New07 Blog Reviews » seo

Nestle, Palm Oil and Social Media, Oh My!

cgseo — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 14:20:53 +0000

By now it’s no secret Nestle is having some issues with their social media, one of the most talked about is their Fan Page fiasco. Greenpeace began the process with a report on Sinar Mas (whom Nestle used) harvesting palm oil , which is having a direct impact on the rainforest and orangutan populations . In March of this year, Greenpeace released a video depicting a man “taking a break” by biting into an orangutan’s finger (the video might be squeamish to some). Nestle promptly had it removed from YouTube, but it didn’t stop Greenpeace from posting it on Vimeo where it went viral. From there Greenpeace supporters flooded Nestle’s Fan Page and well, here we are today. Recently the dust is starting to settle, a little anyway, but there is still a lot to learn from what’s happened. I had the opportunity to talk with Marketing Pilgrim’s Frank Reed, about a few things to take away from what’s happened and how to prevent bad PR getting the best of you online. How did Nestle ruin their online reputation? Were they even ruined? In this day and age I wonder if it is possible to totally ruin your online reputation. People have short memories and are generally forgiving. In the case of Nestle there will be many who learn of Nestle’s efforts to make the palm oil situation right but the apparent unwillingness of many of the social media “protesters” to let them tell their story could actually end up working in Nestle’s favor. What could Nestle have avoided and did any warning signs appear before hand that could have alerted them to remain cautious? Well, if Nestle was aware of what their supplier was doing then they certainly were moving forward at their own risk. It would have made a great story for Nestle if they had identified the issue, ended the relationship then told their story. Whenever it looks like you have been “found out” there will be a price to pay in the online space. When are some constructive ways to respond to negative comments? Stay on message and don’t truly engage. Many negative commenters are looking for a fight. Stay on message. Keep telling the message that is moving toward a resolution and don’t “take the bait” to get into a shouting match. You’ll lose. Should people respond to every negative comment they receive be it on Facebook or other outlet? And if a negative comment is received should the comments be deleted? You should never delete negative comments unless they are truly defamatory to you or another or are obscene. Hopefully, you have put a clear policy together and made it available to participants as to what would cause a comment to be removed. If not you will look suspicious in removing anything from a platform that is intended to be open and conversational. Nestle did say that any pictures of their doctored logo would be removed. As for every negative comment being handled? Probably good to acknowledge the comments though and ask if they are willing to engage offline. If it starts to look like a “flame-fest” it is good to bow out gracefully and call for reasonable discourse. You are the site / brand owner after all and it is your turf so you can make the rules. Most people will see a reasonable attempt to handle an unreasonable person enough effort to seem genuine. Would you advise a dose of ‘reverse SEO’ for the negative comments? Reverse SEO can have a negative connotation especially if your problems and the responses from your audience re-warranted. What companies should be doing, however, is creating as many different outlets of information for the engines to “feed on” about the brand thus making it less likely for other results to float near the top. Google has a commitment to balanced results though so you better make your alternative offerings strong. Is it too late for Nestle? Should they just start over from scratch? It looks like their Facebook page is wrecked for now but this furor should die down especially if they have attended to the issue completely. The trouble with their Facebook page is that it has become a place where others are grousing about issues that aren’t even related to Nestle thus possibly killing any chance for that particular iteration of their Facebook presence to recover. They should consider a “do over” on that one area but once again this tactic will have its supporters and detractors as well. What are your top 5 things people/businesses can do to avoid having their reputation damaged online? 1. Keep their noses clean. Do good business and problems will be few. 2. Handle yourself professionally. No matter how bad the attack it should never warrant you dropping to the attacker’s level. It cheapens your image. 3. Provide many options for the engines with a variety of mediums like YouTube, blogs, alternate sites for specific data. 4. Be transparent. Admitting an issue will do much more good than harm. Covering it up and getting defensive though? Bad move. 5.Take the action that allows you to sleep at the end of the day knowing you did the best you could to be open, honest, transparent and available. Each situation will define these actions differently but work the moral compass angle. Frank Reed is the owner of FT Internet Marketing, Inc ( www.frankthinking.com ) that provides Internet marketing, social media, online reputation and copywriting services to the SME (small to medium enterprise) market. Frank is a daily contributor to Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim and writes weekly for Mike Moran’s Biznology Blog . He does other stuff too so give him a call. Three days after this interview Nestle has posted an open letter to Greenpeace . It seems they are starting to move, or appear to, in the right direction. In addition Nestle has also created a second Fan Page , which seems to be geared more towards the United States audience in order to move away from the mess on their original page. And a third Fan Page which seems to be focusing more on their care to the community and environment. I’d like to ask you the reader, your thoughts on the new release from Nestle and what do you think these new Fan Pages will do for them? Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Nestle, Palm Oil and Social Media, Oh

