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.

1.  Losing ‘Likes’ by Sending Visitors to Your Wall Instead of a Custom Page

When someone hits your FaceBook page for the first time, your one and only goal should be to get them to click ‘Like’.  Worrying about anything else is trivial, and (for the most part) everything will fall into place if you focus on getting the ‘Like’ first. Once they click Like, you’ll be able to communicate with the new fan via posts and status updates that will hit their personal newsfeed.

We’ve seen various studies stating that 85-98% of people who visit your FB Page will never actually visit it again.  This means that you must obtain the like on their first visit if you ever hope to communicate with that person again.  They likely aren’t ever going to visit your wall or checkout any of your fancy applications if they haven’t already become a fan of your business page so first get the like, then invite them to your fancy applications.

So then, why do so many businesses send people directly to their wall when a new visitor finds their page?  The wall is set as the default page by Facebook, and it does an awful, terrible job at getting people to click the ‘Like’ button on the page.  There is no call to action nor a clear message of what visitors are suppose to do.  Contrast that with a Custom Facebook Page geared towards a clear message and a call to action to click the ‘Like’ button.

Here is an example from Coca-Cola, who sends first time visitors to a custom Facebook page. Look at the difference between their custom page and the default wall.  The custom page probably obtains 5-10 times as many likes as the Wall would.

If you don’t know how to design and create a Custom Facebook Page that will compel people to click ‘Like’, just shoot us an email or give us a call – we’ve done a bunch of these.

2.  Killing Your Visibility by Being Too Boring

I mentioned above that once you get a person to “Like” your page, your status updates and posts will show in their newsfeed.  This statement is true, to an extent.  The catch is that Facebook has an algorithm called ‘EdgeRank’ that controls which updates exactly will show up in the newsfeed and which are hidden, and its different for everyone.

Why is EdgeRank necessary?  Lets look at an example.  Say you have 350 friends on Facebook and you’ve ‘Liked’ 50 or so pages (these add up quickly: books, TV shows, brands, non-profits, etc).  Facebook has decided that it is probably too overwhelming if they show in your newsfeed every activity from all of these friends, brands, movies, etc.  So their algorithm uses signals such as what you click on, what updates you like, what you are commenting on, etc to determine if it shows you updates from a certain person or page in the future – this is EdgeRank.

Can you see how being boring on Facebook kills your visibility? If you put out long paragraphs of boring text or ugly images, or (God-Forbid) auto-post stuff from your blog – you are being boring!

And if you are being boring, nobody will interact with your updates on Facebook.

And if nobody interacts with your stuff on Facebook, your updates will no longer show up for anybody.

And if your updates no longer show up for anybody…. whats the point of being on Facebook?

So don’t be boring, be interesting and do things that will illicit interactions.  You may find yourself asking “How Can I be Interactive?”

Here are a few quick ideas to get you started:

• Ask questions that people will want to answer.  The easier it is for someone to answer, the better!  For example, “What’s Better:  Snickers or Butterfinger?”  A simple question like that can illicit a lot of responses – so think of a similar simple question that is related to your brand/industry and get your Facebook Fans interacting with your Facebook Page.
• Post something controversial.  Is there a controversial topic in your industry?  If so, post an image or graph about it, and ask for 1 sentence opinions.
• Post an interesting/funny picture and ask for a caption.
• Write a powerful statement, and ask people to click “Like” if they agree.  Easy, right?

3.  Disconnecting With Your Audience by Speaking The Wrong Language

Social media is very casual and comfortable.  People get on Facebook to relax, decompress, and have fun.  You need to meet them in this place.  That means that you want your brand’s Facebook page to be a more fun version of its real-world self… Think “Your brand at Happy Hour”.

All too often brand’s treat their Facebook page like an extension of their professional websites.  The thing is:  Websites aren’t social, Facebook is.  And people on Facebook want to engage and interact with things they view as fun, not stiff.

One easy way to be natural and connect with your audience is through the words and language you choose.

The language you use on Facebook is very dependent on your target audience.  Whatever you have identified that audience to be – use words that to speak directly to them.

