Some really good posts and information for Social Media and Wordpress integration

• Beyond TweetBacks: Introducing TweetSuite | Dan Zarrella – Nice plug-in for integrating Twitter and Wordpress.
• SocioFluid – another social bookmarking plugin for wordpress | ImproveSeo.info – A good looking plugin for Wordpress to display the social bookmarking buttons for digg, reddit, … I like the buttons because they are not too small and not too big.
• 10 Tools for the Social Media Marketer | Traffikd – If you are an avid user of social media and you are working to build traffic for your own website or blog with SMM, here are 10 tools to help make your work easier.
• SociBook Plugin For WordPress – Nice Wordpress plugin to share your posts on a ton of social bookmarking sites.
• 5 Essential Steps to Make Your Site Search & Social Media Friendly – The increasing demand for fresh, live web content as well as the expectation of consumers to interact with what they find in the search results requires that website owners and content publishers make their websites both search and social media friendly.( via Jeff Cohen @dgtlpapercuts on Twitter)
• Is Everything You Know About SEO Wrong? » aimClear Search Marketing Blog – “Do those old H1 tags still work? Actually word’s out, they don’t really count much anymore for SEO. Does quantity, power or diversity of inbound links take the hill for search engines ranking pages algorithmically for keywords? Actually, correlation data indicates that link diversity is a factor which has become more important.”
• 9 Ways People Respond to Your Content Online | Lateral Action – Breaks down the steps from acquiring web visitors to engaging them. Really awesome graph.

Technorati Tags: Content, Online, Online Content, SEO, SocBook, Social Media, SocioFluid, TweetSuite, WordPress

This week Andy Beal announced the winners of the 3rd Annual SEM Scholarship I was honored to be one of five finalists out of 31 entries. I didn’t win but congratulations are in order for Linda Bustos whose article 8 Stupid Things Webmasters do to Mess Up their Analytics is excellent.

I was surprised that I did come in first in total traffic since there where so many SEO/SEM professionals in the competition I thought I would be much lower in the rankings. It still got me a seat at the table and a single vote for my article which even in my own opinion was infererior to Linda’s I have added her Get Elastic ecommerce blog to my RSS reader it seems like she and her mates are very sharp.

Just for a record here’s a listing of the winners and their scoring:

Maybe next year I’ll have a shot but for now I’ll take a top five finish.

Technorati Tags: analytics, Contest, Marketing Pilgrim, SEM, SEO

I started linkrolling my bookmarks during during this weekend’s U.S. Open but soon became obsessed by Rocco and Tiger. So here’s my marketing, SEO, and social media links for last week.

• The Marketing of Fear – “The challenge of marketing with fear isn’t efficacy. Of course fear marketing works. The challenge is ethics and brand.” My first “real job” out of college was working in financial services. Fear marketing worked, it also made me feel dirty, that’s why I switched career paths.
• Marketing Sherpa: How to Grow an Email List From Nothing to 2 Million Loyal Fans in 2 Years (Hint: Give Them Something They Enjoy) – I like the example of ice cream on your birthday. My wife always wants to go get her birthday club freebie on hers.
• Copy Blogger: How to Increase Your Blog Subscription Rate by 254% – The power of carefully choosing your words to elicit responses.
• Official Google Blog: Fresher Related Search Suggestions: “Recently, we improved our algorithms to process new information faster, and the result is quite tangible — you should now see fresher suggestions for queries on current topics of interest.” [via Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim]
• Poynter Online: Seven Traits of Highly Effective Community Managers – Good list of traits for community management superstars [via Connie Bensen]
• How to Build a Useful Site @ chrisg.com – “Track where your visitors come from and what they are after, and if you can actually talk to them. If you know why visitors arrive you will be in a better position to make them happy.”
• Web Ink Now: Search Engine Optimizing a crap-filled site just makes it a little less crappy – David makes a good point, easy to find crap is still crap. Starting with good content and then optimizing for that content is the key. See my post at Marketing Piligrim thinking like a reader, a marketer, AND a search engine. Otherwise you have a one-legged stool.
• Google Trends Adds Cool New Statistical Weighting Features : SEO Book.com – Google Trends announced a cool new feature for determining the relative search volume between keywords. Aaron Wall riffs on the new Google Trends features.
• Is Google Making Us Stupid? – It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. The supreme irony about this article is its length.
• SEO Tools. Link Checker. Check Backlinks for PR, Anchor & Nofollow – Tools for checking backlinks and their quality [via Chris Brogan]
• SEM Check – Service that provides an audit of your website from an SEO standpoint. (via Marketing Pilgrim)
• Andy Beard: Never Underestimate The Power Of The Dark Side of Search – If you removed all forms of search from the internet, finding information when you need it would be highly inefficient in response to Tim O’Reilly’s post.
• Why Arrington is Wrong about Yahoo!-Google Deal – O’Reilly Radar – Great Quote from Tim O’Reilly : “Create more value than you capture” the most succint and sage advice I could ever give a commerical open source company [via Aaron Wall on SEOBBook]
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Duplicate content summit at SMX Advanced – Suggestions for dealing with duplicate site content including sitemap specifications and robots.txt.
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Deftly dealing with duplicate content – How to deal with duplication of content as seen by Google.
• Google: we don’t know how to make money from YouTube – Times Online – Google has said that it is still unsure how to make money from YouTube, the enormously popular video-sharing website it owns, but hopes to be able to do so soon.
• Micro Persuasion: Friendfeed will Change Journalism, PR and Marketing -Amazing stats for how much credence we put in the opinions of people like ourselves — 58% of opinion elites 35-64 in 18 countries said they trust “a person like me,” according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.This has been growing steadily since 2003. People are increasingly turning to their peers for news, information and recommendations.