Do Negative Headlines Work?

cgseo — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 14:16:08 +0000

If you’ve dipped a toe or two into copywriting, one of the first things you’ll learn about is the power of negativity. Words like “Don’t” or “Stop” or “No” are powerful motivators when used correctly. But at the same time, they can be overkill when a message that’s designed to provoke actually leaves your readers feeling cold. If you read a blog post with the headline: 5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Photography Skills It might tickle your interest. But throw a dash of the negative in there and you’ve got something like: For Best Results: Don’t Ever Take Pictures from This Angle Which one would you be more likely to click on? When Negative Headlines Work

How To Motivate Employees to Contribute Content

cgseo — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 14:10:22 +0000

Sometimes it can be like pulling teeth to try and get others in your organization to contribute to your content development strategy. Of course the excuse is inevitable “I have no time” or “I am still working on it”, amongst probably hundreds of other reasons why employees can’t help. But its funny how when you add an incentive with it, everyone can somehow find time to contribute. Like magic, peoples schedules suddenly free up or that post they have been working on for 2-3 months, is finished the next day. Lets face it, many people are not motivated unless they are compensated for their time. Which is understandable. If someone is going to take time out of their day or work on something at night or on the weekend, they should see some reward or gain from it. Before we get into the different ways you can encourage employees to contribute content, it should be said that you should set standards to keep only high-quality content that is being produced. If you just say, we will give each employee $25 per post…you will be amazed at what will get put in the queue to be approved. Depending on your blog or type of content you are looking to create, try to make sure there are best practices being implemented. Internal Linking to Other Posts Write About Topics That Have Not Been Covered Yet Add Relevant Images and Videos Minimum Word Count (debatable depending on the post style) Ok, so now lets talk about the different ways you can go about motivating your employees to help contribute to your content development strategy. Performance-Based

Advanced SEO Requires Good Analytics Information

cgseo — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 14:00:13 +0000

Good quality analytics (such as Google Analytics or another paid analytics software packages) provides good and very useful information. If you pay attention to it you could very quickly increase the overall efficiency of your website. You just have to look at the numbers and list to what they tell you. The proof is in the pudding as they say and if you ignore your analytics information you could be missing out on a great deal of potential business and traffic. Here are some basic areas for you to review in order to find any holes in your website and to help you decipher data that you learn from your analytics: Conversions: In case you don’t know, a conversion is a completed action on your website, such as lead, sign up, sale, etc. The most important factor (I think) to learn from your analytics software is the conversion data. Understanding and learning about how and where you conversions come from can help you make much more educated and better SEO, PPC and Social Media marketing decisions. I can’t tell you how many people I still speak to think that the best goal for an SEO campaign is rankings or positioning. Sorry to break it to you, but it is not. Increasing conversions (and visitor growth) should be the starting goal(s) of your SEO and search marketing efforts. I won’t get too deep into that as that is not the main point of this post J Bounce Rate: Whether you are looking at this overall or down to a single page if your bounce rate is really high try to figure out what is turning people off from that web page. It could be a variety of things depending on your business so take a deep look at your page. Is it too much info? Or a lack of info? Do you have too many ads on that specific page? It could also be a combination of all these items. It might just be that your page needs to have a serious over haul. Bounce rates vary for each client and industry but understanding what yours is and try to improve your bounce rate is very important. Visitors: When you start to really get into advanced SEO techniques you will need to understand even more so where all of your visitors are coming from. Visitor quality is just as important as visitor growth. You never want to rely on just one stream of traffic because if that stream dries up so does your business. You have to understand where your traffic is coming from because often times it might be from an area that you least expected it to come from. Analytics information allows you to find new locations along with locations of where you might be able to place yourself to find new traffic. Keywords: Analytics information will tell you what keywords your website traffic is using to find your website. This is a potential to really open things up for you as you grow your business online. As new keywords develop you can capitalize by finding new variations on those specific keywords and using them throughout your website. You have to look at your analytics information very closely otherwise you won’t find those windows of opportunity to help improve your SEO and overall search marketing efforts. Analytics keeps your approach to marketing your website efficient and smooth. It is all about finding opportunities that could already exist right in front of you. Data and information that you can get from your analytics allows you to find those areas where you can really maximize your efforts in the online world. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Advanced SEO Requires Good Analytics