Lets say you target men and women ages 22 to 30.  For this age group, I’d use a lot of slang and hipster language.  Think more words like “woot”, “omg”, and “awesomesauce” and less “neat”, “great”, and “fantastic”.

For an older audience, I’d be more inclined to invoke a feeling of nostalgia.  I’d use quotes and references from popular older tv shoes, ask more about children (and possibly grandchildren), and talk about how much things have changed. Again, relate to your audience as best as possible – don’t be stiff or use boring/generic language and clichés that nobody can relate to.

Final Thoughts

The theme around all of this is to be interesting and engaging on Facebook.  Use a custom Facebok Page as the default page to get people to instantly Like you.  Then post interesting content and updates using casual and relatable language to get people to engage with you.  Doing this will mean a healthy, growing Facebook fan base that will keep your brand top-of-mind and will buy your products and services when they are in the market.

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?”.

How Much Mobile Traffic Hits Your Website?

While I believe that it is important that all website be mobile and tablet friendly, it does make sense to prioritize your budget related to when you make improvements to your company’s online presence. To do this, I suggest identifying how much mobile traffic your website receives now. If it is a significant amount, it may be time to invest in improving your website to make it more mobile friendly.

To check the amount of mobile traffic your website receives you’ll need a traffic analytics service that can identify mobile traffic verses visitors that come to your site from traditional computers. We use Google Analytics with our clients and setting up analytics to identify mobile and tablet traffic is quick and easy.

• First, login to your Google Analytics account and select the new version of Analytics if you haven’t already done so.
• Select your website and then click the Advanced Segment button.



• Next, you’ll need to create a custom segment. To do this click the new custom segment button.



• On the next screen you’ll need to give your Custom Segment a name. I usually name this “Mobile Traffic”.
• After you’ve given the custom segment a name you’ll need to configure the segment to only include traffic from mobile operating systems. Select Include >> Operating System >> that Matches Exactly >> iPhone, iPad, Android, and BlackBerry.



• At this point you can click the Preview Button to see how much mobile traffic your website is getting. When the preview has finished loading, the graph below will show you the daily mobile traffic you website has received over the last 30 days.



• After previewing the segment, click Save to add it to your Custom Segments list.

With your custom segment created, you can view information about mobile visitors to your website by selecting the segment from the Advanced Segment button we mentioned earlier. Then use Google Analytics as you normally would to review information about visitors to your site from mobile devices.

Look at Traffic Over Time

Now that you’ve created a mobile segment in Google Analytics you should start to investigate the traffic trends from mobile visitors to your site. Is traffic from the mobile segment pointing upwards over the last 2 years? If so, you can expect this pattern to continue.

This means more visitors to your site via the iPhone, iPad, and Android phones. It also means that if your website is not optimized for these devices,then you may drive away potential clients.

Additional Insights

Creating this mobile segment can also provide additional information to help you and your business. You can find out information such as how mobile traffic behavior compares to users that visit the site on traditional computers. This information can be very valuable to your business as nearly half of all tablet owners have already made a purchase on their tablet device.

The information you can investigate includes:

• Do mobile visitors leave your site faster?
• Is mobile traffic viewing less pages?
• Is the amount of time they spend on your site significantly less than users that visit your site through a computer browser?

If you’re seeing these things then your site is probably more difficult to use on mobile devices.

What Site’s Don’t Work on Mobile Devices?

One type of site that will not work on the iPhone, iPad, and many Android phones are those that are built entirely with Flash. Additionally, if your website has a Flash banner than site visitors on many mobile devices will not be able to see that banner.

While your site may not have flash and technically can be viewed on mobile devices it may not be optimized for an easy user experience. For example, if your site has lots of tiny links that are difficult to navigate or select with a finger it can make the user experience difficult and drive traffic away from your site.

Check Your Site

The best way to check to see if your site is mobile friendly is to visit the site from a mobile device. Does it look right. Does it load quickly? Is it easy to navigate? Would you do business with a company who’s website works the way yours does?

If things aren’t loading correctly or are difficult to navigate, your site needs improvement to keep up with the market. Often these changes can be made quickly and do not have to cost a significant amount of money.

