I was invited to give a presentation called “Engage New Audiences and Recruit Volunteers with Social Media” for the 2011 Volunteer Ventura Summit put on by the City of Ventura. I re-recorded the presentation for internet distribution, following. It’s 17 minutes long and is a nice overview of the basics, along with some easy-to-implement action items for any small non-profit organization looking to share their story online.

Bummer!

PT, a musician friend, is on the road in a lonely hotel room with “a fanta grape soda on the night stand and 4 dunkin donuts on my lap.”

CF laments, “my desk is now officially broken!”

I wish I could help out my good buddy, BS, who barely had the energy to let us know he’s “sick”.

And P. loves the rain, but shudders at a memory. “The rain from my childhood was a dirty, simpering, unpleasant thing, squeezed between tall buildings and reduced to puddles.”

Man, what a bummer! How I wish I could let them know I empathize and that they have a friend, without taking the time to actually write something thoughtful in the comments.

Facebook needs a Bummer Button. It would work the same as the omnipresent Like button, except you’d click it when something’s, well, a bummer. Starving third world children? Bummer. Gay marriage voted down? Bummer. Sharon Angle up two in the polls? Bummer. Foursquare check-in with an overcooked burger and soggy fries? Big bummer!

Facebook measures Likes and Comments as “interactions”. I bet that a Bummer Button would double Facebook interactions. We want to let a friend know we’re thinking about them without getting too involved. It absolves us of guilt while showing solidarity.

There are those who advocate a Facebook Dislike Button. I’m not one of them. Disliking is a button of judgment. It can be too easily interpreted as criticism of the decision to post in the first place. Rand Paul sucks on Aqua Buddha. Dislike! What exactly did you dislike? Rand Paul? Aqua Buddha? Sucking? Or the fact its posted in the first place?

So what am I going to do about it? Well, I guess I’ll start a Facebook Bummer Button page. Rather ironic that if you support the idea of a Bummer Button, you’ll need to Like it first. Kind of a bummer…

Following is a list of 10 things to know about SEO, and why a website owner should consider SEO for their site. This isn’t mean to be a primer on how to do SEO, but rather an overview with some basic knowledge about what SEO is good for, and what to look out for.

• SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
• SEO puts your website’s content in better context for the search engines. Each page on your website should be optimized for the content on that page.
• SEO is used to reach people looking for what you offer without knowing that you exist.
• Regularly creating content, such as blog posts, articles and press releases, greatly helps enhance a website’s search engine presence.
• SEO is primarily based on three things: on-page optimization (such as the Meta Title and many more elements), incoming links (or backlinks) to your website, and domain longevity.
• At lower budgets, SEO works best when targeting local customers or very specific products and services you offer.
• The broadest keyword phrases are far more competitive, and produce much less relevant traffic. Therefore, an effective strategy is to focus on more granular keyword phrases, i.e. “ventura web design services” instead of a keyword like “design”.
• A stats program like Google Analytics is essential to understanding how well your SEO efforts are going. Look for the “Keywords” section, which tells you what people are searching for in Google to have found your website.
• Once a search engine has indexed your site, you do not need to re-submit your site to that search engine. Certainly, don’t pay for it!
• A website owner should consider learning the basics, and do some optimization on every bit of content that is produced. An SEO expert can always refine these efforts later.

And a bonus item:

• You can’t use SEO to trick the search engines for any extensive period of time, because let’s face it – Google knows search far better than any of us could possibly hope to. Stick to the fundamentals, whether you are doing SEO yourself or outsourcing it to a firm.

Questions or comments?

(photo credit: mshobi)

Holy cow, this looks fantastic – view the next-generation browser from the Firefox team, incorporating a feature set they call Tab Candy.   Organization into groups, multiple profiles, searchable notes, sharing of tabs and groups of tabs, concurrent browsing – some absolutely incredible features.

In the video, they do mention performance, unloading content from memory and other ways to address what currently loads a lot of memory.   If they can deliver on what they show in its current Alpha state without Firefox becoming bloatware, I bet they capture an additional 5-10% of market share in the first six months.

I currently use Firefox as my primary browser, and Safari secondarily.  I’ve chosen Firefox not because its the fastest (its hard to keep up with Chrome and Safari is pretty snappy too), but because of the third-party plugins, most notably FoxClocks, MeasureIt and SEO For Firefox.

Add in all the great Tab Candy features and this becomes a formidable application.  I haven’t been excited about a software app like this in quite some time.  Can you tell?

