Internet Marketing Services, Wilmington NC

Posts Tagged ‘Tech Talk’

Tech Talk: What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Tech Talk - Talk, Wimington NCThere’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 SEO mean?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the act of getting websites to show up in the search results for specific keywords on search engines like Google, Yahoo!, or Bing.

For example, it’s through proper SEO that we get Talk’s website to show up when people Google “public relations wilmington nc“.

Why is SEO beneficial?

Every month 10’s of billions of searches are being done on Google alone, not to mention other search engines. That means that billions of people are searching online for specific information, products, or services every month. If you’re targeting the proper keywords, that means that thousands of people could be finding your product or service every month, and that leads to more profits for you, or at the very least, more exposure for your brand. If you’re not targeting any keywords, however, that could mean your site is being lost in the great abyss of the web.

How does SEO work?

There’s a lot that goes into just how SEO works, but there’s fundamentally 3 parts to SEO.

1. Each website has many web pages.
2. Each of these web pages should have a few keywords being used on them.
3. Each of these web pages should have links, that carry “juice”, with the keyword for the web page its linking to being present in the link itself.
4. Link juice is the value being passed from one domain to another as determined by the search engines.

What those 4 steps describe are the following action: I am currently explaining SEO as a component of Internet marketing, in wilmington nc. With that past link, I was pointing to a web page with a link, targeting a specific term, passing “link juice” from this domain (www.talkincblog.com) to another domain (www.talkinc.com).

There is a lot more that goes into SEO than what I described above, for example, determining the competitive value of a keyword, figuring out which web pages (and domains) will pass the most link juice (since not all links are created equal), how to create a proper information architecture to improve link juice flow on a site, and more. But the above describes the fundamental concept behind SEO and how it works.

How can I use this for my business?

If you’re business is located in Wilmington and that’s where you predominantly do business, my first suggestion to you would be to focus on each page of your website (number 1 from above) to improve your on page optimization. Specifically, I would add “Wilmington, NC” to the end of whatever is in the <title> tags of your website (the title tag controls what each web page is called).

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What is a Short URL like TinyURL or Bit.ly? - Tech Talk

Friday, July 31st, 2009

Tech Talk - Talk, Wimington NCThere’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 is a URL?

Before I explain what a short url is, let me briefly explain what a URL is. We all use URLs every day, in most cases without even thinking about it.A URL, put simply, is the location of a web page on the internet.

For example, www.talkinc.com is a URL that takes you to our homepage.

What is a short url?

A short url, as you might suspect, is actually a shorter URL that can be used to direct people to the normal, longer url. For example, http://bit.ly/nfrsq is a short url for http://www.talkinc.com. They both go to the same place, the only difference is that the short url redirects people to our “long” url.

Why did short URLs come about?

Short URLs really began around 2002 in a variety of forms but didn’t really begin to become popular until internet services based on text messaging such as Twitter were created.

The reason short urls became so popular with these text oriented services is because, as you may know, text messages can only be 160 characters in length. This made the need for conserving characters all the more important. The ability to take a url from 50 characters down to 20 was too attractive to pass up.

Why use URL shorteners?

Often times during the process of redirecting someone from the short url to the long url, the short URL service commits an action, such as tracking the number of people who clicked on the link, or serving up a specialized page. These actions means short url services provide additional benefits for marketing, branding and so forth.

For example: We use bit.ly because it has great statistics on impressions and conversions which help our marketing efforts. Digg has created their own URL shortener which aids them with much the same, along with additional exposure of their brand.

Which URL shortener should I use?

If you have a need to use a URL shortener, such as sharing content across social networks, twitter, or text, then I would suggest using bit.ly. There are other shorteners, and Danny Sullivan has written a great comparison of the different shortening services for those interested in part of the technical depth. If you’re not, just use bit.ly!

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Tech Talk: What is a hashtag?

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

Tech Talk - Talk, Wimington NCThere’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 is a hashtag?

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional information and context to messages on Twitter. This is accomplished by using a hash sign ‘#’ and having a “tag” immediately after it.

Part of understanding hashtags means understanding tags. People use tags to easily clasify the topics or categories content is related to. The classification of content through the use of tags benefits the individual as they’ll know what to look for when wanting to find the information again, and benefits other internet users who may be looking for similar content by a similar tag. This process also frequently mentioned with taxonomy.

For example: At the bottom of this blog post, you will notice there are a few tags that I have used to classify topics this blog posts relates to.

How are hashtags used?

Hashtags came about with the advent of Twitter. Without users having any formal way of organizing tweets into categories, but wanting to add additional information, the twitter community began adopting the notion of a #hashtag. As such, hashtags have are used in a variety of ways on Twitter.

For those who love LOST, on Wednesday nights, you could frequently follow the hashtag #lost for what people thought about the episode, what they were guessing the next plot twist was, or placing bets on when Sawyer would punch someone in the face.

Conversely, and much more useful, hashtags have been used to follow the elections in Iran, to keep people posted about fires in San Diego, and or to share thoughts on what the latest going on is in the news.

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Tech Talk: What are keywords?

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

Tech Talk - Talk, Wimington NC

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 are “keywords” exactly?

Keywords are the words people use to search for information online. For example, if you’re looking for information on how to blog, you might google “How to blog” or “What is a blog”. These are keywords, or what are sometimes referred to as key phrases (where the keywords make up a keyphrase).

Why are keywords and key phrases important?

The proper keywords and key phrases can drive significant traffic to your website through a method called search engine optimization. Think of the “traffic” that comes to your website in the same way you might think of the traffic that you get stuck in heading to the mall, or the grocery store - lots of people are taking a specific road to go to a destination (it’s why you’re stuck in traffic, after all). The same concept applies to the internet with search engine optimization and keywords.

Finding the right key phrase(s) is like finding the right road to have your business located on. It’s making sure when people drive by, or when people search, you’re currently at the location they’re looking. This is why the old adage of “Location, location, location” isn’t dead by any means. There’s just a different method for determining what the best location online is, a method where keywords are the road, and search engine optimization is preparing your business for display.

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Tech Talk: What is Subscribe and RSS?

Friday, June 12th, 2009

Tech Talk - Talk, Wimington NC

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!

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