The Facts:

• 60% of your page rank is calculated by what others do in response to your site. Each click on those buttons generates a social page for your post, in turn generating a valuable inbound link from a very authoritative domain.
• Enabling your content to be shared across social media platforms, extends the reach of your content. This makes the money spent on creating content go further.

5 Tips to Optimize Your Website for Social Media

1. Group and Display your Social Media Icons Prominently

Icons linking to your social accounts should be displayed in the top-right corner of your home page for optimal visibility.

2. Feature Social Network Widgets in the Sidebar
  
Displaying Social widgets in your sidebar gives your customers an easy way to follow you with a single click. It also provides social proof by displaying how many followers or fans you have.

3. Display your Latest Tweets in the Sidebar

Entice the visitors to your website to join in the conversation by displaying your latest tweets in your sidebar or footer.

4. Display the Image Thumbnails of your Blogpost in the Sidebar

A picture is worth a thousand words. Include your blogposts image thumbnail on your blog post to generate interest in your blogs. While your at it, consider creating a unique thumbnail for each blogpost.

5. Display Social Media Sharing Buttons at the top or bottom of your Blogposts

Having social media sharing buttons clearly visible at the top (if not then on the bottom) of your blogposts and other content makes it easy for visitors to share your content and spread the word. These buttons usually have counters included, displaying how many people have shared your content. This serves as social proof of your content.

Microblogging

Social Syndication

SMM vs SEO

It’s not a question of having either good SEO or a decent Social Media Marketing (SMM) strategy in place. You need both.

In the recent past, many former bloggers have been saying that blogging is dead. They have abandoned the act of blogging and moved on to the greener pastures offered by the likes of Twitter and Facebook. Social Media and mobile are the buzzwords and blogging is old news.

Frankly, I found this to be an absurd notion. Over the December holidays I encountered three people ranging from the ages of 25 to 56 who had just taken up blogging. They weren’t tech-savvy programmers but a lawyer, a student traveller and a house wife.

If they were taking the time to get into blogging, and for no immediate financial gain, surely blogging couldn’t be in it’s death throes. It seemed to me as though the whole “Death of Blogging” thing was nothing more than hype created to get some attention.

But suspecting wasn’t good enough. If I wanted to make a contradictory statement, I needed some proof.

The Quest for Statistics on the State of the South African Blogosphere

Finding any decent information on the South African Blogosphere proved very challenging. I contacted the Letterdash blogging platform – as part of News24 I am convinced that they must have a thriving community of bloggers – but their contact form was non existent with a 500 – Internal Server Error staring me in the face. Local Blog aggregator, Afrigator, also didn’t provide me with the information I needed.

I had no other choice but to turn to our friends, the Americans…

The Stats from the States

At a loss for finding statistics for our local scene, I consulted the excellent Technorati State of the Blogosphere Report published every year. Surely if blogging was in the decline, it would be visible in the USA first.

While this report doesn’t give a definite number to all the bloggers in the world, studying their methodology does yield an insight into the burning question of whether or not blogging is indeed still alive and well, kicking and with a pulse.

Technorati have an Internet survey conducted every year among bloggers nationwide. The survey group was shrunk from 2,828 bloggers in 2009 to 1,091 respondents in 2010.

However, the Report also uses data collected by Lijit, a trusted publisher network of over 12000 publishers and 700 million page views per month.

Lijit-collected data for the 2010 State of the Blogosphere report was from two primary sources.

• 13,000 active Lijit publishers that have the Lijit Search Widget installed on their blog (up from 11000 in 2009)
• The network of 3.8 million blogs that those 13,000 blogs connect to via their Blogroll and other social network connections tracked by Lijit (up from 2.5 million in 2009).

If Lijit could expand their survey group from 2009 to 2010 because they now have a larger pool of active users, then the Lijit data corroborates that Blogging isn’t dead and thriving still.

I’ll state that blogs have come of age. They have been around long enough to be effectively
assimilated by the mainstream. Blogs have gained legitimacy and are read by most internet users every day, in one form of another. The humble blog may not be the hotshot new kid on the block anymore, but it’s here to stay.

As Warren Ellis said in a recent Wired magazine column:
“When any medium starts getting “the death of…” articles, it doesn’t mean the medium in question is dying, so much as that people are bored with it and are looking for the next thing. And while they were looking for other things to be interested in, Chicago street gangs started blogging to protest against police harassment. Remember Blogger‘s original tagline? “Push-button publishing for the people.” That looks alive and well to me.”

