Here in Ohio, we’ve had a nice week of sunny weather in the mid-70′s, and it’s amazing how a week of sunshine makes you feel! It’s made us feel so good, that part of the crew has made a resolution to start working off that winter weight with an afternoon plank break. I’m realizing just how out-of-shape I am! After the planks, it’s back to the desk to catch our breath and catch up on the latest happenings in the web marketing world. Here’s a sampling of what the crew has been reading this week.
There’s always music playing in our office, and you never know what you’re going to hear. It could be a hair band from the ’80s, or you might hear Cher reminding you to “believe in life after love.” If you’re someone who likes to share what you’re listening to, you’re going to love this announcement about Twitter’s foray into the music sharing biz. According to this post on Wired, Twitter is set to launch a stand-alone music app that will allow users to find new music based on what their friends are listening to. Tweet away those playlists! Even when we’re not listening to music, we still like to share—great articles on SEO, link building and content creation.
WordPress is a fantastic blogging platform that is pretty quick and easy to install. When you download the WordPress install, it comes with a five-minute install guide, which is pretty good for even for the less technically inclined.
But what happens after that? WordPress has a host of setting options and a variety of features. To the uninitiated, these can seem overwhelming to just simply confusing as to what each of these options does. This tutorial is designed to take you through the settings that matter most. I won’t go through each and every one, as some are self-explanatory and others don’t matter all that much. But those that do can make or break the success of your blog.
Decisions, decisions. Whether someone makes a purchase from your site isn’t just about product pages and shopping carts. If they have a question about a product, they need to be able to find a way to contact you easily. If they can’t, they just might decide to take their business elsewhere. And online, that’s quite simple to do with just a few clicks.
In my latest blog post on Search Engine Land, I detail why an optimized “Contact Us” page is critical to not only providing visitors with much-needed information, but can also help generate leads and ultimately sales. And in the end, isn’t that your goal? I hope you’ll find these tips useful for your site.
When looking at a website’s architectural issues, there is no bigger benefit than ensuring your internal navigation and links are set up to ensure proper search engine spidering. This helps give visitors the ability to find information they need quickly and effectively. There is also no bigger breakdown in site architecture than when your navigation fails at helping visitors navigate through the site, or effectively blocks search engines from indexing your content.
All said and done, it doesn’t matter how perfectly your site is optimized if your site navigation fails to get searchers and search engines to your content. Your optimization efforts are doomed to failure.
From Google’s announcement that it will close Google Reader in July—some people aren’t too happy—to nifty ways to optimize a PDF for search, we’ve read some great articles this week on analytics, SEO, link building and content marketing. Oh, and don’t be creepy when you network on social media channels.
We were really excited when Disney bought Lucasfilm and along with it the Star Wars franchise—Episodes VII, VIII and IX!—but were confused with seemingly conflicting reports this week. In an article by the Huffington Post, George Lucas revealed that Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher were pretty much a done deal for Episode VII. Carrie Fisher even seemed to confirm it, but alas, this report says she was only joking. The changes coming to Facebook though are no joke. And that’s not all we’ve been reading about this week.
When deciding which blogging platform you’re going to use, one of the first questions you’re faced with is whether to host it yourself or go with a “free” version that is hosted on another social blogging site. In an earlier post I outlined five important blogging platform questions that you can use to determine what kind of platform functionality you need. Within those, there are often a range of free (or low-cost) and self-hosted blogging platforms to choose from. There are advantages and disadvantages to each option, each important to understand before you jump in with both feet.
Some blogging platforms come in both free and hosted versions, so you really have to know which will benefit you the most. I’ll tackle some of the pros and cons for each one by one, to give you a broader perspective of each option and how it might impact you and your blogging abilities.
As a web marketer, we often start working on websites after the initial development stage. It stands to reason, right? You don’t need web marketing until after the website has been built. Until then, there is nothing to market! While this may sound logical, when it comes to building a website that can be properly marketed, that process must start far earlier than website rollout. In fact, web marketing starts before you even settle on your new business name!
Without setting the proper architectural structure, and specifically, choosing a domain name and making your URLs search engine friendly, you’re setting yourself up for a whole mess of problems later on. Getting out ahead of these can save you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars of development, not to mention the headache of fighting the search engines while making necessary changes.
We felt the chill as a blizzard slammed the New England states this past weekend, we were shocked when Olympic hero Oscar Pistorius was charged with murdering his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, and we wondered if aliens really were invading as pictures emerged today of a 10-ton meteor speeding through the Russian sky, creating a sonic shockwave that injured more than 1,000 people. We thought it best to stay holed up in our office finding great PPC and link-building articles to share with you.
