Does Your Site Validate?
Posted by Linda at April 18th, 2008If someone asked “does your site validate” would you know what they meant? If not, now is the perfect time to find out. Site validation is a process which makes sure your web page is coded “by the rules”. There are many rules to composing web code and if you don’t follow them you could end up in a lot of hot water.
By ensuring that your code is setup properly you increase the chances of your pages loading properly in a variety of web browsers and search engines. Bad code can cause a lot of strange symptoms so it’s always best to make sure your code validates. Many webmasters, including myself, have wasted countless hours stumped with problems caused by bad code.
Although validating your pages may sound complicated it’s actually a pretty simple process. The first step is to open the W3C Validation (http://validator.w3.org) and put in the address of the page you want to check. More than likely when you hit the “Check” button you ended up at a page saying something like, “Failed validation, 16 Errors”. Don’t fret; it’s not unusual for a web page to fail the first validation check.
Scroll down and you’ll find an itemized list and description of the various errors W3C found. Many of these errors are self explanatory and easy to fix. You’ll notice that W3C is kind enough to tell you which line your errors occurred on. Make sure you have an editor which shows line numbers.
In my experience many errors are caused by using the wrong type of element for the doctype you’re using. For example, you can’t use HTML code in a XHTML document. Another common problem is when you’ve accidentally nested elements incorrectly such as : (h1)(a href)text(/h1)(/a). This is called ‘tag nesting’ and must be done properly so your code is easily understandable by all browsers. This code should read (h1)(a href)text(/a)(/h1).
There is another variety of error W3C will spit out and that’s the type which makes no sense at all. When you encounter W3C errors which you haven’t the slightest clue about try copy and pasting the error into Google, and someone will likely have a solution. So many people use W3C that any mysterious errors you come across have probably already been solved by other people.
Sociable Plugin
Posted by Linda at April 18th, 2008Socialable is a plugin for Wordpress which adds a small group of icons below your blog posts that allow visitors to easily add your pages to their favorite social bookmarking sites. You’ve probably seen or used the Sociable plugin on other blogs without even knowing it. It’s probably the easiest and most effective way to add social bookmarking support to your Wordpress blog.
Sociable was authored by Peter Harkins but is now handled by Joost de Valk and is on version 2.6.2 (last updated 3/31/08). Sociable currently supports almost 70 different bookmarking sites such as : Digg, Delicious, Facebook, Google and many others.
Deciding to add Sociable to your Wordpress blog is a win-win-win situation. Yes, it really is so good that it requires three “wins”.
This plugin is beneficial on many levels. It gives your site a Web 2.0 feel, it provides auto-magical offsite search engine optimization since most social bookmarks are public, it can increase unique visitors, page loads and the number of back links in an exponential fashion.
Installing Sociable goes just like installing almost any other Wordpress plugin, the process is fairly straightforward.
1. Download the latest stable version of Sociable (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable/)
2. Unzip the plugin to some place easy to find such as the Desktop or My Documents
3. Use a FTP program (such as Filezilla) to upload the plugin folder to your /public_html/wp-content/plugins/
4. Browse to the WP Dashboard (yoursite.com/wp-admin/)
5. Click on the Plugins tab
6. Find and enable the Sociable plugin
7. That’s it!
Browse on over to the standard Wordpress Options menu and you’ll see a sub-entry called Sociable which contains all of its configuration options.
You might find yourself tempted to simply enable ALL of the social bookmarking site addons - I’d highly suggest against this. Too many icons will prevent people from picking our their personal favorites. Given this I’d suggest picking about 10 to 20 selections. It’s still enough to provide variety but not so many that you can’t locate anything.
Enjoy!
Your Site Needs Content, But From Where?
Posted by Bryan at April 17th, 2008Without content, your site is nothing. It’s a paid domain and hosting, like the skeleton in your high school science class, too fake to have ever really live and die. No matter how many inbound links you have from whatever page ranked site they are on, without content, you’ve got junk. Just because traffic comes to your site doesn’t mean it stays there. Without content, your bounce rate will be through the roof.
