nofollow tags, etcetera… But you’d be surprised at how few PR7 and PR8 web pages out there list links to sponsors using normal hrefs.

I’m sure by now you get the point. Try switching “sponsor” with “advertise” and see if the site has advertising that doesn’t use redirects, tracking links or nofollow tags. You might be thinking that it is easy for Google to see if the word “sponsor” or “advertise” is in the URL, Title or even somewhere on the page – and you would be correct. However, I have not found this to have a negative effect on the quality of that link so long as it is on-topic and the link involves two reputable sites. I’ve studied competitor’s incoming links enough to know that some of them are competitive in the SERPS for certain keywords largely because of a few well-placed sponsorship logo-links with good Alt text pointing to the right page.

5 Senate Campaign Websites That Could Use a Little Design Help

by on Aug 07, 2008 (0) Comments

As a required companion piece to this post, I have grudgingly crafted a review of the 5 sites that are on the lower end of the design scale. Some of these campaigns have no budget, and others are just a few years behind the times. Some others are just lazy. Although none require any real commentary, I need to take up some space on this blog and I think you’ll agree that I’ve done just that.

Kevin Scott

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“Congress is broken and we need to fix it”, states Kevin Scott. At least it says that on his campaign site. This is where I might make a broken site joke, high five Todd and call it a day. But I’d rather focus on the awesome stars and stripes bastardization and glimmering flash treatment that Team Scott chose to waste time on rather than put some actual content on this little gem.

John J. Cina

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Interesting. The navigation, by way of some type of…special effects-eye-trickery, appear to be actual three-dimensional buttons, that I can…wait. Oh, it really is just trickery. Well-played, Senatorial hopeful Cina. You’ve won this round.

Chris Lugo

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Chris Lugo’s site is named voteforpeace, and his message is reinforced powerfully with the addition of a giant mutant peace flower that defies biology with its star-laiden center. All kidding aside, this is the weirdest Senate campaign site I’ve ever seen and as such is my new homepage.

John Kerry

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What the hell happened here? My eye goes directly to Senator Kerry in his hot-pants. I know that wasn’t intended. There is content on the page, but it looks so uninspired. On the plus side, the sub levels are much better than this page. John J. Cina runs excited circles around this page. Then politely sits back down.

Vernon Jones

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The flag on top actually waves (or pulsates, rather), the navigation arrows spin wildly on mouse-over, and the garish red fields inspire fear. It’s everything I look for in a campaign website, really, but just then I’m bowled over by…a digital, lifelike Vernon Jones entering stage right to help me through the process. He’s pretty smooth, and the implementation is well-done, but it’s just an unnecessary addition to a rather overblown, goofy effort.

Well, there they are in no particular order. Just 5 examples of perfectly good urls that went to waste.

Redirects: Good, Bad & Conditional

by on Aug 07, 2008 (0) Comments

100% Organic - A Column From Search Engine Land Whenever you make changes to a web site, one of the most important considerations should be how to use “redirects” to alert the search engine to your changes, to avoid having a negative impact on your search rankings. Whether you’re moving pages around, switching CMS platforms, or just wanting to avoid duplicate content and PageRank dilution, you’ll want to employ redirects so as not to squander any link juice (PageRank) that your site has acquired. There are multiple ways of redirecting, and it’s important you get it right if you want the SEO benefit without risk of falling outside search engine guidelines (such as is the case with “conditional redirects”).

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The Adwords Quirk That Can Ruin Reports

by on Aug 07, 2008 (0) Comments

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is marketed as the best possible way of measuring your return on investment , you cannot question this. Where else can you see exactly where people have come from how much they paid to get there and what they done (bought something , contacted you etc). They key to establishing your ROI is with reporting.
The Google Adwords reporting tool is a huge asset to PPC management and is not bettered by any other PPC advertising programme (in my opinion). However I’ve noticed that when taking data from a scheduled report whether it be daily weekly or monthly that the date that is generated is not always factual.

Within my role a Pay per click optimisation specialist I schedule reports to compile data to let my clients know how successful their campaigns have been. After compiling these reports using the data generated from a scheduled report I noticed the following day the number of their conversions differed from what I had reported on (for the better normally).
When you schedule a report for a period of time it is generally run within 2 hours of the following day e.g. if a report template is set up to capture data for the previous month and scheduled to run on the first day of every month it is run at 01:00 on the first of every month.

KISS SEO

by on Aug 07, 2008 (0) Comments

When performing SEO its best to first implement the KISS strategy, Keep It Simple S…..

Forget about the old school keyword density equations, being completely W3C compliant, creating X amount of content, pages or acquiring X amount of links.

KISS SEO would include, but not limited to:

  • Unique TITLE tag for each page that includes your page’s targeted keyword(s) plus the benefit followed by Company/Site name.
  • Unique META Description tag for each page that should be used to enforce the page’s usefulness and be the marketing pitch to the visitor.
  • A CSS styled H1 tag centered around the page’s main keyword(s) focus – as a side note when I spoke with Matt Cutts at SMX Advanced he said Google doesn’t weigh the H1 tag any heavier than an H2 or H4, but it shouldn’t be used more than once.
  • Content that is both informative, unique, and useful by fulfilling a need of your target audience.
  • URLs in a non-dynamic descriptive format.
  • A flat site structure with breadcrumb links.
  • Absolute internal linking.
  • An html user friendly site map plus the backup parachute of a sitemap.xml file.
  • Robots.txt file blocking any duplicate content (print pages, etc).
  • Using 301 sever side redirects to consolidate similar pages and domain changes, including canocalization such as www vs non-www.

SEO for Dummies (well, and Web Developers)

by on Aug 06, 2008 (0) Comments

Sometime Search Engine Optimization (SEO) seems to have morphed into a mystical creature.  Most people, even those who design and develop websites for a living, know they need it, but don’t know exactly what it is.  They have been feed so much rheteric and sales speaches that they seem to have given up on SEO long ago.

Well, you shouldn’t.  And if you have, I’m here to help you rekindle the love affair.  While there are definitely concepts that can’t be covered in a short article and many that can really, truly only be done by professionals, there’s plenty you can do to give you a leg up and get more search engine traffic for your sites and your clients sites. (more…)