Social and Search

• Tracking Social Conversions – if you only click on one link this week, make it this one. It’s a detailed post instructing you how to use callback events to create events in your analytics package.  This segmentation, testing and of course, goal tracking.
• How to make Facebook Comments Indexable – Make those great comments from Facebook indexable by search engines.  Requires some API programming but oh so worth the effort.
• Introducing Google Instant Pages – Google rolled out several enhancements this week during their Inside Search event.  Google Instant Pages pre-renders the top search result in the background so your load time is reduced.  Currently only available for Chrome developers and beta.
• Yahoo App Search – Yahoo rolled out an app search for the desktop plus an app for use on mobile.  A nice addition for anyone who’s tried to find that perfect app in the app store.
• SMX Advanced Key Takeaways – A nice summary of what went on at SMX Advanced – PPC Analytics, Social, Local and Mobile Search Converge, and a Q&A with Matt Cutts.

YouTube

• YouTube Updates – Lots of change in the YouTube camp this week.  You Tube added an option to *not* include the logo in the player and an “As Seen On” channel that’s great for blogger use.
• YouTube adds a Creative Commons option and joins to 21st century.  Content creators can grant a use license and users can legally use them.

New search engines.  You gotta love ‘em.  Even Matt Cutts loves them.

Whenever a new search engine hits the market I start by checking out their functionality.  Once I get a good sense of what they do – and what they don’t do – I try to find ways that it can help me do my job better/faster/smarter.

First, a bit about Topsy:

• Founded in May 2009
• Focuses on real time search, most notably Twitter
• Topsy claims its advantage is its speed. The engine is capable of indexing 1 million documents per second, and they served half a billion queries in January (mostly via their API).
• In a market where real time search engines are dropping like flies, Topsy remains bullish on the real time search opportunity.
• The engine is still relatively new – just over 2 years – and continues to add features, functionality and widgets.  That last one – widgets – is an important one for Topsy brand awareness.  I gave one of their widgets a test drive on my blog this weekend and you can see it on the right hand side of every page of the blog.

Here are a few ways Topsy can help you work better, faster and smarter:

1. Monitor buzz around your brand or site. Topsy supports the familiar “site:” directive, but in this case it returns tweets linking to your site.  You may be thinking “big deal” my analytics tells me who’s linking to me.  With Topsy you get a more complete picture of the Buzz – Jane said X, and then Bob and Sandy told their friends, and then their friends shared it with their friends…You can choose a time frame and can even view a chart of mentions on the right.
   You may be thinking “I can just get this from my analytics” but Topsy will give you a different dimension.  Two things Topsy gives you that your analytics can’t:
   • The actual source of the link.  Referrer data only shows you the URL that the link came from.  On Twitter this is often just “twitter.com” or “twitter.com/username”, or even the URL shortener.
   • Instances when the link didn’t create any clicks.  Even if they didn’t create clicks you may want to engage with the person who shared the link.

   If we look at the above screenshot again we see another great feature – alerts and rss.  Alerts will send you an email with the query (somewhat like Google Alerts) and rss is an rss feed of the query.
   You can monitor what people are saying when they link to your site as well as identify influencers.