Get Help

If your site needs assistance to make it more mobile friendly let us help! We offer services that include:

• Mobile Traffic Identification
• Mobile Website Design
• Flash Free Interactive Website
• Mobile User Behavior Analysis – Understand how your mobile users use your site and take advantage of it

Feel free to give us a call or reach us through our contact form on this site.

One of the requirements for the website was that it must be PCI compliant.  PCI is short for Payment Card Industry, and specifically the PCI Data Security Standard.  It is a set of server, website, and business requirements to ensure that the website and credit card data are secure from hackers.  The major merchant account websites that businesses use to process credit card payments require their customers have PCI compliant websites.

We did a lot of searching for information on PCI compliance for WP E-commerce, but there wasn’t a whole lot out there to find.  So, I thought I’d document some of the things that helped us pass the client’s SecurityMetrics automated scan.

Website Architecture

Here are a few particulars you should know about our website architecture:

• Server: Hosting was on a VPS from a well-known VPS hosting company. It is the only website hosted on this particular virtual machine.
• Operating System: We are running the latest version of a well known Linux OS.  For security reasons, I won’t give it here, but its a popular one.
• WordPress: We are running the later version of WordPress – (at this time, WP 3.2.1, although we’ll continually upgrade as new versions are released)
• WP e-Commerce Plug-in: For security reasons, I don’t want to give the WP E-commerce version we are using (but its inconsequential for gaining PCI compliance anyway)
• WP Plugins: We run a couple of popular WP plug-ins, but not a ton.

Selective SSL

We used the WordPress plug-in HTTPS for WordPress to put SSL on specific pages.  This meant that the site was simply in ‘HTTP’ most of the time your were browsing, but as soon as you viewed your cart or hit a login page, it switched to ‘HTTPS’ and stayed that way.  We found this met our needs nicely as we didn’t really feel it was necessary to to put the whole site under ‘HTTPS’. Configuring it this way was PCI compliant, and didn’t add the extra weight of being a completely ‘HTTPS’ website.

Automated PCI Compliance Scan

Our client hired SecurityMetrics to review their PCI compliance.  The client fell into ‘PCI Compliance Level 4′, which basically meant that they had to pass the automated security scan and a business assessment test to be deemed compliant.  The first time the site was run through the scan it failed – but none of the flagged issues had anything to do with the website software; all issues were server setting and versioning related.  We were able to fix most of the issues pretty quickly by hand.  Again, we didn’t have to change anything on WordPress or WP e-commerce.

There were two issues that we couldn’t resolve.  The scan didn’t like the versions of SSH and SSL that we were running, and because it wasn’t a straightforward upgrade for this OS, we filed a request to SecurityMetrics for them to manually approve our versions.  We were using an up-to-date OS, and the vulnerabilities they associated with the versions of SSH and SSL we were using had been fixed via backports in the OS.  To appeal, we simply wrote up a 3 page document with some supporting information and screenshots.  After exchanging a couple of emails with them (they were very slow to respond… about once every 7 days), they manually lowered the remaining issues and it passed!

Getting Your Site PCI Compliant

What we learned is that getting a WP e-commerce site PCI compliant is much more about your server settings than it is about the software.  I will say that you won’t get your site certified if you are using cheap or shared hosting.  You are really going to need root access (full control) over your box to adjust any settings that the scan takes issue with.  Assume that it will take you around 3-10 hours to get your site tweaked just right for the automated scan.  Good luck, and let us know if you have any experiences with WP e-commerce to share!

If you are having trouble getting your website PCI compliant, we can help.  Shoot a note to info@mangoco.com.

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.

Google +1 and Search Result Pages

Shortly before making Google+ available to the public, the company released a +1 button to allow site visitors to show their support and interest in sites that had content they approved. This approach was of course preparatory for Google+, but also a move to compete with the Facebook Like button that is found across the internet. Many questioned the value of +1, but it became clear how the service could offer value if Google+ itself was a success.

