First of all, SEO it’s an acronym for two things:
- Search engine optimization (a process to „optimize” a web page);
- Search engine optimizers (the persons that do the process above).
I detail both of these bellow.
Language: English
Internet marketing tip: how to encourage comments on your web site?
You know the story – you build a web site, you put a comments box, nobody comments. Then some people start commenting, but very rarely. Then you do get some comments after a while, but they stop. How to exit these circles? I found a solution by reading: Get Free Books, Gadgets, and More by Writing Thoughtful Reviews The solution involves: Award the commentators which write the most useful comments with products from your web site, for further testing / reviewing. That’s it. It’s harder if you sell private jets, it’s easy if you sell books or small presents. So, use your current customer base and start from there.
In the name of „Understanding the business”
In the name of „Understanding the business”, this thing happens: You get lots & lots of detailed descriptions of a business. What I’d do better: Avoid describing things – „we do like this & this & this”. Sure, a brief description is necessary, but not too much. Focus on USP (Unique Selling Proposition) – what you have and is different. Focus on Insights – „I will tell you this & that, and by those two things you should get an idea”. Focus a lot on actionable steps and clear processes. Make it clear what needs to be done.
Microsoft Word’s biggest usability problem, in my opinion
You might think I’ll pick on the functions, look & feel. No, I’ll go somewhere simpler – if I type something in Word, I work for 2 hours, I close the document and don’t save, I’ve lost everything. There’s no option to prevent this. A document I write in 30 days, a thesis paper, takes, if only words, less than a MB of data. If compressed, we’re talking peanuts. Why wouldn’t Word create back-up copies of everything I work on, automatically save them and then let me recover the data? Beats me. Solution: When installing Word, ask me about saving everything I type (for privacy issues). Put the autosave function to work at 30 seconds interval, not 10 minutes by default. Autosave even the „don’t save” files. Even if you don’t make the above options standard, they should be as option. I’d also love such a function for Notepad. There is a race between mankind and the universe. Mankind is trying to build bigger, better, faster, and more foolproof machines. The universe is trying to build bigger, better, and faster fools. So far the universe is winning.
Usability tip: sort by sales, descending
SEO tip: Blogspot.ro.com? A „slight” change
Recently, blogspot.com started redirecting all users which enter from a certain country to a specific URL. So, if you visit http://grupuridediscutii.blogspot.ro/ you are redirected to: http://grupuridediscutii.blogspot.de/ if you come from Germany, to: http://grupuridediscutii.blogspot.ro/ if Google suspects your IP is in Romania and so on. It does a 302 redirect: Details.
Political campaigns tip: get the data from your political fan-base!
Let’s have a look at the political campaigns in the US:
- Get the latest — Barack Obama
- Mitt Romney for President | Mitt Romney for President of the United States of America in 2012 (the splash page kind of banned my IP) :)
- Gary Johnson 2012
- Jill Stein for President
Tip for reputation management: best tools for RM is Google, closely followed by Facebook and YouTube
At SEM Days 2012, Lucian DESPOIU (Kondiment) suggested these tools to for great reputation management: Google should be the main channel. Facebook and YouTube should also be taken into account. Why is this? Google is the most visited web site on the planet. Google is the most known brand on the Internet. Google is the most used search engine. Facebook is the place where people spend most time on the Internet. Facebook is the biggest social network. YouTube is the second search engine. YouTube is the largest channel for video. Sure, there are other channels to take into account: Less important general channels (there are other search engines than Google, there are other places where people spend their time online) – LinkedIn, Twitter, Yahoo!, Bing, the list can go on. Local channels (country-specific, zone-specific, area-specific) – Trilulilu, Xing, hi5. Niche channels (channels which appeal only to a specific set of people in your community) – Pinterest, Last FM, SlideShare, Instagram, Flickr.
Tip for reputation management: keep it positive!
At SEM Days 2012, Lucian DESPOIU (Kondiment) gave this idea on an approach on how to do reputation management: when you do reputation management (RM), focus on the positive things. So: When you endorse / like / appreciate something online, do it for a positive reason. Rather than „I hate it that there are so many bad roads in Romania”, say it like „We appreciate those who strive to make the roads better in Romania”. Rather than „stray dogs are bad thing in major cities”, say it like „what solutions can we find for the stray dogs problem?”. Be constructive and focus on the positive when you associate with a cause which isn’t yours. Keep the same rule (be positive) for messages which are yours. So, if you have a message, formulate it and make it a positive one. Fight for win, avoid fighting to prevent a loss. Aim to get somewhere, rather than avoiding getting in bad place. Quite nice. :)