Social Media Time Saving Tip

cgseo — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 14:20:43 +0000

What I am going to share with you is not new, but I am surprised at how many people do not use this time saving source. Ping.fm is a resource that I want everyone to know about. If you aren’t using it then you need to rethink the reason why. If you are using this wonderful tool then maybe I can share with you some more helpful tips to help in your successes. In there own words: “Ping.fm is a simple and FREE service that makes updating your social networks a snap!” To me the best part is that the service is free and you can post from anywhere with their mobile, instant messenger and email apps. They also work along with hundreds of other 3rd party apps to make updating your status simple and fast. Ping.fm was recently acquired by Seesmic making the service much more powerful. You can send an update and it can be submitted instantly to 50+ social networks including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Ning, WordPress, TypePad, Yammer, Status.net and many more. My favorite part about using this valuable resource is that I can post from my iPhone from anywhere sharing with my friends and family something cool. For example, I recently sent an update to all my friends to over 20 of my social networks right from my phone. The update was sent from the beautiful mountains of Utah stating that I had just finished a Half Marathon. Here is a very short video I created showing how easy it is to sign up and start using Ping.fm today: There is also a trick to update your Google Buzz account via Ping.fm and here are the steps: 1. Of course you must have a Ping.fm account, sign up here – http://ping.fm/ 2. Add Gtalk by clicking “Add Network” at the http://ping.fm/networks/ page 3. Next enter your email address and password associated with your Google buzz account then click submit: 4. And for the last step, you need to add Gtalk as a connected service by logging into your Google Buzz account. See images below for steps: That is it, your Ping.fm posts will now automatically post to your Google Buzz account. Most other social networks are much easier to add as you can see in the video I shared above. There are some things you need to know with using Ping.fm as a social media tool. You need to remember that it is simply a tool that will help save you time. It is not an automated tool that will make you millions or get you more followers necessarily. I see many people abuse the tool to the point that they are not being social anymore with their friends and followers. As we know, Social Media is all about the conversation and being social. If all you are doing is submitting updates and not a part of the discussion then you will loose out on what social media really is. Here are some helpful tips and reminders to save time but still be social: Only use Ping.fm as a status update service and not your only means of connecting to your social networks Post your status updates and make sure you still login to your social network profiles to be a part of the dialogue Don’t overdue it with your submissions, you will loose a lot of friends and followers this way Use other tools to help you in the conversation (e.g. Seesmic , Hootsuite , or Tweetdeck ) In conclusion, Ping.fm is simply a tool for us as marketers and individuals to use to help us save time when conversing and sharing stuff with our friends and followers. This free resource has the ability to help us be more productive if we use it correctly and wisely. Bear in mind that any tool can be abused, so just be careful. Also always remember to have fun. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Social Media Time Saving

Track Any Page Changes in Google Chrome

cgseo — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:26:57 +0000

We are pretty good at tracking page changes at FireFox already. I did a detailed overview of all the addons that track any page for changes and notify you in various ways. I also mentioned that those tools are awesome for various purposes: You can track Google SERPs (especially the newest results that change daily) and thus easily see your brand name mentions; You can track social media sites like Digg or Sphinn to get timely notified about new hot stories on any category page (or new search results); You can use page trackers instead of an RSS reader to monitor new front page stories, You name it! So while we can do that in FireFox, some (many?) of us may have switched to Google Chrome. So the good news is that they can do the same thing there as well! Page Monitor is a fun Google Chrome extension that allows your browser to monitor changes to web pages. The great features of the extension include: The ability to monitor any number of pages for changes. One-click adding of pages. Smart comparison system that ignores ads and code changes. Highlighting of changes that happened to a page since the last check. The ability to set separate check interval for each page. Get it installed in seconds and notice a tiny icon in the toolbar (next to the page address). The icon is used to add new pages to monitor as well as to notify you of the number of updated pages: So when on any page you want to monitor, click that icon and easily start tracking the page changes: Now whenever this page changes, the monitor icon will display a notification on its badge. Of course, you can repeat this for any number of pages. If you want to see the actual changes on the page, click “View changes” (see the screenshot above) and you will be able to see what has been added (green color) and what has been removed (red color): The tool offers to customize some settings as well. To access options, right-click on the icon and select “Options”. From there you can: Stop monitoring any page or rename any page record; See how long ago the tool checked the page; Set the checking interval; Set tracking changes to particular elements on the page (e.g. a price tag on a shopping site) by specifying a CSS/jQuery selector or regular expression to match against the page’s source code (the result of applying this selector/expression is compared). Of course, this feature requires that you know how to use selectors or regular expressions . Set some general look and feel (highlight color, sound alerts, sorting, etc); Import and export the list of pages to monitor: Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Track Any Page Changes in Google

