Are you familiar with the term contextual linking?

Before we get into that, here is a little history…

It used to be common for websites to have a “Links” page or Site Maps. These pages would link to all of the other pages on your site. The main problem with this concept is there is no relevant content on these pages to please search engines.  Search engines look at the surrounding context of a link to determine its value.  (Site maps do still have value. We will discuss that on a later date.)

Contextual linking can be internal and external. Both are essential.

• Internal contextual linking consists of linking valued keywords to content throughout the site.
  Linking to category level from a product page or linking to a complimentary product would be examples of internal contextual linking.
• External contextual linking takes traditional link building to the next level. It’s more than just obtaining a link. It’s obtaining a link embedded into high quality content. Difficult? Yes, of course it is. However, that is why it is so valuable.

Do you link to other pages within your site from content?

Many people are still scared of pay-per-click, or paid search marketing. The fact is it can be a very profitable marketing channel.

Paid search marketing allows advertisers to target specific searches and cities. It also allows for clear and concise statistics. Not only can advertisers see clicks, but, if optimized properly, they can see if those clicks are converting.

The beauty of pay-per-click marketing is not in the clicks, it is in the statistics. For non-converting keywords, PPC allows quick adjustments. Pay-per-click is not about getting more traffic, it’s about getting quality traffic.

The PPC Myths are everywhere, but still just myths. What are you waiting for with PPC?

I have several PPC tips available on my blog at http://www.johnwellis.com/tag/ppc/ to help you get started with your paid search campaigns.

First off, let’s look at tips on avatars to avoid:

1. Don’t use those Flash-generated Japanimation style avatars. They all look too similar, which means they’re not unique enough to distinguish you from the rest of the millions of people who are also using them.
2. Don’t use inanimate objects or pets.
3. Don’t use a generic avatar. The worst thing you can do is not customize your avatar. A grainy, blurry photo of your dog is better than that.

An ugly dog is better than a generic icon!

Logos

Benefits:

1. Represents your brand and business
2. Often well-crafted and memorable
3. More room for creativity
4. Ties your blog / other social media pages together
5. Easily recognizable among masses of avatars

A logo is often the most remembered thing from our whole interaction with clients – indeed, that is the purpose a well-designed logo: Stand out in someone’s mind to remind them of your business over all others in your particular field.

But getting recognized is tough. Although there are so many different avenues, networks, tools, and channels available for creating your personal brand, standing out from the crowd is more difficult than ever.

For businesses, logos are often designed by professional graphic designers to capture the essence of your business and what it does in a simple yet creative way (or least, it should be).

Good examples:

Some may argue that a logo can be impersonal, cold or even stale. If that’s your opinion, then perhaps you would choose a photo avatar.

Photos

Benefits:

1. More personal
2. Everyone can do it
3. Not everyone is a designer
4. People recognize faces, even after a long time
5. People with highest twitter followers tend to use photos

Whether it’s a professional headshot, a candid photo, or a self-portrait, photos show a personal side to your online profile. It shows that you want to connect on a personal level and that you’re not afraid to be yourself. It also shows a level of trust, giving out your image to the online world, just like extending a hand to be shaken.

Good examples:

Overall, photo avatars are best used by two types of people in the social media sphere:

1. Personal profiles / accounts used mostly for personal information.
2. Professionals that are either the sole face of the business or an integral part of the overall team that interacts with the general public.

Symbols/Icons

Due to privacy concerns, some people use a symbol (a typewriter for a writer, a gavel for a lawyer) instead of a photograph. I’m not a fan of these simply because they are impersonal and too generic.

Combination avatars

Combining your company’s logo and your photo is a great way to combine the power of the two individual avatar styles listed above. Not only does it allow people to “see” who they’re connecting with, but it also shows people whom you represent.

Fuel Labs is one of the first companies to demonstrate an effective and consistent combination avatar design. The “company” accounts on Twitter, Facebook, show just the logo but the design for everyone on the Fuel Labs team is a combo avatar that successful locks company-name-face together. With this design, Fuel gets to show off its team, and brings clarity to its presence across various social media platforms.

Obviously, I’m of the same mind. Fuel’s implementation just makes sense to me. So for my avatar, I’ve combine a stylistic candid photo and my personal brand logo. Yes, it could be improved, but it hits all the touchpoints I was wanting to address: logo, face, and color palette that matched my current web site color palette.