Technorati Tags: Links, marketing, SEO

Aaron Wall at SEOBook has a good video on why SEO is a social Activity. Nice overview pointing out that the days of gaming Google is over and that SEO requires a good deal of human interaction and understanding to be effective. I like his example of sending some dirt to ValleyWag which got him a premium link (albeit with inaccurate spelling of his name).

It’s a well done SEO training video. What did catch my attention is that he mentions the book The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (which I am re-reading right now).

Aaron also recommends the work of Duncan Watts who I think does a great job of explaining the science of networks in his book Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age.

The reason I am re-reading the Tipping Point is because of the Fast Company article “Is the Tipping Point Toast?” featuring Duncan Watts who is a network-science theorist working with Yahoo! I am trying to discern if Gladwell is a hypemaster while Duncan’s science might be more accurate. Read them for yourself but I have to wonder if Gladwell’s ideas will stand the test of time or if Watts alone has real insight.

Technorati Tags: Duncan Waits, Malcolm Gladwell, SEO, SEOBook, Six Degrees, Tipping Point, Training

Random Links from April web surfing.

• Stop leaving out the valuable breadcrumb trail – Breadcrumb trails are still a vital part of on page SEO. They provide backlinks to the homepage and help it’s authority status.
• Omni WordPress Theme | Premium Design Templates – A premium Wordpress theme with a web 2.0 feel.
• Best practices when moving your site from Google – Planning on moving your site to a new domain? Lots of webmasters find this a scary process. How do you do it without hurting your site’s performance in Google search results?
• Bookmarkit – The Social Bookmarks sidebar widget for WordPress allows you to select a number of social bookmark sites which are displayed in the sidebar.
• Idealware: Comparing Open Source Content Management Systems: Joomla, Drupal, and Plone – Open source content management systems can make creating and managing your website a lot easier – and there’s no licensing fee involved. But which should you use?� We look carefully at Joomla, Drupal, and Plone to compare their strengths and weaknesses.
• Psystar Corporation – Open Computer: The Smart Alternative to an Apple – Why spend $1999 to get the least expensive Apple computer with a decent video card when you can pay less than a fourth of that for an equivalent sleek and small form-factor desktop with the same hardware. This turned out to be a sketchy drama as documented here by Gizmodo.
• StumbleUpon Alerter – Blog – Adamant Solutions, Adelaide, South Australia – Web design, custom software development and website hosting – StumbleUpon Alerter is a small tool that sits in the system tray. It keeps an eye on all of your discoveries on StumbleUpon and plays a noise whenever someone reviews or gives your sites a thumbs up.
• Monochrome Pro | Graph Paper Press – Another WordPress theme I have been digging.
• Which RIA Tools Give Us the Best Bang For Our Buck? @ ENTERPRISE OPEN SOURCE MAGAZINE – A number of emerging frameworks seek to tame the browser and make it a suitable platform for a rich client application. The biggest fish in this pond is currently Google Web Toolkit (or GWT)….
• How to write a press release – Nice how-to for those who don’t know the in’s and outs of wrting press releases.
• BitNami makes it easy for mom & semi-geeks to use OSS � rand($thoughts); – As OSS ISVs began to use BitRock�s InstallBuilder, they started hearing that customers didn�t just want the standalone ISV product. Customers wanted the whole stack that the ISV product runs on. In response, BitRock now offers ISVs Custom Stacks.
• What’s That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog] – Technorati is still seeing a steady flow of hacked blogs showing up in Technorati crawls. The ones that we can identify as symptomatic of the compromise aren’t getting their crawls processed. 2.5 is a way to clear up the problem but not the only solution.
• Unconfirmed: Lenovo’s Entire New ThinkPad Line Leaked, X300 Gets Siblings – Lenovo is rumored to be releasing a whole line of ultra-portable’s based on the small form factor X300. Maybe they will give Apple’s MacBook Air a run for their money.
• The Server Room – Forum Powered by eve community – The Server Room is Ars Technica’s forum for large scale IT.
• Jiffle – Scheduling Made Simple – Jiffle� makes scheduling appointments and meetings quick and simple.
