Mark McLaren and McBuzz Communications will be participating in Social Media Camp Seattle on Saturday, July 12. The “Camp” is really a bunch of presentations given by anyone who feels up to the challenge. It should be very informative, with lots of fun and great networking. Come check it out!

Everything works on a volunteer basis. The organizers invite local authorities on Blogging, Podcasting, Live Streaming, and New Media and “give them the stage - BarCamp Style - to share what they know with the world.” The guiding principle of BarCamp is that “Attendees must give a demo, a session, or help with one.” Attending a session is, I have found, a form of helping. So if you don’t feel up to the task of doing more than that, don’t worry.

This is a one-day deal. There are no sleep-overs or any of that planned. So don’t worry about bringing a sleeping bag (though some BarCamp info talks about doing so).

There will be a beginner track (for Blogging 101 and such), and an advanced track (with topics like What is Social Capital - and Why Should I Care?).

You can see proposed session topics here.

Here is the topic I’m proposing:

Using a Free Blogging Service versus Blogging on Your Own Hosted Site -
How to Decide which One is Best for You

Your input prior to the event would be greatly appreciated!

Links to the Social Media Camp Website
At times, the Social Media Camp Seattle website chokes so you may get an error if you click the first link below. (If so, try the second link.) I’m hoping this is a good sign, like: Social Media Camp Seattle is so wildly popular that their site just can’t handle all the traffic it’s getting.

Social Media Camp Seattle website

Social Media Camp Seattle information on Upcoming

There is also a big networking event that evening. This looks like it will be well worth attending.

http://mashable.com/us-summer-tour-2008/summermash-seattle/

My biggest challenge is knowing whether to spell “Social Media Camp Seattle” with or without spaces. Fortunately, Google seems to have figured out that both forms refer to the same thing.

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Introducing Web 2.0 will be held on Wednesday, July 30, 2008 at the Community Center at Mercer View, Mercer Island, Seattle.

SUMMARY
“Social Networking”, “Social Media”, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, blogs, Wiki’s, Podcasting, RSS, XML. The Web 2.0 movement has ushered in a host of new technology and business opportunities that can leave one feeling dizzy and confused. In our 60 minute seminar you’ll learn the basics about popular Internet trends that can help you promote and manage your business.

For more information, see the Introducing Web 2.0 web page, or Upcoming.

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Twitter is a “micro-blogging” tool that allows users to send out short messages that can be read on the Twitter website, or on a desktop program (or “client”) like twhirl, or via text messaging. It also integrates with things like Status Updates on Facebook (in case you were wondering).

It’s similar to instant messaging in that you can keep in touch with your friends, but it has a significant advantage over instant messaging because you can follow messages from people you don’t know or haven’t (yet) met - provided they let you do so, which most Twitterers do.

So, for instance, I can follow the “tweets” or short messages of renowned marketing authorities like Guy Kawasaki, or of entrepreneur search marketers like Andy Beal and Danny Sullivan.

Some Twitterers are better sources of useful information than others. Sometimes people just make idle chit chat. Sometimes they share a link to a blog post or story they think is important. But, in general, it’s great to get these folks’ take on what’s going on in the world.

Online marketer Jennifer Laycock calls Twitter “acceptable evesdropping”. And - let’s be honest - who doesn’t like evesdropping?

You can “follow” (connect with) Mark McLaren and McBuzz. Just create a profile on the Twitter website and login to the site, then go to the mcbuzz profile (click here), click on Follow (to connect with McBuzz), and send me a “tweet” (a message) that starts with @mcbuzz, which directs the message to me.

You’ll get the hang of it quickly.

But wait! Twitter does more: just like blogging or LinkedIn or Facebook, it establishes your brand. It can help to establish or strengthen your reputation as an authority in your field. It gives you greater visibility online. (Do a Google search for “mcbuzz” and you find the McBuzz Twitter profile on page one.) And it can create or foster connections between you and other professionals you might not have met.

In short, Twitter has got some serious mojo. It has characteristics that the early World Wide Web and blogging had way, way back… Not long ago, there was a time when it wasn’t clear that those two things had much to do with marketing and communications. And Twitter is more immediate, more concise. In a day and age when twenty-somethings use text messages and Facebook instead of email, and fewer and fewer people take time to read a newspaper, immediate and concise is where you want to be.

Of course, Twitter itself may not necessarily be the tool people are using in a year or two, but the tool (or some part of the tool) we are using then will be a lot like Twitter. Better to get aquainted with the technology now than two years from now.

If you like Twitter, try the desktop client I mentioned, called twhirl. It’s got more features than the Twitter website - just like your desktop email client (Outlook, Thunderbird) has more features than web mail - and it’s easy install and use.

