SiteProNews |
- Beyond Your Web Site: Nine Ways To Build An Online Presence
- Ten Things I Love About Social Media
- Caffeine, Google’s Mild Stimulus
| Beyond Your Web Site: Nine Ways To Build An Online Presence Posted: 21 Aug 2009 07:46 AM PDT Virtually every company has a Web site — that’s a given. But with the volume of professionals going online for work-related purposes, you need more than a Web site to command maximum visibility and generate attention for your products and services. To compete effectively, it’s necessary to expand and enhance your exposure in the same online sources your customers and prospects use while searching for products and conducting research. A broad and deep online presence gives you greater opportunity to present your brand, message or offer to your target audience — increasing the likelihood of gaining customers. Here are nine online strategies — beyond your Web site — that will help you build the presence you need. Get listed in searchable directories and catalogs. Professionals in virtually every industry have preferred Web sites and directories they return to over and over again to find products and solutions. Searchable online directories give you a powerful and highly visible presence in front of customers and prospects when they are searching for answers. Advertise in industry e-newsletters. E-newsletter advertisements deliver your message directly to the inboxes of prospects and customers. They are a great way to announce new products or your presence at a trade show, or to offer white papers or Webinars to an opt-in audience. Publish technical articles online. Consider publishing your technical articles and white papers on industry authority sites, content aggregators and online publications read by your target audience. Work to establish relationships with these sites by pitching article ideas and positioning your company as experts for reporters writing stories. Place banner advertisements. Due to their highly visible nature, online banners offer both branding and lead generation opportunities. But your ads need to appear on the appropriate Web sites. Seek out a media partner that knows the online behavior of your target audience and can help you place banner ads across a network of relevant sites used by your customers and prospects. Join industry trade associations. Associations typically list members and provide links back to your Web site. Some will allow you to submit your logo, which helps increase brand visibility for your company. Make sure the link back to your Web site goes to a relevant page — it might be your home page, but it also might be a deeper, more specific page. Use keyword search ads wisely. Most companies are using keyword search ads to some degree, driving traffic to their Web site. If you use keyword ads, choose specific keyword phrases rather than the most popular search terms (for example, “hydraulic linear actuators” instead of “actuators”). This way, you will not waste money gaining visibility with people who are not your target audience. Comment on blogs; participate in online discussions. Interactive social media such as blogs and online discussion groups devoted to your industry are good ways to get your name out there. Remember to post comments with care — anything you write can be seen by many people and is a direct reflection of your company. Don’t forget about SEO. Search engine optimization (SEO) can draw more attention to your company’s Web pages by helping them rise higher in search engine results for specific keyword searches. Determine how SEO can best fit into your marketing strategy without too much strain in resources. Consider social media. Social media — including blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook — are another way to promote your company and key messages to your target audience. Although you may not be using social media as part of your online marketing strategy right now, it makes sense to gain a better understanding of it and how you might effectively use it in the future. Maintaining a comprehensive online presence will help you get your message across to business professionals who rely on the Internet for work-related information, resulting in increased exposure for your products and services. Angela Hribar is chief sales and marketing officer of GlobalSpec, Inc., a specialized vertical search, information services and e-publishing company serving the engineering, technical and industrial communities. She has more than 25 years of experience in marketing, sales, business development and operations management, and is an expert in building and facilitating a collaborative environment across cross-functional executive teams. She can be reached at marketing@globalspec.com Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources Beyond Your Web Site: Nine Ways To Build An Online Presence |
| Ten Things I Love About Social Media Posted: 21 Aug 2009 07:42 AM PDT As summertime is a period of reflection, in between applications of sunscreen and dips in the pool, thought I’d spend the next two columns pondering the good and the bad of social media, starting with the good part. (You’re right. It is not a coincidence that I’ll be on vacation during the two weeks these run, but a girl’s gotta take a break every now and then, right?)
