When Facebook unveiled the ability for web content creators to embed their “Like” feature in third-party websites in April, it had the potential to be a game changer practically overnight.  The concept of directly leveraging Facebook’s user-base to drive traffic to one’s blog was huge.  But would it actually work?

Since in the world of analytics we like to see hard data, this week Mashable reported that after users of blog platform TypePad installed the Facbook “Like” capability on their blogs, traffic to their blogs increased by 50%.  Since most modern CMS’ like Joomla and Drupal (let alone WordPress) are essentially blogs on steroids, it is reasonable to deduce that the same benefit can be seen when implementing the Facebook “Like” feature on a CMS-built website.  Just make sure that the content your are linking via the “Like” feature provides value, entertainment or both….otherwise you will loose trust and harm your online reputation.

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Today it is more important than ever to understand and appreciate the nuances of how authoring content for the web differs from old-school press release and marketing copywriting. Gone are the long and elaborate introductory paragraphs.  As search engines treat the information at the beginning of a string (i.e. title or sentence) with greater importance than the copy that follows later, it is critical to be terse and to the point. Get your message across as efficiently as possible and you’ll be sure to reap the benefits of this new thinking. The way in which Twitter has become a real-time search engine further underscores the fact that brevity has its merits.

Mike Kalil recently wrote about this topic over on SEOmoz.org.  The following is an excerpt from that post:

Get to the point. Make it clear from the get-go what your release is about. Don’t try to be cute. I used to get releases all the time from PR people who buried the news or tried to get creative with their writing. Sometimes, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what some releases were even about. If you’re looking for a creative outlet, press release writing is not the avenue. Try writing a short story.

At least pretend you’re objective. Obviously, you have a vested interest in what you’re writing about, but it’s still important to craft your releases like down-the-middle news stories. Avoid unnecessary adjectives; most adjectives are unneeded. You don’t want your release to read like an advertisement. Pick out the newsiest element and concentrate on that.

Speak English. I see releases all the time that are stuffed with industry jargon that most people do not understand. Don’t assume that what you’re writing about is a familiar subject for the people who’ll read your release. Dumb it down. Assume your release will be read by the densest guy in the room.

Send it out manually. Instead of just dumping your releases into submission sites and hoping someone important notices, email it yourself to media outlets and bloggers you think might be interested in it. If you’re publicizing a new product, send your release to newspapers in the company’s area. If you can, find out which reporters cover the relevant beat and send it to them directly; that usually only takes a phone call.

Have good timing. If you’re looking for coverage, sending your release out on Election Day or after hours on a Friday is goofy. Those are good times to release bad news you’re obligated to report – any White House spokesman will tell you that – but it’ll do you no good unless your story is wildly sensational. News outlets are typically more desperate for copy during the summer months and around holidays.

Act like a human. Interactivevoices’ post about getting a link from CNN.com – the only PR10 news site – illustrated this perfectly. There’s no harm in picking up the phone and calling reporters directly to see if they’re interested in your story. For all you know, the only thing preventing your news from being published is an over-finicky spam filter.

Don’t beg. When I was working as a reporter, I didn’t realize why some sources were so hellbent on me including links in my stories. Now I know. If your link is relevant to the story, the reporter will probably include it. If not, you’re still getting good publicity.

Of course, all of this will only help if you actually have something worthwhile to say. If you think there’s nothing interesting to say about your enterprise, you’re probably wrong. You just need to think long and hard to figure out what it is.

In the end, content generation is about providing value.  Give you audience something they can use and they’ll be sure to be back for more.

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Its no news that realtors are looking for innovative ways to generate leads these days.  What is different is how they’re able to efficiently leverage technology to achieve their goals and set themselves apart from the competition.  As we’ve discussed in the past, merely having a website is hardly enough to make a difference.  Furthermore, most realtor websites are merely sub-accounts on their parent-organization’s main site.  From a SEO (search engine optimization) perspective, this is troubling in that the individual agents aren’t fully in control of their own site content and are therefore unable to effectively  leverage SEO best-practices.  In most cases, establishing a web presence outside of the parent organization is crucial to distinguish yourself from the pack.