2. Monitor buzz around your competitors. Let’s say you’re SEOmoz and you want to monitor activity around both SearchEngineLand and SearchEngineWatch.  Easy.  Topsy makes it easy to re-run search queries by inserting everything right on the query string.  Take a look at the query comparing the SEOmoz, SearchEngineLand and SearchEngineWatch.
   Once you’re on the screen you’ll be able to see trends.  For the most part, all three sites follow the same pattern but there are a couple of notable exceptions. Since it’s very unusual for SearchEngineWatch to have more mentions than SearchEngineLand, I was curious to see what caused the spike on June 9th.  Rolling over that dot showed something interesting.  SearchEngineWatch’s hot story was the release of the 2011 Search Ranking Factors by SEOmoz.  In other words, SearchEngineWatch had a significant impact on SEOmoz news. Very interesting.
3. Identify hot topics in the past 24 hours. If you scroll down on the anlytics page in #2 you’ll see a listing of the 15 most tweeted posts for that past day.  While you presumably know what they were on your own site, it’s much harder to get at that information for competitors.  Keep in mind this is real time search – not visitors or unique users – but it does show interest and intent to read.  While it’s likely that you’ll already know if your competitors are getting big buzz, this is particularly helpful with the low to medium buzz and can help you identify when something is gaining traction before it hits prime time.
4. Monitor what people are saying about a specific topic. Let’s look further into the announcement of the SEOmoz release of the 2011 ranking factors report.Viewing the tweets that linked to the page you can see what people are saying about the report.  Since they’re limited to 140 characters what they say can indicate their key takeaways.  In the case above, we see “Social signals will have the biggest impact” as this user’s summary of the report.
   This can also be helpful if you’re doing research – a way to get the Cliff’s Notes version of a post.  Browse through a dozen tweets and see if any patterns emerge.
5. Deliver more relevant, interesting content to your audience. By watching what people are tweeting about and what they’re saying you can get a handle on hot topics and what people think of them.  It’s not uncommon for people to tweet things like “Good post, but curious about the impact on [something]“.  That’s an invitation for you to get working on a post, page, eBook or white paper on the topic.  Let your audience’s needs guide you.

As I mentioned above, I installed the Topsy social plugin on my blog.  I’ve had mixed results. The plugin did better on the posts with a narrower focus – e.g. Mobile and Email Integration. However, posts with broader content – e.g. Website Launch Checklist – had off-topic results and displayed searches for “pages”, “credit card type” and “version numbers”.  All words in the post, but not core to the page.  I like the idea of the plugin, but they need to do some work on how they determine what the page is really about.  Not a big surprise though since real time search is more literal and less about semantic nuance.
One other place where Topsy provided some unexpected results – one good and one not-so-good – was when searching for a video.  I searched for the CloudFlare intro video made by Robert Scoble a couple weeks back.  Topsy brought back several tweets linking to the video on YouTube.  Clicking on one of the tweets brought up this page:

I love how Topsy embedded the video – no need to leave the page and go to YouTube to watch it!  Two points for user experience.  A nice to have would be if it listed the name of the person who uploaded the video.  Although YouTube doesn’t enforce it, attribution is critical so why not?  They must be using the YouTube API for the embed so they could easily get the publisher.

On the not-so-good front, the “mentions of” analytics chart on the right is not correct.  It shows June 9th as the first day for mentions but even Topsy lists tweets as early as May 25th.  So, something isn’t quite right with their analytics.  Not a show stopper, but certainly something to keep in mind.

So there you are – five ways I’ve been using Topsy.  I’m sure I’ve missed a bunch though.  Have you been using Topsy?  What ways can you see using Topsy?

PPC, Media and Social Advertising

• Social Ad Startup Taykey Lands $9 Million – In a privacy-aware culture, Taykey promises a “privacy safe” ad solution powered by semantic technology and not by behavioral profiles.
• Half of Mobile Campaigns Drive Consumers to Sites – With 49% of mobile campaigns driving users to a mobile site, “this…demonstrates how advertisers have invested in creating a persistent mobile presence”  More brands are opting to invest in mobile sites and mobile-aware functionality. Hallelujah.
• RIP Referrer Data! How Mobile Apps Can Kill Your Mobile Metrics – Mobile apps don’t retain the same refer data as browsers.  Looks like the days of log file analysis have returned – oh joy!  I smell a business opportunity here.
• 11 Facebook Ad Management Tools Reviewed – As Facebook advertising heats up, so is the market to manage and track.  Now can we drop talking click thru rate and start talking conversion rate?
• An Optimizer’s Guide To Facebook Ads Performance Reports – The most comprehensive guide I’ve seen for Facebook Ads – how to interpret the reports, what the metrics mean, and the nuances of advertising socially.
• Google’s New Product Local Ads & Product Extensions To Show On Mobile – Google added two ad types to its mobile ads.  Searchers can now get more information than ever about your product while searching via mobile – product availability, product images, price and more.

Connecting with Your Audience

• 8 Methods + Lots of Tools for Getting to Know Your Audience – Market Research, Social Industry and Brand Sentiment, Traditional Brand Sentiment, Site Feedback and User Interaction: Tons of tools plus good direction on how to organize and tackle this mammoth task.
• Online Brand Development – Old School Link Building in the Social Media Age – A great list to cultivate in-bound links.  Jason lists many more traditional approaches but guess what?  They work.  And he puts a social media spin on many of them.

