Nathan Snell « Talk, Inc - Find Your Voice

Internet Marketing Services, Wilmington NC

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Tech Talk: What is Subscribe and RSS?

Friday, June 12th, 2009

There’s a lot of terms flying around in this new age of “social technology”, where companies like Facebook, Blogger, and Twitter are becoming household names. But what do any of these terms really mean and why should you care? That’s what I’ll be explaining in my weekly Tech Talk.

What does “Subscribe” or “RSS” mean exactly?

Our first weekly term is “Subscribe” which is often synonymous with “RSS”. Let’s talk about “Subscribe” first since it’s a word we’re already familiar with (or it’s at least in the English dictionary).

You may have noticed websites that have “Subscribe” on it, or more specifically “Subscribe to this blog” or “Subscribe to this news feed”. What this actually means is that by clicking on that subscribe link or button, you can have any new updates from that website or blog automatically sent to your e-mail (or online subscription reader) as soon as that site is updated with a new post. RSS and Subscribe are the exact same thing, except that RSS is really the technology behind how subscribing works.

RSS, sometimes referred to as a “feed”, stands for Real Simple Syndication. It’s called RSS because of exactly what the acronym means – it’s a very simple way of syndicating images, text and sometimes audio and video. The reason the term “RSS” is still used, even though it’s used in the same fashion as “Subscribe”, is because us nerds like to have our super secret cool language that only we understand (true story) .

Why “Subscribe” and RSS is important.

In the past, the way news or information online has been read was through a process of going to a website, reading the headline, and clicking on the respective article. That method works fine if you’re not visiting more than 2 news sites a day. For those who might visit on a low range of 5 - 10, and a high range of 50 - 100 to keep up with the latest trends in their industry, subscribing is just a more efficient way of getting your information.

Being able to “Subscribe” to someone’s “RSS” removes all the trouble, allowing you to either receive new information via e-mail, or read it in your RSS Reader. Subscribing to an RSS feed allows you to pull the information you want, when you want it, and in a convenient manner. In other words, rss allows the information to be fed to you, instead of having to hunt it down.

Subscribe to our blog via e-mail or RSS feed!

Tags: feed reader, howto rss, howto subscribe to blogs, rss, rss reader, subscribe, Talk, Tech Talk, what is rss, wilmington
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10 Questions To Ask An SEO Consultant You’re Looking To Hire

Friday, May 29th, 2009

If you don’t know the questions to ask when hiring a SEO consultant to help build traffic to your website, you’re not alone. SEO is complicated, so it can be challenging to evaluate candidates’ expertise without at a baseline understanding yourself.

To provide a basic overview of SEO, we hosted a webinar entitled SEO or S.O.S?: Buyer Beware – Shop Smart for SEO. You can download the recorded presentation and slides here. As a follow up, we created 10 Questions to Ask a SEO Consultant to test the knowledge of a consultant or employee before making any hiring decisions. We have also provided a printer friendly version of the questions for download.

We encourage you to utilize these two resources to make fully informed decisions about SEO. Good luck!

1. What type of content is most easily crawled by search engines?

XHTML.

2. What is the best way to improve the frequency in which search engines crawl your site?

Update your content frequently.

3. True or False? Out of all the major search engines, Google is considered to have the best tools for researching the link information of a competing website?

False. Yahoo!’s Site Explorer and search engine is considered the best source for acquiring competitive link information.

4. True or False? The maximum number of characters that Google takes into consideration when looking at the Title tag of your page is 70.

True. When using keywords on your page, you want to make sure all relevant keywords and information are in the first 70 characters, as that’s all Google pays attention to.

5. Why is it important for a website to have a flat site architecture?

You reduce the number of links a search engine must follow to get to content. In addition, the flatter a website, the easier it is to spread a larger portion of the link juice being passed to various pages on the site, thus boosting the ranking power of each page on the site (unless page sculpting is being done, preventing juice from flowing to certain pages).

6. What should be considered when deciding on the URL path for a web page?

The web page the URL is directed toward is an important factor in being chosen as a relevant search result. The page determines the keywords to be placed into the URL path.

For example: www.talkinc.com/internet-marketing/seo.html
The above would be a good path, leading to a page on our site related to SEO and internet marketing.

7. True or False? The number of times a keyword is used on a page is an important factor in how search engines determine what your page is about.

False. Keyword density having an effect on search results is a myth. Properly using HTML tags in a document and the accompanying text is how a search engine determines what your page is about.

8. Why is the long-tail theory important when considering keyword choice?

The long-tail theory states, in reference to keyword choice, that instead of going for a single highly competitive keyword, you will see better immediate results and long term results by creating several pages that rank well for less competitive terms than one page that is trying to rank for a highly competitive term (which also has much higher fluctuation).

