We are really thankful for all of the feedback that we have received through our blog comments in 2009. We would like to share some of those comments (we refer to them as love letters) with you.
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Tomorrow, December 2, ProspectMX is partnering with the League of Lancaster Bicyclists (LLB) to gather toy donations for a local non-profit group. This blog post was written by Jonathan Bentz – jonathanbentz.gooruze.com.
The League of Lancaster Bicyclists will be hosting a ride in Quarryville, PA to raise awareness for the local toy drive. The world headquarters of ProspectMX will serve as a toy drop-off destination. Good’s Store in Quarryville will also serve as a drop off location.
ProspectMX and the LLB need your help. The local non-profit is around 100 toys short from their toy goal for area children in need. If the organization doesn’t acquire its number of toys, THEN THE KIDS DON’T GET TOYS FOR CHRISTMAS!
As an added bonus to you for helping ProspectMX make dreams come true this holiday season, stop by our offices and you can receive a FREE website consultation with one of our knowledgeable internet marketing consultants. Its the least we can do to show you how much we appreciate your generosity this holiday season.
For more information on the bike ride and toy collection, happening this Wednesday from 9am – 6pm, please give me a call at 717.406.1884. You can also hit me (@jonathanbentz) or Dave Conklin (@prospectmx) on Twitter and we’ll get you all the details.
Thanks in advance for your help this holiday season – we really appreciate it!
Well, it’s that time of year again, and yes, this is the obligatory “Happy Thanksgiving” post. But in all seriousness, as we enter the holiday season, it’s important to reflect on the past year and all the things you have to be thankful for. Quite frankly, it’s something you should do on a regular basis, but let’s face it, most of us only worry about it from November to January.
I’d love it if the team and our readers could take some time and just give a shout out about what they’re thankful about. At the risk of sounding like a kiss ass, I am certainly thankful to be in the position I am here at ProspectMX. I work with some great people, I’m constantly learning new things… and I’ve got seniority I can lord over other people… kidding, kidding (sort of).
For real though, the internet marketing field is not only an exciting one, but incredible in it’s flexibility and need for creative thinking. Where else can you go out for a few drinks with your coworkers and wind up with tons ideas? Some are brilliant, some are hilarious, some are ridiculous, but all useful. Plus, once executed, those ideas can result in thousands of dollars in revenues from traffic, links, media notice, etc.
It’s a remarkable industry, and it’s nice to be a part of something that continues to grow and evolve.
I’m a sucker for fun or little known facts that have no practical use… so, here are some I found to add to my repertoire (and which are guaranteed to make you feel fat!):
Dang… I feel really, really bad for turkeys all of a sudden. But luckily not quite bad enough to go vegetarian this year. I can’t vouch for the validity of some of those facts… credit goes to the 1-800 Flowers website.
Have a blessed Thanksgiving everyone!
I’ve been reading a lot of bloggers lately hyping up this new link building service called Tynt. According to a quick Google Blog Search, 1,083 mentions of Tynt have come up over the last 7 days. It is also getting enough buzz across the innerwebs that a client was savvy enough to email me about it this morning.
Allegedly, Tynt is a cool service for bloggers and other creators of written web content. Tynt provides a piece of Javascript that creates a backlink to your blog post or site when your content is copied and pasted by a third party into a content editor.
Below is an example of Tynt at work. Thanks to Patrick Altoft of Branded3 for noticing that the Daily Mail in the UK uses it, and blogging about it on BlogStorm. He wrote a great post that helped alert me to Tynt. His post was also so good that I impulsively scrolled my mouse over his text, hit “CTRL + C” on my keyboard, and hit “CTRL + V” on this blog post.
Tynt Insight monitors copy and paste behavior on billions of page loads per month across hundreds of thousands of web sites . Our data shows that up to 6% of page loads results in a user copying content! On a site that has 20 million page views per month – cont
Source: Add links when people cut and paste your content with Tynt
Wait a second… where’s the link?!?!
When Tynt works its magic, the title of Patrick’s blog post on BlogStorm (Add links when people cut and paste your content with Tynt) should have been hyperlinked directly to his post. After all, I directly copied and pasted his content into my Wordpress editor – no Jedi mind tricks here.
So… where’s the link?
Turns out Tynt’s Javascript code inserts the link to your blog post the second someone copies and pastes your information into a WYSIWYG text editor.