We're all rats in Google's maze

…and what else does Google have its fingers into?

Aaron Wall and PPCBlog put together a fantastic flowchart showing how Google works.  As Aaron prefaces it, this probably won’t be accurate in the years to come, because Google is on such a rapid development path.  It might not even be accurate by the end of this year.

I have been paying increasing attention to Google’s wider initiatives the last year or so, beyond the tools that I use heavily for clients, such as Google AdWords, Analytics, Places and TV Ads.

Google has been making huge investments in mobile marketing for instance and obviously their mapping initiatives are top notch.  What you may not know is that Google is active in the Consumer Packaged Goods vertical, as well as retail in general.  And how about Google Energy, which has been granted power utility status by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission?

Anyway, back to the subject – the flowchart above is such a great visualization tool because it’s so difficult to explain the complexity inherent in a single search, and the value of good content creation, search engine optimization and pay-per-click management.

Facebook recently changed a key element of Facebook Pages, where the notion of having Fans (and thus having a Fanbase) was changed to “people who Like the Page”. Or Those Who Like Pages Formerly Known as Fans. Or The Knights Who No Longer Say Ni.

I’ve received a number of laughs, if not outright guffaws, at the mention of how many “Likers” one might have. “Hello Likers!” began one status update that received more thumbs up than anything else I’ve posted in a long time.

My associate evan austin of the Ojai Peace Coalition today came up with the phrase Likebase. Likebase, hmmm… I think I like it. Why not, I thought?

So for lack of a better term, I’m going with Likebase. It’s tongue-in-cheek and obviously a little silly, but it beats the heck out of saying “Likers” which makes me sound completely illiterate.  Likebase it is.

What’s Google Places? It’s the new re-branded Local Business Center, where you can claim your business, edit your business listing and influence how your business is displayed in Google Search, Google Maps and other locally oriented Google search tools.

One of the new features is “Service Areas”, where you can identify the geographic area you serve, whether its a city, a radius of x miles around a defined point (marker location), or a polygon on the map that identifies a service area.

Something curious happened when I was working on a client’s Places page. This client services their customers at their homes. There’s an option when editing a Google Places page to check or un-check a box labeled “Do not show my business address on my Maps listing.” This had been unchecked (so that the business address did show), and I decided to check it and watch the stats for a week. The client still had their service area (stretching multiple counties in Southern California) identified on the map.

The stats weren’t promising and the keywords that triggered the listing were far less relevant and slightly less frequent than when the business address showed up in the listing. But worse, the business was showing as being located in another nearby city to its actual location. This was primarily due to an old listing on a third party site that Google appears to be using as a trusted information source.

So here’s the curious part. When I unchecked the box, so that the address would show again, it set the marker location for the business about 20 miles to the south, on a small island off the California coast.

This showed up on every search I could think of. Businesses that are in the same commercial building were showing up properly, but my client’s business was located on a deserted island, with nothing but sea birds and possibly a naturalist or two as prospective clients.

I (finally) fixed it – its officially called an “Incorrect Marker Location” – here are instructions on how to do so:

When logged in to Google Places, you’ll see the Dashboard, which contains stats in the main column, and abbreviated business info in the right sidebar.

In the right sidebar, click the Edit button next to “Your Business Info”

You should see the your marker location (and service area if applicable) on the Google Map in the right sidebar. Just below it, there’s a link that says “Fix incorrect marker location”. Click it.

You’ll get a pop-up Google Map, where you can drag the marker location to wherever the business actually resides.

You can zoom in and out with the controls in the upper left if you have a fair distance to travel. I had to pull up a different Google Map in a separate browser tab, to fine tune the location based on other local businesses.

Save Changes.

That’s it – it propagated across all listings within a few minutes. Hope this helps.

I got a kick out of the latest Nigerian banking spam email. Fed Chair Ben Bernanke dropped me a nice note to let me know that the federal government of Nigeria sent him $10.5 million to pass on to me. He even congratulated me on my inheritance fund! Spam emails like this seem quaint in comparison to the more sophisticated and well-cloaked phishing schemes, where it appears that Paypal or BofA or Chase is sending an important notification requiring its recipients to login and provide sensitive information. As always, watch what you click.