Look out for the next post, where I will delve a bit deeper into the findings of the State of the Blogosphere Report and what it says about Microblogging and SEO.

JWTIntelligence is a center for provocative thinking that is a part of JWT, a leading marketing communications brand. They have recently released their annual 100 things to watch report on slideshare

It’s jam packed with juicy predictions on what the technological trends will be that have an impact on our daily lives in this year of 2011.

The report makes for interesting reading, forecasting what new technologies, business strategies and popular icons will rise in popularity and be more widely adopted and what might make a bigger impact.

I’d like to direct your attention to point 47 – Long form content

Although moblogging – blogging from a mobile device – is also indentified as a trend and will no doubt continue to grow in importance, long form content and the need for quality, well researched content will still be going strong and might even see a resurgence. I think it’s high time.

During last year’s Heavy Chef event on the topic of “Is Blogging Dead” (Short answer – No, it isn’t), exhilarating speaker, blogger and serial entrepreneur Rich Mulholland stated that he believes there will always be a need for strong, well written and thoroughly researched (Journalistic) content online.

This prediction of the resurgence of long form content is already coming true when taking into account the recently announced changes to the Google Ranking algorithm. With an emphasis on original content, there will be a need for longer form content as you can only be so original in 140 characters or 300 words when writing on a topic with any substance.

Tim Johnson from I’d Rather Be Writing recently posted this article making a powerful statement on the need for more long form content. It is a challenging article that takes on the nasty old question: Is Google making us stupid?

If the components of the Google Ranking Algorithm are taken into account, with Trust/Authority, Link Popularity and Anchor Text (All elements that implicate outside sources linking to your website) being by far the most important for SEO and counting for more than 60% of the ranking weight it should be clear that writing well and writing sense still has a lot of value and will continue to do so.

It needn’t be.

SEO is one of those functions that easily get’s outsourced or shifted to a junior employee, as nobody really understands it or wants to deal with it.

A lot of focus has been placed by some SEO ‘practitioners’ to load pages packed with keywords in order to achieve higher SEO rankings. The idea is that the more you talk about what you do, sell or what your niche market is, the higher you will rank in search engines.

This is all good and well, but only up to a point. Having your targeted keywords in prominent positions within your content is important (just mind the keyword density!), as well as well defined Meta data and a robots.tx file and sitemap. This forms a part of good Search Engine Optimization Strategy.

However, all these activities fall under aspects of SEO which you can directly control. These form the aspects of SEO that you say about yourself.

Unfortunately, in SEO as in life, what you say about yourself isn’t really that important. It just isn’t very credible. The truth is:

What others say about you online is more important then what you say about yourself.

Let’s have a closer look at the Google algorithm:

When looking at the Google algorithm, it is clear that over 60% of your page rank as calculated by the Google algorithm is made up of activities that others perform online in response to your website:

• 23.87% – The general trust and authority that your site has as a result of quality incoming links. Google views a constant stream of incoming links as a sign that other people trust your site enough to not only link to you, but to link to you again.
• 22.33% – The amount of links coming into a specific page. The Reasoning: The more people link to you, the more widely respected your content.

It’s interesting to note that Google treats these two elements almost the same: consistency and credibility – This is why it is so important to blog continuously and create content that has meaning, not just mindless babble or senseless reposting.

• 20.26% – The anchor text of links from other sites (anchor text is the words used in the clickable portion of a link). This is how Google determines what other people say your content is about

How do you become credible enough to attract quality incoming links? By sparing a bit more focus and attention for SEO CopyWriting and giving more thought to the content you publish online.

Blog, tweet and update your social networks as much as you want, but be sure that your contribution to cyber space is of value to others.

It is important to remember that the Google Algorithm is a constantly shifting beast. Recent announcements have been made that they will once again make changes to the algorithm to combat content farms and the reproduction of content/resources, placing a bigger focus on original content.

I think we can all applaud that.

So when doing the SEO dance for your website, keep in mind that quality beats out quantity every time, and definitely in the long run.

You can hate on the Google Ranking Algorithm all you want, but at least it’s better than this.

Note: This blog was inspired by Brian Clark, one of the founders of Copyblogger and Scribe.

Also Read: Social Media’s impact on SEO

The recommendation is that if you are writing content about topics whose value is short lived (Timely) you should continue using dates, but if you have old content that is still of value (Timeless) and users are no longer clicking on your results in the search engines because they prefer to read a new article you can consider removing the post date from your posts.