Feel free to contribute yours below, and look out for next week’s “Ten Things I Dislike About Social Media.” Catharine P. Taylor has been covering digital media and advertising for almost 15 years, and blogs daily for BNET Media. Contact her here. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources Ten Things I Love About Social Media |
| Caffeine, Google’s Mild Stimulus Posted: 20 Aug 2009 10:00 PM PDT
In fairness to Matt Cutts, he said changes to Google search have been in progress for a number of months and hence, by implication, that the launch of Bing had nothing to do with the development of Caffeine. Moreover, I would hesitate to guess, it has far more to do with speed in real-time, so as to address its place in step with the social networking giants. Although initially unavailable for testing because of “system maintenance”, Matt Cutts, Google’s enforcer of the Google Webmaster Guidelines and the man who cracked down on link spam, has invited us all to test it. He said Google hasn’t made an update of this magnitude since 2006 and that it will make internet search much faster and more accurate than ever before, although “currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all”. He went on to say: “The new infrastructure sits ‘under the hood’ of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.” The new architecture is said to include size, indexing, speed, accuracy and ranking changes and Google is asking searchers to give it a try it and report their feedback. While the version is still a pre-beta release at http://www2.sandbox.google.com, you can test the old Google against the new for yourselves at http://www.comparecaffeine.com. With the surge in popularity of “real-time search” via social networking sites, Google has recognised that search engines have to deliver content at speed. Granted, but there have already been some negative comments, although I don’t wholeheartedly agree with them. According to marketingpilgrim.com, “…Google’s attempts to include more social media “real time” results, it turned the dial to 11, when 7 would have worked just fine. Another clue that Caffeine is focused on speed – perhaps at the sacrifice of relevancy – is there appears to be more ‘Similar’ only and less ‘Cached’ results.” Personally, I have only seen a shift in relevancy, not sacrifice. So how does all this compare? According to tests at mashable.com, the new search was “lightning fast”; double the speed. Next, they tried accuracy. They commented that: “Both sets are very accurate, but subjectively, the set displayed by the new Google search more accurately reflect what a user would be looking for.” Then followed a test of temporal relevancy, or how breaking news was returned. The answer: “about the same”. Their conclusion was that Caffeine is:
“Clearly,” they wrote, “a priority for Google and Bing…with both Twitter and Facebook launching real-time search engines, they needed to respond.” So, I tried out my own website and that of my partner’s. Maybe the caffeine hit kicked in somewhere along the line, as he has gone from #4 to #2 and I have gone from #3 to #1, which all sounds perfectly satisfactory to me. The reason I mention this is that both of these sites have been involved in article writing, social media, blogging and RSS for about three years, and I thought it about time a new infrastructure gave us some more weight for following the “rulebook”. But not to be deterred in my research, I looked up many search terms, most of which returned similar results. However, one interesting oddity was to look up “search engine” to compare results of the old against the new. The figures weren’t too different in volume, at 246m against 243m, but with one surprising omission in the new: Bing does not feature on the first page of results. Oops! Most site owners have been happy with Google’s results, with one notable exception: I read a piece by the Guardian in which a British husband and wife team have been waging a three-year battle to get their price comparison website recognised by Google. So I searched on “Search and compare prices”, the first part of their search string. Nothing much on the old Google, but Caffeine has elevated them to eighth position. Good news for their business. And goodbye lawyers? In final conclusion, then, the update to the infrastructure seems to include:
To my mind, if you have followed the rules and what has been said in the SEO forums and articles over the past couple of years, Google’s Caffeine update has retuned forthcoming search results to be more in keeping with what they have for a long time recommended – and for those of us who have been doing so it offers us little more than a mild stimulus, as in Matt Cutt’s own words, “…most users won’t notice a difference”. John Sylvester is the media director of V9 Design & Build (http://www.v9designbuild.com), a company specialising in web design in Bangkok, and who is an expert in search engine optimization and web marketing strategies. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources Caffeine, Google’s Mild Stimulus |
Although denying it has anything to do with the recent launch of Bing, Google’s Matt Cutts unveiled their “secret project”, one of the biggest behind-the-scenes updates to Google search in three years and is now testing the next-generation architecture of web search, called Caffeine.| You are subscribed to email updates from SiteProNews Recent Articles To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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