11:30 pm in Social Media by Will Fleiss
I just finished reading the book, Citizen Marketers: When People Are the Message. Its all about how and why people are motivated to promote products and brands on their own time without any tangible incentive. The book discusses many examples of how honesty and full disclosure lead to successful consumer interaction, and eventually a viral response far greater than the sum of its parts. Being able to harness the power of these bloggers, social networkers and forum participants is a word of mouth marketing tactic that is only becoming increasingly important.
What in the world does it have to do with SEO? Well, many will say absolutely nothing. They may say that even white hat SEO is essentially gaming the system and has no place among all this truthiness. For those naysayers I have dubbed this kind of SEO “Pristine White Hat SEO.” It is optimization for search engines that involves the creating of platforms and interacting with visitors that allows “citizen marketers” to flourish on a given website, and thus attracting the fresh content-hungry search engine spiders. Build an environment on your website where consumers can naturally and honestly interact about a related topic, and the rankings will follow.
8:37 pm in Other Search Stuff by Will Fleiss
A cool way to get an idea of what kind of sites the search engines like to crawl is to see where your name comes up in the search results. Create some profiles on a few social sites, comment on some blogs, and submit some original articles to free article submission services. Then do a Google search on your name and watch what comes up. The difficulty level of getting yourself on the first page certainly depends very much on how common your name is. Be sure to search on your name and “your name”. I myself, Will Fleiss, am currently competing with my distant cousin Heidi Fleiss and Mike Fleiss, creator of the reality tv show The Will. Admittedly, I am lucky enough to have a rather uncommon name, however if you test a few things out I think you will find that its not that hard to get your 15 minutes (or rankings) in the Google Search spotlight.
8:53 pm in Other Search Stuff by Will Fleiss
The spammers on Squidoo have hit the trip wire, and Google has begun to penalize a lot of Squidoo pages. Jason Calanis cites a few examples of the spam. We’re talking real – free rington, porn, viagra - spam, not spam like my client creating information rich lenses, that could actually be useful to someone moving to Charlotte. Ed Dale’s blog TubbyNerd.com, sites several reasons for Google penalizing Squidoo’s ranking, non of which have anything to do with spamming. Either way, Squidoo has lost a lot of its initial zazooo given to it by its high rankings on Google, so it appears it will be necessary to build some backlinks to your Squidoo pages if you want to see them rank.
6:29 pm in Image Search by Will Fleiss
So if you verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools, there is an option that says, “Google now offers enhanced search for images contained in your site, including advanced labeling techniques for images hosted by Google”. You can opt-in to this “enhanced image search” by clicking on a box that say, “I would like to enable enhanced image search on my site and am authorized to opt into this advanced service.”
What does it mean to opt-in to enhanced image search?
Google answer: If you choose to opt in to enhanced image search, Google may use tools such as Google Image Labeler to associate the images included in your site with labels that will improve indexing and search quality of those images.
Has anybody seen a positive impact come from opting into this? I can’t see any down side, but if anyone has any experience with it please share…
10:43 am in Other Search Stuff by Will Fleiss
Check out this SEO informational video with interviews of the top guns in the SEO industry.
9:43 pm in Social Media by Will Fleiss
Google once again is playing the role of the puppet master as the massive Internet company pulls the strings behind the social networking umbrella platform called OpenSocial. It has been confirmed that MySpace, SixApart, and Bebo will join forces under OpenSocial, already consisting of Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle, in an attempt to take on Facebook Will Facebook be forced to join, or is the college based network just getting started? Please feel free to weigh in…
I just finished reading the book, Citizen Marketers: When People Are the Message. Its all about how and why people are motivated to promote products and brands on their own time without any tangible incentive. The book discusses many examples of how honesty and full disclosure lead to successful consumer interaction, and eventually a viral response far greater than the sum of its parts. Being able to harness the power of these bloggers, social networkers and forum participants is a word of mouth marketing tactic that is only becoming increasingly important.
