The Power of Facebook

My mother-in-law recently got a new computer from Dell. Some time after it arrived, she needed to register her Microsoft Office software by entering the product key found on the CD case. That's when she discovered that Dell had not sent her the Microsoft Office CD.

Many frustrating calls with Dell followed. It had been longer than 21 days since the computer had been delivered so she was apparently out of luck. Even though it was their mistake, they refused to send out the CD.

That's when I turned to Facebook. I decided that I was going to post a complaint to the Dell Facebook page every day until Dell contacted me to rectify the situation. It only took 24 hours. The admin for the Dell Facebook page sent me a message and promised to help.

A great example of how Facebook is becoming a key player in customer service.

Is Email Antiquated?

Email becoming out-dated; who'd have thought it? I see it happening though. My friends and colleagues are increasingly opting to contact me through Facebook and LinkedIn rather than use email.

Indeed, social communities make socializing less awkward. You don't have to formally ask for someone's email address or phone number. It seems to be more acceptable to simply "add someone as a friend" or ask them to "join your network". And, then, the lines of communication are open.

I'm finding that email acts more as a reminder to go and check my social networks, as I receive email notifications when someone contacts me via one of my networks.

Email, formal? That's what people are saying. It makes writing a letter seem archaic. Social networking takes instant messaging to the next level.

For more on this topic, check out Erik Qualman's post: "Will Social Networks Become the Next Inbox?"

SEO: Top 4 Reasons Why Your Website Won't Rank

It's the question that SEOs love to answer: "why doesn't my website rank?" Ususally, the answer comes down to any number of the following four things.

Technical Issues
When you engage with an SEO company, they will perform an audit of your website to identify any technical issues that prevent search engine spiders from crawling your site and indexing your content. Some of the main offenders are flash, javascript menus, iframes, unfriendly URL structures, bad HTML, etc.

Lack of Content
More often than not, your ranking issues are less to do with technical problems than they are content. Content is the most important factor in search engine ranking. If you don't have good quality content to support your target keyword phrases, you can't expect to rank for them.

Keywords
It's important to be realistic when selecting keyword phrases. Don't expect to rank for highly competitive phrases. Instead, choose popular (but not as competitive) phrases that are appropriate for your website's content and target audience. Oftentimes, companies will choose very competitive phrases and will then wonder why they are not number 1 in Google. Performing a thorough keyword analysis prior to optimization is imperative in order to select the keyword phrases that make the most sense.

Links
As important as content, are links. In the past, optimizing your website was enough to achieve high rankings. Nowadays, without "link popularity", you're not going anywhere. The link popularity of a website is determined by the quantity and quality of inbound links. Therefore, every SEO program should have link building as an ongoing task.

Remember, even if your website has been optimized with the right keyword phrases, it takes time to achieve high search engine ranking. And, optimization alone does not guarantee results. SEO is an ongoing process that depends on both content optimization and link building. It is crucial to begin a link building program as soon as your website has been optimized.

SEO Tips from Google

Google held its third online Webmaster Chat on October 22, 2008. Google representatitives including Matt Cutts answered an array of questions relating to webmaster and SEO best practices.

Here are some useful nuggets:

- Dynamic URLs are no longer a problem. There is no need to re-write dynamic URLs as static URLs. The Google spiders can access most dynamic content.

- It's a common misperception that links from .gov, .edu and .info websites pass more Page Rank to your site.

- When beginning a linking program, it's a bad move to begin with article submission directories.

- Google changes its algorithm a lot. Last year, there were over 450 changes made.

- Use hypens rather than underscores in your page URLs.

- Google does not approve of ranking software such as Web CEO. Using it violates their Terms of Service and can result in Google blocking your IP address.

Finally, the best advice that Matt Cutts had for SEOs: read Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

Integrated Marketing: Customers Not Channels

There's a big difference between integrated campaigns and integrated marketing, and this difference is where many companies fall down. They believe they're integrated because they developed a multi-channel campaign. But did that campaign speak directly to their customers' wants and needs?

