The reality is that we will never have more time and we will never be less busy. And unless we have the luxury to hire someone to do the work for us, our best option is to make time. Even as little as 1/2 an hour a day can go far in moving your social media presence forward. So what would it take to do the most with that half hour?

Preparation, education and practice:

1. Prepare

What structure, tools and resources do you need to be successful? Do you need to set aside half an hour each day? Do you need to set up a dashboard like Hootsuite to manage all your networks?  Do you need to read a book or take a class, or test features of a social network to get familiar with them?

Do all of these and more.

2. Always learn

Surprisingly, a large set of social media features are not being utilized. Highly useful features such as Google+ people and community search,  Twitter lists, Facebook post geo-targeting and post scheduling, LinkedIn “saved searches” etc, are all important marketing opportunities left untapped by most marketers.

To be effective at social media marketing in less than an hour a day you need to know exactly what feature to tap into. Good news is, there are articles, tutorials and classes to teach it all.

Each social network has layers and layers of features. Take the time to visit each page and research everything from privacy settings to search functions. Many times you’ll need to use the “hover” method – take your mouse and let if hover over icons to get text descriptions of features. I think it’s a pity that so many features are hidden behind nameless icons. So take your time to do your own personal social media “treasure hunt.”

3. Make social media a daily habit

Do you wish social media came easy? Practice to make the behavior automatic. Building new habits takes extensive practice. Professor Ian Newby-Clark advises:

• Write down what you’re trying to accomplish
• Make a mini-plan. Keep it simple. Search for 10 new contacts on Twitter this week, talk to 10 journalists next week.
• Refine it. Keep what worked, ditch what didn’t.
• Repeat, Repeat, Repeat

Today it may take you 10 minutes to craft a social media post but if you keep practicing you can get to where it may only take 10 seconds. Today it may take 20 minutes to find your targets online, next week it may only take 5 minutes.

4.  Use tools and hacks

Tools make everything faster. I use CircleCount to get Google+ circle insights, SocialBro to search Twitter users by keywords in their bios, Sendible or Hootsuite to post to multiple social networks, including LinkedIn groups, all in one and Buffer to quickly schedule content to be published at the best time of day. Many other tools are available and to make your lives easier.

One word of caution, there may be too many tools out there. Don’t allow choice paralysis to take over. Use a mini-plan here too: one tool at a time. Once you’re familiar with one tool or set of hacks add another to your arsenal.

Ultimately, the key to successful social media is activity. So just keep trying and practicing, purposefully. Purposeful practice requires knowledge, dedication and persistency.

How do you sustain your social media habit?

Featured image courtesy of ragesoss via creative commons on Flickr.

The post How to Beat the “Too Busy For Social Media” Bug appeared first on .

Elly is a VERY smart social expert with a wealth of experience. I’m very excited to watch her lecture for almost two hours on ways to use Facebook to turbocharge your business results.

I promise you this event will be unlike anything you’ve ever experienced before in terms of social media learning. The class is a whole day and is filled with an amazing group of experts. I’m personally going to be sitting in on this one and taking robust notes, because I know I’m going to learn a TON of stuff that will help me.

If you have any questions at all about the class, about 312 Digital or about what Elly will be covering, please do not hesitate to give me a ring at (312) 448-6400 or contact me direct via twitter or the contact page on this site.

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If you don’t care about any of those things, then here’s what you need to know. SEO has the ability to drive massive traffic to any web site, provided you are doing it right. The number one ranking factor, by far, is the number and quality of links pointed at your website. In days of yore (read 2011 and earlier) all you needed to do was get oodles and oodles of links pointed to your site and you would rank for most any phrase that mattered. Google told us they cared about quality, relevant links, but what they said and what did were two different things back then. Today, all that has changed.

Today Google is backing up the tough talk with a hard core focus on quality and relevant links to your site. And a bunch of crappy links from crappy sites with over-optimized anchor text will do you no good at all (provided it doesn’t get you removed from the index altogether).

So all this begs the question; if you can’t just go out and automate your link building, what are you supposed to do to actually build links to your website? I’m so glad you asked. Here are a XYZ ways to build links that still work today, along with specific recommendations and tips to help you master each link building technique.

1. Write Epic Shit!

There is no better link building technique than amazing content. When you write something extremely valuable to your readers, it will naturally attract links. We share things that we find valuable. It’s human nature.

You’re natural question would be “define epic.”

Here’s what I mean by epic. Your aim should be to write the definitive web page about the topic you are writing about. My aim when I created this post was to write the very best post I could find about “link building techniques.” I may fail in that quest, but it is what I’m shooting for. That means a longer post. That means a lot of work. That means text and images to ensure the post is instructive and valuable to a number of readers.

Protips

• Once you’ve created your masterpiece, don’t forget to share it far and wide. It helps if you’ve build an excellent network prior to writing said masterpiece. Use ever means necessary to get the word out. And if the piece is a blog post and comments are enabled, be sure to check back a few times each day to address and respond to any comments on the post.
• Perform solid keyword research before you write your page and basic SEO as you upload it so you’re relatively sure your post can compete for the phrase you are targeting. No matter how good your piece, it’s always helpful if you’ve written something that can rank as well – meaning more traffic, more exposure and more potential people who may link back to it as a resource after they’ve read it.
• Remember – Epic is not about length. Epic is about value. Lots of valuable posts are longer. Not all long post are valuable.