• How Google Blogsearch ranks your Posts� In their own words! – How does Google know how many people are subscribed to your feed? Answer: Google Reader, the most popular feedreader at the moment, with a (loosely) estimated 30%+ share or the newsreader market.
• Gartner Explains Why Windows Is Broken – CIO.com – Business Technology Leadership – Interesting take on why t
• TagCrowd – make your own tag cloud from any text – TagCrowd creates a TagCloud from a URL, uploaded file, or text. [via Sam's blog]
• WPZOOM �� WP Themes & Showcase, Blogging Tips & Hacks – Nice site about Wordpress themes and blogging tips.
• Forecast: IT Operations Management Software, Worldwide, 2007-2012 – IT operations management software market revenue will reach $18.1 billion in 2012, reflecting a compound annual growth rate of 7.2% from 2007 through 2012
• 451 CAOS Theory � Qlusters waves goodbye to openQRM – And then there was three? Qlusters, the former(?) open source systems management vendor has handed the development of the openQRM project over to the open source community and announced that it will no longer be involved in the project.
• GapingVoid: How Does A Software Company Make Money, If All Software is Free – Hugh talks about software companies without business models, more on this later.
• James Governor�s Monkchips � Building a Social Media Platform and Community: Three Legs – The three-tiered architectures and developer communities. I think maybe the in more general terms you need an extensible application, a medium for collaboration, and a call to action. Then what do I know I’m not an analyst .
• LifeType | Open Source Blogging Platform – Open source blogging platform.
• My Essential Twitter Tools – If you�re using Twitter for personal, corporate use, or to manage the brand of a client.
• In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop – New York Times – A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy
• In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop – New York Times – Bloggers at some of the bigger sites say most writers earn about $30,000 a year starting out, and some can make as much as $70,000. A tireless few bloggers reach six figures…
• 10 Open Source Education Tools | John M Willis ESM Blog – Interesting list of open source software Moodle, Edubuntu, FreeMind.
• Logic+Emotion – “Once upon a time, we were consumers. We consumed things. We took in the messages that were communicated to us. We didn’t really get to talk back. If we had a good or bad experience with a product or service�we told a friend.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Microsoft, SEO, Twitter

When you optimize your website for the Google search it’s helpful to see things the way Google does. That we you can measure results and identify other sites that are being successful in your niche. The following commands can be entered into a Google search to return information useful for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specific to Google.

related:http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/index

Technorati Tags: analytics, commands, Google, SEO

I was referred to the origins of the term Social Media Optimization(SMO) from an old ProBlogger article about Google’s treatment of blogs.

The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.

While I think video and other tactics are important especially given Google’s inclusion of video in search results. One trend of growing importance is optimizing web pages by including microformats:

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.

Examples of microformats are

• hCard – For people and organizations
• hCalendar – Calendars and Event
• XFN – Social Networks

A broader list of microformats can be on the microformats wiki.

I think the key thing to consider when optimizing your website for audience (Whether it be readers or search engines) it’s important to make it easier for the website to be be consumed. That means syndicating content, offering multimedia when and where appropriate. Now I have one more TLA (Three Letter Acronym) to throw around along with my geek-speak laden vocabulary.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, optimization, SEO, Social Media

Thursday night the Iowa caucuses gave the U.S. their first glimpses into who the real front runners were for the Democratic and Republican parties. After seeing who won it made me wonder, as a web marketer, whether there was any relationship between the winners and their presence on the web. So I did a little non-partisan analysis.