The need for consistency

As designers, we should all have similar avatars displaying across the web. When you comment on a well-known blog and your comment’s avatar is the default generated “monsters” or geometric shape patterns, you do your business a disservice by not extending your brand recognition.

Use it on your blog, on Twitter, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, everywhere. Even if people don’t automatically remember your name or your website, they’ll remember your avatar and make an association. When they see it again later, on another network or site, they’ll be more likely to pay attention, to friend you, and maybe remove a few of those degrees of separation.

Do you have unique title tags?

It is essential for every single page on your website to have unique title tags. The title tag is, and has always been, the most important factor in achieving higher search rankings.

Yes, search marketing can be complicated and extensive. However, creating unique title tags is easy, but yet so many sites are missing them. Without a unique title tag, the “complicated” stuff is useless.

What is a title tag?

The content of a title tag displayed at the top of the browser window. It’s the html used to describe what the page is about.

The HTML coding for title tags look like the following: <TITLE>Contact Me: John W. Ellis</TITLE>

The title tag should contain 3-5 words describing the page, followed by the site name. Below are two examples of unique title tags

http://www.zappos.com/cougar – “Cougar – Shoes, Bags, Watches – Zappos.com”

http://kashboxcoaching.com/management-coach-program/ – Management Coach Program << Kashbox Coaching

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The Young Men’s Christian Association (“YMCA” or in the USA “the Y”) is a worldwide movement of more than 45 million members from 124 national federations affiliated through the World Alliance of YMCAs. Founded on June 6, 1844 in London, England by George Williams, the goal of the organization was putting Christian principles into practice, achieved by developing “a healthy spirit, mind, and body.” The YMCA is a federated organization made up of local and national organizations in voluntary association. Today, YMCAs are open to all, regardless of faith, social class, age, or gender. — Wikipedia

While opinions concerning the branding has been mixed, The Guardian has a unique take on the change:

The Guardian, YMCA rebrands itself as The Y

It was perhaps the most joyfully proclaimed acronym in the history of popular music. Four letters, four actions, one exuberant hit record that came to be seen as a symbol of gay culture in the 1970s, on a par with moustaches and wide lapels.

But on Monday, the YMCA was laid to rest in the US, marking the end of its 166-year history. Or to be more accurate, MCA was laid to rest, leaving the Y standing tall and proud as the sole surviving letter of the Young Men’s Christian Association, the original Bible study group founded in London in 1844. The board of the organisation’s American branch announced that it will henceforth call itself by its common street name, “The Y”, unveiling a new logo as part of a major “brand revitalisation”.
…
Audrey Haynes, the group’s vice president, said it was a “momentous event in the history of the Y”. She said the new logo was a symbol that “honours our past and represents our future”.

But for many, that was precisely the problem: honouring the past. Specifically, what on Earth now happens to the famous Village People pop hit that took the US and the UK by storm in January 1979?

What will thousands of teenagers at coming-of-age parties and barmitzvahs now dance to at the end of the evening, and what becomes of the choreographed hand movements with which they spell out Y-M-C-A in time to the legendary chorus? “It’s fun to stay at the Y-Y-Y-Y” doesn’t quite cut it.
…
The organisation hopes its new-look, diminutive name will make it “warmer, more welcoming”, as an executive told the New York Times. But they must be mindful of the confusion that can set in when institutions change their spots.

Take the artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince. He turned himself into gobbledygook for much of the 1990s, only to switch back to the thoroughly understandable brand Prince in 2000.

45 million are part of this global non-profit organization whose mission it is “To put Christian principles into practice through programs that build a healthy spirit, mind and body for all.” After 43 years with the same logo, the organization is introducing a new identity system by Siegel+Gale and is adopting the moniker the whole world already has for it: the Y.

Siegel+Gale’s Co-President, CEO, and Chief Creative Officer, Howard Belk, has shared some additional clarifications and intentions behind their work:

The underlying reason for change was simple. The mission of the Y has broadened dramatically over the past 20 years and the organization’s brand — its story — needs to better express its highest order impact on our world. The new identity is that of an organization that strengthens the essential foundations of community.

Here is what the new brand needs to accomplish…

• Convert brand awareness to action. The new mark is an expression of the Y’s commitment to a higher cause, namely, strengthening the foundations of communities, as well as its personality, which is welcoming and hopeful. The previous mark was intended to serve primarily as an identifier for facilities and was not reflective of the brand.
• Align with the Y’s newly articulated areas of focus: Youth Development, Healthy Living and Social Responsibility. The new identity appeals to and is more relevant to youth by being fresh and accessible. It reflects healthy living through its brightness and sense of movement. Social responsibility is conveyed through the range of colors and its direct relationship to the areas of focus within communications.
• Counter mis[con]ceptions of the Y as merely a provider of programs and services and instead convey the true spirit of the Y as a ‘movement’ committed to strengthening communities.
• Build on the heritage of the Y as a beacon within its communities. The new identity is more of beacon, a visual call to action, than it is an identifier.