2. Guest post

Of all the link building techniques I know if, my favorite by far is guest posting. Writing guest posts is an EXCELLENT way to get back links to your site. When you write a guest post on another blog, most publishers will allow you to include a bio with a link back to your site. To be safe and ensure your links don’t look too manipulated, be sure to link your name, the url of your website or the website/business name. Don’t link the same descriptive text from bio of every guest post you write, as that may start to look manipulative over time.

Few create better links back to their site using this technique than my friend Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media. Andy is a guest blogging machine. He’s seemingly everywhere, bu his guest posts add value wherever he goes. And he makes sure he communicates that value back to the publishers where he guest posted. If you’re interested in checking out Andy’s handiwork, he’s even built a Listly list of his guest articles.

Protips

• Be sure to implement Google authorship for your guest posts via the use of rel=”author” tagging.
• Target potential guest post sites that are in your vertical but have more authority than your site. There are reasons to write for newer blogs too, but building links of immediate value means writing for websites that are more powerful than yours. Check out the domain authority of sites where you might guest publish via Open Site Explorer and compare against the domain authority of your website.
• Finding keywords when writing guest posts is just as important as when you write for your own site. Do the same keyword research for your guest posts as you would for your own site. It means more work for your guest posts. But it gives you a chance to rank for more competitive phrases; phrases where your website might be able to compete.

3. Create an AWESOME Infographic or Data Visualization

Let’s face it. Most infographics suck. There’s nothing worse than being lured into clicking on an infographic that was just a blog post that some “web marketer” thought would generate a ton of links if it was turned into a graphic.

However… HOWEVER, there are few things better at generating interest, awareness, shares and links than a well done infographic or other way to graphically represent complex data. Telling stories with graphics and interactive web apps is a winner. Know who’s doing AMAZING work in this area? The New York Times.

Protips

• One great litmus test to find terrible infographics is whether the image could convey the same information if structured as a blog post. If so, you have no business creating an infographic.
• Don’t forget your sense of humor when creating infographics. A combination of witty, humorous or otherwise remarkable info conveyed in a snappy graphic can be very compelling.

4. Curate a List (a GREAT List)

One of the less frequently use link building techniques and a great way to build tons of quality inbound links is to create THE DEFINITIVE RESOURCE about some area that is a good fit for your website or business. I know there are many such “list posts” you probably read every single day. Hell, this blog post technically qualifies as one of them. But that’s NOT what I’m recommending here.

What I am recommending is the lost art of the GREAT list. The list that is novel and informative; exhaustive and well researched; updated and curated.

I am sure there are many examples of publishers who do this sort of thing, but the best example from my body of knowledge is Lee Odden’s excellent Top Rank Blog. Lee created more than a few of these types of resources. My two favorites are the Big List of Search Engine Marketing Blogs (over 400 marketing blogs all categorized and reviewed) and the annual 25 Women Who Rock Social Media post.

Notice that both of these lists have a badge associated with them that are easily downloaded and displayed so that people who made the list can show off their credentials. Now…not everyone has a blog with the cache of Top Rank Marketing Blog to be able to pull on and get people to list, but you may. Who’s to say it’s not worth a shot at starting.

Protips

• Pick a list unlike anything else out there.
• Put a lot of time into creating and curating the list. And don’t just list the resources. Put the time and effort into writing a brief review about the people or web sites that comprise your list. Tell your readers WHY you thing they’re awesome/terrible/creative/resourceful etc…. Pssst. You don’t have to have a COMPLETE list the first time you create it. It’s totally OK to update the list as you go, maybe adding people each month, quarter or year. The Big Blog List mentioned above took shape over many years.
• If your list is based on something positive, be sure to let the people know you’ve added them to the list. Circling back and welcoming them into your community is a great way to build relationships and odds are much better that they will promote the post by sharing or adding your badge to their website.

5. Hold a Contest

Another great way to generate links back to your website is to hold a contest. The end result feels a lot like list curation mentioned in #4 above, but the tactic varies significantly.

You may be struggling to find a reason to hold a contest. I would be willing to hold a contest for nearly any reason or for no reason at all. Hold a contest to crowd-source a design for your blog or a new logo. Hold a “Best Blog In Your Industry” contest. Hold any contest that might get traction and awareness in your industry.

As an example, I present you with Social Media Examiner. They hold an annual contest where readers nominate the best social media blogs. The nominating blog post gets a ton of traffic and engages the entire social media community as people scramble to get their blogs nominated. Then they engage a bunch of experts to serve on the judges panel (more awareness). Then the annual list is announced (along with a badge). The blog post that announced the 2012 winners generated 5892 links from 92 different domains. WOW!

Protips

• When creating the rules of your contest, instead of private submissions via emails or forms, make the submission a public post on a blog or other website with a link back to your site. Then the applicant can notify you of the page that linked to your site via email if necessary.
• Promote the HELL out of your contest. The more people know about it, the more potential links you can earn.
• Contests of this type are WAY more successful when you already have a killer community to draw on and excite.
• I’m a huge fan of Facebook, but I would rather run 10 contests on my site than run 1 on Facebook. I’m sure there are reasons to have a Facebook contest. None of those have much to do with link building – which in turn helps your website.