Here’s one success story’s take on why Twitter: Penelope Trunk on Twitter

As webpronews.com puts it, “Anyone with a desire to connect with others in a quick way, while reinforcing one’s name and personal brand, will find [Twitter] useful.”

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In other words, say I have a PDF on my site called “mcbuzz-wordpress-tutorials.pdf” (which I don’t - this is just an example). I can do a search using Google for “site:mcbuzz.com/pdf/mcbuzz-wordpress-tutorials.pdf” and Google will tell me whether is has this file in its index or not. Remember to use the entire path or URL for the page or document. If you keep your PDFs in a directory on your site called “pdf”, then you need to include that in the URL as shown in this example. (If you have quesitons about this, send me a comment.)

This post follows along the same lines as an earlier one called “Are PDF Files Indexed by Google?” But I also wanted to talk about this topic for a couple of reasons related to Search Engine Optimization and WordPress.

1. In WordPress, it is possible to specify the URL of a page or post — independent of the title you give the page or post — using the “Page Slug” / “Post Slug” feature. If you don’t specify a slug, WordPress will make one automatically using “Permalinks“. I told WordPress to give this post the URL “mcbuzz.com/2008/document-webpage-indexed-by-google”. If I hadn’t done so, WordPress would have called it “mcbuzz.com/2008/how-to-see-if-a-page-or-document-on-your-website-has-been-indexed-by-google”. Shorter is better as long as the relevant keywords are included in a URL, so I made it shorter by tweaking it a bit and removing words I don’t think are as relevant for SEO as the ones I kept.

2. Google is indexing pages and posts very quickly these days, sometimes in under an hour. The post you are reading right now was indexed in less than 7 minutes. If you have a URL indexed by Google, you may not want to change it because if you change it, the link to the page that’s in Google’s index will be broken. Someone might find your page or post by doing a Google search, but when they click on the listing, they will get a “Page not found” error from your site.

So, if you want to use the Page Slug / Post Slug feature in WordPress to customize your URLs, do so before or shortly after you publish a page or post. If you are thinking of changing a URL, you can check to see if your page has already been indexed before you change it.

If it has been indexed, you need to weigh the possible long-term SEO benefit of changing the URL so that it is more likely to show up on page 1 or 2 of Google for your target keywords — because Google will eventually re-index it. But if it has been indexed already and you want people to find it for some searches right away (in the next week or two, say) then you are probably better off leaving well enough alone.

Here’s an update to this post. News flash: That last paragraph applies only to WordPress.com-hosted websites and blogs. If your site is hosted by a third party rather than WordPress.com, and you are comfortable enough with WordPress to be able to download, install and activate a WordPress plugin (or you know someone who can help you do so), then you don’t need to worry about whether a post or page has already been indexed by Google or not. You can use a WordPress plugin called “Redirection” to redirect someone to the new URL when they request your page or post using the old URL.

In other words, say you create a post called My New Post with the URL http://www.example.com/my-new-post/. It gets indexed by Google in 30 minutes or whatever. Then you realize, Oops!, I should have named that post My New Post About WordPress, because it’s about WordPress! And you really should include “wordpress” in the URL to make the URL more search engine friendly, i.e., to let search engines know that the post really is about WordPress. One of the absolute best ways to do that is to put your keyword — in this case “wordpress” — in the URL. So go ahead, rename your post and either create a new post slug yourself or let WordPress do it for you.

Now your new URL can be http://www.example.com/my-new-post-about-wordpress/ (or whatever you want to make it using the Page Slug /Post Slug feature in the editing window). If someone finds your post using Google, and Google is still using the old URL, that person will click on the link and when their web browser asks your host’s server for the page at http://www.example.com/my-new-post/ , the server will know that they really want the page at the new URL http://www.example.com/my-new-post-about-wordpress/ and it will redirect them there. The fact that you changed the post title and the URL will not keep people from being able to find the page. Pretty cool.

Now for this to work, you have to know how to install the Redirection plugin, and how to set it so that it does what you want. And you also have to be using permalinks. (Read more about WordPress permalinks here.) I just installed the plugin on mcbuzz.com, at it’s one of the easier plugins to use. Just follow the directions in the readme.txt file that comes with the plugin. You can set it to create redirections automatically when a post slug changes, or you can do it yourself manually when a post or page slug changes.

Confused? Just send me a comment using the form below.

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Google AdWords now gives website owners one more reason to take this seriously: AdWords Keyword Quality Scores now include landing page load time. Hence, advertisers whose landing pages have long load times will pay more for keyword bids than those with faster-loading landing pages.

For more, see Google AdWords Help article “How does load time affect my landing page quality?” Thanks to Web Pro News for their post on this topic.

