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How to Build a Robust Social Presence Get your basic data out there. For many professionals, the core of your social presence probably involves one or more of these: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Each of these can be set up in less than five minutes and costs you nothing. Before jumping in, a few tips are in order: * When creating your profile, be sure to include a nice photo, and follow the steps suggested at each site to complete as much of your profile as you can. When you're considering adding, following, or contacting someone, think about the impact of missing or otherwise insufficient information. Business networking should not feel like you're living in a mystery novel. None of us has time for that, so think about the people who are looking at you. Make it easy for them to understand who are and what you do. * Thoughtfully add people to your network. I overheard someone on a plane last week saying "I have over a thousand people in my personal network but have no idea who most of them are." If the people in your network lack credibility, what's that say about you? These are your "friends," right? * On LinkedIn, seek out recommendations, but only from people who are qualified to give them. Five hundred professional connections without a single recommendation sends an unfortunate message. Likewise, a recommendation that starts out "I've never actually worked with Dave, but..." is useless, and detracts from social capital and personal credibility. * Participate. Leverage your ability to add or become friends, to post, and to comment to your advantage. Talk about your business, about news that relates to you or your profession, about things that are of interest to your audience. Do not shill or spam. * Be careful with questions like "What are you doing right now?" This common question -- in the context of business -- is a thought-starter, not a literal interrogative. The best response is less along the lines of "ea

This Blog Google Blogs Web Blog News This Blog Google Blogs Web Blog News Make your 404 pages more useful Tuesday, August 19, 2008 at 10:13 AM Your visitors may stumble into a 404 "Not found" page on your website for a variety of reasons: * A mistyped URL, or a copy-and-paste mistake * Broken or truncated links on web pages or in an email message * Moved or deleted content Confronted by a 404 page, they may then attempt to manually correct the URL, click the back button, or even navigate away from your site. As hinted in an earlier post for "404 week at Webmaster Central", there are various ways to help your visitors get out of the dead-end situation. In our quest to make 404 pages more useful, we've just added a section in Webmaster Tools called "Enhance 404 pages". If you've created a custom 404 page this allows you to embed a widget in your 404 page that helps your visitors find what they're looking for by providing suggestions based on the incorrect URL. Example: Jamie receives the link www.example.com/activities/adventurecruise.html in an email message. Because of formatting due to a bad email client, the URL is truncated to www.example.com/activities/adventur. As a result it returns a 404 page. With the 404 widget added, however, she could instead see the following: In addition to attempting to correct the URL, the 404 widget also suggests the following, if available: * a link to the parent subdirectory * a sitemap webpage * site search query suggestions and search box How do you add the widget? Visit the "Enhance 404 pages" section in Webmaster Tools, which allows you to generate a JavaScript snippet. You can then copy and paste this into your custom 404 page's code. As always, don't forget to return a proper 404 code. Can you change the way it looks? Sure. We leave the HTML unstyled initially, but you can edit the CSS block that we've included. For more information, check out our gu

# Many people link to social sites from their blogs and websites, and they rarely put 'nofollow' on their sites. Most social sites, on the other hand, started putting by default 'nofollow' on all external links. Consequence? For example, bookmark your new site 'example123.com' at 'stumbleupon.com'. If you google for 'example123′, stumbleupon.com page about it (with no content but the link and title) will be on top, while your site (with actual content) that you searched for will be below. Imagine what effect this PageRank capitalization has when you search for things other than your domain name! # Each site and blog owner is contributing to this unknowingly and voluntarily. Do any of these look familiar? social bookmarks Most blogs and sites have at least few of these on almost every single page. Not a single one of these buttons has 'nofollow', meaning that people give a very good chunk of their site's importance to these social sites (hint: importance that you give to these buttons is importance taken away from other internal links on your site). Most of social sites however, do have 'nofollow' on a link pointing back to peoples sites after users link to them for being good. Conclusion, people give them a lot of credit on almost every page, while these sites give nothing in return. (Two 'good' sites among these, that I know of, are Digg that does not have 'nofollow', and Slashdot that tries to identify real spam and puts 'nofollow' on those links only. There are probably few more.) # This can be easily prevented, and PageRank can be re-distributed, in no time! Solution is very simple. 'Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.' If you have a WordPress blog (as millions of internet users do), download plugins Antisocial and Nofollow Reciprocity. First one puts 'nofollow' on above buttons, second puts 'nofollow' on all external links pointing to 'bad' sites. If you are using some other blogging app

Oct 9, 2008 at 3:00pm Eastern by Matt McGee Google Starts To Classify Content Types In Web Search Google Snippets Like other search engines, Google already distinguishes between various types of content. You can search specifically for images, videos, books, blog posts, and so forth. Google has separate search engines for each. But two recent changes suggest that Google is improving its ability to classify different types of content that's gathered from ordinary web pages. Search Engine Roundtable points to a discussion on WebmasterWorld about the addition of dates at the beginning of some search results - something Michael Gray spotted in mid-September. From my personal experience, this seems to be happening mostly on content that Google can identify as blog posts and news articles - but not exclusively on those types of content. And speaking of identifying types of content, Google Operating System points out that Google is starting to show special forum-related information in search results when it can identify that the result comes from a message board. Author Alex Chitu suggests this could mean new advanced search options in the future: This new feature shows that Google is able to automatically classify web pages and to extract relevant information. Once Google starts to show data for other kinds of web pages, we can expect to see an option to restrict the search results to a certain category (forums, reviews, blogs, news articles). The screenshot above has examples of both cases, the top showing dates in the snippets, and the bottom showing forum information.