9. True or False? Meta descriptions are an important factor in search engine optimization.

True. While not necessarily playing a role in getting your site to rank well, the meta description does play an important role in driving traffic to your page. The meta description is frequently used as the description for your page on the search engines result page, and a good description entices users to click on your page listing. This is why SEO is about driving traffic to a website, not just improving pagerank.

10. True or False? Using keywords in the H2, H3, and H(x) tags aren’t important as long as you use your keywords in the H1 tag.

False. The H(x) tags are an important part of optimizing a page, the same way the STRONG/emphasis tags are an important part of optimizing a page. There have also been some instances where H2, H3, and H(x) tags have taken greater precedence over H1.

In addition to the questions above, you will also want to ask the following questions to ensure they are a good fit for your needs.

•    What is his/her keyword research/choice process?
•    What does he/she considers “good” links?
•    What is his/her link building process?

Use the following grading scale to determine if he/she is a true SEO expert.

Each question is worth 10 points.

100 points – Knows what they’re talking about.
80 points – Knows what they’re talking about, but if he/she missed any questions after #5, they may not be up to speed on the more advanced methods and processes.
70 points – Knows some components of SEO but may not know enough to accomplish what you want for your website.
60 points and below – Does not know enough about SEO to ensure a successful campaign.

Tags: 10 seo questions, hire seo, Internet Marketing, SEO, seo consultant, seo questions, Talk, talk blog, talkinc, wilmington nc
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SEO or SOS - SEO Basics Video by Talk in Wilmington NC

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

Thanks again to everyone who attended our SEO Basics Webinar! You can view the slides for this webinar on SEO Basics, and we also have a list of our other videos that are available to watch for free. If you have any questions, feel free to e-mail us or leave a comment!

Tags: SEO, seo webinar, video, watch talk, Webinar, webinar video
Posted in Professional Development, Webinars | Comments

11 Steps To Make You a Pro Twitter-er

Monday, April 27th, 2009

Twitter was built on the concept of simplicity, so that leaves a lot of flexibility and variation in just how you can use Twitter to promote your company, yourself, or just your personal life. We receive a lot of questions on using Twitter, so I thought I would outline the steps we take with Twitter for clients here at Talk, and have taken ourselves in many cases (though you may see some variations as we’re always experimenting with new methods to get the best results).

Step 1. Before you start tweeting, let’s focus on setting up your twitter profile. This means taking the time not only to upload an avatar, but to also create stronger branding on your Twitter profile page via creating an Extended Profile. You should also define your purpose for twittering. What are your objectives?

Step 2. The Twitter Landing Page (TLP) is a unique page you create on your website that greets those users who come specifically from Twitter. Once you’ve created your TLP, you can begin using it by pointing your Homepage URL on your twitter profile to your TLP.

How to build followers on Twitter

I think it’s very important to manage your Tweets (or have someone manage them), especially as you work on building followers. You want to make sure you’ve got a good reply to tweet ratio, meaning if someone were to look at your last 10 tweets that they’re going to see an @reply to someone in there. Think of your Last 10 (L10) the same as it is in sports. It’s your recent activity or track record. Your L10 shows you’re a human, and there to interact, not just add to all the noise that’s already on there.

Step 3. Seeding your new Twitter account is important. I use Twellow as it’s a well organized Twitter Directory. It works great in conjunction with Mr. Tweet if you Twellow users first, then run Mr. Tweet to help you find more followers based on your Twellow results. Twellow is one of my first steps in seeding a new twitter account. Seeding your account helps with social proofing.

Step 4. Finding more relevant followers. Use Mr. Tweet. This is one of my favorite tools, Mr. Tweet gives you suggestions on who you should be following based on your current followers and twitter habits. It also gives you a means of finding followers without past activity which helps for seeding new twitter accounts you can utilize .

Step 5. Relevant auto-following with Twollow. Twollow allows you to auto follow those that tweet a particular keyword you enter (For example: Your company name). This is another resource for building up followers on Twitter. This can be a great tool if you spend some time researching those keywords that most apply to your business or topic on Twitter. The more specific you can be with your keywords, the higher potential you have to make a connection with someone who is interested in what you have to say (which is really what you want).

Experimental Step 6. Pruning your twitter followers. Not all your followers are going to remain active, and Twitoria helps to define those that haven’t been. You can discover what followers haven’t tweeted within the time frame you specify. I say this is experimental because using Twitoria requires a fair deal of account micro-management. As it stands, and I could be wrong, the only reason I see using Twitoria is if there is a drop in the follower or follow-back percentage for people who are above a certain follower threshold (eg: more than 1,000 followers). If there isn’t (and if anyone has done some studies, please let me know!) then there’s not much point in pruning your followers besides personal reasons.

Let’s get tweeting.

Step 7. Scheduling tweets and more. A tool any good Twitterer should be using is TweetLater as it lets you send out messages while you’re away. TweetLater also has other functionality, such as Auto-DM (though I would encourage you to proceed in that area with great caution- we traditionally don’t set this up). TweetLater works well for planning promotional campaigns, or organizing messages across different social media properties.

