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Facebook has become something that no business can deny having a strong presence on.  Just as how having an actual website was optional for a business 10 years ago but is now mandatory, we are quickly reaching the tipping point where having a Facebook page for your business will no longer be optional.

Many businesses have recognized this need and have rushed to put something up on Facebook for their business, but this often produces hastily thrown together pages that might be better off not existing at all.  Today I want to look at a few things that we see many businesses doing wrong on Facebook.

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The last two years have shown that the computer industry is quickly changing. More mobile electronic devices are being purchased and the traditional classic computer towers are being used less and less. Steve Jobs was right when he said that “PCs are going to be like Trucks” and used only for heavy computing.

It has become common to grab a tablet computer like the iPad or use your smart phone to search for information on the web. Each month the number of individuals browsing the web on tablets or smart phones is increasing and this trend is expected to continue strongly into the future.

Tablet computers like the iPad are becoming a center piece of consumer use. Additionally half of all CIOs are planning on using a tablet device in their corporations.

This growth is particularly important for websites in industries related to travel and media. It’s not uncommon for people to browse for vacations or view trailers for upcoming movies while sitting in bed or on the couch with a tablet device.

The expectation that use of tablet and mobile devices will continue to grow has led many to wonder, “Is my website mobile friendly?”.

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We recently designed and built an e-commerce website for a client using WordPress and the WP e-Commerce plug-in as our platform.  We customized the heck out of GetShopped’s WP E-commerce plug-in because our client had some very specific and intricate requirements for calculating shipping, and thankfully we found the plug-in pretty easy to modify.  The AJAX functionality, coupon code customizations, and flexible payment gateways (among other things) all seemed really well built. You can see the website here:  The Optic Zone.

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A few months ago Google announced their response to the successful social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Google+ was instantly haralded as an improvement to the social approaches the search giant had previously attempted, Google Buzz. And while initial numbers for the growth of Google+ were astounding, the long term viability of a social network that competes directly with Facebook was still in question.

A few months have passed and its becoming more clear that Google+ is not the long term success that Google and its employees were hoping for. Pageviews and interactions on the site continue to fall and most recently it appears that Google is doing everything it can to push the product infront of more and more people. It is even beginning to feel like Google is getting desperate for social relevance. (more…)

We’ve been managing a number of Twitter accounts for a while now, and have concocted and tested several different strategies to increase follower counts.  Some of the things we tested were very ‘white hate’, while others…. lets just say they were probably on the wrong side of Twitter’s Terms of Service.  What I want to talk about today is one of the methods that has proven successful in gaining new followers for brand Twitter accounts.  While this method could be used with some success on personal accounts, my focus for this article is on Twitter accounts that are associated with websites in a particular niche.

You’ll hear a number of gurus say, “it doesn’t matter how many followers you have, its all about engagement.”  While this may be true, if you only have 20 followers, there isn’t a lot of engaging to be had.  Sometimes you need more followers, and this method works.

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With the release of Google+ the company made a push to change the overall design of their most important web properties, including their search results page. It appears that they’re also interested in adjusting the way they display sitelinks for web properties.

Earlier tonight we started seeing Google results with the sitelink layout displayed in the picture below.

Over the past year the most links we saw in the sitelink section was 6 but often it was even less than that. Google periodically did not display sitelinks but instead showed up to 5 results from the brand or website. With this adjustment, many of the links that take up the top 10 results are now appearing in the sitelinks section, allowing more results from other sites to be included on the first page of Google Search results.

What Does This Mean for Reputation Management?

If this test appears to be successful and makes its way to the mainstream search results it will definitely have an impact on Online Reputation Management efforts for brand names. Previously, many ORM companies relied on pages from a domain or their sub-domains to take up most the positions in the top 10.

With this adjustment a wider collection of sites will be displayed on page 1, making it more important that your brand image be strong and positive.