Web Dev and Analytics

• CloudFlare: A website security product accidentally makes sites 60% faster – How a security company unintentionally created a Content Delivery Network, and made their sites significantly faster in the process.
• Search and Rescue: 4 Ways to Find Lost URLs After a Bad Website Redesign or CMS Migration – If you’re planning a site redesign or if you just completed one, read this article to help discover where you went wrong…before it’s too late.

SEO

• Introducing: The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors – A visual guide to all that impacts SEO.  A pretty handy, condensed guide.
• 2011 Edition of SEOmoz Search Engine Ranking Factors – In stark contrast to the SEO Periodic Table of elements, SEOMoz gives you keywords, domains, negative factors, historical comparison, social metrics and a slew of others.  Read the intro by Rand Fishkin to better understand the results and how to interpret them.

Mobile

• iPhone Mobile App Discovery with Bing – Bing announced several enhancements to the iPhone user experience – app search, deep launching into apps, and app autodiscovery.  Nice move, Bing – you created a way to keep iPhone users on Bing and away from iTunes.
• QR Code Generator by Mobile Barcodes – One of the most complete QR code generators I’ve seen.  Create 4 different types of QR codes – the basic link to a URL, send a text message, call a phone number, or send an email.

Social

• Where To Use Twitter’s New Follow Button – An intro to Twitter’s new Instant Follow button plus a few HTML tips for the newbs.

Bing

• Updates to Bing Webmaster Tools, data and content – They rewrote Index Explorer (page level data), added a user-configurable crawl delay to set Bing to crawl slower during peak times and more frequently during slower times as well as updates to user management.  Coming across this post was a reminder to get more familiar with Bing Webmaster Tools.

Apple and WWDC

• Apple Integrated Twitter Authentication – Apple implemented Twitter Single Sign On (SSO) and added SSO methods to its API for use by app developers.  And then TechCrunch posted a follow up detailing just how big a win it was for Twitter.
• Apple iCloud vs. Amazon Cloud Player vs. Google Music Beta – PC Mag compares the cloud services and explains a few of the differences.
• Apple pilfers rips off student’s rejected iPhone app – What would a big announcement be without a healthy dose of IP scandal?  Even the logos are almost identical. Tsk tsk Apple.

I’m starting a new weekly post here called twurl – this week’s URLs.  I’ll be sharing the top posts, articles and web pages that I found throughout the week.  Most will have been links I shared via Twitter but if you’re like me you don’t keep up with *everything* shared by your community.  Here is your chance to catch up with the most interesting/important/entertaining posts I saw last week – the ones that grabbed my attention and became conversation at the office/dinner table/over IM.

Mobile

• Google Maps Enhances Mobile Browser Version – Google added mobile functionality to rival (beat?) the app.
• Native App versus Browser – Which is better for mobile commerce? – Don’t just focus on visits and page views, for commerce make sure you focus on conversion, too.
• A First Look at the new SkyGrid – As consuming news becomes an increasingly difficult task, SkyGrid finds news you might be interested in.  It’s like a digital assistant for your news reader.

SEO

• 11 Best SEO Blogs to Follow – Great list by KaiserTheSage that will likely include a few new ones for you as well.
• Technical Site Audit – Great checklist on how to perform a technical site audit. A must read.
• Hacked Canonical Tags – A sinister, but real, issue where hackers add a canonical tag to your pages, effectively stealing all your link juice without you even noticing.
• SEO Strategies for eCommerce Websites – a thorough list of what you should do when SEOing an eCommerce site.

Apps & Tools

• CloudFlare – speeds up web apps by creating a Content Distribution Network for the masses.  Video interview by Scobleizer.
• 5 Social Media Marketing Tools – Search Marketing Sage’s list of the top tools they saw at Pro SEO.

HTML5

• Why 2 Engineers Left Apple to Start Hype – An HTML5 Flash alternative for animations
• 9 Outstanding Websites for Design Inspiration – A showcase of some really creative uses of HTML5 and CSS3.