In contrast, I use an HTML editor to create my blog posts, rendering Tynt’s magic useless. Also, because of the way Tynt’s script works, their attributions are very easy to remove. A novice web plagiarizer can easily take them out of a post once they have copied and pasted your content.
Tynt is promoted as a “provider of SEO benefits by generating more links back to your content that are search engine visible.” Read more: http://www.tynt.com/#ixzz0XnNAbeTL
See – even when HTTP code is used for link placement, it is still ineffective.
Is Tynt worth adding to your site to be an assistant to your link building efforts? Sure. But will it actually produce a quantity of links for you? No.
I get that bloggers and news sites are tired of having sites steal their content, and I 100% agree with your gripes. As an alternative to using Tynt for building links when your content is stolen, I would personally recommend Wordpress users check out Joost de Valk’s RSS Footer Plugin.
After reading over Michael Gray’s testing with this plugin, the RSS Footer Plugin seems much more effective at putting content bandits to work for your link building efforts than Tynt.
As a internet marketing company, it’s our main goal to help companies rank their websites higher in the SERPs. That’s what we’re good at and that’s what we do. But it’s my job as a designer to make the pages look good; an equally important proposition. A well designed page gives your company and your product more credibility. If your website is ranking high and features a great product yet looks like it was made in the late 90s by a neighborhood kid, chances are todays web consumer won’t be thrilled.
So with that in mind, and this being my first blog post in the holiday season, I have decided to share with all the readers of this blog some helpful tools and tricks to make your site look better.
1) Color scheme. This is one of the most important things to focus on for the design of your site. Granted, many sites are colored based on the corporate color scheme, but there are always ways to to spruce it up with complementary and secondary colors. My go to tool for finding color schemes is the fantastic Color Scheme Designer by Petr Stanicek. This is a great tool where you can enter a color hex code and automatically generate a color scheme. Another great tool is Adobe Kuler, a newish tool that I feel I have yet to even scratch the surface of.
2) Standards. If web 2.0 was centered around rounded corners and shiny buttons (I’m sort of kidding), then web 3.0 will surely be about standards. It’s no longer only important that your page looks good, it has to be coded correctly as well. And this isn’t just to satisfy people that care about code. Properly coded web pages save bandwidth, function (for the most part) well in multiple browsers, and are easier to have function in mobile browsers. The best resource for standards web design and development is A List Apart by Jeffrey Zeldman. His new edition of “Designing with Web Standards” was released a few weeks ago and is an extremely helpful book.
3) Firebug. Want to see what that form would look like just a smmmmidge to the right? Want to know why that image is overlapping your text. Firebug is the thing to get! Firebug is a free plug in for Firefox (you are using firefox aren’t you?) and allows you to edit elements of your css code in real time without actually changing any of the code. If you don’t have it…get it! A necessary plug in.
4) Fonts. As anyone who has developed websites will tell you, the variety of fonts you can choose from on the web is very limited. Do you want Arial or Georgia? Yeah. That was a problem I have run into for a long time and have finally found a solution. It’s called “Cufon” and allows you to upload a font that is then converted to a javascript file and is placed in the header of your website. Then it replaces text in various css tags to be displayed in that font. It is very cool and does not change your css coding of words inside tags. You can check it out here… http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/.
Well there are some little tips and tricks to use to spruce up your website. I hope you found them useful and your website has a happy holiday season. If you have any suggestions or questions, the comment area below is a good place to put them.
Most projects fail. According to the Standish Group, only 32% of all projects succeed, which is defined as being delivered on time, on budget, with the required features and functions. Those are pretty dismal figures and don’t bode well for customers and project sponsors who are investing in projects.
There are a number of things that project managers and teams can do to try to improve performance. But what if you’re someone who is working with an internet marketing company? Do you, as a client, have a role to play in helping to increase the chances of your project succeeding?
I believe you have a significant and important role. So… how can you help your internet marketing project team help you?
One of the most important things you can do is understand some basic project management concepts and adjust your expectations in accordance with those concepts. I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty of project management here, but I believe it is necessary to give an overview of a basic project management concept, the theory of constraints, and how it applies to managing internet marketing projects.
All projects have three core components: scope (the work to be completed), cost, and time to accomplish the work. For a defined amount of work, we can reasonably say it will take a certain amount of time, given a certain level of resources.
The challenge is to keep the triangle in balance. Say, for example, you would like to include additional items into your project – perhaps a nice feature for your website, a tweak to the design, etc. These projects increase the scope. Therefore, an adjustment to the cost and/or time is required. If cost will be higher, then the time required to complete the project will be longer.