So where are you supposed to get your content from? It may seem simple enough to just visit a competitors website and rework their content. Some of it probably didn’t even originate from them in the first place. But if they’re popular enough for you to be doing that, then you’ll need to list them as a source. If not, and they happen to stumble onto your site through copyscape (a plagiarism tool), you’re not going to be doing too well.
But linking to your competitors isn’t the best idea when you’re trying to, you know, compete. So don’t utilize that as a source unless you really have to or the piece/keywords are getting a lot of attention right then and there. Until you start getting press releases directly sent to you from your niche, you should keep an eye out on sites like PR Newswire and BusinessWire for relevant press releases. Sourcing these isn’t an issue, and the traffic you could pass over might actually get you noticed too. Unfortunately, unless you’ve got all the time in the world, you’re not going to break every story either.
Having new content continuously added to your site makes a huge difference traffic wise, regardless of whether it’s a blog or not. Not everyone has the time to write all the articles either, so many sites start up a blog and just let it die off. You can easily fill this spot with a hired writer. There are plenty of sites out there, such as DigitalPoint and SitePoint that have many content writers available at various prices depending on the work. You’ll want to make sure that the writer has a decent reputation and definitely check out copyscape to confirm that the content isn’t just plagiarized work. Also, the cheaper it is, the more you need to worry!
Content is what the Google Spider eats. The more food you’ve got for it, the more it visits. Don’t keyword stuff and don’t hire the $.01 per word writers and as long as you keep posting, you’ll be golden.
Google Analytics: What Is It And How Can I Use It?
Posted by Bryan at April 15th, 2008One of the most useful tools that any webmaster can have installed on their site is Google Analytics. Having the power to either personally view, or invite others to view statistics for your site such as the number of visitors to your site, what keywords users are finding your site through, how long they spent on your site, and plenty more. Just like when Google had said “enough” to paying for 411 information, thus releasing 1-800-GOOG-411 for free, this is a fully functional web analytics software that they offer for free as well.
To set up your Google Analytics account, simply register for any or all of your personal websites and then add the html code assigned to each site. After Google Analytics has a chance to gather the information on your site (I recommend giving it at least a day or two before you start following the information), you’ll be given several different options on how you can view the information that it collects.
The Visitors tab shows you everything you could want to know about who visits your site, down to the country and browser that they’re using.
The Traffic Sources tab shows you what sites referred your visitors over and keywords used to find your site, as well as what percentage of your total traffic came directly to your site, was referred to your site, or came from a search engine. This tab also includes your Google AdWords campaign and regular campaign controls, which allow you to monitor the results of specific actions that you’ve done to increase traffic.
The Content Tab gives you statistical information on the pageviews, unique views and bounce rate. It’s very useful to find out which pages people are entering through the most, leaving from, and what ones are viewed the most.
It also has it’s own Goals tab which you can manually configure if you have a specific goal you would like to achieve traffic wise. It provides you with enough information to let you know how close to succeeding you are and how long you have left and what’s working the best to achieve those goals.
There’s really no excuse not to have Google Analytics set up on your site, considering how useful it is and that it’s free. The ability to add another Gmail account on to view your statistics works great too if you need advice or want to hire on an SEO/SEM.
FYI, if your site exceeds 5 Million page views for month, unless you’re a Google AdWords member as well, you won’t see anymore information than the initial 5 Million. Hopefully that won’t inconvenience you too much.
Below you’ll find a screen shot from the Google Analytics page for LeopardDocks.com - Submit, Download, and Search Custom Leopard Docks. Click the thumbnail to see it full sized.
What Is Vertical Search?
Posted by Bryan at April 11th, 2008
Not performing a general search? Then perhaps Google and Yahoo aren’t the places you should be looking. I know what you’re thinking, not using Google or Yahoo? But when you’re looking for specialized information, such as a job search or housing search, you would want to use a Vertical Search Engine. With the mounds of data that those two major search engines would spit back out at you if you tried to search for those options directly on there, using a vertical search engine like SimplyHired.com for job hunting or ZIPVO.com to find the perfect home, would provide you with results that wouldn’t be cluttered with irrelevant information.