Methodology

I looked at a number of factors to determine their reach on the web but mainly I relied on their buzz factor on Technorati (the leading blog search engine), the ranking of their website as determined by Alexa (a web service that determines a websites popularity), and Google (for PageRank and general popularity based on number of times the term is mentioned).  I also looked at the quantity and quality of personal communications from the candidates which in my mind is quite low for someone who is trying to sell you not only on their positions but their sincere belief in those positions. My main criterion was their willingness to engage in conversations with their constituents via personal messages in a conversational way. I was looking for blogs that allows comments or forums that allowed discussions among supporters and even those in opposition of their platform. I also poked around for other ways they engaged the web-savvy voter. 

Here are my findings.

The Democrats

Barack Obama

His election site is the first hit for his name on Google (as is the case with most candidates). He also is running Google Adwords advertisements on his own name. A look at his site shows that his Alexa ranking is a 17,303 and he has a Google page rank of 7. Technorati shows over 104,000 hits for him in the blogosphere. I also notice that The ObamaBlog on his HQ website however doesn’t use RSS (Real Simple Syndication) and doesn’t have any personal messages on it from the distinguished gentlemen from Illinois. Senator Obama does have 214,000+ friends on MySpace though. He also has a group on LinkedIn.  And another 208,000 supporters on Facebook. Barack’s staff also sends updates via Twitter though they are more status than messages from him. 

Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton’s election site is also the number one hit for her name, and while I didn’t see any Adwords running on the search by her organization. I did get one for MikeHuckabee.com [See illustration on the right]. Hillary’s Alexa ranking is on 32,729. Hillary also has RSS enabled for her blog. Hillary’s blog was ranked 12,130 on Technorati with an authority of 379. 

John Edwards

John Edwards election site is the the number one hit for his name. The Alexa ranking for his site is 69,182. His blog does support RSS and it’s driven by supporters and well supported though any message from Senator Edwards is absent. The blog itself has an impressive showing with a ranking of 6,516 and an authority ranking of 572. His Google Page Rank is 6.

The Democratic Google Fights

Finally, we pit Obama versus Clinton versus Edwards in Google searches.

• "Hillary Clinton" yields 6,360,000 results.
• "Barack Obama" yields 1,800,000 results
• "John Edwards" yields 4,240,000 results

What’s disappointing is that none of the candidates have a personal blog post(or at least one that I could readily find).  I guess the see no benefit in virtual glad-handing bloggers. Also, when it comes to Google search, it’s worth noting that Hillary and John Edwards have been more prominently in the public eye for a much longer time which could explain their commanding leads in Google search results.

Republicans

Mike Huckabee 

Mike Huckabee’s election site has an Alexa ranking of 38,119 and a search for "Mike Huckabee" in Google returns no Google Adwords for himself or his competition. He also has a blog and he made a personal post. Actually, he actually made more than one. While searching the archives are a little tough, Huckabee’s figured out that he can type it once and have it live on. Plus one for understanding that if you have a blog it’s important to communicate your own thoughts there not the positions that your team has carefully screened and crafted. 

Mitt Romney

The MittRomney.com website has an Alexa ranking shows 63,714. His website is pre-empted by ,in my opinion, an awkward splash page.  His blog is populated mainly by aggregated posts from his five sons. He’s one of the few that candidates where I have found a personally written blog post but it’s not ranked in Technorati and his posts are sporadic.

John McCain

John’s election site has a 99,639 and a Google Page Rank of 5.  John McCain is advertising on his name in Google Adwords. He’s not listed in Technorati but he has 274 blog reactions. His website looks like a production of his staff and doesn’t seem to have any "personal touch".

Fred Thompson

Fred Thompson has no Internet site that I can find the best I can see is the Friends of Fred. Perhaps he is relying on his Internet Movie Database entry to provide his web presence. [Updated: Fred does have a Facebook profile with 18,000+ supporters]

Ron Paul

Ron Paul is perhaps the most web savvy of all the presidential candidates. His site RonPaul2008.com is ranked 6,034 which is astounding, for comparision the Republican National Committee web site GOP.com has a ranking of 101,168. Though ironically Dr. Paul has no blog that I could find prominently linked from his election site he does have one at http://blog.ronpaul2008.com (which has 529 blog reactions via Technorati) and it was personally updated numerous times by his staff. Ron Paul also has some personal messages. He effectively uses YouTube to communicate messages as well with over 43,000+ subscribers and 6.5 million views. His Facebook page shows he has 67,000 supporters. The Ron Paul 2008 website shows a Google Page Rank of 7 (the highest of any candidate). 