Product Management & Architecture

• Should Architecture in an Agile Project be Allowed to Emerge? – A LinkedIn Group post with great conversation about the Agile methodology and where non-functional requirements fit.

Geek Humor

• The Number Line – A comic by xkcd where we learn about important elements such “negative imitator numbers” and “e and pi observed”.  If you sat through a decade’s worth of math classes this is your gift because only you will be able to understand the shear genius of this comic.

We’ve all heard the stats – mobile will again see significant growth in 2011.  As digital marketers and technologists we certainly don’t need to be convinced.  Just observe the plethora of smart phones at use during meetings, at lunch, in line at a store and (gasp!) behind the wheel.

Given all this data, it’s a bit surprising that mobile email has yet to hit prime time.

Is Email Really a Mobile Player?

Absolutely!  Look at these stats:

• From the Pew Research Center’s Mobile Access 2010 report:
  • 34% of cell phone owners access email from their phones – a 36% increase over last year
  • Minorities – Hispanics and African Americans – continue to lead cell phone usage with 41% of African Americans and 47% of Hispanics using mobile for email
• From ComScore’s Email Evolution
  • Web-based email decreased 6% last year
  • Conversely, daily mobile email usage increased 40%
• 13% of all email opens were via a mobile device – Mobile Email Opens Q4 2010 Report by Knotice

Do you want to ignore 1 in 3 of your recipients?  I didn’t think so.

There are a few best practices – and by best practices I mean “things you need to do to communicate effectively with one third of your audience”.

Trend #1 – Preheader as a continuation of the subject line

Although the most common use for the preheader is to link to a web version, some marketers are taking advantage of this space in more creative ways. Mobile devices – even smartphones with larger screens – show a smaller portion of each email in the preview pane. With preview’s lack of images and snazzy fonts, engaging the reader and creating calls to action are even more challenging.

So why not pair the preheader with the subject line? Use it as a continuation of the subject line.

Instead of:

Subject: 20% off all workout gear – sweats, yoga pants, t-shirts and more < Some portion of this will get cut off!
Preheader: View in a browser

Improved:

Subject: 20% off all workout gear < Only 25 characters!
Preheader: Sweats, yoga pants, t-shirts and more. View in a browser.

Trend #2 – View on a mobile device

view on a mobile device preheader

This is a good addition to the preheader that’s getting more play.

Why is it?   Take a look at how few characters are shown in the subject on my iPhone – 29 measly characters.

The good news here is that your mobile version can have a bit more jazz than the text version – not much in the way of images, but you can use fonts, links via text calls to action, background colors to draw attention. Simple html formatting that’s still lightweight and easy on the eyes.

And by that I mean not following Old Navy’s lead. While I love that they added a link to the mobile version in their preheader, their mobile version has much room for improvement.

Old Navy's mobile version

Things I would do differently:

• Format for readability – use bold, larger font sizes (sparingly, of course) and dividers.  Make it easy for readers to, well, read.
• Don’t write the copy as if it’s a text version.  They used short sentences and paragraphs – good – but could have improved the flow.  Those last few sentences are direct pulls from original email but without any formatting they don’t read as smoothly.
• Link to the full online version closer to the top.  They’ve buried it under all the legalese.  How many people do you think will scroll all the way down under all that small print to see if you’ve buried anything good?
• Test on several mobile devices – more on this in Trend #3 below.

Trend #3 – Test

OK, I’ll admit that this one isn’t much of a trend, but it really needs to be.

Not convinced?  Here are a couple examples of what can go wrong:

Aetna

Here's what happens when your mobile email and mobile web site don't play well together

Scenario

• I received an email from Aetna alerting me to a “new communication”.  Never having received one before I wanted to access it right away.
• I wasn’t home so I used my iPhone but couldn’t remember my username.  Fortuantely Aetna gives you a way to get your username.
• I followed the instructions and it worked flawlessly.
• I logged in to the site and got the welcome screen on the right of the image above.  No access to my online communication!
• I called them to find out what my “new communication” was.  The representative explained that she can’t access them.  Awesome.
• In a span of 10 minutes I went from being impressed by Aetna to being completely frustrated.