The problem arises that the content creators can choose to remove the dates of their posts regardless of the nature of the content. Let’s take a look at an example.

Case Study

If you take a look at this post on Search Marketing Standard, you will find a very informative piece of writing on the new index, Caffeine, used by Google when compiling their search rankings.

Informative: Yes.  Timely? I don’t know.

Why don’t I know? Because there is no date on the blogposts. This causes a serious problem for me. How am I supposed to know if this technology is new, or if it has been implemented months ago and might have been amended in the mean time?

A news blogpost without any date - Useless?

That’s the problem with removing dates from blogs. Sure, this can help users click on your older content or blog in their search results, unhindered or deterred by a old date. But is that fair?

The argument for excluding the date of the Blog is that this way your timeless content will be discovered by your users, without them being prejudiced by the date, resulting in them thinking that your content is old and no longer relevant.

Fair enough – But who is to say your content IS relevant? Perhaps you wrote a stellar expose on the newest search technologies or the latest in ergonomically designed office furniture in 2008. It was a momentous piece of writing, it generated wide reaction and was well received. Is it still relevant 2 years down the line? Would it be ethical, or fair, to cheat users into clicking on your link in their search results, thinking they’ll find the latest info, when your content isn’t the latest?

In this case of the Google Caffeine blogpost on Search Marketing Standard, in order to determine whether or not this is timely news, I had to google ‘Google Caffeine’ and find other blogs and information sources that affirm that Google Caffeine was indeed launched on June 8 2010, making the news relevant to me, now.

This took extra time. FAIL.

When making the decision to remove dates from the blog on your website, do take into consideration what type of content you are handling on your blog. If, as in the case of the Social Marketing Standard, you’re blogging on current news events, it might not be the best move to remove dates from your posts.

Dates give context

Think of old fashioned newspapers. Yes, they are still around. And yes, it’s true that with more and more content moving online, that all news will ultimately be distributed online in the not too distant future. Newspapers mark their articles with dates, they take care to report accurate dates within their articles to better shape and communicate the context of the content. It can be argued that without a date, some if not all newspaper articles would be irrelevant.

Case in point:
If the results of a sports match was reported without the date, it would not have the same relevance or impact as when attached to the date of the match. Let’s look at this news snippet:

Sports: Australia beat South Africa 41-39 in the Tri Nations.

Without a date, this fact becomes a lot less valuable, as this could now refer to any match between these two teams in the entire history of the tournament. Removing the date actually devalues the content.

The final word

I think that a lot of Web writers can and SHOULD learn a bit from the practices of good journalism. If you’re going to blog, you still have a base responsibility of reporting your facts as accurately and within as decent framing context as possible.

If you are creating ‘Timeless’ content – a term that should be treated with some scepticism since what is timeless for you might not be timeless for the rest of the world – the argument can be made to not include dates. Just be sure that you are doing this because your intended audience is still people, and not our robot friends, the search engines.

Wikipedia is not new user friendly – Period

I was recently tasked with making a Wikipedia entry for Positive Heroes, a South African NGO focusing on raising awareness and uplifting positive rolemodels that live with Aids. It seemed like a simple assignment…

For the number one reference source on the planet, the first point of call in most circumstances when you need to know anything, and the website that tops the Search on most subjects, the process of updating and adding content is painful, frustrating, unclear and requires more effort than some would say it’s worth.

 In the world of Web 2.0, Wikipedia has to step up, evolve and get with the program.

Markup Language and usability

The process of writing a Wikipedia entry:

1. This process starts of with the use of the Wikipedia Article Wizard, a simple enough Wizard that takes you through the steps of writing a Wikipedia article. You are constantly bombarded with cautions that if your article does not address the notability requirements, it will be swiftly deleted.

The wizard has steps on Subject, Notability, Sources and Content. At the End you are presented with a bewildering 3 choices:

2. I would recommend using the Userspace draft at all times, even if you are a seasoned article writer. What happens if you, Jannie Wikipedian, regular contributor and admin extraordinaire, gets called away and your new article left unfinished is unleashed on the unsuspecting cyber public?

When creating a userspace draft, you have to be sure to leave the “Special:MyPage/” intact, or else you are confronted with this page:

This is just bad usability design. If you are not allowed to remove this tag…why enable the user to do so in the first place?

3. Fine, on to the Userspace draft.
Now, finally, we are in business and you can write your entry. The mark up language is intimidating for a newbie and the process could be simplified with using designated areas instead of the mark up language, but that being said, writing the article is quite easy once you get the hang of it.