6. Issue a Press Release

I know, I know. Matt Cutts said press releases don’t have link value. Except he never said that. The exact quote is:

“I wouldn’t expect links from press release web sites to benefit your rankings, however.”

This does not mean that sites that re-run or syndicate those press releases don’t benefit your rankings. And they clearly do.

So find something to write a press release about. The better your release and the more newsworthy the event you are publicizing, the greater the likelihood your release will get picked up and have a follow on article written with a real world, editorially granted link to your website. You know…the good kind. Buried deep within original content. On a kick ass website.

Even if that never happens, but the release gets picked up by 100 or more news organizations who are starved for content, and your release includes a link to your website, most of those links will count. They probably are not as valuable as the editorially given link from within an original article, but there is some value there.

Protips

• Only issue a press release when you have something that is truly newsworthy to share.
• Make sure your release includes some of the keywords that are related to your product, service or business.
• Include one, maybe two deep links to internal pages in your website – preferably to a product or service page related to the release.
• Use one of the better known news distribution sites to maximize reach.

7. Host an Event

Some of the best ways to generate links to your website don’t have anything to do with “link building” per se. It just so happens that one of the byproducts of these activities is links and social shares. Events fall into that category.

The simple fact that a customer or evangelist attended an event does not guarantee that they will write about your event and link back to your website. But that happens quite regularly. I encourage you to consider hosting an event and to do so in such a way that links become one of the byproducts as people socialize the event before the event, during the event and reminisce about their experiences after the event.

Protips

• Plan for, announce and socialize a special hashtag for the event and encourage attendees to tweet or share info on Facebook as the event proceeds.
• If there is a lecture happening be sure to capture the slides from the presentations and have them uploaded to a page on your site so that attendees can share the slides while at the event.
• Encourage your sales channels (including affiliates) to share your website as part of their promotion process.
• Take a cue from Mark Schaefer and the excellent Social Slam team and ask attendees to send you links to any follow up blog posts they write about the event so you can create a blog post yourself that captures and shares all the posts written by event attendees. This way of someone writes about the event, but did not provide a link back to your website, you can ask them them edit the post to include a link.

8. Interview an Expert (or 14…or 102)

The best part about interviewing someone on your blog (whether in print, via a podcast or on video) is this: Interviewing is a group sport. It takes (at least) two to tango. Which means you’ve immediately doubled the number of people who are interested in promoting that post.

By pulling together a number of experts and interviewing them, or getting their perspective on a hot topic gives you a chance to earn a number of back links. Online friend Cheryl Burgess does this really well. Take the post in the screen shot above as an example that Cheryl wrote for the AT&T small business blog. That one article generated links from 18 different domains since it was published.

Protips

• Posts like this are HARD WORK. To successfully craft and create a post with a bunch of interviews is a lot like herding cats. Getting the information in the format you want can be difficult. Be patient. Be persistent. Be clear about what you are looking for. It will all pay off in the end.
• Follow up with your list of experts after the post is live and encourage them to share. One of the tactics I have used with some success in situations like these is to create a half dozen suggested tweets for them and include the tweets in the follow up email. Experts are often VERY busy people and making it as easy as possible for  them to share your work can pay dividends.

9. Use Stock Business Assets Creatively

One of my favorite ways to create links to your site is to break out of the dull routine of standard business practices and do something remarkable or extraordinary. Take, for example, the About Us page for Lateral in the screen capture above. Rather than another BORING about us, they’ve created an interactive experience – something that involved the website visitor in an unexpected way. When you mouse over a team member, that team member’s picture turns to color from black and white – and every other team member looks at the image that is now color.

Unique.

Unexpected.

Remarkable.

And that page has generated links from 432 links from 103 different websites. Wait. Make that 104. So smart.

Protips

• Think creatively about all your standards business assets. About Us Pages. Business Cards. Did I mention Business Cards? 404 Error Pages. Take the things other business just go through the motions with and do something genuinely remarkable.

10. Share, Share, Share and Share Some More

One of the easiest ways to build links is to share the creative work of others. This may not work all that well unless you already have an audience built, but if you have gained permission to share that work with a link back to the original source, who’s to say other bloggers don’t re-share and credit your site with a link?

Here’s a great example.

Have you see this graphic before?

It was created, best as I can tell, but an agency called Neutron LLC.

It was later re-shared by the website Ads of the World. The Ads of the World page? Linked to by 116 different domains. The original neutron version? Two links. Two.

Protips

• Consider assembling all the best shares you shared on social media during the week and doing a roundup post every Friday that includes all those original elements. Be sure to link back to the original sources from your blog post.
• Consider mashing up elements – what about pairing this sharing idea with a contest encouraging your visitors to vote on their favorite piece of shared content throughout the year?

Link Building Techniques – Conclusion

There you have it. 10 great link building techniques to improve the link profile of your website or blog.

There are many, many, many other ways to build links. These are the ways that tend to generate links in bunches and bunches.

What have you see with your website? What sorts of link building techniques have worked best for you over the years?

Featured image courtesy of Anonymous9000 via creative commons on Flickr.

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I’ve been on a crusade to find a well planned and executed QR code campaign. My habit is to scan a QR code whenever I see one.  Every time I scan a new QR code, I’m filled with curiosity, trepidation and skepticism – hopeful that this may FINALLY be a well thought out campaign; a campaign that will showcase the possibilities of the technology and highlight a compelling business use-case.