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Here’s an update: According to one report, Google grabbed 69.17 percent of all U.S. searches for the four weeks ending June 28, 2008. Nielsen Online still shows Google at 59% (PDF document).

That’s why, when web marketing professionals talk about optimizing a website for search engines, they mean optimizing for Google. In general, ranking well in Google search results will bring more visitors to your website than ranking well in Yahoo! search results will. And a paid advertisement on a Google search page will typically be seen by more people than a paid advertisement on a Yahoo! search page.

However, more people clicking on your ads and more visitors to your website does not always mean better results. One way to measure results is by the number of “conversions” on your website, that is, the number of visitors doing what you want them to do, like picking up the phone and calling your business. It’s always good to remember that people searching on Yahoo! or MSN.com might be of different demographics than those searching on Google. For every 100 visitors that come to your site from a Google search, you might get one phone call. (Just a hypothetical example.) But for every 100 visitors that come from a Yahoo! search, you might get 5 phone calls. With that information, you may want to advertise more on Yahoo!

Then again, even conversions, like the number of phone calls you get for 100 visitors to your site, are not the final measure of results. What if almost every phone call you got from a Google search resulted in a sale, whereas only a small fraction of the calls you got from a Yahoo! search resulted in a sale? In that case, even though more calls are coming from ads on Yahoo!, it would still be smarter to do most or all of your advertising Google. (Again, these are just hypothetical examples.)

Ultimately, more traffic is good, but more qualified traffic is really what you want, whether it’s from Google or Yahoo! or whatever. And you need to use website traffic tracking software like Google Analytics (which is free and easy to install) to collect this information. Combined with other techniques, such as putting a special 800 number on your website so that you know which inquiries and sales are coming from your site as opposed to through other marketing channels, you can get a good idea of which online marketing channels are working well and which are not.

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Following up on a question from a reader (Optimize PDF Files For Websites and Search Engines), as I note there, one way to see if a PDF on your website has been indexed by Google is to copy a long line of text from the PDF, and then put it into the Google search box — with double quotes on either end. You can do this to find any particular document or page available on the Web — as long as it has been indexed (scanned or “spidered” and catalogued) by Google.

For example, if you Google “Enter an estimate of your 2008 nonwage income (such as dividends or interest)” with the double quotes on either end, Google offers you a link to a PDF of IRS Form W-4 for 2008. This shows that the 2008 W-4 PDF document has been indexed. (Incidentally, Google also offers you a link to the mcbuzz.com page you are reading right now since it contains the same string of text.)

Another way to see if a PDF has been indexed by Google is to use the “site:url” query modifier. This is a handy trick when you want to narrow your search to one domain. If I Google [site:mcbuzz.com] - without the brackets, Google lists every page in my site that has been indexed. If I Google [site:mcbuzz.com web] - without the brackets, Google lists every page in my site that contains the word “web”. And, as a helpful reader points out below, you can Google [site:mcbuzz.com filetype:pdf] - without the brackets, to see if there are any PDF files on the mcbuzz.com website that have been indexed by Google. (Be sure not to put a space between “filetype:” and “pdf”.)

I don’t have any PDFs on my site. Try it with another domain to see an actual positive result. To see if a particular PDF on my website has been indexed, I can Google [site:mcbuzz.com “some word or phrase in the PDF”] - without the brackets. Of course, you can also Google [site:mcbuzz.com myfilename.pdf] to do the same.

Returning to the Form W-4 example, Google [site:irs.gov “Enter an estimate of your 2008 nonwage income (such as dividends or interest)”] and Google lists one and only one result: the PDF on the IRS website.

Something fairly amazing: Google knows every phrase in that PDF and in any other document or web page it has indexed. That’s a lot of information.

The other question in the mcbuzz.com post mentioned above was whether a PDF would be indexed if it were encrypted or had other security settings applied to it. If you have Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional, you can answer this question yourself.

Open a PDF and then open the Document Properties dialog box (File > Properties…). Click on the Security tab, and you see the various security options. There are different security options depending on which version of Acrobat Reader you want your PDF to be compatible with. The dialog box tells you if search engines will be able to read all or only some parts of the PDF (e.g. metatags or attachments) when you select the various options. If the PDF can’t be read by search engines, it won’t be indexed.

For those interested, here is more information about Google query modifiers like “site:url”.

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You may have noticed that on a Google search results page, whenever keywords appear in the URL of a listed page, they are in bold. For example, in a Google search for “mark mclaren”, whenever the words “mark” or “mclaren” are in a URL, they are in bold.

Several Google results for “mark mclaren”. The keyword terms that appear in the page URLs are always shown in bold.

Google looks at a number of things to figure out what a page is about, and the URL is definitely one of them.