Google eventually added a +1 button next to each result on their Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). The idea was that users would approve of the results by clicking the +1 icon if the page provided the information that they were looking for. But most recently it appears that very few people are engaging with the +1 icon on SERP pages. In fact, Google has recently started prompting users to click the +1 button when they return to the SERPs with a small tooltip that highlights over the +1 button and includes text like “You’ve visited this page 3 times. +1 it!”

In addition to pushing the +1 button on users of their search engine, Google also has done its best to draw attention to the Google+ link in the menu bar found on Google web properties. A few days ago Google was advertising the social network on its main search page with a large arrow pointing to the Google+ link. The advertisement coincides with the announcement that Google+ was now in open beta and available to everyone with a Google account.

Google has a dominant hold on the search engine market and it is clear that they are going to try and leverage those pageviews to propel themselves into a better position in the social networking market. So far it seems that their approach has short term validity but over the longer term users are drawn back to Facebook for social connections, Twitter for quick conversations, and LinkedIn for business connections.

Why Search and Social Don’t Easily Mix

Combining search and social is not an easy task, even for Google. I believe the reason for this is that people are not always interested in what their friends and connections have searched for on the internet. I know that I spend a lot of time searching for information and products that help me stay informed about the SEO industry. I can only think of one of my friends that would have any interest in the topics I’ve been searching.

Just because I found something valuable on a particular topic through Google’s search engine does not mean that my friends will find that same information interesting or of value. Even if they find themselves searching for the same phrases they may not feel that the result I +1′d was the best result for them. What has always made Google great is that its search engine allows users to find information that is helpful to them quickly and easily. Combining social features with SERPs may only confuse the process.

If Google is serious about establishing a social network, my suggestion would be that they do not try and squeeze into the market by leveraging (or some may argue compromising) their search engine. After all, we don’t see Facebook trying to create a search engine that competes with Google. Instead they focus on improving their social product which makes the gap between them and their competitor’s even larger.

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.

Hat tip to Michael Gray for the ideas introduced in this article!  We executed it slightly differently, which is why I wanted to write a post about it.  Michael uses some different tools and methodologies, but the concept is the same.

The Tools

What I love about this method is its elegance in simplicity.  While there are a ton of tools and methods out there that can help get you followers, this strategy is both easy and doesn’t require much more than Twitter.com and a ManageFlitter account.

ManageFlitter is a Twitter approved tool that allows you to manage who your followers are, and who you are following, in a number of different ways. The interface provides several different filters to slice and dice these users into groups.  For the purposes of this article, we are most interested in the features which tell you, of the people you are following, who:

• is not following you back
• is inactive
• doesn’t have a profile picture

These three features will help us measure our success and continually manage who we are following in an intelligible way.

The Approach

We are undertaking the tried and true method of following users in the hopes that they follow you back.  As ‘played out’ as that sounds – it still works very well.  Lets do some math!

On the account we have performed this on the most (10 times), we are seeing an average ‘follow back’ rate of 32%.  We generally do this on 200 followers at a time, which means for each run we gain roughly 64 followers.  If we did this once a week, we’d have 3,328 followers in a year.  Do you know how many people would kill to have that many real accounts following them?

So here is the method, step-by-step, to gaining more followers.

Step 1:  Identify Similar Accounts

Let’s say you run a grilling website, and are trying to build up followers for the associated Twitter account.  The first thing you need to do is determine who on Twitter currently has followers that may be interested in following you. As a grilling fan, I know that people hold Steven Raichlen in high regard – he runs BBQ University, has grill training excursions, hosts a BBQ show on PBS, writes tons of great grilling books, etc.  His followers are definitely interested in grilling.

I checkout his profile on Twitter and I see that he has 2,206 followers.  Wow, not as many as I expected, but good enough for our example.

You’ll want to find 5-10 “Steven Raichlen’s” if you will…5 to 10 people/brands on Twitter that have followers who would be interested in your grilling site/account.  I don’t know a ton of other professional grillers, so I simply Googled ‘Twitter Grilling’ and found this article:

From that article I found 4 solid accounts to follow:

1. @bbqaddicts – 2,501 Followers
2. @BarbecueRecipes – 1,916 Followers
3. @bestbarbecue – 521 Followers
4. @BBQTricks – 8,703 Followers

Perfect, now we know of five accounts that could potentially send plenty of followers our way.