Well. I found it.

I think.

Last night, I took the family to Red Robin (Yummmmm!) to celebrate my 6 year old son’s excellent report card (his choice). After dinner, we paid the bill and received our receipt, along with this:

Being the curious type, I scanned the code immediately and was quickly whisked away to the following series of screens.

I like this campaign for several reasons.

Timely

The code is presented at the most optimal time – the restaurant is seeking feedback on your experience. What better time to capture that feedback than while you are right there in the building.

Incentive

There is an incentive to scan it. A chance to win $1000, hell yes I’ll scan it!

Mobile Optimized

The experience was clearly optimized for mobile. Simple. Short. To the point. Answer just a few short questions. Get in. Get out.

A Better Way

This is an improvement over other alternative methods of collecting the same feedback. The team did not just slap up a QR code on a flyer because it was cool or trendy. I HAVE to think the response rate on this feedback survey is WAY UP over the previous iteration where a long url or phone number is printed on the receipt. I’ve NEVER taken a survey that way. Ever. I also have to think the feedback is more reliable because it is happening right at the point of sale rather than if/when the consumer got home and remembered to bother making a call or navigating to the internet.

Viral

I even like the last screen where they are giving you additional shots at winning money if you share with your friends. That’s another nice touch.

In my humble opinion, this is a well thought through campaign from end to end. What say you?

Featured image courtesy of lydia_shiningbrightly via creative commons on Flickr.

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Authorship is the means by which you claim authorship over an individual blog post or pages you wrote on the internet. Until now, Google could read your name as being associated with a blog post, but there may be hundreds of potential people who have the same name as you. How can Google be sure that YOU were the author of that post?

Enter Google Authorship. With a few simple steps you can connect your Google+ profile with specific blog posts – whether on your blog or not! Before we get into the specific of HOW to set up authorship, it’s important to point out what Authorship is. And what it is NOT.

What is Google Authorship?

As I mentioned, it is the expressed, validated connection between a specific person (represented by their Google+ profile) and a piece of content.

What does Authorship do?

When the authorship connection is made, and when Google decides to show the authorship expression in the search results, your Google+ profile image will appear next to the search result. There will be additional links to dig deeper into your profile information, such as this screen shot from my friend Andy Crestodina’s blog post about Authorship.

The presumed value of authorship markup today is that you will see an increased click through rate on your search result as compared to others that do not have authorship markup present. There’s also the slight chance that a user might dig deeper into your profile or additional content from with the search result. Personally, I don’t think that’s too likely, as searchers are searching for answers to questions. Finding your profile was not top of mind when running that search.

That’s it. As of today that’s the value.

What about Author Rank?

The concept of Author Rank is a future state where the influence of an individual author will be accounted for when determining how a specific piece of content ranks within search results. Executing the authorship markup is an important step to take now, so you will be ready for the day when Author Rank becomes a reality – but it’s important to note that Author Rank is not here yet. To date, I have yet to see any credible report that Author Rank is live today. It’s a gleam in Google’s eye.

The importance of Guest Posts

Despite all the histrionics around new ranking factors in the algorithm, quality inbound links remains one of (and probably THE) most important ranking factor. Writing guest posts for trusted authority sites in your specific vertical is a powerful way to build inbound links to your site. In fact, it’s one of my favorite ways to build links. It’s hard work, but the results are well worth the effort.

How to Setup Authorship for Guest Posts

Did you know that you can implement the Google Authorship markup for all your guest posts and not just the content on sites you control? Here’s the simple step by step process.

Step 1. Setup a Google+ profile if you have not yet done so.

A Google+ profile is a prerequisite for Authorship markup. This is how Google knows you are, in fact you, and not someone else with the same name.

Step 2. Link to your Google+ profile from your Guest Posts using rel=”author” tag.

Most blogs that accept guest posts will do one of two different things to show you as the author. They will either create a blogging account for you inside their CMS, or they will include your bio as guest author at the top or bottom of the individual post. Hopefully, if the blog creates an account for you they are also using a plug in to show your bio associated with the post (my personal favorite is WP About Author). If not, you’ll have to specifically request that they include the bio with the post. Your bio needs to link to your Google+ profile using the following HTML link structure:

<a title=”Author: Erin Feldman on Google+” href=”https://plus.google.com/113009267381530816581?rel=author” rel=”author“>Google+</a>

The bolded sections are the important park – the TWO sections that say rel=author and rel=”author”. Just copy and paste the above text and replace Erin Feldman’s Google+ account number with your own, and swap her name for yours at the beginning of the text. Here’s an image to explain a bit more graphically what’s going on – this is taken from Erin’s recent guest post on this blog.

Step 3. Link to the blog from Contributor section of your Google+ Profile

Now that you have the Google Authorship markup language in your bio on the guest post, we have to complete the connection. This is a simple process. Go to your Google+ profile and edit the contributor section to include the url of the blog where the guest post is being published.

Step 4. Verify the connection with Google Rich Snippets testing tool.

Now that the markup is present on your guest post bio and you’ve completed the cycle by connecting your contributor section to the blog that is publishing your guest post, you should test to ensure everything was done correctly. Navigate your browser to the Google Rich Snippets testing tool and input the url of your guest post (obviously, you’ll have to wait until it’s been published first.) The tool will tell you whether authorship markup is present.