From: MR. BEN S. BERNANKE
Subject: SPAM Contract fund credit from bank federal reserve board
Date: March 22, 2010 12:53:44 PM PDT
Reply-To: frb_500@bk.tc

Federal Reserve Banks
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
33 LIBERTY STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10038,

Attn: Honourable beneficiary,

Contract fund credit from bank federal reserve board

This is to let you know that we received a payment credit instruction from the federal government of Nigeria to credit your account with your full inheritance fund of us$10.5million from the Nigerian reserve account with our bank.

However, what we required from you is your banking particulars where you want your fund to be transferred.

{1}. Your full name and address
{2}. Your telephone, and fax
{3). Your bank name and address
{4). Your a/c name and numbers
(5). Your swift code / routing numbers
(6) .Your current occupation

Be informed that transfer will commence immediately we hear from you with the account information. Once more, bank Federal Reserve board will not hesitates to credit your account within 24hours in accordance with fund release order regulations.

Your immediate response is highly needed to enable us commence for the transfer.

Thanks for banking with Federal Reserve Bank while we looking forward to serving you better.

Congratulation to your inheritance fund.

Thanks and God bless you.

Regards,
Mr. Ben s. Bernanke
Director Federal Reserve Bank New York,

or “Why You’re Not #1 in Google for mortgage“

As small business owners, I think we all attempt to get a basic understanding of the mechanics of each area of our business, even if we outsource it. Having an understanding of accounting, operations, procurement, warehousing, etc. is important, and allows the proprietor to get a more accurate 50,000 foot view of the business.

That basic understanding of what is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often simplified to the following:

I heard that I need to put keywords on a page in order to show up on the first page of Google for {insert a single massively competitive word here, like mortgage, pilates, dentists or autism}.

Here’s why the over-simplification doesn’t translate to the expected results.

1. The target keyword phrases are overly broad
2. The website doesn’t have many incoming links
3. There is little relevant content on the page
4. There is no long tail of content
5. The website is on a young domain

The target keyword phrases are overly broad

The broader your target keywords are, the more competitive they will naturally be. Get a sense of who the competition might be for these increasingly targeted searches:

• workout
• workout clubs
• los angeles workout clubs
• 24 hour mid-wilshire workout clubs

As you narrow your target, something else interesting happens: the person that visits your site finds what you offer to be increasingly relevant, and is more likely to take an action, such as signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase.

Making the assumption that you can compete at the highest, broadest levels will cost you money and produce an endless source of frustration. Competing for very targeted keywords is attainable for any business and contributes to a web marketing foundation on which you continue to build over time.

Your homepage is (almost) always going to carry more weight than your other pages, and the first words in your meta title will be your strongest. So if you or someone else optimizes your home page for your primary target keyword phrase, and you aren’t competitive for it (i.e. in the top 10 in the google search for that target keyword phrase), consider getting more targeted and keep reading below about incoming links.

The website doesn’t have many incoming links

Incoming links (or Inlinks, where another website links to your website) are extremely important for this reason: in order to get a lot of incoming links, you need to have good content that people find valuable. When websites link to your content, particularly large high-traffic websites, it conveys that you are an authority on your topics and worth paying attention to.

The flip side is this: if no one links to you, why should Google care?

Run this test:

• search on google for one of the big, popular words you think you should rank well for, like shoes or car repair.
• note the URL of the first result
• go to Yahoo Site Explorer, and enter your website’s URL
• click “Inlinks” “Except from this domain” to “Entire Site”
• note the number of Inlinks
• now do the same thing for that #1 result in google

If you aren’t already competitive for that term you tried, I would bet that the Inlinks of the #1 result URL are a factor of at least 10 if not 100 greater than your site.

Now try the same test on a more granular “keyword phrase” (two or more words) that more accurately describes your business. Going local is even better – santa monica dentist, ventura childcare, refinancing santa barbara.

The #1 result, if its not yet you, should be much more in your league. The exceptions are when the large database-driven sites such as Yahoo or Travelocity clog the top of the results, but that’s another post, another day, and you should still have a shot at the first page of results.

So the takeaway is that no matter what optimization you do to your website, you have to build incoming links to your website by creating great content, sharing it on the social networks, listing your site in directories and resource guides and using your URL whenever you promote your business.

There’s little relevant content on the page

Optimization is putting the content of a page in better context. You can not optimize a page for 50 different keywords and expect to be competitive.

I find that each page should be optimized for two or three keyword phrases which directly correlate to the content on the page. Your page on “custom blue vinyl widgets” could be optimized for blue vinyl widgets, custom widgets and vinyl widgets by color.

