Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

Integrating Social Media into Your Website
– Part 2

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

This second post concentrates on selecting the right social media websites for the client, and how to try to ensure that traffic to their main site is maximised.

As I mentioned in the last post, my client in this case is an actor and the site is designed to both help him get new work, and to chat with his fans.

Firstly we looked at what type of content he was going to be able to put up on the site. In this case we came up with: -

  • Video of his acting gigs and profile videos
  • Photos, both as screen captures from his acting roles and profile pics that he has done
  • Status updates from Facebook (he is on Facebook pretty much every night)

On top of this, I added Twitter as the ideal way to post messages while he is working on a set, and blog posts for longer stories he writes about some of the funny things he gets up to.

A Bit of Background on Twitter & Facebook

If you don’t move in web circles you will still probably have heard of Twitter and Facebook, but just to give you a bit of background: -

  • Facebook – currently the largest social media website in Australia and the world. This is typically a closed system where only people you specifically allow, will be able to see your content (although Facebook is trying to change this). Facebook is most often used to connect friends that may have drifted apart, but is also used as an online meeting place for like minded people.
  • Facebook Fan Pages – These are special Facebook pages that are open to outside searches and can be accessed by anyone. People can post comments, photos, video, events and more. Once you have a certain number of followers, you can also get a custom URL. In our case we got http://www.facebook.com/frankieoatway so it is nice and easy to remember.
  • Twitter – the current darling of the social media world, news and tech community, where twitter usernames are now the de facto name badge. Twitter allows you to post short messages of 140 characters or less that say what you are doing there and then. They can be sent via the Twitter website, many phone applications and even SMS. These are great for very quick messages posts and are totally open to searches and casual visitors.

Both of these sites are great community builders and can drive a lot of traffic to a central location if you provide links to good content on your own website.

Having taken care of the text based social media, we need to look at blog posts, which is almost the same, but longer!

Blogging

Blogs started off as ‘web logs’ which were basically online diaries, but have evolved to cover pretty much anything up to very large news organisations. The great thing about blogs is that they are easy to update, and Google loves them as content is always being refreshed.

There are various blogging platforms including Drupal, Joomla, Squarespace to name just a few, but the 500lb gorilla is WordPress.

I have to admit that I am a WordPress fan, it is very easy to post to via the web, email or iPhone apps, you can set up static pages and there are 1001 plugins to add functionality to the system. It’s also free, and easy to install (many hosting companies will install it for you). You can also buy or create themes that customise your sites look and feel to just the way you want it.

As we were going to have our own hosting and URL (http://www.frankieoatway.com), WordPress seemed an easy choice to make. This was particular because of the ease of posting and changing content for the less technically minded, but also because of the links that can be set up to social media sites, and the text (RSS) feeds it produces that can be used in many other ways.

So we seems to have our text based information published. Next we look at some of the other media we need to incorporate.

Photos

The next content type we had to look solve was how to spread photos around the other social media properties, and back to the main WordPress website.

There are quite a few choices here, but sticking with the big boys, you have Flickr (owned by Yahoo) and Picassa (owned by Google). Both of these allow you to upload photos, organise, distribute and even edit them.

This was a difficult choice I have to say, but in the end I went with Flickr, probably because I am more familiar with it, but also because they have a very simple uploader I can just put on my clients computer.

Video

Video was an easy choice. Youtube has the widest reach and is easy to use. Setting up a channel also makes sure your video is collected together. The downside is in this case is that videos are limited to 11 minutes long, and in our case, that has meant we will also need to look at other channels such as Vimeo for short film releases.

Keeping It Together

When setting up these sites it’s important to try to keep things together, so that you have a consistent brand image across all the media you use. In our case we have used the same profile photo, same bio info and have managed to get the same url for all of the sites. That makes it really easy, as you can pretty much type in the URL knowing what you are going to see and once you land on the page the right person is confirmed by the profile photo.

In our case we were lucky as Frankie Oatway is not that common a name. We managed to get: -

As you can see we have consistent branding to avoid confusing messages to people who may want to see Frankies site.