Troubleshooting

If you’re having problems validating with the rich snippet tool, or instead trying to validate by running a search and looking for the image in search results, consider the following:

1. Authorship cannot be connected to a Google+ business page. Businesses are not authors. People are authors.
2. Authorship requires a clear head shot image of a person in your Google+ profile. Google will not display an image that is anything other than a head shot. Again, authorship is people-centric, not business-centric or logo-centric.
3. If checking a search result and not seeing Authorship present, but it’s been validated in step 4 above, don’t fret. Google decides if/when to show. It’s not a permanent thing, but rather contextual.
4. You will only personally ever have one authorship listing per search results page. Don’t run a search for you name and wonder why all listing you have authorship connected for aren’t showing images.

One Final Caveat: Be careful who you write for

It’s important to select your target blogs with care. As with any endeavor on the internet, the blog you select to write for is a partner of sorts and its important to deal with reputable sites and blogs. You should find a blog owner who will go the extra mile to ensure you have authorship markup setup properly for you. They should be vested in your success because your success is equivalent to their success.

I realize this sounds like a bit of a no-brainer, but you do need to be careful.

I’ll point out an example of what can happen, if you’re not careful. About a year and a half ago, I co-founded a group blog that did pretty well on the web. Not long after starting the project, I walked away from the site and relinquished any ownership interest.

This was long before Google authorship was important. In an effort to ensure everything was marked up properly on that site, I logged in and adjusted my bio to include all the proper markup, to update my social media links and to adjust my bio.

When I checked recently, someone from the site had logged in, stripped all markup and social media links and changed my password to ensure I could not add it back in.

Again, it goes without saying, but be careful out there. Select your guest blog targets carefully.

I wish you the very best of luck with setting up your authorship as you gallivant across your corner of the web creating awesome content for others.

What’s been your experience with authorship on your own blog and on guest posts? I continue to hear about a lot of confusion relating to authorship. What about you?

Featured image via creative commons on flickr courtesy of mdanys.

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It isn’t that such journeys aren’t made; it’s simply that they’re made in areas not always admitted into professional settings. Children’s books, for instance, often are the culmination of words and visuals working together. The Runaway Bunny or I’ll Love You Forever or Adventures in the Big Thicket are beautiful examples of words and images complementing each other. Those books are memorable in terms of both the language and the art. If that’s the case, why not embrace some of those methods in professional settings? Why not tell a business’ story through words and visual aids? Why not have a meeting that doesn’t involve the usual pie charts and bar graphs? Why not share data in a way that is more friendly to people and how they prefer to digest information?

Some attempts have been made to cross the distance between words and visuals; infographics, for instance, disseminate information in a format that uses both words and images. Unfortunately, infographics can be so laden with information – sometimes incorrect or skewed – that the onlooker only grasps a few snippets of data. The infographic has failed to tell the full story for one reason or another and has failed to have a long-lasting effect on the viewer. The images don’t capture attention; the words get lost on the page; the context or reasoning behind the data is missing; the personal bias hasn’t been admitted; et cetera, et cetera. Even memes and quotagraphs could be seen as an attempt to bridge the gap between words and visuals. Such things are even more limited than infographics; the aim behind them is to highlight a particular facet of a given story or to provoke a specific response. They, like infographics, don’t and can’t tell the entire story.

If those things don’t tell stories successfully, what does? I’m afraid I don’t have an answer to the question. It’s something I’m still puzzling and may puzzle for years to come. How can words and visuals be brought together to tell the full story? Is it found in providing context to and additional resources for infographics? Is it using memes and quotagraphs to illustrate important points? Perhaps. Perhaps it’s all those things and something more that hasn’t yet been identified.

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I also do a fair amount of speaking and training on SEO. And when I’m speaking we always leave time for questions and answers. Without fail, one of the questions that always seems to come up is “what is the one mistake most people make with their SEO?”

I hear that question so often I thought it would be a good idea to address some of the more frequent mistakes in a blog post where we can have a good dialog about it. So, below are the three SEO mistakes I see most often.

SEO Mistake #1: A site created without a content strategy

More often than not I am hired by a company that already has a web site – a web site that’s “not working.” And typically that web site was thrown together carelessly; without really thinking through how consumers or businesses would search for the products or services the client provides. Instead, the client lists what they do and the web developer just builds a site devoted to those pages.

This mindset puts the cart before the horse. Building the site should only begin after a content and keyword strategy has been fully considered and created.

Fix this problem by:

• Develop personas for your visitors and align the goals of the site against those personas.
• What do you want visitors to the site to do?  How will they do it once they get there? What funnels do you want to drive them down in order to ensure each persona takes the desired action?
• Research the words and phrases that people use to search for what you do online.
• Develop a content strategy that will serve those ends.
• Plan a page of content designed to target each of your major key phrases.

SEO Mistake #2: Awful title tags

I’m sorry, but I don’t know how else to put this one. Awful is the best word to describe it. And I see it every single day. I’m forced to deal with it on nearly every site I work on. And for every client site I see this problem I see about a hundred others while simply surfing the web.

The title tag is one of the most important basics of SEO. Always has been and is likely to continue to be so for the foreseeable future. The title tag should be aligned with the key phrase of each page of your site. In most cases the title tag should be the key phrase or the main topic of that page. They should be key word rich, limited in length and the most important words should be at the front of the tag.