Step 8. Short urls that count. There are a lot of URL shorteners, but the one that is by far the best is Bit.ly. It provides the proper redirects (301) for SEO, it provides tracking, it’s low on domain character usage (giving me more space to send messages), it doesn’t have a framebar, and it has venture capital funding so it’s unlikely it’s going anywhere. There’s a great article by Danny Sullivan that provides a detailed analysis of all the different URL shorteners and which one is best (Bit.ly).

Step 9. Twittering outside of your browser. The Twitter website is a good way to Twitter, but we like to do things in great ways at Talk, plus we’re not always in our browser, so we use Tweet Deck both to organize and send out our Tweets. Tweet Deck, in my opinion, is the best client for twitter, allowing you to group followers, search, and a lot more. They also recently added in support for Facebook Updates (very cool!).

Step 10. Tracking tweet conversations that matter to you. This is an important part of being part of the conversation and keeping up on trends, so much so that Yahoo! recently released a neat application that does tracking called Sideline. Sideline is like TweetDeck in that it runs off of Adobe’s AIR platform, so you aren’t constricted to your browser. It being new, we’re still integrating it into our process.

Step 11. Keeping on the up and up of Twitter trends with Twist. Twist is a great trend analysis tool that can be used in conjunction with sideline, or to help with the keyword research mentioned before that helps with using Twollow. An example on using it would be observing that “LOST” has a spike every Wednesday night (when the show airs). If you create a follow strategy to start a relationship with some of those individuals, you can create an opportunity to connect, and you also know the best time to market to them. Eg: Maybe you should time your Tweets for after LOST (similar to airing new TV shows after the prime time)?

If you have any tools you think should be a part of the list, let us know!

*For discloser, this is an adapted version of a similar post on my personal blog.

Tags: Internet Marketing Wilmington NC, Marketing, Social media, social media marketing, tools, twitter, twitter tools
Posted in Internet Marketing | Comments

How to control your privacy on Facebook using Lists

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

Let’s face it. On Facebook, not all people are created equal, so we might want to have some discretion for just who we want to be seeing what information about us (especially true for students seeking jobs). With this in mind, and after doing some research on just what kind of Facebook Privacy tricks there are, I put together a way of using Facebook Lists in conjunction with Privacy Controls that let’s you control just who sees what.

How to create a Facebook list
First, let me explain what you’re really doing: You’re creating a list of friends who are blocked from seeing parts of your profile. The control of what you can prevent people from seeing is fairly in depth, allowing you to be as specific as restricting friends to only being able to view a certain photo album, or a little more broad in preventing them from seeing all your status updates.

Step 1. Creating a new privacy list
When you first log in to Facebook, you’ll land on your stream page. If you look to at the left-hand column, you’ll see categories in your news feed like “News Feed”, “Photos”, and “Events”. Now, if you look at the bottom of that section in the image above, you’ll notice a link that says “+create”. Click that, and we’ll begin creating our first list!

The window that pops up will prompt you for the name of your new List. Let’s call our list “Business List”. Just type that into the edit box that’s available, and hit enter when you’re done.

Step 2. Add people to your new privacy list
As you can see from our new Business List list, Facebook gives you a nifty little area to add or remove people from your list. To start adding people to it by simply typing in their name. Once you’ve typed in their name, either click on the checkbox to check it, or hit enter and it will automatically add them to the list. When you’re done, Just click the “Save” button.

Step 3. Controlling the privacy of your new list
So far we have only created a new Facebook list and added the people we want to be on that list. Now is when we can actually control what the people on that list see. To do this click “Settings” then “Privacy Settings”

Here we can see a list of all the different areas we can block people from seeing. In this example, we’re just wanting to control what our new “Business List” sees on our profile, so click “Profile”.

Here I want to make it so anyone who is on my “Business Friends” list cannot see anything from my photo album. To do this, click on the drop down box next to “Photos Tagged of You” and then on “customize…”.

The image above should look something like the new window that will pop up for you. Look down at the bottom where it says “Except These People”. That is where you want to type the name of your privacy list, in our case “Business List”. You’ll notice it auto-completing for you. In addition to lists, you can add friends in this area, too.

Once you’ve done that, click save, then save changes on the “Privacy > Profile” page you are on, and you’re done!

Editing a previously created privacy list
Of course, one of those wonderful people in your “Business Friends” list might make it to your “out-side-of-work friends” category. In this case, you’ll want to remove them from your “Business List” privacy list. Fortunately, this is very easy!

Go to your Facebook Stream again, and click the “+create” link again. It will pop up that box again. When it does, instead of typing anything, click on your existing privacy list name instead of typing in the name for a new one, and then click edit.

Have any other Facebook tips? Let us know!

Tags: Facebook, facebook friend list, facebook list, privacy, social media privacy, social network privacy
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