On the other hand, this adjustment is also giving a significant amount of screen real-estate to a website or brands domain and pages. Managing this feature in Google Webmaster tools will be critical to ensure that you’re driving traffic to sections of the website that you feel is most important.

With the increased screen real-estate I also imagine that the sites that appear towards the bottom of the first page CTR will decrease significantly. It will be less likely for searchers to scroll past all of the domain pages and information to find other sites that have something to say about a website or brand name.

What do you think about the new sitelink layout Google is testing? How will it impact your site, brand, or clients?

We were recently introduced to the Grammarly tool and we’ve been having a blast with it.  Grammarly is a ridiculously powerful Grammar check tool that has a lot of interesting uses for online marketing, content marketing, SEO, and writing in general.  We’ve been using it to QA all of the content that we publish online for ourselves and our clients and the results have been great. It results in content that is more professional because it is error free, and it also suggests different words to use instead of standard/generic adjectives to bring about more interest and flair in the piece of content.

Grammarly bills itself as the “world’s most accurate grammar checker”.  Although our exposure to grammar and spelling tools is limited to those squiggly red and green lines that Microsoft Word uses, we certainty don’t disagree with the tagline.  The depth of the scans and the explanations are lightyears beyond what you get out of those colored underlines in Word.

The process for using Grammarly is pretty straight forward.  You login to the website with either a username/password or through your Facebook account and you are taken directly to a large input screen (pictured below).  You simply copy and paste your text into this box and click the big button to begin the scan.  It takes just a minute or so and what you get back is a rich set of findings and recommendations.  Simple interfaces like this are great; there aren’t a bunch of checkboxes or setting screens, it is just very clean and simple to use.

Grammarly also has a tool that plugs directly into Microsoft Word.  It makes the power of Grammarly just one click away from a Word document.  As soon as you click the Grammarly button in Word, your document content is put right into the Grammarly website tool for analysis.

One of the great parts about Grammarly is that many colleges and universities across the United States have purchased blanket memberships for all of their students to take advantage of.  Knowing that Grammarly has prestigious institutions such as UC Irvine, Alabama State, and George Mason (my alma mater) as customers who have purchased the tool for their student population provides a level of comfort as a customer, knowing that some very smart people in academia have approved of it. Its also a nice benefit for the students at those colleges to have the tool available to them for unlimited use for free.

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Update:  This change by Google was short-lived.  About a week after they blacklisted ‘scam’ they added it back.  Many companies are again dealing with this Online Reputation Management issue.  If you need assistance with this or a similar problem, let us know.

In a move that is making waves through the Online Reputation Management community, Google has blacklisted the word ‘scam’ from its Autocomplete (formerly called ‘Google Autosuggest’) algorithm.  For those not familiar with what this all means, here is some background on the issue.

Google Autocomplete Background

As you probably know, when you begin to type a search phrase into Google, a number of keywords drop down as you type, suggesting queries that maybe of interest to you.  For instance, if I begin to type in ‘Kmart’, Google recommends some other keywords that I might be interested in, such as ‘Kmart coupon’, ‘Kmart locations’, etc.

Google Autocomplete Suggests that a Company May be a Scam

While many companies have no problems or issues with what Google suggests, there is a not-so-small group of business, products, and services that have struggled with Google over the words that it is choosing to suggest.  Take the company ‘Direct Buy’ for example:

Direct Buy is a membership club for furniture… I think of it as sort of a very expensive Costco that just sells furniture and other household goods for what they claim are cheaper prices.  So, lets say you are considering joining Direct Buy and paying their membership price which runs into the several thousands of dollars range.  Most people, before taking that plunge, will do a bit of research on the company.  I would start with Google, and if I began to type in ‘Direct Buy’ and was presented with ‘Direct Buy scam’, you can believe I’m going to click on that and investigate the allegations.