And yet, instead of seeing tags like “Chicago architectural engineer” I see title tags like “Brand XYZ | About Us”. This is unforgivable and represents the one thing that miffs me more often than any other mistake. I see people who hold themselves out as web designers and web developers making this simple mistake time and time again. And it just kills me. Want to know a secret? It kills your search traffic too.

Fix this problem by:

• Creating unique title tags on every page of your web site
• Ensure the title tag is descriptive of the content on the page and aligned with the key phrase you’ve designated for that page.
• Avoid using your brand at the front of title tags. In fact, I prefer to avoid using them in title tags altogether.

SEO Mistake #3: Content that has been written with a poor understanding of SEO

I would classify the first two mistakes highlighted above as people not even considering SEO when developing a web site. This third mistake most often occurs when someone is taking a stab at SEO, but they lack a certain fundamental understanding of how to do it well.

You’ve heard the old internet joke about SEO’s right?

An SEO copywriter walks into a bar, bars, bar stool, tavern, pub, pubs, public house, beer garden, beer, lager, ale, wine, whiskey, shots, shot glass…

Alright, alright. I get it. It’s funny. But it’s only funny because it’s true. Old school copywriters and SEOs did write drivel like that (although truth be told it was more often in meta keyword tags and title tags than in content or copy).

But that’s not SEO best practice today. Best practice today is to write your content for your users, for your readers. Write copy that compels action first. Then, and only then, go back and modify a word here a phrase there to ensure the words of your key phrase appear in the content of the page a few times. It really is that simple. Any attempt to over-complicate the matter beyond that is a mistake and a stretch.

For me this has been SEO best practice since 2006 or 2007, and I have the numbers to prove it. When I managed one of the larger SEO teams in the country from 2006 to 2009, we launched hundreds of web sites per month. One of the first things we did after I took over was changed our copywriting standard to the one articulated above.

Our old standard was to include the key phrase verbatim in the copy 4-6 times per page. That standard resulted in stilted copy and our customers hated it. But we insisted on it for “SEO reasons.” After we made the change to more natural sounding copy, our search engine traffic did not suffer one bit. We still grew traffic 32% year over year, just as we had in previous years.

Fix this problem by:

• Write copy and content for humans. Write copy that sells!
• After you’ve written kick-ass copy, then and only then, go back in and add in your keywords.Ensure they appear 2-4 times in the copy and the key phrase does not need to appear verbatim.

So that it. Those are the things I see most often. There are other challenges that face web sites to be sure, but these are the ones that are not too technical and that can still keep an otherwise solid web site from performing its main function – to attract and convert visitors to real or potential customers.

What about you? What’s your experience been? Have you been through a process where an experienced SEO has looked at your web site and made recommendations to improve performance? what did they find?

Images courtesy of jurvetson, eivindw, & Pink Sherbet Photography licensed via creative commons.

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The best feedback we’ve received thus far is through our feedback survey we sent to students after the class. We asked students “would you recommend 312 Digital courses to a friend?” So far we’ve had a 100% of our respondents say YES! That’s great news, but writing about events like this helps me structure my key takeaways and to embed the lessons I’ve learned. So I wanted to take the time to write a debrief of how things went last week, what we learned and how we plan to make some subtle changes to make our future courses even better.

I know the post is a bit long. If you’re interested in what we’re building here at 312 Digital, I think you’ll find it interesting.

The Attendees

We had 36 confirmed tickets for the event. 29 of those tickets were paid, and 7 received a free ticket (we reserve a small handful of free tickets for speakers and for 312 Digital to give away). Two people originally confirmed were unable to attend. All 29 of our paid customers attended the course, which was a great turnout!

The people who took the course came from a variety of backgrounds. Some were business owners, while others had specific responsibilities as content marketers or community managers. One of the more interesting (to me) groups was a duo of executive recruiters who attended to get a better idea of exactly what their customer businesses needed when hiring in these verticals. Smart.

The Location

The event was held at the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce training room. The room was the perfect size and is very conveniently located in downtown Chicago in the AON building. The room isn’t quite perfect though. Because the screen isn’t back lit by the projector, we kept the front set of lights off, which meant our speakers were in a somewhat darker area of the room. Also, the seating is not tiered and the screen was a little bit difficult to see for people in the back of the room. Both of these areas received comments from students in our follow up survey. We’ll definitely be staying with the Chamber location for some time, so we’ll have to find a way to work around these limitations in the future. I think one way is to maximize the use of the top half of our slides and to try to limit the amount of important information we place on the bottom of slides. I’ll also be encouraging our speakers to do more wandering around the room, if possible.

We also had a few minor issues with the wifi in the venue. I’m not sure if there were just too many people piggy backing off one signal to make that a useful conduit. For future classes, we’ll investigate bringing multiple cellular hotspots into the room as backups.

Also part of the “location” was the food accommodations we had for our students. Unfortunately, we ran out of coffee in the morning and did not address that quickly (but will definitely do so next time). Walked down as a group and grabbed lunch at Sopraffina in the building by using a voucher system. We weren’t very clear when we announced the plan to our students, so next time we’ll be sure to let them know they can bring lunch back into our room or eat downstairs at the restaurant. There was some confusion among our students about that and I assume responsibility for the miscommunication. That said, I thought the food was good and that Sopraffina offers a variety of options for our students. We’ll definitely continue to lunch there for future courses.