While plenty of SEO and social media experts will tell you that you need a blog to attract search engines to your content, the reality is that most people do not have the time nor the resources to properly maintain a quality blog that would attract search engine attention.  Luckily, there is a simpler solution.  Micro-blogging websites such a Twitter are ideal places for realtors to talk about their listings and easily publish links to photos and MLS information.  This capability is further extended through the use of mobile devices that can post content on the fly to Twitter (especially with plugin apps for the iPhone, Blackberry and other PDA’s).  Once you combine this with the fact that Twitter is FREE and can be automatically linked with a Facebook account, the amount of reach to potential clients expands dramatically.

Another effective, albeit expensive, option is PPC or pay-per-click advertising.  Sure Google AdWords can be very effective.  The issue comes down to advertising budget.  Especially in saturated markets such as the north east, the cost of entry can be prohibitive for individuals.  In cases such as these, it may be more effective to pool money in a co-op or through the parent organization as opposed to individually created advertising campaigns.

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With the growing number of public relations agencies delving into digital & social media, the misunderstanding and misuse of these new technologies and capabilities appears to be the standard rather than the exception.  David Henderson addresses this point beautifully in his post about The Changing Face of PR Leadership.  If these major agencies are to survive, they need to evolve their strategies around these new capabilities rather than cramming their old sqaure tactics through the round hole of digital marketing and social media.

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Even though its widely accpeted in the SEO community that flash based websites are not search engine friendly, this information isn’t universally known, let alone properly understood.  A recent discussion on this topic convinced me that this subject was worth revisiting.

Put simply, the way search engines work is that when they get hip to your site (usually via a URL from another site they’re already indexing) they will index your site.  The indexing process involves the scanning the content of your site (called “crawling”) and then associating the text content and meta data to a relational database.   This is how search engines decide what your site is about and how to include it in their search directories.

The important distinction here is text.  Search engine “bots” can’t read images, let alone text trapped in images.

As FLASH content is image and animation based, its content is almost completely invisible to search engines.  Its fine to use flash for media players and cool effects, but its a very bad idea to build the site entirely in flash.  While accessibility is one thing (mobile devices, disabled users, etc can’t display/understand flash),  not even showing up in search engines is a whole other issue.

Phaseous Phact: If you want your website to show up in search engines when users search for your proucts and services (not just your company name ur URL), do not build your entire website in flash.

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This morning I happened upon this AP story from CNN.com where the author suggested President-Elect Obama may have to give up his Blackberry handheld because his emails could be subpoenaed and made public, not to mention the fact that consumer cell devices are rather easily tracked.  As a technology expert and enthusiast, I have to take issue this this arguement.

The rule of thumb for corporate America is simple:  do not put anything in a work email that you wouldn’t want to appear on the front page of The New York Times.  The same should hold true for any public official utilizing “official” equipment.  While there are matters of national security to take into consideration, but most electronics manufacturers (let alone contractors to the Department of Defense) offer secure encrypted versions of their regular products for official use.  Research in Motion (RIM), the company behind the popular Blackberry handheld offers a secure version of their product.

In the end, it really comes down to judgement.  People should not be afraid to use these technologies  They just need to include common sense with their execution.  It would be a shame fore the President-Elect to cease using his productivity-boosting devices.  His campaign was revolutionary in its communications methods to its supporters, leveraging the best in social media (Twitter & Facebook) and email marketing.  This is a key ingredient in this day and age if his administration whishes to contiune the transparency they’ve touted throughout the campaign.

One key security issue I will agree with is cell signal triangulation.  However, one would think that the military would have figured out ways around that.  After all, that’s their job.

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While investing in SEO in today’s market can be one of the most cost-effective and import things a business can do, there are certain cases where it may not be ideal.  As discussed over on searchengineguide.com:

If you have created a completely new product that serves a completely new niche, there simply may not be enough people searching for it to make search marketing efforts worthwhile. If this is the case, you’d do far better to spend your money engaging a good public relations firm or working on a social media strategy that will help you break into the marketplace by engaging your customers in the places where they have conversations. You’ll have to educate them before you have any shot at selling to them.

