Red Carpet Web Promotion started 13 years ago on June 1st 2000. Remember Y2K? Some of our first projects were creating affiliate websites for posters. Thanks to all of our clients, many of which were our uncles and family friends at the beginning. Thanks to our employees, contractors and families!
Link Management & Penguins
A great article was written in Search Engine Land that sums up Toxic links, and how Google’s Penguin updates (still ongoing) are changing the way the linking landscape. “SEOers”, like us, now have to review any new clients’ incoming links to weed out the rotten, or over SEO’d links.
Search Engine Land: Risk Management for Links
What is SEO?
What is Search Engine Optimization? See our short video clip for an explanation. http://youtu.be/nOQ7cFMfgU0
Link Building Page Update
We just updated our page content describing link building for your website. Given the changes in the Google algorithm our approach for link building now also includes an assessment and cleanup of unnatural links to your site. These include any links from spammy sites that were put up just for the benefit of SEO. The benefit of these types of links is gone and to avoid penalizing your position in search results it is recommended to do a clean up of bad links. See the details here: https://www.redcarpetweb.com/link-building.html
Facebook for Enterprises
I recently attended a Facebook for Enterprises seminar by the Montreal Girl Geeks, a non-profit organization in the city. The presentation addressed several concerns and assumptions that I encounter everyday – including the infamous question, “Isn’t your job just being on Facebook all day?” And with that question launching the presentation, I knew we were in good hands.
Mandy Poon, the topic presenter, walked us through the differences between social media for brands vs. people and explained why it’s necessary for companies to invest time (and gasp, money!) into social media. Let’s face it, it’s not going away anytime soon and to find a company without one single social media account nowadays is a rarity. Why a company should invest in social media is pretty straightforward – the platforms put you in direct contact with your target market! You can speak directly to your customers who can help spread the word about your brand and get them involved in your brand too.
Here are some key takeaways from Mandy’s presentation:
– If a company is just getting started in social media, you should ask yourselves what your main goal is. It’s not the place to advertise your company’s products and services 100% of the time – doing this will turn off your audience. What you should do is start conversations that your potential customers will be interested in that will add some kind of value to their lives.
– Establish a voice. Will you be funny? Serious? Informational? Mandy spoke about how difficult it is for brands to have a dialogue with customers – why? Because they are so used to traditional media being a one-way street where they are just talking about themselves!
– Be prepared. Companies have to be ready to respond to both positive and negative feedback because the biggest mistake a company can make is to ignore – or worse – delete a user comment. Another no-no is to post infrequently or disappear altogether after a few good posts.
I also strongly recommend investigating what your competitors are doing, as well as reading up on each social media platform’s policy (tip: no advertising on your Facebook cover photo!).
Other issues that came up:
– The recent changes to the Facebook algorithm and how companies are struggling to show up in the newsfeed.
– Should a company build a global, regional or local strategy? Mandy informed us that it usually depends on internal structure and the resources a company has available. Example: if the corporate office manages everything worldwide, there just might not be enough manpower to have an account specifically for Spain.
Check out the slides from Mandy Poon’s presentation here.
For more information, please visit the Montreal Girl Geeks Facebook page here.
Linking is Still Queen
Almost 10 years ago, I wrote a piece called “Linking is Queen”. The article discussed how linking is essential to the health of a website, but that content was still “King”.
Skip to 2013 and the only thing that has changed is the way we link. There is no longer any need to solicit links, though it would not hurt to solicit them from appropriate sites (such as clients and suppliers). Links today come directly from a viewpoint of popularity. If you are popular, you get discussed and linked to in social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, and more. This in turn makes your site, your brand, and/or yourself a deemed authority on the subject in question.
So how do you become popular? The answer is the same as it ever was: “Content is King”. Write original, valuable content, and people will discuss it, share it, Tweet it, and make your article or website the most popular one around. You can use tricks like link bait, but that is just another way of confirming to “write content that people want to share”. It all comes down to: good content generates good links.
So what is good content? Good content is both unique AND adds value to a website.
- It is not offered anywhere else
- It is an original solution to people’s problems
- Is either interesting, surprising, and/or has a practical use
If you want your content to spread, it should trigger one of the 3 A’s: Anxiety, Awe, or Anger.
Unique content without value may in fact harm your site’s authority. So don’t regurgitate old ideas, be creative and initiate new concepts. That is how you will make it to the top.
So, in a decade, everything has changed, and nothing has changed. Content and links are still the King and Queen that dominate search engine landscape.
Don’t forget to pledge your allegiance.
by Shawn Campbell – February 8, 2013 – www.RedCarpetWeb.com
Hootsuite – Social Media Management Tool Review
I use Hootsuite as my social media management tool and though I’m pretty satisfied with it, there are of course a few things that I think they can improve on. To get right to the point, here goes:
What I really like about Hootsuite:
- I can easily import my networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and have access to a bevy of apps such as Wordpress, Instagram and Constant Contact for email marketing.
- I have the ability to schedule my messages whatever day or time I want in my timezone (instead of using Facebook’s old school scheduling tool) and I can see my scheduled content organized in Hootsuite’s Publisher.
- I can create streams to scan my client’s competition and see what they are posting about and can also add hashtags to search keywords related to my client’s industry.
- Hootsuite provides easier management amongst teams so that anyone can use their own account to log in and be accountable for any interaction they instigate.
- I also think their support team is on the ball with answering requests (it would be pretty terrible if they weren’t, considering…)
- At a reasonable monthly add-on fee of $29, I subscribe to Hootsuite University, have become officially certified and all with a nice badge to use for our company website.
- I have unlimited access to training videos and industry experts providing tips on various industries and how they handle social media.
The nitty gritty of what I don’t like?
- I can’t tag people or pages in any posts or comments I make, which means that I have to go to Facebook.com if I want to make my post more engaging, or in other words, be more social! However, to defend Hootsuite, this is apparently an issue of Facebook’s API not allowing them to provide this option.
- I’m not able to create a stream of my Newsfeed, which is unfortunate because I can’t share or interact with any pages my client has liked.
These (seemingly) small issues are actually quite important on the grand scheme of things because the whole point of social media is to be able to interact with your peers on a regular basis and the goal of using Hootsuite is to be able to use all of your social networks in one place. Hopefully, by the time that someone from Hootsuite reads this, they’ll have moved my recommendations up the ladder in their Feedback Forum.
There are many other major aspects of Hootsuite I didn’t discuss such as reporting and pricing but let’s keep that for a subsequent post.
What about you? What are your initial impressions and experiences with Hootsuite?
SEO For Facebook Graph Search? Facebook Has Some Tips
“How do I make sure my business gets found in Facebook search?”
Never fear: Facebook itself has already shared a few tips to help make that happen. We’ll get to that below, but first a quick bit of background that’s good to know.
What Business Owners Need To Know About Facebook Graph Search. See full article.
Jan 15, 2013
by Matt McGee, published on http://searchengineland.com/
Taking Advantage Of Facebook Offers
“A Facebook Offer is a coupon created and shared exclusively on Facebook. Admins can create these Offers on their Page, and Facebook users can then claim the Offer to use at a business via an email confirmation…”
Offers can be used online or in stores. See full article.
Jan 3, 2013
Taking Advantage Of Facebook Offers
by Emily Wilson published on Marketing Land.
Financial Times: US clears Google’s core search business
January 3, 2013 7:07 pm
US clears Google’s core search business
By Richard Waters and Tim Bradshaw in San Francisco
The US has ended a sweeping antitrust investigation of Google without imposing any sanctions on its core search business… see full article.
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/61124f52-55d4-11e2-9aa1-00144feab49a.html