The Course

We scheduled the day in four 2-hour increments. Each content block was planned to be approximately 90 minutes of presentation and discussion (Q&A). The presentation was then followed up with a 30 minute small break out session among attendees where they were encouraged to talk with each other about what they learned during the previous 90 minutes and how they planned to apply that information to their business in the coming weeks.

The 30 minute breakout was a very good idea that needs some tweaking to be better. First, 30 minutes was too long. In our future classes, we will be reducing this time to 15 minutes and reducing the total time in class by 1 hour. This class went from 8 AM to 6 PM. Future courses will end at 5. Second, we will be encouraging students to mix and learn from others instead of doing these sessions with people at their table. Third, I will be encouraging our speakers to be available during this time to mix in with the students and provide feedback and further answer questions.

Another key takeaway happened because of a mistake. My plan was to have printed versions of the slides available during the day of the course for every student. But, we got one of the slide sets at literally the 11th hour and were not able to get the files over to the printer in time. I made the option available to students that would send them printed copies after the event. Only 8 of the 34 attendees requested a printed copy of the slides (we made the slides available to students during the course so they could take notes directly within PowerPoint). Here’s the conundrum with printing the slides – to print the slides the way I would have liked to would have cost us over $5,000 just for that class. That’s subverts the business model and is too big a burden to bear. Printing them in black and white and 2 slides to a page is more affordable ($1000) but doesn’t keep the quality feel I want associated with the brand. So this may be a case of “if you can’t afford to do it right, don’t do it at all.” The current plan is to make slides available on demand in print, but to encourage students to bring laptops with for taking notes and viewing slides on their laptops.

The Speakers & The Content

We had four speakers and the feedback we’ve received about their knowledge and performance was uniformly high. Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media spoke about content marketing and keyword research. Carolyn Shelby of 435 Digital, the digital consulting arm of Tribune Corp spoke about SEO. Mana Inoescu, President of Lightspan Digital spoke about Social Media. And Dave Rohrer, a senior SEO consultant spoke about analytics.

The survey we sent to students after the event has been completed by about two thirds of our attendees. Amazingly, despite being sick before the event, Andy received perfect scores from our attendees. Every single survey marked him a 5 out of 5. Mana was a very close 2d, coming in at 4.94. Carolyn and Dave received very solid scores as well hovering just above 4.

Of the feedback we received, the consistent theme was that the SEO and Analytics content was a little bit advanced for the attendees, a little too technical or went over people’s heads. I’ll admit to being a bit confused by this because both the speakers and their content are still receiving marks in or near 4 out of 5. Only 2 or 3 students have marked those sessions as a 2, but we’ve received about 5 or 6 comments along those lines.

I’m treating this as my main takeaway from the day’s events. My goal is to ensure 312 Digital provides awesome content, well delivered and expertly timed for our audience that day. This means I need to be clearer about who can best benefit from that day’s materials and also do a better job of reviewing the content with speakers that they plan to present so we can ensure they are targeted appropriately. It might also be helpful if I reviewed the list of attendees with the speaker as they prepare their slides so they can have better information as they are creating their content.

The Business Model

Overall, I believe this event was a tremendous success. The event was profitable. We proved that 29 people would pay to attend a training class like this. Believe it or not, there were many doubters. The model has promise. Obviously, we would have been even more successful had we “sold out” (each class is planned for a maximum of 50 attendees to keep the classes small). But even at 29 paid attendees, we made a healthy profit.

One of the big successes from this event is the way we used affiliates. We worked with our speakers and other local business owners and to create promotional codes the students could use when signing up for the class. Use of those codes would trigger a $100 savings for the student and a $100 affiliate payment to the referring agent. I love the idea of the affiliate model because one of the many goals of 312 Digital is to build a number of communities and to be a community resource to each of those communities. I want our students to build a community together, and to pull on each other as resources. I want our speakers to form another community – where we can all learn from each other. Utilizing the affiliate model creates another potential community – a community of affiliates – where we can plug in and add value. I see a lot of benefit this using this model and I plan to expand our efforts and outreach in this area.

I would much rather pay an affiliate fee for every ticket we sell, enriching members of our local community for sending business our way than pay money to “market” the business through offline advertising or other means of driving awareness and interest.

Of the 30 attendees, 10 used promo codes to receive discounts and 8 of those promo codes triggered an affiliate payment from 312 Digital to other business for helping send the students our way. My goal is to double these numbers for our next class, if possible. We’re on track with 100% of the students we have lined up for our next class have used an affiliate code.

Conclusion

All in all the event was a huge success. 100% of attendees said they would recommend 312 Digital to a friend. That’s a huge win for a any start-up. So for that, I’m incredibly thankful. I’m also driven to improve on this impressive start by getting even better and will use the lessons learned to tweak future events for the better.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to give a HUGE shout out to Andy, Carolyn, Mana and Dave for helping get 312 Digital off the ground. Also, Lisa Pugliese and Heather Acton who gave of their time to help out the day of the event and make sure everything went smoothly.I’d also like to thank Kurt Scholle for acting as the photographer at our event and to the Attention Era team (Aaron Biebert and Ryan Jon Sheetz) for doing such a professional job shooting video. I’m excited to see the video they are in the process of editing from the day’s events. We’ll share it with you as soon as we have it!