This problem afflicted tens of thousands of companies.  Using a combination of scraping Ripoffreport.com and running the scraped data through the unofficial Google Autocomplete API, we quickly identified hundreds of companies that had this problem.  Some are actual scams, while others are real, legitimate companies that have just a few unhappy customers who have taken to the internet with a vengeance.  Some of the companies we identified with the ‘scam’ autocomplete issue were:

• Amway
• Aflac
• Prepaid Legal
• FreeCreditReport.com
• The Ladders
• Kevin Trudeau
• Classmates.com
• Matthew Lesko
• Herbalife

However, as of Monday, March 28th, it appears all of this has changed.  Whether a company is truly a scam or not, it appears that google has blacklisted the term ‘scam’ from being included in Google Autocomplete.  As such, all of the aforementioned companies and individuals no longer need to worry about consumers being nudged to examine if they are a scam or not.  It appears that ‘rip off’ is also blacklisted, while ‘ripoff’ is not  – way to not be thorough, Google. Take a look at Direct Buy’s Autocomplete as of today:

For those companies that are legitimate, and are not scams, this is a great day.  Previously, it took just a few unhappy customers, disgruntled former employees, or unscrupulous competitors to complain in enough places to influence Google into suggesting ‘scam’ along with a brand name.  For these companies, this blacklisting change is right and just.  However, for outfits that are true scams, the real people hurt here are consumers – they will no longer be hinted by Google that something may be a scam.

Hat tip to Distilled for first picking up on this.

In any industry, there are high-quality and low-quality providers.  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is no different, but it can be very hard to spot the ‘good guys’ from the ‘not-so-good guys’ in SEO (and any other serviced based business) because there is no physical product that you can put your hands on and inspect for quality or lack thereof.  Aside from the standard references and proof of past experience, I’d like to share a few SEO techniques that are definite red flags.  If your SEO company is touting any of the following techniques, run (don’t walk) to a more reputable SEO firm – like MangoCo

It can be hard to keep all of the SEO Jargon straight:

“We’ll Submit Your Site to the Search Engines”

This sales offering is very misleading, and even big companies such as Verizon can’t resist touting it.  Submitting your website to Google is SEO taboo – you should never use their submission tool.  If you read this article, you’ll see that people have tested submitting sites to Google to see if that is an effective way for the Big G to add you to the index, and the short answer is that ‘it isn’t’.  Our conjecture on this is that, if Google thinks you should be in their index, they will find you.  Google finds you by following links on other people’s websites.  Google reasons (we believe), that if you are worthy of being linked to, then you are probably worthy of being indexed.  Google probably thinks that, if you have to resort to submitting your site to Google, then its probably because nobody else on the internet thinks you are worth suggesting/promoting/linking to.

And…anyway…. who uses any other search site besides Google, Yahoo, or Bing?  What are those other 100+ search engines that they put you on?  Sounds like a waste of time and a false sales pitch.

If you really want to get indexed by Google quickly, the best thing you can do is get someone to link to your new website.  You can do this by calling on a favor from a friend, writing an article for an article directory such as eZine Articles, or creating a profile on a content-based social media site such as Squidoo or HubPages.

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Many small businesses across the country begin their SEO campaigns with dreams of being able to quickly rank for their market’s key phrases. Unfortunately, ranking on the front page of Google for phrases like “Jobs” or “Pest Control” means that you’re often competing with major brands or franchises who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars each year on marketing efforts, including SEO. Small businesses often look at this challenge and decide to compete for more local keywords such as “Dallas Jobs” or “Norfolk Pest Control”.

Local vs. General

General Keywords are essentially the market keywords. Often one to two words about any particular topic or industry make up a general keyword. These keywords do not include specific location modifiers. An example would be the keyword “Pest Control”.

Local keywords are often the market keyword plus a location. For example, if I was hoping to rank in the search engines for Pest Control assistance in Washington DC, I’d focus my efforts on ranking for terms like “Pest Control DC”, “Pest Control Washington D.C”., and “Washington D.C. Pest Control”.

People are more likely to enter General Keywords into the search bar when looking for any particular service or idea. We can see the differences between general search and local search numbers below.

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