Once done, you are prompted at the top of the article to click on one of two links:

Selecting the Wikipedia: So you made a userspace draft link bring you to a page that once again drums in the importance of notability, sources and content,Just like the wizard.

Here at least they have the information on the tag you need to add as a first time Wikipedian. It is deeply nested in the Notes section of the page, and I didn’t find it until my second go around at writing an article, but there it is, proudly and for all to see:

If you’ve made contributions before, moving the article is quite easy, as you’ll have a move tab on your toolbar at the top:

4. And that should be it. Relatively easy, if you have the time and patience to weave through the pages and pages of text.

Observations and ideas for improvement on the process:

1. Article Wizard

In the Article Wizard it is recommended that you first edit a few existing articles before writing up your own.

This seems a bit silly and counter productive to me. Now you have to hunt down articles, reading through vast quantities of information and edit articles that you care nothing about just to make your own contribution? How does this ensure that entries aren’t unnecessarily edited just so you can get your article onto Wikipedia?

2. Once the article has been written…

It would be much easier if there was simply a button that you could click on within the editing window of your article to have it moved to the main Wikipedia.

3. Talk Page

- Submitting your article to the talk page MIGHT get a response, but as I’ve found the article can languish on the talk page without any interest from the administrators. Moving it to the talk page  just to be rejected (most probably without anyone having actually read it) and without any comment as to why does not foster the feeling of inclusion on the vaunted “encyclopedia that anyone can edit”.

- As far as the Talkback page is concerned.  It would be better if the page could function like a comment section on any other blog.

In closing

When writing a Wikipedia article, the glut of information that you are bombarded with is confusing, irritating and frustrating. Especially as so much of it isn’t relevant to your particular case.  There needs to be a simpler user interface, and seeking help should point you in the direction of a page that deals with your specific problem and not every other problem ever encountered on Wikipedia.

Somewhere in the midst of writing this article, my Positive Heroes article was accepted as a new unreviewed article’ proving that even after a relisting cycle my article was not read by the administrators. I’m just hoping it won’t be “swiftly deleted” as is promised everywhere on the submission process.

We’ve discussed the nature of the business blog as opposed to a personal blog and outlined the top reasons to have a business blog in place.

So now you’ve decided that you too need a business blog to promote your company, services and products. It is a powerful tool – but only when implemented, used and promoted properly. Fail in any one of these three categories and you may just be wasting your time.

Setting up a blog is both cost effective and easy but your attempts will fall short if you don’t keep the following in mind:

1. Content is King

Visitors come to your site to find some type of information. The more information you have on your site, the more people will come to your site to get that information. Getting people to visit a website is half the battle. Once you have them there, you have the opportunity to market your other products and services. Take heed however not to simply have content for content’s sake and stay consistent with the quality and usefulness of content to meet reader expectations.

2. People Are Selfish

Sure you have an awesome product, but no one really likes to be advertised or marketed to. Everyone wants to know what’s in it for them. By blogging, you can provide content and information that your customers and potential customers find valuable. They’re more likely to listen to what else you have to say (about your products).

3. Sites Need to Be Updated

No one is going to come back to a site that doesn’t look like it’s been updated since 1995. Blogging gives you a quick and easy way to constantly update your site. Spend time and invest energy writing new posts and publishing them, providing your audience with timely and relevant information.

4. Build Reputation

People want to do business with someone they trust. Blogging gives you the opportunity to give a lot of information away for free, which builds the reputation that you care about your customers. You have to put your best foot forward at all times to maintain a good impression.

5. Show Some Personality

People also want to do business with other people. They want to understand what your company stands for and what the people who work there are like (which goes a long way towards building trust). Blogging allows you to write a bit more informally, have some opinions, and show off your personality.

6. Be An Expert

If you’re in business, you’re probably an expert at something. You have a lot of valuable information stowed into your head. Blogging gives you the opportunity to show off your expertise while offering something of value to your customers. People want to deal with someone who knows what they’re doing.

7. Listen & Connect

Probably most importantly, blogging gives you the opportunity to connect directly with your customers, potential customers and other industry colleagues. You’ll get some great information about what other people think that you can use to improve your own business. If you can not effectively reach your audience, you will be well served to rethink your content and recalibrate your message.

8. Analyse

With a business blog, you need to have clear goals that you want to reach, and then monitor and analyse whether or not you’re reaching those goals from your blogging efforts. There’s no point in writing eloquent blogs that might just be cyber realm poetry if you’re not achieving your business goals.