Akin to balancing your financial portfolio, its important to properly balance your marketing strategy.  Sure, SEO can be incredibly impactful, but its not a magic bullet.  Its critical to perform the necessary market reserach to best determine how much search volume there is about your particular area and what the best course of marketing a promotion should be in your case.

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Just as savvy investors see opportunity in down markets, internet marketers and SEO experts do the same when they notice a disproportion in spending on PPC (pay-per-click) advertising compared to SEO.  The often referenced “Google Heat Map” indicates that the lion-share of clicks for search results are within the organic listings.  That said, recent reports show PPC spending is over ten times the amount invested in SEO and organic search.  So what does this mean?

PPC is an expensive band-aid.

While it may drive traffic to your site, the chances of false positives resulting in no sales conversion is much higher than if organic search results bring traffic to your site based on proper SEO and good site content.  Since so many folks are focusing on the easy PPC fix and not concentrating on what really matters in the long run, they will lose their ability to compete effectively as other website become more SEO-aware.

In these uncertain economic times, it is critically important for businesses to invest in proper SEO in order to ensure their ability to be competive in the search engine space both today and tomorrow.

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The general consensus in the SEO world has held that search engine friendly static URLs are indexed more effectively than complicated database-driven (and seemingly nonsensical) dynamic URLs.  However, according to a recent post on Google’s Wemaster Blog, that assumption is not exactly accurate.  As most major websites today are based on database driven content management systems, it would be completely impractical to rewrite and manage all URLs so that they would appear to be static.  To that point, attempts at such URL rewrites may actually hide information from Googlebot that otherwise could have assisted in the indexing process.  While URL rewrites can be beneficial to the end-user experience (those pages to tend to have higher click-through rates), they are no longer required as Googlebot has become much more capable at well-indexing those database driven dynamic URLs.

The following in an excerpt that addresses certain dynamic URL’s myths with respect to Google:

Myth: “Dynamic URLs cannot be crawled.”
Fact: We can crawl dynamic URLs and interpret the different parameters. We might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URLs if you try to make your urls look static and in the process hide parameters which offer the Googlebot valuable information. One recommendation is to avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static. It’s always advisable to use static content with static URLs as much as possible, but in cases where you decide to use dynamic content, you should give us the possibility to analyze your URL structure and not remove information by hiding parameters and making them look static.

Myth: “Dynamic URLs are okay if you use fewer than three parameters.”
Fact: There is no limit on the number of parameters, but a good rule of thumb would be to keep your URLs short (this applies to all URLs, whether static or dynamic). You may be able to remove some parameters which aren’t essential for Googlebot and offer your users a nice looking dynamic URL. If you are not able to figure out which parameters to remove, we’d advise you to serve us all the parameters in your dynamic URL and our system will figure out which ones do not matter. Hiding your parameters keeps us from analyzing your URLs properly and we won’t be able to recognize the parameters as such, which could cause a loss of valuable information.

Following are some questions we thought you might have at this point.

Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That’s our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems. If you transform your dynamic URL to make it look static you should be aware that we might not be able to interpret the information correctly in all cases. If you want to serve a static equivalent of your site, you might want to consider transforming the underlying content by serving a replacement which is truly static. One example would be to generate files for all the paths and make them accessible somewhere on your site. However, if you’re using URL rewriting (rather than making a copy of the content) to produce static-looking URLs from a dynamic site, you could be doing harm rather than good. Feel free to serve us your standard dynamic URL and we will automatically find the parameters which are unnecessary.

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The internet has been abuzz with the news of a new search engine created by former Google engineers called CUIL today.  It offers a new interface and a new take on search, sporting its own algorhythm.  However, a few quick searches reveal deep holes in CUIL’s index coverage.  Not only is it lacking key data in its search results, questions arise with respect to its search’s hierarchy.  For example, the very first result for “Pete Lacis” brings a old, but hardly ever used domain of mine where there is much more relevant and valuable information to be found for the same search in Google and Yahoo.  Time will tell if CUIL has any competitive power in this market.  I would expect for over 30 million in venture capital funding, the search results to be a little more compelling.

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