Google and Yahoo send out their spider to retrieve and index information from all of the web. A vertical search engine however, has it’s own specific database that it uses to pull up information from. Instead of this being a dangerous concept for the world of online marketing, it has actually proven to be very powerful. After using the vertical search engine, a user will get information more relevant to what they’re looking for, which means higher conversion and click-through rate for the businesses that advertise on those search engines. As opposed to Google Adwords and Paid Search Listings, you’re not selecting a series of terms and relevance to advertise on, because the site you’re advertising on is already specifically aimed at your businesses niche.
Depending on the type of site, advertising can range from a listing for a used guitar for sale on Gear-Vault.com to a banner advertisement for Justin Williams, mortgage broker from Prosperity Mortgage, under a real estate listing on ZIPVO.com. Your target audience will view your advertisement less as an add and more like a resource that is completely relevant to their search.
By no means am I saying avoid the major search engines and just use this. That would be like Toyota choosing to only advertise in car magazines.
Here’s a list of some popular vertical search engines that Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Watch has put together.
New Optional Benchmarking Feature Available in Google Analytics
Posted by Linda at April 10th, 2008The title of this post was actually the subject of a Google email I got earlier. It looks like analytics is now offering a feature that allows users to share their data.
Dear Google Analytics users,
We are writing to let you know about a change in our service offerings.
If you have logged into your account recently, you may have noticed
that you can now choose to share your Google Analytics data. By
providing data sharing options, we hope to provide you with transparency,
control, and new services based on your preferences.
There are several options including; sharing “Anonymously with Google products and the benchmarking
service” or “With Google products only”.
The big question is how many people will enable this feature. If it is a large percentage of G analytics users then there will be some real data coming out of this feature which will be interesting. What may actually get users to share their data is that by sharing they will get to take advantage the new advanced Google products and services as they become available. I’m going to think for a day and do some more reading before deciding myself.
Here is more info on data sharing:
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=87515
What Is Page Strength? How Do You Use It?
Posted by Bryan at April 9th, 2008We’ve all come to accept the fact that Google really is the top dog when it comes to the search engine world, but that doesn’t mean that their tools are the best way to find out your sites visibility and reach. Relying on one source for this information is never smart anyways, the guys over at SEOmoz created what they call the “Page Strength Tool”. Where Google relies only on its own information, the Page Strength Tool pulls its information from not only Google, but Yahoo, Wikipedia, DMOZ, Alexa, de.licio.us, and Technorati to compile its information.
But what exactly does it give you for information?
- Number of links pointing to your full URL
- Number of links pointing to your domain (only important if you didn’t enter your domain in the search)
- SERP rank for the first four words of your sites title tage
- Age of your domain
- Incoming links from .edu domains
- Incoming links from .gov domains
- Your Alexa Ranking
- Number of results Google lists when searching your site
- Percentage of links leading from your domains homepage to the site you have searched
- Total number of Technorati related links
- Total number of searches for your site at del.icio.us
- Your DMOZ listings
- Number of links to your site from Wikipedia
- Google Page Rank for the site you searched and the domain
That seems like a lot of information in one place, and it definitely is, but as we said earlier, you can’t simply rely on one source! Use this tool to get a quick glance of your site to know where you need to make some changes. Also, you can run the information from your site against your competitors and get a fairly detailed read out of what they’re doing right or wrong that you may not have addressed.
Yahoo in talks to use Google search ads: source
Posted by Linda at April 9th, 2008Interesting news coming out of San Francisco. I’m not really surprised that these talk are going on. Google has been extremely vocal about the Microsoft takeover. They obviously think a Microsoft takeover of Yahoo would be bad for the internet in general. I wonder what affect this will have on adsense if it ever materializes. At first glance it might be thought that Google’s paid ad reach would sky rocket but that may not be the case because Google already powers such a huge percent of daily searches.