Step 2:  Follow Their Users

The next step is pretty simple, we start following their followers.  But, before you do this, login to ManageFlitter and note how many people are not following you back.  This is critical to ensure you know how many followers this method helps you gain.  Its a good idea to track this all in a spreadsheet like this so that you can see your progress over time:

To start, we would go to Steven Raichlen’s account at twitter.com/sraichlen.  Then, click the ‘Followers’ tab, and ‘All Followers’ from the drop-down list.

This will bring up a list of every user following @sraichlen.  The list is ordered by when they began following his account, with his newest follower at the top and oldest follower all the way at the bottom.

From  here, just start clicking the ‘Follow’ button all the way down, counting each time you click.  As I mentioned before, we like to follow 200 users at a clip.  There are some loose rules I have about whom I don’t follow, and they are:

• People without a profile picture (it shows an egg)
• People without a bio (unless they look really legit)
• Brands/Initiatives (they don’t generally act like real users in following back)
• Foreign accounts (I don’t like seeing a language I can’t read in my stream.  If I follow them, their tweets are in my stream)

Once you are done here, your new ‘not follow back number’ will be whatever it was previously +200.  Update the spreadsheet to reflect the old number + 200 as your baseline (column C2 in the example above).

Step 3:  Watching your Numbers in ManageFlitter

The waiting game begins.  I generally don’t revisit this again for two days.  If I start following people on Monday afternoon, I’ll login to ManageFlitter on Wednesday afternoon and note down how many people are not following back.  The difference between what it was at the beginning, and what it is now, is how many followers you have gained from this process.  There are some circumstances where this number can be off by a bit, but for the most part its a pretty solid and consistent metric to go by.

Not everyone is a social media junkie (like us) that logs into Twitter 83 times a day.  As such, I like to give people 7 days to follow back before I ‘close’ the run and generate the final number of followers I’ve gained.  This is how the ‘not following back’ number looks in ManageFlitter:

Step 4:  Review Results and Unfollow Wisely

In the fictitious example above, you can see that our users gained 68 new followers, which is a ‘follow back’ rate of 34%.  If you remember, we ran this against just one of the 5 twitter accounts we identified.  The next step would be to run it against the others, spread out over time so as not to mix up the data.  Once you’ve run the process against all of them, you can see which account’s users have the best ‘follow back’ percentage.  Going forward, you’d then want to target the accounts that have users most likely to follow you back.

After a run is completed, we now have the opportunity to unfollow some users.  Because you can get into a sticky situation called Twitter Follow Churn, I’d highly recommend taking it very easy in unfollowing users who do not follow you.  I generally only unfollow users once every few months.  I’ll routinely unfollow users who have gone inactive or have deleted their bios or profile images, but I’ll only bulk ‘unfollow anyone who isn’t following back’ once ever few months.

So there you have it, a safe and effective way to get more followers.  If you have any thoughts on gaining Twitter followers, please share it with us in the comments!

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?

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.

In this post we thought we’d have a little fun with the tool and  use it to analyze those notorious Nigerian scam emails, also called 419 emails.  These emails include crazy money requests from supposed deposed kings, lawyers organizing class action lawsuits, foreign defense ministers in need of assistance, and the like. So, without further adieu, this is our ‘Grammarly Scam‘ test.

Example #1 – Mr. Mike Ole, Manager of a Bank in South Africa

Below is the first email I ran through Grammarly, and I was amazed that it scored a 0 out of 100!  My guess is that the score factors in the ‘plagiarism check’, and since this email has been published online, it trips that.  Nonetheless, this email is pretty bad when it comes to grammar, so I really hope nobody fell for this scam.  The error/notification breakdown is:

• Use of Articles:  1 Error
• Sentence Structure:  1 Error
• Passive Voice Use:  2 Times
• Writing Style:  3 Issues
• Synonyms:  13 Notifications

My favorite line in this email, which Grammarly caught as a fragment, is “Awaiting your urgent reply via my email.”  What does that even mean? Ha!