Oct 7, 2008 at 8:11am Eastern by Barry Schwartz Google Webmaster Central Hosting "Link Week" This week at the Google Webmaster Central blog, Google has a series of blog posts all about links. The first two blog posts are live and are named: * Links information straight from the source * Importance of link architecture Google explains that they will be writing about three main topics this week. (1) Internal links, the links that you have within your site. That post is already live and is about the how you should structure your link structure for best search engine visibility. (2) Outbound links or the links you post on your pages to other sites. I assume Google will discuss the value of these links and who you should and should not link to. Clearly, think about your user here and not the search engine. (3) Inbound links or the external sites that are linking to your site. I assume Google left this for last, because this may be the most interesting topic. Google plans to bust some myths, so it will be interesting to see what they say on the topic of links hurting your site. Time will tell - but stay tuned for more information. Postscript: Here is Google's post on linking outbound, which has useful tips for beginners on who and when to link out. In addition, it tells you how to handle user generated content links. Postscript 2: I was a bit let down by Google's inbound link post.

Oct 22, 2008 at 10:55am Eastern by Paul Bruemmer Two Ways To Justify SEO In Uncertain Times In House - A Column From Search Engine Land During uncertain economic times like these, our advice is to always stick with the fundamentals to maintain business efficiency and progress. No matter what your business model, performing the fundamentals will keep you on-track and in-line for leveraging future success. If the C-level executives in your company are having any doubts about the value of SEO and are hesitating to release more funding, it's time to perform a cost-benefit exercise. It's your job as an in-house SEO manager to reestablish their confidence in the value of SEO as well as your value and the value of your team. When funding gets in the way, having a narrow focus, putting it on the table, and describing company goals you are committed to are all very important. 1) Leverage Your Paid Search Data To demonstrate implicit value for SEO, start with a baseline. Show where your key terms currently rank in organic and multiply by the cost-per-click value. Run the numbers for the value of direct clicks with high search intent. One way to go about this is to calculate an Effective Cost-Per-Click (eCPC) for your organic listings: 1. Access the Keyword Tool within your Google AdWords account. 2. Type your best performing (for instance, 20) keywords. 3. Select descriptive words or phrases and synonyms. 4. Click Get Keyword Ideas. This will produce a report; select Exact within the "Match Type" field and click on Approx Avg Search Volume. 1. Look at the Cost-Per-Click column to acquire the CPC value (let's assume it's $2.00). 2. Go to your web analytics data and identify the number of organic clicks for these keywords (let's assume 20,000/month). 3. Multiply the two (CPC times the number of organic clicks (in this case $40,000/mo)). 4. Create a spreadsheet with your best performing keywords and make the statement, "if we

From Prince Harry in Afghanistan to Tom Cruise ranting about Scientology and footage from the Burmese uprising, blogging has never been bigger. It can help elect presidents and take down attorney generals while simultaneously celebrating the minutiae of our everyday obsessions. Here are the 50 best reasons to log on

Questioning the Future of Search By Mike Grehan, ClickZ, Jan 26, 2009 Related Reading New Signals to Search Engines Ajax and Search Engines SuperPages.com Combines Local Search with Social Networking Search Engines Are Allowed to Reject Ads Suggested Searches search engines - social networking - reject ads - static link Subscribe to newsletters Subscribe to RSS feeds Post a comment (0 posted) Last week I presented a Webinar based on the "thought paper" I wrote called, "New Signals To Search Engines." As it was a long read at 23 pages, I highlighted the more salient points, but mainly wanted to try and answer the hundreds of questions I received following its publication. The top question was about social media. It seems that many companies already have barriers to entry. Amy Labroo, associate director of online media at Advantage Business Media, asked specifically about any backlash due to unmonitored content in the social media space. I've come across this situation quite a lot recently. Many companies worry about negative commentary and therefore don't accept comments on their blogs or social network sites. In fact, many haven't started a blog or a dialogue space at a social networking site. This is simply hiding from your audience. If people have negative commentary about you and they can't make it known at your Web site or blog, they'll make it known somewhere else. I advocate putting yourself out there and listening to your audience. Marketing has changed from a broadcast-my-corporate-message medium to a listening medium. The voice of the customer is very, very loud online. And those companies that still believe they own their brand and the message may well be in for a bit of shock as brands are hijacked by customers. Let your customers have their say. Keyword-driven marketing is all about understanding the language of the customer and creating marketing messages in that language. From time to time, I meet with creative agencies and almost always end u