Lastly, there have been a bunch of people who have acted as my personal board of advisers as we launched this business and event. Special thanks to them for their great ideas and feedback – and for putting up with my personal brand of crazy over the last several months. You know who you are.

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The biggest single factor in how high a site ranks is it’s “authority,” which is another way of saying link popularity. This authority is per domain, so it’s almost always best to not build separate websites. Separate websites mean separate domain authority.

If you have two sites and someone links to one of them, the other site doesn’t benefit from the link. You’ve diluted your efforts. It’s better to have one site that ranks on page one than two sites that rank on page two!

He also recommended the following:

• Make one site! Make it awesome.
• For each topic, make one section. Make it awesome.
• For each keyphrase, make one page. Make it awesome.

Also on Tuesday, Andy presented on content strategy and keyword research to a class of students for 312 Digital and repeated the same information for everyone in the class.

Best Practice

I agree that this is the way to go – about 90-95% of the time. In most cases, having everything awesome and concentrated on one domain is the way to go. But there is a different choice that can be made with dramatically positive results. I love this response because Andy couched his terminology just enough.

I’d venture a guess that nearly everyone that read that post walked away with this phrase top of mind: “Make one site!” Meanwhile, I focused on this phrase: “[I]t’s almost always best to not build multiple web sites” (emphasis mine). Almost always, means there are times when it would be best practice to have multiple sites. Here’s just one example I can pull from real life to illustrate when multiple sites was far and away the best course of action.

An exception for every rule

In July 2009 I took over as General Manager for a small brand that did online bar exam preparation for lawyers called MicroMash. We shuttered part of that business and re-branded as Multistate Edge in 2011. But shortly after I assumed control, we rebuilt the MicroMash site and started a blog on a separate domain BarExamBrief.com (which the business allowed to expire recently.)

We decided to build two separate web sites for two reasons. First, we wanted to establish the blog as an INDEPENDENT voice of authority on the subject of bar exam preparation and bar exam results. We explicitly set out to be a news oriented site, one that contained announcements regarding every state in the nation and also included announcements about our competitors and changes they would make to their programs. Second, I knew that because the competition was not particularly strong in that space, we had a chance to place TWO web sites on the first page of Google instead of one. A year later, as I reflected back on that decision, I was certain I had made the right call.

We had two top phrases we cared about:

• [state] bar exam
• [state] bar exam information

With 50 states plus the District of Columbia all offering bar exams to lawyers and law students, we had 102 search phrases that we measured. Within a year, we achieved between two and four top 10 listings for every one of our top phrases. Searches like “Illinois Bar Exam” and “New York Bar Exam Information.” In many cases we had three due to multiple pages from one of the sites hitting the top 10.

The story above is just one example where going with a single site may have been a missed opportunity. Frankly, we’ll never know. But I stand by my decision to go with two. I think it was the right decision then, and I’d do it again in a minute if they hired me on as a consultant.

For me, the deciding factor in the above case study was the level of competition for those search phrases. Experience and intuition told me that I could grab those killer results because our competition did not optimize for those phrases. They still aren’t today. The Multistate Edge web site I built in 2011 was above the fold for nearly every search I ran this week – usually only being outranked by the state agency that administers the bar exams.

My recommendation? Discuss your multiple web site strategies, problems and ideas with an experienced consultant – someone who can offer sound advice based on years of experience. Doing otherwise may be a bad decision – regardless of whether you decide to build one site or two.

HUGE CAVEAT: The case study above does not represent the classic “duplicate content” scenario that actually prompted Gini’s question of Andy. In that scenario, she was asking if there are ways to re-purpose content across multiple websites. Re-using the exact same content across multiple web sites is almost NEVER a good idea. In our example above, we created original content for both sites. I’ll likely be writing another post soon about duplicate content.

What’s your experience been with multiple web sites covering the same subject matter? I’d love to hear what you’ve done or tried.

Featured image courtesy of orangeacid via creative commons on Flickr.

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BuiltWith has also broken down the Top 100,000 sites that use Google Analytics into 40 categories with most falling into Business, Shopping, and Technology.

Why Use Google Analytics Alternatives?

There are many reasons to use Google Analytics like the price, the ease of use, the ability to track your PPC spend, the filters, etc. So why use an alternative to Google Analytics? Well why not? Why not use Google Analytics and another service? There is no “right solution” for you or anyone but there is a “what works best for you” solution out there (and hopefully it is in your price range). There may be legal issues that prevent you from using Google Analytics or similar services. You may also want a solution that utilizes log files and doesn’t add load time to your site. You may not trust the data you are getting and want another solution to verify current data trends. Perhaps you want a solution with more customer support or a feature that Google Analytics doesn’t offer. Whatever the reason you are looking, the list below should get you off to a great start for finding a web analytics solution.

UPDATE: As was pointed out in the comments I may have left out some explanation around the pricing – Sorry! The pricing in the table below was taken off the services’ site when possible and is based on Per Month pricing (in most cases). The solutions in the Premium category were given a “large” placeholder which is just that, a placeholder. Your cost for Premium solutions will be different for everyone and will require you to contact the solution.

So what analytics solution do you use and what do you like about it? Share below and help others find their perfect web analytics match too!/td

Featured image courtesy of Elvert Barnes via creative commons on Flickr.

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