Form

• From severe, static and rigid to friendly, approachable and dynamic.
• Forward looking, optimistic, contemporary.
• Preserves heritage of the triangle.

Color

• From corporate red and black to hopeful and bright.
• Better reflects diversity of the organization and its members.
• Provides a freedom within a framework.

Finish

• Gradients bring depth and dimension.
• Is sympathetic to key applications such as signage and contributes to the beacon effect.
• Is not problematic from a production POV given current technology.

Name/Typography

• The previous logo was a standalone “Y” with the letters YMCA underneath. The communicative name was adjusted to reflect what people affectionately call the organization, “the Y”.
• Trademark law requires the inclusion of the full YMCA name as well as the ™ mark.

As for my opinion on the Y’s new logo, I believe that the original mark has too much existing equity in it to warrant such a wholesale change. The design would have been better if the original mark was simply softened, executed in black and red, and then updated colors added to the system to satisfy the need for a youthful look. In addition, I think the gradients date it and won’t age gracefully. The Y logo has worked well for most of its history with just two colors. As far as the layout goes, the “YMCA” feels tacked on and makes the mark feel unbalanced. The way it is placed now just creates unnecessary visual dissonance and hurts the overall presentation.

Here is this week’s tip:

How fresh is your web content?
Are you creating unique content on your website? If so, how often? Monthly, Daily, Weekly?

Search engines love fresh content. They like to see your site is being monitored and updated constantly. More content leads to more indexing of your pages. This is one of many reasons why search engines love blogs. Blogs, if done properly, are updated often with fresh, unique content.

“Social networking for business purposes is growing,” [Ryan Scully, director of Discover's business credit card] said. “With such small operations, small business owners don’t need a long time to tell whether something is good or bad for business, so the social networking numbers will be the ones to watch.”

In 2007, 22 percent of small business owners told the Watch that they were members of an online social networking community such as Facebook, Linked-In, My Space or Twitter. Three years later, that number has more than doubled to 48 percent as of this month. Of those who are social networking, 55 percent say they have used it to promote their businesses, which is up from 45 percent in 2009.

In addition, 35 percent of small business owners who told the Watch that they promote their operations through social networking use four or five sites; 43 percent use two or three sites; 20 percent use one site; and 2 percent use more than five sites.

In terms of which networking opportunities they seek most, online sites moved into second place at 14 percent, a jump from 8 percent last year. Other networking avenues include:

• Local, in-person networking groups - 26 percent
• In person at conferences and organized events - 10 percent
• Chambers of Commerce or trade associations - 9 percent
• E-mail - 6 percent
• Other forms of networking - 15 percent
• Not sure - 21 percent

While the number of small business owners who have Web sites increased from 37 percent in 2009 to 45 percent in 2010, there are still many who say they don’t need one. Of the 55 percent of small business owners who don’t have a Web site, 57 percent say their businesses will never have one; 29 percent say they will; and 14 percent are not sure.

– excerpt from the Small Business Watch, April 2010

BRAND NEW: Romania’s new tourism logo and slogan — “Explore the Carpathian Garden” after the Carpathian mountains at the center of the country — were created by the joint partnership between TNS, a global market research firm and THR, a hospitality consultant.

In a horribly designed presentation available on Issuu, TNS and THR provide some market research, and it turns that more than 40% of people who have visited Romania consider both the Carpathian mountains and the countryside landscapes to be the major attractions. So, the heavily green new logo comes well justified. But the real story of this logo doesn’t lie in its rationalization, concept, or execution…

As it turns out, tropical leaf above the lettering is royalty-free clip art available at iStockphoto, created by Belgian designer Tom Nulens of Sodafish. In addition, the clip art was already used by an Irish company called Change Transport as its logo. I’m sure there was nothing in the TNS/THR report that rationalized lazy and unimaginative design.

Update: For the code-heads out there, a Smashing Magazine article describes some this CSS differences with IE 6, 7, and 8 – CSS Differences in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8

Late-Night Update: CSS issues have been resolved for IE 8, but IE 7 will need additional work.