We recommend the use of Google Analytics for tracking the traffic generated by your blogs. It’s free, easy to use and offers a wealth of features.

9. Patience

Blogging for business forms part of your marketing startegy and as a new skill that you are implementing it will take some time and tweaking for it to achieve the results you have in mind.

10. Marketing

Continually marketing your blog is important. Simply setting it up and letting it run is not enough. You have to create awareness for your blog by using other social media channels such as twitter and facebook, your standard email newsletter, getting involved with the blogging community within your niche by commenting on their posts and hosting competitions on your blog to drive traffic toward it.

Plinky is a blogging prompt tool, aimed at getting bloggers’ creative juices flowing by giving a short prompt in the form of a sentence, a question or a challenge. You then answer the prompt and also have the capability to add photos or other media, depending on the prompt of the day.

Once you’re done and satisfied you can share your answers on Facebook, Twitter and blogs.

Interested? Let’s take a look at Today’s Prompt

Twittery

Plinky is a bit like twitter, or other similar social networking sites in that you create a profile for yourself, you can follow others and read their posts as they go live, or comment on them.

If that’s not enough, you can even suggest a prompt yourself to the community.

Supported Services

Plinky provides support and integration with a wide variety of social media platforms making it easy to publish your prompt answer to the rest of the world.

The Supported Services include :

• Blogger
• Live journal
• Typepad
• WordPress.com
• WordPress.org
• Xanga
• Facebook
• Twitter
• YOUR BLOG – It provides the embed code to publish your answers straight to your blog!!!!
• Email

The Real Prize

But that’s not all, and hardly the feature that makes it fantastic. Plinky also has a picture finder, that finds pictures to accompany your post based on a keyword that you type in. It gives you a few options, and it’s as simple as selecting the image and posting your answer

-If this sevice (a Keyword Picture finder) where available for use off the Plinky platform and utilizing more creative commons databases than just flickr…well, you can imagine what a prize that would be for bloggers

All in all, Plinky is a very useful tool to any blogger and a service that has amazing potential for growth. Keep an eye on this one!

In the previous post we stated the importance of the business blog. Knowing about the business blog is a good starting point, now we’ll take a look at the uses of the business blog to promote and grow your business.

1. Frequently Asked Questions

Your blog can be utilized as a customer service and information desk for your business. Here you can post answers to Frequently Asked Questions by your customers, This allows you to refer customers to your blog instead of having to respond to each customer via email or over the phone.

2. Contests and Promotions

Contests are a great way to drive traffic to your site and build interest in your company. Fun contests and games that are easy to enter and take part in serve as great promotion and bring your customers back.

3. Photo Blog

Not the Wordy type? Instead of writing, you could put up a daily photo for your customers. A photo and a short description can be very compelling. These can be photos of your staff members, product offerings, team days or anything that could capture the imagination of your customers while staying true to your company’s character.

4. Developer Notes

If you are in the business of developing any type of product – whether it’s software, fashion designs or a new braai spice – a behind the scenes look can often be fascinating for your customers, to see what you are doing and how new projects and products might be moving forward. It’s also an excellent way to build anticipation for your new offering – Just make sure that you deliver!

5. News

Keep your customers informed by blogging about the latest news in your area of expertise or about the specific topic(s) relevant to the company.

6. A Recruitment tool for your business

Potential employees can learn about your culture, your policies, your way of interacting with the world, and the process you use for hiring employees through your blog. It is a powerful tool for engaging the people who might want to potentially work for you.

7. Build your personal brand

A business blog allows you the opportunity to put a voice to your brand, and gives you the opportunity to develop and meet customer expectations for your brand.

8. Web Presence

A business blog extends your business’ Web presence. Each new blog post you publish on your business blog becomes another entry point, and with each new entry point comes the potential for more traffic.

For small businesses it is a low-cost alternative to having a web presence. For small business owners without the time to learn web html or the money to hire a designer/developer, blogging offers an inexpensive method to get your company’s name out on the Internet.

9. What’s New Pages

If you add lots of new articles, information, or products regularly, sometimes it can be difficult for your customers to find out what’s new. A quick blog entry can show them what’s updated on your site.

10. What’s Coming

You can use a blog to peak interest in future products or projects. It’s also a great way to keep notes about what you’re planning for your customers, the entries are archived so nothing is lost either for you or your customers. Plus, if your blog tool has a comments feature, you can use that to judge interest before it goes live.