A New Feature-Rich SEO FireFox Addon: SEO Doctor

cgseo — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 13:40:11 +0000

It looks like Vladimir Prelovac has become our SEJ featured developer. I have already shared his plugin for smart blog interlinking and mentioned another WordPress plugin by him called “Insights” . Today I am sharing his FireFox addon that has been developed for about a year. SEO Doctor is a newly launched FireFox addon that has tons of useful SEO features; I am looking at only a few of them below (to see the more detailed overview, check out Vladimir’s post). Status Bar

2010 NFL Draft Online : Live Video & Twitter

cgseo — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 23:17:08 +0000

The 2010 NFL Draft will mark the first time the drafting of college players by NFL teams will be held in Prime Time, and not during the weekend, as the NFL has expanded the event to 3 days, in a similar fashion as they did with the 2009 Probowl, holding it the weekend before the Super Bowl. This year, the 75th NFL Draft will start tonight at 7:30 pm, and is being televised on ESPN and also the NFL network, which will be airing 24 hour NFL Draft coverage. I’m pretty excited to watch the draft on ESPN tonight, to see where this class of intense defensive players and QB’s are picked up, and to see what the Baltimore Ravens (my hometown team) does with their #24 pick. But if you’re like me, your cable provider may not offer the NFL Network, so my 2010 NFL Draft experience will be limited to ESPN. Fortunately, there are alternatives to watching the Draft Live Online, and also following this year’s Draft via different tools and mobile apps. Watch the NFL Draft with Live Video NFL.com is hosting live streaming video of the NFL draft beginning at 7:30, when the St. Louis Rams will be on the clock with their #1 pick. The live stream will be at NFL.com/draft/2010/live/landing . CBSSports.com is also covering the NFL Draft with video coverage and detailed team and player rankings & information at Inside the Draft. ESPN has Draft coverage on 2010 NFL DraftCast also with Live Video and detailed team information and NFL news. In addition, ESPN has extremely cool integration of Twitter Feed and Facebook conversations around the Draft that even shows your Facebook friends who are watching the NFL Draft on ESPN. Between NFL.com, CBSsports and ESPN, there is no shortage of live streaming video coverage of the 2010 NFL Draft. Follow the NFL Draft on Twitter The official hashtag for this year’s NFL Draft is #NFLDraft which you can follow on your mobile, PC or favorite Twitter application for updated NFLDraft info, rants and insight … in 120 characters or less. There is also a very good Twitter account worth following called NFLDraftBible and of course you can follow NFL Player reactions on Twitter via their Twitter accounts; here’s a great list from Listorious . In addition, if you want to find friends on Twitter who may also be watching the NFL Draft or follow your favorite players, try the Google Labs Follow Finder. For example, you can check out the followers of Chad Ochocinco or ESPN’s Mel Kiper Jr . Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . 2010 NFL Draft Online : Live Video &

Search & Social Awards : Vote Now!

cgseo — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 18:05:25 +0000

The voting for the 2010 Search & Social Awards is now open! Search & Social is holding this contest to introduce the search marketing & social media community to multiple blogs in various different genres and online marketing disciplines. The final tally will be taken on May 1st and then winners will be announced on May 3rd, during an awards ceremony at the Search & Social Spring Summit in Tampa, FL. Not only are these awards fun, but it also gives you a chance to see how readers feel about your blogs. Search & Social encourages all nominees to promote the contest on your blog and to your followers. Search & Social Awards Categories include : SEO Blog PPC Blog Search News Blog Link Building Blog Web Analytics Blog ORM Blog CRO Blog Copyrighting Blog Local Search Blog Social Media Blog Best Link Bait of 2009/2010 Affiliate Marketing Blog Search Marketing Community Best SMM Blog Best Blog For Bloggers Best Blog About Facebook Blog About Twitter Vote and Rate your favorite blogs in Search Marketing & Social Media AND if you have been nominated, don’t forget to blog about it to tell your readers to vote for you AND add a badge to your site! Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Search & Social Awards : Vote

Search by Voice Available Now in Google Maps 4.1 for WinMo and Symbian

cgseo — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 16:26:53 +0000

Google just announced that its cool search by voice feature in Google Maps 4.1 is now available for Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 phones. This is the same voice activated search feature that BlackBerry and Android phone users have been enjoying for quite some time now. So, if you have any Symbian S60 or Windows Mobile phone, you can now search for anything by simply speaking your search terms instead of typing them. To use this feature, you simply need to open Google Maps on your phone, press the “call” button and speak your search term clearly. This feature works with all kinds of search on Google Maps for mobile such as places, specific businesses, types of businesses and addresses. In addition, this feature also lets you choose your preferred language including accents. To enjoy this feature on your Windows Mobile or Symbian s60 phones, you must download and install the latest Google Maps for mobile 4.1 for Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 phones. You can grab the app from m.google.com/maps using your phone’s browser. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Search by Voice Available Now in Google Maps 4.1 for WinMo and