Here’s another FANTASTIC tool to help your site get better rankings and be easier for your visitors to navigate.

How does it work? Well, I’m glad you asked.

The Keyword Linking tool enables you to automatically link to a URL for a given keyword or phrase, much like sites like Wikipedia do. Every time a keyword occurs in a post on your site, the Keyword Linking tool automatically generates a link to the page you define. This is huge for building pagerank within your own site.

How to use it:

1. Login to your site admin panel.
2. Look for the “Keyword Linking” option under the “Posts” menu on the left side of the screen. Click on that link…
   
3. The instructions are very straightforward.
   
   All you have to do is enter the Keyword that you want to use into the “Keyword” field, the link that you want that keyword to go to into the “URL” field, and click “Save”. There are some “fancy” options there too, just in case you’re feeling froggy, but the basics will get you started.
4. Post-specific links: You can override the global keyword settings in each post. See the bottom of your “Post” page for the same type of form with the same options for “special” linking on that post only.

Note that these links can be internal to your site, or external links to other sites. If you’re linking offsite though, make use of the “Use Nofollow” option to only send pagerank to sites you intend to.

Happy Linking!

For the past couple of years I’ve been discussing, well… preaching might be a better word, about the merits of social networking. From Myspace to Facebook and Twitter (anlong with countless others). Throughout it all I’ve been saying that you need to have a presence in the social space. I’ve spent my days (and nights) integrating my clients’ sites with a number of tools to make this job easier and faster. And for those that leverage the social space, life can be good. But there is a downside that I feel the need to caution against. Managed incorrectly, the social space can actually hurt your web presence.

So when you are building those social pages out there, remember that your goal is to leverage those sites to drive traffic to YOUR site, not to those sites. If your social space contains too much information, or more information that your “real” website then you are hurting yourself.

Some things to consider:

1. Your goal in the social space should be to push your information out to where your users are and by doing that draw them back to your site. If you post everything on Facebook (for example), then why would your Facebook fans bother to come to your site?
2. When you create content on social sites you are building the social site, not your own. Their site, their users, their ads, their control. Again… leverage that tool, don’t build your business on it. Put YOUR content on YOUR site, under YOUR control, with whatever other message you want those users to see.
3. When a user sees ALL of your information about a given topic on a social site, and therefore doesn’t bother to visit YOUR site, they may miss other items of interest that you’ve spent time developing (look to the right for an example). So don’t leave them out there, bring them home.
4. Lastly, remember that trendy, social type sites come and go. Their popularity may be huge this month, but six months down the road it may fall off when the next new site comes along. So if you have all this great content, and “followers”/”fans”/”peeps”, and posts on your “wall” telling the world how great you are… and it’s all out there on your Tripod account… what do you do when the next thing comes down the road, rebuild it all? Conversely, if you are pointing all those things towards your own site then you can just go with the flow… and when the next big thing happens you just draw customers from that site as well.

So keep building those social pages. Reach out to where your current, and new, customers spend their time. Just remember that your goal is to bring them back to your site and build those pages and posts accordingly.

Over the past several weeks I’ve been working with clients to help them leverage the “new” web in order to bring traffic to their sites (the articles are linked on the right). After watching this out in the wild for a bit I felt the need to stress the following:

Keep Your Social Network Professional

Here’s what I mean by that:

If you have a social networking profile that is for PROFESSIONAL use, make sure that the comments/status updates that you post are at the VERY LEAST spelled correctly. You wouldn’t want a typo on your website or in an email to your clients, why would you have that on a “tweet” that your clients read?

Secondly… and I cannot stress this one enough, this is no place for Internet Slang or Instant Message acronyms. Phrases like “u” and “ur”, “rotflmao”, “kewl”, and “thanx” have no place in a comment or status update. It just doesn’t look professional and lessens your credibilty with your audience, unless of course your audience is twelve years old.

These comments/updates still represent you and YOUR COMPANY to the rest of the world. Make sure they represent properly.

All that being said, if you feel that you must be able to just toss anything out there, set up a second account that your customers aren’t linked to and say what you want, however you want to say it.