The next post concentrates on how we planned to connect the sites so that they all talk to each other and updating one will trickle down into the other sites when and where we want it to.

<<< Part 1

Part 2 >>>

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Posted in Marketing, SEO, Social media | 1 Comment »

Integrating Social Media into Your Website

Saturday, April 10th, 2010

This is the first in a series of posts looking at how social media can be integrated into a website, what advantages it has and why you would do it for particular clients.

I recently put together a website which integrates a clients site requirements, with social media such as:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Flickr
  • YouTube

These posts are a summary of what I have learned along the way. They include a summary as possible of my thought process, planning and how I implemented the integration.

Why Integrate Social Media into a Site

There are many reasons why you might want to integrate social media into a site including:

  • To take advantage of existing community you have developed – This depends on whether you already have an active Facebook or Twitter following, for example. Taking advantage of these existing friends/followers can help drive traffic and interest in your site.
  • To improve the visibilty of your site to search engines – Often getting a new site in front of Google can be difficult. However, Twitter and Facebook Fan Pages are being spidered by Google all the time, so links from these sources will help get your site initially spidered. The other factor is that creating these pages will get you inbound links to your website which will help with your ranking. How much it helps, coming from a social media site, nobody knows, but I’m guessing that the more followers/fans you have the better, and the more specific your discussion the better.
  • To spread your content as widely as possible – One of the biggest problems I see is people with good content, but just not getting it out in front of their audience. By distributing your content as widely as possible you increase the chance that your content will be seen, your site linked to, and your product or service bought. This takes a bit of a leap of faith from marketers more used to control of their information stream, however structuring your content appropriately makes sure your name is out there, and that you are not annoying your readers/viewers.
  • Ease of use, for a client used to social media sites – I threw this one in there because it is increasingly the case that clients, who may not know how to drive a websites CMS system, do know how to use Facebook and Twitter. By integrating these into your site, the page stays current, Google spiders it more, and there is also often more topical interest from clients.

There are more reasons than I have here, but hopefully this will be enough to get you thinking!

Case Study

In the case I’m going to look at, my client is an actor, Frankie Oatway, who’s career has all of a suddenly taken off after a move from England to Australia. He is a big user of Facebook with quite a few followers, but had never had a website before and wanted to keep everything as simple to manage as possible.

As an actor he was looking to develop fans, but was also looking to show his work as widely as possible to attract casting agents and may potentially release short films on the web.

In this case it was very apparent that Frankie was the brand, he is full of life and a really nice approachable guy. Social media was the therefore key to get his content in front of as many people as possible along with links back to his site (ideally with a high ranking in Google, for his name) so that agents could find and contact him should they need to, and fans could just have a chat with him.

The next post covers how we decided which social media to use and how we should develop his site.

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Posted in Marketing, SEO | 2 Comments »

Web Page Structure for Great SEO

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

I have recently been putting together some websites and have been using the Sitepoint book “Designing without tables” as a guide to some of the CSS techniques. What I noticed was that the author was structuring pages as follows for a 2 column layout: -

  • Header with navigation
  • Sidebar (floated to the side)
  • Main content (positioned using margins)
  • Footer

The trouble with this layout is that if you read the HTML from top to bottom, as a search engine or screen reader would, the sidebar content is higher up the page and is therefore given a higher priority than the main content. What this can mean is that Google misinterprets the information on your page, and in some cases what your site is about, which is obviously a big problem.

A simple solution is to use the same techniques to float the main content and the sidebar so that the main content can come first (have a look at the webxopt home page to see how this is done, and you can get the css from http://www.webxopt.com/styles.css).