Old Navy

a savings so secret I can't even access it :(

Back to the Secret Savings email from Trends #1 and #2 above.  After reading the email I was curious what my secret savings would be so I clicked on the link.

Instead of finding out my secret savings I was brought to Old Navy’s mobile site, with no way to get to the full site.  I couldn’t figure out a way to get my secret savings from my phone.

Old Navy – you came close!  I was willing to forgive the formatting issues but I draw the line at clicking on a link in a mobile email that doesn’t work on a mobile device!  You had a customer engaged enough to:

• open your email
• click on the mobile version
• click on a link

And then frustrated her by not giving her what you promised in the link.

If this example doesn’t convince you of the importance of mobile testing, I’m not sure what will.

Additional Reading

Here are some great companion articles for mobile email

• Blue Sky Factory’s blog – great for all advice on email, and here’s a link to their mobile posts.
• ClickZ’s email columns – including a recent fave “8 Things I Wish Everyone Knew About E-mail Marketing“
• Subject Line + Preheader – the Perfect Mobile Pairing by Media Post

It’s an exciting time to for car and tech enthusiasts.  Car manufacturers are adding mobile and bluetooth to their models to answer consumers’ demands for more.  Some of the latest innovations include…

Toyota Unveils Entune

At the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Toyota announced the Entune Multimedia System.  Entune is similar to Ford’s Sync but with a leg up — over-the-air software updates.  Over-the-air updates save owners from performing the update manually — either by downloading to a USB device or bringing their car into the dealer.  Instead, owners get up-to-date software just by updating their mobile app.  The next time their phone connects to the car it will automatically upgrade the car’s firmware.

Entune uses your phone’s data plan so owners will need to ensure they have an adequate plan.  Entune mobile apps are available for iOS, Android and Blackberry.

Entune’s line-up of features is impressive:

• Bing integration for GPS, live search and points of interest.  And since Entune uses your smartphone’s data plan, streets and points of interest are constantly updated.  My Acura’s GPS can be updated once a year for $150.  You bet I’ll be looking for mobile app integration when I buy my next car.
• Open Table for finding and making restaurant reservations.
• MovieTickets.com to buy tickets and read recent reviews.
• Mobile apps to check sports scores, stock quotes, traffic, news, weather and compare fuel prices.
• Music – iheartradio (over 750 radio stations) and pandora.
• And the best part – all the apps integrate with bing so you can make a restaurant reservation, buy movie tickets and get directions all from your car’s console.

Ford Sync Continues to Add Features

Sync has been on the market for a few years now but that doesn’t mean the features are stale.  Ford has been releasing frequent updates, including the release of Sync Destinations just last month.

Sync’s current feature set includes…

• Audible text messages – no need to wait for a light or risk life and limb to read that “important” text.
• Hands-free calling – make a call, browse your phonebook and answer a call.
• Turn-by-turn directions – get audio directions, store favorites and perform a business search of more than 14 million US businesses.  This is where Entune has Sync beat by using the owner’s data plan to access up-to-date maps and businesses.
• Vehicle Health Report – diagnostics, read scheduled maintenance, view recall info and schedule service.
• Personalized Daily Info – configure Sync to show news, sports, weather, horoscopes, stocks and movies.

Get the full list and watch demo videos at Ford’s Sync site.

BMW ConnectedDrive Adds Email and Text Messaging

Also at this year’s CES, BMW debuted the world’s “first in-vehicle mobile office integration” — allowing drivers to access email and text messages.  ConnectedDrive uses the new Bluetooth Message Application Protocol (MAP), currently available only on select Blackberry devices.  For safety, drivers can read messages only while stationary.  While moving ConnectedDrive allows users to listen to messages via a text-to-voice translation.

ConnectedDrive is powered by QNX, a subsidiary BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM).

Audi Multi Media Interface (MMI)

Audi adds a touchscreen with multi-touch action – that two-fingered pinching you can do with an iPhone.  MMI brings entertainment, navigation and other features into a single platform.  MMI is powered by the Nvidia Tegra processor – the same name powering many notebooks and tablets.  Speculation is that a future release could include 3D maps with Google Earth.  MMI is expected to be released in select 2013 Audi models.

What’s Next?