Example #2 – Mrs. Susuan Patrick

This is another fun one because of the humorous quotes it contains.  My favorites include, “My husband died as a result of brief illness called heart attack” and “I took this decision because I don’t have any child that will inherit this money.”

The scorecard is:

• Use of articles:  1 Problem
• Verb Agreement:  1 Error
• Wordiness: 1 Identified
• Passive Voice Use:  3 Issues
• Spelling:  3 Errors
• Writing Style: 5 Issues
• Vocabulary Use:  2 Problems
• Synonyms:  24 Suggestions

So this one is worse that the other scam email.  The Grammarly Scam detector rating would probably be higher for this one that the others.

Example #3 – Tasha Nicole, Regional Purchasing Manager of Smith Chemical LTD

Staring off a letter with ‘hi dear’ probably won’t get you very far when you are trying to scam somebody… and this letter does just that.  The grammar and spelling in this one is pretty bad, and our favorite quote from this one is, “The profits we will share it, you take 60% and give me 40%” – that sounds like a lyric from a rock song to me.

The errors found are as follows:

• Use of articles:  3 Issues
• Pronoun Agreement:  1 Error
• Punctuation within a sentence:  5 Issues
• Wordiness:  1 Issue Identified
• Capitalization:  1 Issue Identified
• Writing Style:  10 Issues
• Synonyms:  24 Recommendations

Final Thoughts on Grammarly

If you found this site while doing research for ‘Grammarly’, ‘Grammarly Reviews’, ‘Grammarly Scam‘, or anything else – you probably want to know if Grammarly is good or not.  What I wrote about above was some of the fun we’ve had while playing with content that is obviously riddled with errors.  Running it through Grammarly brings up all sorts of notifications and errors, and it actually does demonstrate how powerful Grammarly is at analyzing text.

However, internally, we use Grammarly on a daily basis to ensure that what we publish for our websites and our client websites meet a very high standard.  Anything published with your name or brand name tied to it is a direct reflection of your name/business, and if its full of errors, you put off unsavory signals that may lead people to draw wrong/bad conclusions about your business.  Grammarly is one of those cheap, simple, effective tools to eliminate this from ever being an issue.  Anytime you write something that is of importance, whether an email or article, running it through Grammarly gives you peace of mind that it isn’t fully of errors.  For us, it’s a no-brainer to use.

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.

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.

“We’ll Optimize Your Meta Keywords”

Meta keywords just don’t matter anymore.  Google changed the game a decade ago when they went away from keyword density and meta keywords to determine rankings.  A number of tests have shown that Google & Bing are not even aware of your meta keywords – they simply ignore them (Yahoo did use them in a few rare instances, but Bing now powers Yahoo Search, so Meta Keywords are dead!).  So, with Meta Keywords, at best the SEO company is just wasting your/their time adding these to your site, and at worst they are exposing your keyword playbook to all of your competitors.  I can’t think of a good reason to use Meta Keywords. Ever.

Exceptions: Don’t confuse or group together Meta Keywords and Meta Descriptions.  Meta Keywords are definitely useless, but meta descriptions are still used by Google.  The descriptions aren’t used for ranking, but they are often times the text that Google Displays along with your page title and URL.

“We’ll Comment on Lots of Blogs for You”

Blog commenting, when used to contribute meaningful insight and information into a relevant community, can be a fairly useful practice to gain exposure and traffic for your website.  However, when an SEO firm is talking about blog commenting, most of the time they are talking about comment spam.  Unscrupulous SEO firms have automated bots that blast meaningless, annoying comment spam across the internet with hopes that a few of the sites will publish them with backlinks.  This may have worked 6 or so years ago, but it does not anymore.  First off, most blogs are set to nofollow comment links, which means even if the comment is approved, the published link is not passing value.  Second, it could really give your website/company a bad name to hundreds or thousands of bloggers, causing an online reputation management nightmare.  And third, its really frowned upon by Google, and if you are caught, you can expect a penalty.