See the link below for details.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080409/bs_nm/yahoo_google_dc
What About Mobile Marketing?
Posted by Bryan at April 3rd, 2008
The mobile market has expanded to the point where many people rely primarily on their cell phone. Almost all cell phones currently available are capable of receiving SMS text messages and accessing the internet. With the average consumer having their cell phone on hand more often then their laptop, this market is perfect for taking advantage of but also requires a bit of finesse or you’ll wind up turning your audience away.
Before you even start thinking about Mobile Marketing, I highly encourage you to become familiar with the Mobile Marketing Association’s (MMA) Best Practices Guidelines and their Mobile Advertising Guidelines to fully understand what’s considered acceptable protocol and what isn’t. Also, the Mobile Marketers Mobile Outlook 2008 is a great read for more detailed information on the topic.
The options are really limitless in this form of marketing as each day it seems that cell phones become that much closer to becoming a laptop. Starting with the basic SMS text messaging and MMS marketing, you have the option of providing one or two way communication with your audience. Your audience can opt in to receive your marketing material, respond back to you to request more or different material, and even submit information to you that you can use in a number of ways. Advertising on mobile sites is a viable option now as well and even google adsense has broken into that market. But it doesn’t just stop there, games and applications for your phone are full of advertisements and sponsorships and you paid for them.
Having been a big fan of the Heroes TV Show, I actually opted into their mobile marketing campaign which is fairly viral. I was sent at least one text message a week, offered a gateway to their WAP site, and even asked to reply back to them and help figure out clues for some mystery relevant to the show. It was very captivating in a viral marketing sense. Also, if you have frequented a bar recently, you’ll notice several of them have a tv screen advertising unit they call BarCast which lets you text and picture message their service and have that broadcast on the advertising board.
The options really are limitless, but the audience is a lot more thin skinned about how you approach the situation.
April Fools Day is to Viral Marketers as Halloween is to Dentists
Posted by Bryan at April 1st, 2008You have 364 days left to take advantage of this, so you’ll want to set an alarm to remind and come back to reference this post.
Today the internet goes dead. Every news source and trusted form of information now lay suspect as the dreaded Fools Day leaves its mark. But what’s that you say? Your social bookmarking sites are flooded with hilarious or concerning stories that you can’t help but click on? Your search engine of choice offers to let you to search into the future? And of course, you can’t simply click the link and read it and be done with it. No! You must send it out to everyone you know so that they too can share in the hilarity.
Congratulations. You have provided some giddy marketer with the results desired from there viral marketing campaign. April Fools day is all about capturing the attention of your specific audience and giving them something to gab about. So while Google is just doing it for the giggles because, let’s face it, we live in their world, everyone out there is fighting for a piece of the pie. The following is a list of the April Fools Pranks from this year that definitely make the grade.
- Newsflash: Digg Admits It’s Rigged and Just a Game
- Clinton Drops Out!!!!
- NASA to Burn Sponsor Logos into the Surface of Mars
- Betamax to HD-DVD Converter
- Match.com Works For eHarmony Founder
So what do these sites gain by putting up this little piece of humor for the world to see? Traffic, and lots of it.
So how can you take advantage of April Fools Day 2009 like everyone in marketing should?
- Create a fake news story or product/service based off of a popular buzz term.
- Make sure it at least makes you smirk before you launch it. Test it out on your friends.
- If your target is the U.S. then launch it right at Midnight EST.
- Use social bookmarking sites and sites specifically tailored to listing April Fools Day Pranks submitted by users.
- Keep tabs on what blogs in your niche write about, the cool April Fools Day Pranks they’ve seen and either comment on them or send the publisher the link right as you go live.
- Know when to call it quits. YouTube directed every featured video on their site to a Rick Roll. Shortly after they reverted back to normal and many people clicking over to see the prank most likely surfed around for a bit.
So next year when you’re planning your April Fools Day Prank, I’ll be one year closer to living on Mars with Project Virgle’s Plan B.