As you can see, tech innovation has become an imperative for car manufacturers.  Consumers are demanding it and are willing to pay for it.  This is the edge Detroit and others needed – increased consumer satisfaction and higher transaction prices.  And while manufacturers attempt to outpace each other we car buyers get to reap the rewards with fast-moving innovation and just plain cool technology.

As most (all?) of you know, Chris Brogan identifies 3 words to focus his efforts on for the year. I hadn’t intended to do one for myself but after pondering it this weekend I decided the act of defining a set of words to use as my guide throughout the year would help me keep focus on the important things. And what busy person couldn’t benefit from a bit more focus?

So here are my 3 words for 2011:

• Serve – This one has several meanings. For me as an individual it means keeping focus on my priorities – personal relationships, family, health and career. It means making sure I leave work early enough to work out 3 times a week – no matter what, and taking 30 minutes each morning to read the blogs and news on my “daily reads” list. For me as a manager and leader it means clearing roadblocks for others and helping them see when the roadblock is within their control – even when it’s within themselves.
• Connect – Attend local meetups, seek out Philly-area people in my field and comment more on blogs and forums – even when I’m busy. All too often I use the “I was too busy” excuse but really, it’s all about committing to what’s important. And what’s important doesn’t change just because “I’m busy”.
• Prioritize – I’m cheating a bit with this one because I started this at the end of last year. This is all about recognizing what’s important and seeing it through, and the converse of admitting when something isn’t as important and letting it go (or letting it go for now). That last part is a real challenge for me – I pride myself in being able to “do it all” but that often translates to doing lots of things but not doing any of them as well as I could (or as well as they deserve).

Tomorrow when I get in the office I’m putting these 3 words on my wall for all to see. “Busy” is a constant theme in my life (and probably yours, too) but these are important and I want to give them the emphasis they deserve.

What are your 3 words?

On Monday I reviewed Google webmaster tools in Part 1 of my series on optimizing a site for SEO.  If you’ve never used Google webmaster tools please read that post first, and then come back here to learn how a few  free WordPress plugins can help make those SEO updates quickly (and in some cases, automate them so all you have to do is install the plugin).

Canonical URLs

• Platinum SEO Pack – Very configurable – manage title, description and keyword meta tags at the post level as well as category and tag pages.  Includes automatic 301 redirects for permalink changes.
• All in One SEO Pack – Meta keywords and descriptions and titles.

Crawl Errors

• Redirection – Automatically adds permalink 301s when you rename a page.  Allows manual management of 301s as well.  Monitors 404s and allows easy mapping to 301s.

Sitemap

• Google XML Sitemaps – Creates sitemap.xml and a zipped version.  Automatically regenerates whenever a post is added or removed as well as when a permalink changes.  Pings Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Robots

• Robots Meta – Edit robots.txt from within WordPress.  Also allows granular control at the post level if you want to add robots meta tags to specific posts.  Disallow indexing of category, comment, and feeds.

As you see there’s a lot of overlap in features – redirects, meta tags, titles, etc.   When deciding what to install, make a complete list of features and install accordingly.  Don’t be afraid to test drive and install something else.

I should mention that I run this blog on the Thesis theme and several of the features of the above plugins are provided in Thesis as well.  However, in the WordPress world there’s always “a plugin for that” so I wanted to focus on free plugins for this review.

Come back on Friday for Part 3 when I’ll explain what the above concepts are in more detail and discuss why they’re so important.

Google Webmaster Tools provides a set of useful tools to evaluate, manage and modify how your site is seen and treated by Google and other search engines.  While most of the toolset outputs information you could figure out on your own, if you’re busy (who isn’t?) or if your site has several developers and content contributors (most do) Google webmaster tools provides a consolidated way to keep track of how your site interacts with search engines.

Getting started with Google Webmaster Tools

In order to use Google webmaster tools you need to verify that you’re the site owner.  Google gives you two ways to do this – inserting a tag in the head of your page, or uploading a file to your site.  Verification is immediate so once you’ve setup the verification you can get started.