This is all easy stuff, but on a 3 column layout you have the problem that you need to float something to the right, something to the left and have something in the middle too. That makes things difficult, but using the old trusty nested tables technique, you can do it as follows: -

  • Header with navigation
  • Div to contain main content and left hand sidebar. This is floated left. Inside this div there are two more divs, the first contains the content which is floated right, the second the sidebar which is floated left. The end result is a left hand side bar, and central content area.
  • Div to contain the right hand sidebar, this is floated right
  • Footer

The end result of this layout is a 3 column view with your most important information (your main content) at the top of the HTML document. An example of the code is shown here: -

<div id=”header”>
<p>Strap Line<br /> for the site</p>
</div><!– header –>
<div id=”wrapper”>
<div id=”navbar”>
</div><!– navbar –>
<div id=”content”>
<div id=”main”>
<div id=”copy”>
<h1>Main Heading</h1>
</div><!– copy –>
<div id=”image-bar”>
</div><!– image-bar –>
</div><!– main –>
<div id=”sidebar”>
<div id=”sidebar-content”>
<h4>News</h4>
<p>Here is some news</p>
<a href=”#”>Link</a>
</div><!– sidebar-content –>
</div><!– sidebar –>
</div><!– content –>
<div id=”footer”>
</div><!– footer –>

and the CSS is: -

#header {
margin: 10px auto;
position: relative;
height: 80px;
}

#header p {
width: 920px;
margin: 0px auto;
padding: 10px 18px 0 0;
position: relative;
color:#f8992b;
font: 16px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
text-align:right;
}

#wrapper {
width: 920px;
margin: 10px auto;
position: relative;
background-color:#FFF;
border:#000 1px solid;
min-height: 450px;
}

#navbar {
width: 100%;
height: 22px;
margin: 0;
}

#content {
margin-top: 0;
}

#main {
margin: 20px 0 0 20px;
width: 645px;
padding: 0;
min-height: 300px;
float: left;
}

#copy {
margin: 0 0 0 20px;
width: 455px;
padding: 0;
min-height: 300px;
float: right;
}

#sidebar {
width: 220px;
float: right;
margin: 0 15px 0 0;
min-height: 300px;
}

#sidebar-content {
width: 220px;
float: right;
margin: 0;
padding: 20px 10px 0 10px;
min-height: 200px;
}

#image-bar {
margin: 0;
width: 170px;
padding: 0;
min-height: 386px;
float:left;
}

#footer {
clear:both;
width: 100%;
height: 22px;
}

The drawback to using this approach is that to reposition the different divs in the document is slightly more difficult, however for most simply respositioning such as print and mobile style sheets, this shouldn’t really be too much of a problem.

In my view the SEO advantages far out-weigh the downsides.

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Posted in SEO | No Comments »

SEO and SEM – What Are The Differences

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

This post is follow up to some discussion on merketinggeek.tv and relates to whether SEO/SEM is useful for small business. I have edited it a bit to make it suitable as a standalone post, but essentially this is just a long winded comment I wrote!

Firstly I should mention the definitions that are being used. The industry seems to be using the following (which I actually don’t agree with but hey that’s what they are using): -

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) – Optimisation of a website for organic search results. This could involve changing code, rewriting content, inbound links, article writing etc etc.

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) – This is pretty much defined as Adwords or similar paid advertising, and to be honest is why I said I actually don’t agree with these definitions as marketing isn’t just advertising). If you look at wikipedia for example they define it quite tightly as ad related  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_marketing).

These can essentially be used differently. Personally I believe that every commercial site should have SEO and usability work done on them. This can be done by the site creator or an external company. The reason I say this is that it will help you be found over time, but importantly it will help users find what they are looking for. As an example You may have a page about orange widgets. If you were to optimise this page for Google you would make sure that the title h1 tags included ‘orange widgets’ preferably at the front of the title.

The reason that Google likes this is that it is how readers read too. The title of the page should be what the page is about and by front loading the keywords the title becomes easier to scan and see what it is about. Therefore what is good for Google is good for site visitors too (after all that is what Google is about), and what is good for your users is also good for your business bottom line.

SEM on the other hand will depend on the business. If you need to drive new customers and are not high up in Googles natural (organic) listings. SEM is a good way to get a presence. This may be the case particularly when you are starting up a business. There is also an argument that even if you are no1 in Google for your keyword, advertising may still help to solidify a searchers perception that you are the company to deal with. I haven’t seen any stats on that but it sounds a reasonable argument.

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Posted in Marketing, SEM, SEO | 1 Comment »