If you want to move the deadline forward so that the project is done sooner, then scope or cost will also need to be adjusted to reflect the changed time component of the triangle. Scope can be reduced in order to get done sooner and/or we could increase the cost so that we can acquire more resources to apply against the project in order to get done sooner.
I believe that simply understanding the triple constraints will help you communicate more effectively with the project manager of your internet marketing campaign and the team working on the project. It will also enable you to have more realistic expectations about the scope, cost, and time components of your project.
In the spirit of Halloween, I would like to take this time to talk about a potential trick that was pulled on all of us recently.
As anyone in the internet world will tell you, it is difficult to make something ‘viral’ in today’s online media world. The one thing required to make something viral is that it needs to be something that, when viewed, inspires the viewer to pass it along to everyone they know, invite people around their desk to watch it, or tweet/retweet it.
And that’s not an easy task.
Today’s savvy internet user is fairly unshockable. There is little you can do (and keep it PG-rated) that will create ANY kind of shock, interest, or humor. That makes it relatively hard for a big company like Microsoft (who already has a perceived image) to create a promotional campaign/video. What can they possibly do, then?
Let’s fast forward to right before the launch of Microsoft’s newest OS, Windows 7. They of course needed to market it after the dismal Windows Vista release, so they decided on a (let’s sarcastically say) brilliant ad campaign where users would host Windows 7 launch parties.
Essentially, a person could decide that they liked Windows enough that they would go online, sign tons of paperwork and become an official launch party host. They could then recruit all their friends to come (using an overly complicated invitation system that discouraged people from actually using the official way) and sit around and… install Windows 7.
But that’s not all. If you had enough people you could potentially get a Windows 7 box signed by Steve Ballmer. Don’t even check eBay, because I’m sure no one would want to part with that gem.
I realize that I may not be explaining this process very clearly. So Microsoft, in their eternal wisdom, made a video that explains the whole process. Please enjoy below.
Now… I’m going to assume you watched it and that you have the sensibilities and intelligence of a moderately intelligent human being. What the heck was that?!?! Awful, awful, awful. I mean really… it’s embarrassing. On every single front. Acting, video, writing, sound quality… was this really produced by a multi billion dollar company?Why, this video is so BAD that I am inspired to forward it to all my friends and laugh at it…
Oh wait. They got me. Now, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but this one has to make you wonder. Did Microsoft intentionally make one of the worst, lamest, milquetoast videos to play right into the lame-o image that Apple created for them? My gut says no, they aren’t that smart. But at the same time, it makes me wonder.
If the goal of the video was exposure and publicity, it worked. The video has been viewed millions of times. It has been laughed at and mocked, it has been spoofed and goofed. It’s an embarrassment. Again, I don’t think they meant to, but Microsoft made one of the most talked about viral videos of the year by making themselves the brunt of the joke. Congrats. They did it.
But at what cost?
So your business is green now… how about your website?
Imagine if you printed each page of your site, and then gave them to Google. Then, after you handed them over, Google had to file them away in their archives. The smaller the pages are, the less space your pages would take up, correct?
If we look back at rule no. 1 of the Three Golden Rules Of SEO: “Do right to Google and Google will do right to you,” we uncover a great SEO rule for techs: the more we can reduce the size of the pages on a website, the better the website is for Google to crawl.
So – how do I reduce the size of my pages and my site?
Reusing the same style sheet and javascript file will make your site easier to update and also more consistent. This will also reduce the total number of bytes the page contains when Google has to index it. In order to do this, you would need to edit the pages of your site and move the code into a seperate file.
Given the sample below, PennDOT has 87 lines of javascript on their home page. They could copy and paste that code into a file called home-page.js and replace all those lines of code with 1 line.
<script src=”/home-page.js” language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript”></script>
For moving CSS, it is the same approach but the code is slightly different. Take a look at the 300+ lines of CSS on the Lancaster County Library website. This can be easily moved to an external style-sheet by copying and pasting that code into a file named home-style.css and replaced with 1 line in the head section as follows:
<link href=”/home-style.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” />
You’re welcome Google, we just saved you 8KB of bandwidth and 8KB of storage each time you index those two pages!
Create a file in the main directory of your website named “robots.txt”. The search engines will read this file each time it crawls your site to see what urls you don’t want included in the index. To determine what urls to exclude, you could do a Google search using “site:yourdomain.com” and look at the results.