Prefered Domain

Found in Site configuration > Settings

Select which version of your domain you want Google to use – e.g. www.mysite.com or mysite.com.  Choosing which version (canonical URL) you prefer tells Google to treat both versions of the link as one.  This is important to avoid duplicate content hits.  If Google sees both versions as separate pages then it evaluates its relevance separately.  Since one of the biggest influencers on search algorithms is inbound links, you want site A’s link to you as www.mysite.com and site B’s link to you as mysite.com to count as 2 inbound links to the same page.

You can also set this via the the canonical URL tag

<link rel="canonical" href="mysite.com" />

For further reading on the canonical URL tag, SEOmoz has a great article on why the canonical URL tag is so important and how duplicate content can hurt your SEO ranking.

If you can’t set the preferred domain

It’s not obvious, but in order to set the preferred domain you need to verify both versions of the URL.  If you don’t, Google will tell you it can’t change the setting until you verify the site.  I got hung up on this at first, so make sure you verify both www.mysite.com and mysite.com with Google webmaster tools.

Crawl Errors

Found in Diagnostics > Crawl errors

This sections ists the problems Google is having indexing your site.  These include

• Inbound links to pages that don’t exist
• Pages blocked by robots.txt
• Pages in sitemap.xml that are inaccessible

Sitemap

Found in Site configuration > Sitemaps

The default location for sitemap.xml is at the root of your site.  If you have multiple sitemaps or the sitemap is located elsewhere, here’s where you can tell Google about it.

Robots

Found in Site configuration > Crawler access

What is robots.txt?

Robots.txt is a file search engines use to understand which pages you want or don’t want to be indexed by search engines.  There are 2 configuration settings

• noindex – don’t add this page to search engines
• nofollow – you can index this page, but don’t follow any of the links on this page when spidering the site

How to create a robots.txt file

Google webmaster tools can create robots.txt file for you.  It allows you to specify pages and directories to both allow and block.  Even though I know how to create a robots.txt it’s so simple to do here and avoids human error (because, you know, I make mistakes occasionally).

HTML Suggestions

This section lists some potential places for improvement in 5 key areas

• Duplicate meta descriptions
• Long meta descriptions
• Short meta descriptions
• Title tags
• Non-indexable content

How to Use the Output from Google Webmaster Tools in WordPress

In the next segment of the series I’ll be posting a review of a set of WordPress plugins to help make some of the improvements recommended by Google webmaster tools.

I’m an experiential learner.  I learn by doing.  There’s nothing as impactful for me as experiencing something myself.  Once I do, it just clicks.

Once I realized this I started to take note of things that worked for me in all aspects of my life – magazine headlines, highway signs, parking lot design, recipe layout.

It was only natural that I’d use Wegmans as a case study.  I love Wegmans.  I drive past two other supermarkets every weekend to go to Wegmans.

What can we learn from Wegmans?

• Don’t make your customer guess.  Far left pic – Wegmans carries at least a dozen varieties of apples.  I can’t possibly keep them all straight – baking or eating, firm or soft, sweet or tart.  I used to go for my old reliable McIntosh but these signs introduced me to some new varieties.  Now I always go home with a few Pink Ladies (my new fave).  And guess what – Wegmans is the only local supermarket I can get them at.
• Give them new ways of using your product.  Middle pic – I love their olive bar, but after umpteen weeks of chili pepper olives, artichoke hearts and garlic hummus I was growing tired of the usual.  A few weeks ago this sign popped up giving me new creative ways to use the same ol’ same ol’.  Last Friday we made a pizza with oven roasted tomatoes, roasted garlic and mozzarella balls and it won’t be our last.
• Give them more than they ask for.  Far right pic – As soon as I walk into the store I can smell the fresh baked bread on Saturday mornings.  I’m an early riser though and often most of the racks are still empty.  They’ve started putting up signs letting customers know when a variety is done baking but not ready to be put in a bag.  If I want just-baked bread all I have to do is let them know.

These little extras are what makes me drive past an Acme and a Shop Rite week after week.  Not only do I get a big selection of fresh produce and meat, but they give me a way to broaden my options, spruce up my weekday meals, and enjoy their freshest offerings.

Next time you’re planning an update to your site, think “What are my users guessing at?”, “How can I show them new ways to use my product?” and “What can I give them will be unexpected?”

Now if Wegmans could just make that Asiago Cheese dip low fat.