I did a little experiment lately to prove the point. My LinkedIn profile has a custom URL — as they all do: you can change your LinkedIn URL from a generic numerical URL to whatever you choose. Mine used to be http://www.linkedin.com/in/mcbuzz and it was nowhere near page one of Google results for “mark mclaren”.

Then I changed it to what it is now: http://www.linkedin.com/in/mcbuzzmarkmclaren and a few weeks later, there it was on page one. To the best of my knowledge, all other factors remained unchanged, so this stands as pretty good evidence of the power of putting keywords into a URL when you want to improve a page’s rank in search results.

If you try this technique with your own LinkedIn URL, be sure to put the new link somewhere where search engines will find it. One good place is in the sidebar of your blog or website using one of the “View My Profile” buttons LinkedIn provides. See an example of a LinkedIn profile button on the McBuzz About This Site page. If you already have one of these, you need to update the URL to match your newly customized one.

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The Bellevue Chamber sets high standards. It responds quickly to requests from its members and prospective members. It does a great job of communicating with the business community about networking opportunities and other events and resources. And it understands the importance of growing its membership.

The majority of the Chamber’s membership is small businesses and consultancies, which is a great fit for McBuzz.

Here’s the McBuzz Communications company profile on the Chamber website.

With backing from organizations like the Bellevue Chamber of Commerce, McBuzz is looking forward to a great 2008.

Just as a side note, the Bellevue Chamber also excells from a web marketing standpoint. The McBuzz Communications company profile was online the same day we joined! And it was indexed by Google in about 24 hours. That is good stuff — because an incoming link from the Chamber is good for search ranking, and it also simply means that McBuzz can be found immediately by searching the Chamber’s website, or by Googling (or Yahooing) keywords like “bellevue chamber mclaren” or “bellevue chamber mcbuzz”. This is not the case with all Chamber of Commerce websites — but it should be.

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Wrong. Because in fact AdWords is not a tool. It’s a relationship.

Now that kind of terminology is bound to make some people race for the door, but I’ll explain what I mean by taking a look at three aspects of using AdWords where businesses sometimes come up short.

One: Make a good first impression with your AdWords text ads.
Your AdWords text ads are like a blind date for prospective customers: they’ll know immediately if they want the relationship to go any further. To build a relationship, create ads that specifically target their needs – rather than generic ads that attract large volumes of unqualified leads clicking through and costing you money.

Let’s say you run a meat delivery service. Which of the following examples of ad text do you think would bring in better, more interested customers who were ready to buy:

• Meat delivery – shipped right to your door.
• Tired of flowers? Send steaks, ribs and chops today!

While the first piece of text is vague and non-specific, the second addresses a more particular need that your customer may have – to find a unique alternative gift. The second statement also utilizes specific keywords to further advance your message.

And remember: Your AdWords campaign should be split into multiple ad groups, each with its own specific keywords. That way you’ll be more closely aligning the content of your ads with the specific needs of your customers. If you only have one ad group, you can’t possibly address all of your prospects’ various wants and desires.

Two: Your landing page tells a lot about the commitment you’d like to make.
Mark got into this in his last post (What is a Landing Page?), but it’s important enough that I’ll make a finer point of it here. A common mistake made by companies who misuse AdWords is that they’ll set up ads with lots of carefully-chosen keywords, but they’ll only link those ads to their website’s homepage. It happens like this: your customer reads something specific in your AdWords ad, and clicks on it believing that your site will immediately address a need they’ve got. But when they reach your website, all you give them is your homepage, where they have to search further to find what they want.

And then they leave. You’ve lost them because you didn’t commit to the relationship.

Link your ad to a landing page specifically created to address the promise you’ve made in your ad. And if you’re really trying to build a relationship, don’t use that landing page to immediately force a sale. Get to know them instead – gather their information through e-newsletter subscriptions or RSS feeds. And give something back, such as free downloadables, tips or resources. Take your time and cultivate the relationship. Your AdWords investment will pay off in a big way when you finally make a sale because you’ll have created trust and confidence instead of angling for a quickie payoff.

Three: The best relationships are in it for the long haul.
Too many businesses set up AdWords accounts and leave them alone, believing that the ads will work their consumer magic with little or no additional effort. The truth is, AdWords campaigns need attention. Your ad groups should be tested and revised as needed; keywords that aren’t performing should be eliminated and new ones brought in; you need to measure your landing page analytics to see where your new visitors are coming from, what they’ve searching for and what they do when they reach your website. If they’re not converting into paying customers, why aren’t they – and what can you do to fix the problem?

Your AdWords relationship can pay off big benefits for your business – but it can’t do it alone. You need to approach the creation of an AdWords campaign with a commitment to be involved. To listen. And to put in the necessary work to ensure a successful union of advertising and customer response.

Alan Lopuszynski
McBuzz Communications LLC

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