If you have a lot of duplicate pages, especially from a dynamically generated script, the results will most likely be displayed at the end of the results. Click to the end of the pages of results, and look for the caption at the end “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the X already displayed.”
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included. Click on that link and browse through the duplicate results. Once you have determined some urls to exclude you would simply add them to the robots.txt one url per line, as follows:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /url-to-block
The search engine spiders support blocking an entire directory as follows:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /directory-to-block/
Googlebot specifically supports a wild card feature. So if you would like to block an entire range of urls, say from a web calendar at an address like /calendar-2009.html you could do this as follows:
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /calendar-*.html
I use a Firefox plugin called Live HTTP Headers so that I can inspect the http server headers. This is a handy troubleshooting tool while testing 301 redirects as well.
In order to use this you would need to be using Firefox, and install the plugin. Go under the tools menu and choose “Live HTTP Headers.” Leave the box open and load your website in the browser.
Several lines of text will go whizzing past. Go the whole way up to the top to look at the original request and response. Note the headers for a page from Wikipedia in the image below. In the first section – “GET /wiki/Google HTTP/1.1″ – is the request that the browser sent to the server. Note the line “If-Modified-Since.” This second section is the response from the server. What we are looking for here is the first line “HTTP/1.x 304 Not Modified” and “Last-Modified: Sat, 24 Oct”… This server does support the If-Modified-Since HTTP header.
When the Googlebot spiders this page again, it will be able to determine if the current web page is newer then the one already in the Google cache, therefore saving bandwith to download the page and storage space to store duplicate pages.
Is Google finding a way to integrate the tracking of online and offline marketing results?
Many people know that one of the great things about internet marketing is the ease and accuracy with which marketers can track the results of their efforts. With internet marketing, it’s generally not a case of not enough data. It’s more like:
“What in the world do I do with all this data?! What’s relevant for my company?”
But what about businesses that still rely on that antiquated tool – the telephone – to do business? How do you know which marketing activities generate the phone calls? Was it that magazine ad, an internet search, that midtown billboard, or a customer referral? Sure there are ways to track that, but none of them are convenient.
Your trusted, data hungry friends at Google may be working on a solution for at least part of this phone call tracking problem. Using Google Voice, the search engine has begun tracking phone calls that are coming from ALL Google-related internet marketing sources.
Google Voice allows for the creation of a phone number that is not tied to a particular location or phone. Instead, the number is tied to you or your company. The user can also control which phone rings (office, home, mobile, etc.) when someone dials a Google Voice number. A “G-Voice” account is similar to a Gmail account in that it’s portable and more flexible in where, when, and how it can be used.
One of the things that is rumored to be part of Google Voice (which is only available by invitation only at this point) is call tracking. If this is the case, companies would be able to use their Google Voice phone number in various internet marketing mediums to track calls generated from those sources. Two mediums that jump out right away are AdWords Pay-per-click and Google Local Business Center.
Yes, there are PPC management companies that connect sponsored ads to phone numbers. But if Google could provide a way to use that phone number across a variety of online properties, I think it would be quite valuable.
Ease of measuring marketing results is always a good thing in my book.
Get more info about Google Voice from this handy YouTube video.
I have been known when I speak to groups around the country when publicly asked about ranking in Yahoo! to smirk a bit. I have despised Yahoo! for years becuase of their completely unethical practice of having you pay them to be included in their “organic” results. Well, it’s coming to an end, largely because of their deal with Microsoft.
Barry Schwartz broke the news a few days ago and included this from Yahoo! in his post:
We are committing our resources and efforts to our core areas of focus, including improving the search experience and relevancy of our ads to increase user engagement and ROI for advertisers, and as a result, have decided to exit Search Submit. We have stepped up innovation in Search Marketing, recently rolling out search retargeting, Rich Ads in Search and improved matching technology, and in Consumer Search, with enhancements like the new search results page. These enhancements deliver value, control, innovation and relevance to our advertisers, leading to increased ROI.
Yahoo! will exit Search Submit at the end of 2009. Yahoo! is providing those advertisers affected by the decision a sufficient lead time to assist in the transition. In addition, Yahoo! has recently announced a series of important enhancements to its Search advertising business and will work closely with many Search Submit advertisers to provide them with search solutions that will benefit their businesses.
So what does this mean for business owners and marketers? My advice is to begin paying attention to Bing’s results if you’re concerned about engines other than Google. We believe that you’re going to see Bing’s results when you search on Yahoo! in the coming months.