Google announced yesterday that it is rolling out a new “engine” for its search engine. Code named “Caffeine” this new engine won’t look much different on the outside, but early tests do indicate that it will perform much better on the inside delivering more relevant search results, and delivering them faster. And by golly they should… earlier today it took 0.29 seconds for them to give me Results 1-10 of about 12,900,000… that’s far too long (please note the sarcasm).

With Microsoft’s new engine “Bing“, and the upcoming Yahoo/Microsoft team-up, Google does have to stay on top of things. So we’ll just have to see if these new changes, which again will be mostly transparent to end users, will make any real impact or if they will just help Google stay on top.

Regardless though, the landscape is changing. And if you operate a web site that relies on search results you need to be aware of these, and other, changes. While Google still maintains a healthy dominance, they are not the only game in town. So a little attention to some of the “lesser” players is certainly in order. So brush up on your Microsoft SEO tactics if you haven’t already. The differences are minor (mostly dealing with how inbound linking is handled from what we can tell), but with Microsoft making gains on this front you don’t want to get caught napping…

Of course questions and comments are welcomed, as always.

RSS Feeds are critical to your SEO strategy.

RSS? Really Simple Syndication. Bet that helped…

RSS is the juice that keeps the Web moving...

RSS is the “juice” behind Web 2.0. As we discussed in the first part of this article on leveraging the web, in today’s Internet there are two types of businesses, those that use new technology to push their messages to their customers, and those that are still trying to figure out how to do that. RSS is part of the “how you to that.”

Now, we aren’t going to go get all technical here. You don’t need to “know” a new coding language (don’t go run out and buy “RSS for Dummies“… yes, that is a real book). Here’s what I want you to do:

1. Become RSS “aware”: It’s all around you. Look for the RSS Icon. You might even click on it. You might be a bit confused by what you see, but we’ll get to that in a second. The point is that RSS is “everywhere” these days (except on your site, right?). Now… if we could just figure out how to leverage RSS to OUR advantage…
2. Get an RSS “reader”: This is the important part. You can read most RSS feeds directly in your browser, but then you’ll have to open each feed EVERY time
   you want to see what is going on with that site. That isn’t very efficient, is it? No. And that’s sort of the point of all of this… LEVERAGING the tools… So go grab yourself an RSS reader. You can Google “RSS readers” and find something that works for you. I personally recommend Google’s Reader (http://www.google.com/reader) as that allows me to keep track of my feeds from pretty much any browser.
3. Subscribe to at least TWO RSS feeds using your reader: Start with the RSS feed for this site then add at least one more feed. Remember, we’re talking about using the tools here. Subscribing to just one feed is certainly a start, but the real benefits of will become apparent when you are keeping up with multiple feeds at the same time from one location. This is the power of Web 2.0.

I should also note here that you can pull RSS feeds into other sites as well. If you’re on Facebook (FeO is!) you can import feeds directly to your profile using several methods (Google for more information). Again… that’s the “magic” to all of this… you can read this data from pretty much anywhere you already are… now… if there were only a way for YOU to get YOUR information out to YOUR customers in such a manner…

It’s time to put the web to work for you.

You’ve built your website. You’ve pasted it on everything that goes out of your office or business, from letterhead, to receipts, to email signatures, to business cards. Your “www” is all around you. But that’s just it. It’s all around YOU. But your customers only see it when they need something from you (you hope). How can you engage your clients in such a manner as to stay on their proverbial radar?

Back in “the day” you would gather your client’s email addresses and every so often send out a mass email about your latest product offering. Or perhaps an actual mailing using the good old “direct mail” method. Maybe you did some cold-calling. Whatever it took to get your message in front of your clients, you did.

And all the while, your website is sitting there. Waiting. Hoping that one of those customers, or perhaps even a new customer, would stumble by and go bananas over this great new product/service/idea/annoucement (you did put this great new product/service/idea/annoucement on your webiste, didn’t you?). If we could only figure out a way to put the information on your site and then instantly inform your customers, and potential customers, of this information. Well, perhaps we can, and it’s Really Simple.

Over the course of the next few posts I’ll be exploring just how to do that. We’ll be talking about things like “Web 2.0″, and RSS, and a bunch of other terms (some of which I’ll make up as I go along, just for entertainment value). So stay tuned…