“We’ll Submit Your Site to Hundreds/Thousands of Directories”

Directory Submissions can be a good piece of a strategy when done right – but when an SEO is touting it, they are probably not doing it the right way.  For most clients and internal projects, we almost always recommend a Yahoo! Directory submission, and then we evaluate perhaps also submitting to Best of the Web, Business.com, JoeAnt, and a few of the other large, well-respected online directories.  The directories I just listed run around $200+ each because they are human edited and do not include junk and spam.  This is the good type of directory submissions.

The bad type of directory submissions are the ones that generally read something like, “We will submit your site to 500 (or insert some other large number here) different web directories!”.  This is bad.  Its unnatural, and Google can spot it in a second.  Focus on quality with SEO.  If its easy to get 500 links, they aren’t going to be quality, and 1 link from a reputable site will be more valuable in Google’s eyes than 5,000 directory submissions.  Again, if Google picks up on these SEO gaming techniques, you could be subject to a penalty.

Other Signs of a Bad SEO Company

100% Focused on Onsite Optimization

We see this a lot.  Its not an obvious sales tactic, but one that you’ll need to inquire with the SEO company about.  The key question is, “What offsite SEO techniques will you be doing?”.  If the answer isn’t “Building a large number of high-quality backlinks”, then they probably aren’t a company you want to work with.  There are two critical pieces to SEO:

• Onsite SEO:  Changes made to the website itself to improve its search engine rankings.  The changes can include text changes, site architecture changes, layout changes, conversion optimization, and many others.
• Offsite SEO:  Although its most often referred to as ‘linkbuilding’, this refers to an SEO obtaining links from other websites that point back to the client’s site.  These links are viewed  as ‘votes of confidence’ in Google’s eyes, and help a site rise in the search engine.

Both onsite work and offsite work are key to a successful SEO campaign, however, onsite changes alone cannot help your site reach any sort of top ranking.  Ensure that any SEO company you work with is building your high-quality links.  If they are solely focused on onsite changes, you will never be able to obtain good rankings for any types of keywords that would drive large amounts of traffic.

Guaranteed Results

Its impossible to guarantee results, and a good SEO knows this.  Guaranteeing results can drive SEO’s to undertaken strategies that Google advises against – which can lead to penalties.  Work with a firm that is confident in what they do, has the experience and references that show they have been successful, but carefully manages expectations and the expected outcomes.  Guaranteeing results is not a good practice.

Final Thoughts

It can be hard to tell good SEO firms from bad ones.  If you need help, we’d be glad to provide further advice and information to ensure that you end up in good hands.  And, if you are looking for a new provider, we’d love to know your goals and be considered for your next project.

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.

The numbers in the table above demonstrate the true value of ranking for a general keyword. However, for many small businesses, of the general searches are not very important to rank highly for. For example, if you’re providing Pest Control services in Washington DC, you are not interested in individuals in Miami Florida searching “Pest Control”. You’re only interested in people in the DC area that search for “Pest Control”. Thankfully, there is a way for these businesses to quickly receive the benefits of ranking for general keywords when it matters most, which is when they’re searched for by people in your area.

Combining Location and General Keywords

Google and many other search engines understand the exact situation described above and have provided us a solution. When a user searches a general term that has local relevance, Google will provide back results that include the best sites for that term, and they will include the best sites in the users local area mixed into the results.

Lets compare the two screen shots below.

Search: Pest Control

Search: Pest Control DC

The first screenshot shows the results of a general search of “Pest Control” by a user in the Washington DC area. The results include a number of Pest Control industry leaders websites, but as you move down through the results you’ll start to notice that they include location based results. The top 10 includes results of small businesses and local area competitors for the general search term.  This means that a local mom and pop shop can rank for the general search term for even very competitive General Keywords, which could be a huge driver of new business.

If we look at the second screenshot you’ll see that many of those local listings included in the ‘general keyword search’ are top ranking in the local keyword search.  This further proves our point, that if you have strong local SEO, you stand a good chance of showing up for the general keywords when a user in your local area searches the term.

Conclusion

You may ask what this all means? Essentially, if you’re able to rank highly for local searches for your target keywords, you should expect to show up in the results of individuals in your area that search the general keyword. For many industries, focusing efforts on Local SEO will allow you to compete for the general keywords when they matter most, which is when people close to your business are searching for your services.