The Republican Google Fights

Finally we look at Google search results for Google. 

• "Mike Huckabee" returns 1,560,000 results
• "Mitt Romney" returns 1,470,000 results
• "Ron Paul" returns 3,050,000 results
• "Rudy Giuliani" returns 1,310,000 results
• "Fred Thompson" returns 701,000 results

Analysis

Ron Paul, Mike Huckabee, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards seem to be the leaders when it comes to the reaching Internet savvy voters.

Looking deeper at the amount of money raised by each candidate it’s no wonder that Ron Paul (who has raised considerably less money then many of the other candidates ) has a good website presence. As someone with scarcer resources he’s turned to the most leveraged method for reaching voters the Internet, a scale-free network.  Though he finished in fourth place in the Iowa caucuses he would be my prediction to be the surprise candidate of the election based on his ability to effectively communicate over the Internet. 

I also think it’s notable that perhaps the best execution in communicating via the Internet is Obama election machine.  I don’t believe that he’s demonstrated a human element over the Internet but he’s photogenic and he his team uses the Internet to effectively deliver the messages of his platform. 

All of candidates could benefit greatly from leveraging the Internet. Here are my impressions on what they are doing and how they could improve.

• Blogging – Personal messages via their blogs can be delivered better via RSS. With exception Mitt Romney does this fairly well and Ron Paul does this via his You Tube channel,his blog, and even Twitter. Though the other candidates could learn something here.
• Adwords – Google Adwords is a big opportunity for all candidates and running ads that counter the issues that they feel their opponents are weak on would be interesting. I have to wonder there is almost a lack of advertising on candidates names which I find interesting. 
• Social Networking – Obama and Paul seem to have successfully tapped into the social networks of Facebook and MySpace. I would love to see what Fred Thompson’s MySpace would look like (I can’t find one). He does have a FaceBook page which means someone at Thompson HQ understands that the Internet is a useful promotional tool. 
• Marketing/Polling – If I were running the candidates online campaigns I would be making sure that each candidate was running affiliate badge campaigns that pointed to candidate’s "At a Glance Page" that had their strongest easy to understand messaging. The same way Internet marketers use landing pages for product marketing. I would also be doing my own polling to test messages and gather intelligence on why their supporters find them appealing as well as other demographics.
• Claim Blogs on Technorati – I think there is valuable insight to be gained by the candidates who have claimed their blogs on Technorati. This gives them a ranking and a way to report on their blog success. Conversely, it also provides their competition a competitive view. 

My gut feeling looking at this data is that while you probably won’t win the election on the web alone but you gain an advantage by doing so. I think Huckabee, Obama, Paul, Edwards, and Clinton are doing this most effectively. I also think that Fred Thompson by ignoring the web precludes himself from being a true contender. I am surprised that Giuliani who was such a proponent of IT when mayor of New York doesn’t have a greater web presence (I gleaned this information from his autobiography no personal knowledge). As the election progresses I will continue to observe and comment. New Hampshire is coming up and will give me more data to correlate the result and the candidates web presence. 

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, elections, Google, Hillary Clinton, Iowa Caucus, John Edwards, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Search, Web 2.0 marketing

Google Webspam Engineer Matt Cutts has a really good video on how Google search snippets are generated. Since I brought Socialized Software online I have been working on what i need to do to generate search traffic. This is a great tutorial on how Google creates your listing and what you can do to try and alter it. 

Technorati Tags: Google, Search, SEO

I have been working an SEO FAQ for our intern Mike at Zenoss when I came across Blogrush a blog widget company that provides updates from other blogs based on the content of your page. I thought I would give it try and see if it’s  a) interesting tome and my readers and b) if it sends any real traffic my way.We’ll waitand see for now it’s just the little widget below my blogroll titled,"From the Blogosphere". Unfortunately, a nasty hacker mucked with mycomments so I turned them off until I have a chance to turn them on, Iwon’t be able to gather any feedback.

Technorati Tags: Blogush, SEO, Zenoss