Attempting to “sneak in” or “stuff” keywords isn’t going to fool Google – they have dealt with people trying to game the system for over ten years.

The page of content itself should have 2-4 paragraphs of well-written text that contain the keyword phrases and/or variations of them. One critique of online stores is that there often isn’t enough descriptive text for each product, therefore the products don’t rank as well as they could for targeted searches.

An addendum to this point: websites built in Flash, with very little exception, have poor search engine positioning. Any small business owner interested in search engine traffic should avoid contracting for a Flash website where the majority of the content isn’t in HTML-style pages (I say HTML-style, because database driven websites, where files are .php, .asp, .cfm, etc. can be quite effective in search engine optimization).

There is no long tail of content

So how do you then increase your visibility for many different keyword searches? You continue to create good content for your website. As you add pages to your site, it creates a “long tail”, where traffic trickles in to all of your pages, creating an increasing amount of overall traffic.

A blog is a great way to do this – creating two new blog posts a week focused on some keyword phrases that your site isn’t well optimized for will help build your overall traffic. Consider how people use your products and services – the above widget vendor might consider writing a blog post entitled “How To Clean Blue Vinyl Widgets.”

Other websites and blogs may find this valuable and link to it, helping to establish the widget vendor as an authority on blue vinyl widgets and how to clean them. That authority is reflected in search engine results and the perception of the company in the eyes of its audience.

Note that the blog’s domain needs to be the same as yours to have the full search engine impact you are looking for. In other words, tribalcore.com/blog is more impactful than if we were to have a blog at tribalcore.blogspot.com.

The website is on a young domain

The search engine optimization stool has three legs: on-page optimization, incoming links and domain longevity.

By domain longevity, we mean: how long has there been a consistently accessible website at that domain? Check your domain or your competitors at The Wayback Machine.

The first website at www.tribalcore.com was put up in 2003, and has gone through four major revisions since then, the most recent being this month.

So even though the content has changed, the domain has had content up consistently for seven years. That contributes significantly to our search engine presence for the various keyword phrases we are optimized for.

An assumption that clients make is that search engine optimization has an immediate “silver bullet” impact even on the newest of sites. Quite the contrary, where SEO really shines is on an older domain with great content. Having a site up at least six months if not a year is about the threshold for contributing to search engine results.

Summary

A keyword strategy includes researching keyword phrases, creating great content around those keywords, and optimizing your pages accordingly. And that’s a solid step forward and a good piece of the puzzle.

As a small business owner, keep in mind that you also need plenty of incoming links, a commitment to produce content on a regular basis and the patience required for new websites without domain longevity to find their legs.

Your next step is to get your home page optimized for your target keyword phrase, see how you rank, do some incoming link research, and read through this article again to see what you’re not doing as well as you should be.

Small business owners occasionally have to wade into the murky waters of domain registration and management (not to mention nameservers and advanced dns). It can be tricky to figure out what points where, and how to make changes so that everything points where it should.   Here’s an overview of how your domain is managed, the difference between Nameservers and Advanced DNS and where to head when its time to make a change.

The registrar is the place where you register a new domain – godaddy.com, networksolutions.com, register.com and name.com (my preference) are examples of registrars.   The hosting provider is where your actual web files sit on a server.   These web files might include HTML, images and a database.   

Your domain records will always have a set of two or three Nameservers listed.  Nameservers are the whole ball of wax – you are saying that for anything that has to do with the domain, go where the Nameservers are.   When you first register a domain, the Nameservers point towards the registrar.

Whoever controls the Nameservers for your domain also controls the DNS (which stands for Domain Name System).   Managing the DNS allows you to more finely control your domain.   For example, you may want one company to host all of your email, another company to host your website and Google Apps to host your group calendars.   You use Advanced DNS to point A records, CNAME records and MX records to different locations to accomplish these various setups.

When you build your website, the hosting provider generally says one of two things: point your Nameservers to us, or point an A record to us.  If the hosting provider says point your Nameservers to us, then they are responsible for managing the DNS, which would mean that either you have access to make Advanced DNS changes through an admin they provide or you have to request DNS changes from them.   If the hosting provider says point an A record at us, it means they are only responsible for the web hosting and FTP access to your web files.

The most important thing to remember is that if you have to make a DNS change (such as a request to point an A record to a new location), you have to make that change with the company that is hosting the Nameservers.    It is most likely one of two places: the registrar, where you first registered your domain, or the hosting provider that hosts your website.