Integrated marketing is about taking a strategic approach to your marketing program as a whole and it starts with your customers. They're the ones that define what your marketing objectives should be. Too many companies make the mistake of deploying tactics that they think are right, without really understanding how their customers will respond and how success will be measured.

By putting the consumer at the center of your marketing strategy, you can create a customized program that leverages tactics most appropriate for your target audience's needs. It is this consumer-driven strategy that should dictate the messaging and voice use to communicate consistently across multiple channels.

Integrated and interactive marketing are closely linked; truly integrated marketing requires participation and conversation. That's because your entire marketing strategy is based on responding directly to consumer needs. To do this effectively, you always need an ear listening to the consumer and a quick response to your consumer's behavior.

Read more on integrated marketing in the "Five Fundamentals of Integrated Marketing" over at Clickz.

When to Optimize Your Website?

It is a common misunderstanding that you first build your website and then engage the SEO expert to optimize it. This may arise from people thinking that SEO is a form of magic that can be applied to any website to achieve any result desired. Alas, SEO is not magic, and the way that a website is built is going to affect its ability to be search engine optimized.

Case in point, dynamic ecommerce websites have long been a challenge for SEOs. Dynamic content is essentially invisible to search engines and if a search engine can’t read the content on your website, you are not going to rank highly for your target keyword phrases. Static, crawlable content is the most important factor in gaining high search engine rankings. If you’re building an ecommerce website though and you have hundreds and thousands of products in your database, it is not practical to create thousands of static html web pages. This is the point where it is important for your SEO expert to be involved. They can advise you on how to build a dynamic website that is search engine friendly. For more information on optimizing dynamic websites, see my earlier post: How to Optimize Dynamic Websites.

There are, of course, many factors to consider when designing a website that could raise red flags for search engines. Here's a short list of common mistakes that web designers make when an SEO is not involved from the start:

Flash
Search engines cannot read content within a flash file so this content is essentially invisible.

Frames
Designing with frames can be as bad as using Flash. None of the content within your frames is indexable by the search engines; the spiders just see an error message.

Javascript-based menus
Search engines cannot see or follow links within javascript menus and therefore cannot access the content.

Proliferation of imagery
If you're using image-based text, search engines won't read it. It's important to add alt text to all images (so that search engines can understand what the image is) and generally limit the use of image files throughout your site.

URL structure
The naming convention for each page should be search engine friendly. This means using keyword phrases (separated by a "-") in your page URLs (eg. search-engine-optimization).

So, in short, if you’re building a website and you know that you are looking for search engine optimization services, engage your SEO expert now. They can advise you as you create your website, so you design one that meets both your needs and those of the search engines.

How to Optimize Dynamic Websites

When an SEO sees a dynamic website, their heart drops. From a design standpoint, dynamic URLs are often the most practical way to create an ecommerce website that contains thousands of database-managed product pages. The problem with dynamic URLs is that search engines have trouble following them, which means that the content that lives at those URLs is not indexed.

You will often here dynamic content and dynamic URL used interchangeably, but don’t go mistaking them for the same thing, because they’re not. A dynamic URL is the location at which dynamic content is stored, not the dynamic content itself.

Here are some ways to optimize a dynamic website so that the search engines are able to crawl it more easily.

Use static URLs for dynamic content
Search engines follow static URLs. If you locate your dynamic content at a static URL, search engines are more likely to find it and index it. Dynamic URLs usually contain question marks and id numbers, which don’t tell search engines anything. Replace these with simple URLs that contain your product name or category. There are several URL “re-writing” tools available that work differently depending on your server.

Link to dynamic URLs from static pages
If you can’t convert your dynamic URLs into static URLs, there are other things you can do, such as linking to dynamic URLs from static pages. If you create a site map, give it a static URL and then link to dynamic URLs from that site map, the search engines will probably crawl your dynamic content. The more incoming links you have to your dynamic content (especially from other websites), the more likely the search engines will be to index it.

Pay for search engine inclusion
This does not mean high ranking, but it at least allows you to have your dynamic content indexed. It is then important to make sure that dynamic content is properly keyword optimized to increase your rankings.