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Make or Break your SEO: URLs & Title Tags
With a growing number of companies and organizations utilizing search engine optimization to increase their online visibility it is surprising to see a majority of them still using convoluted URLs and generic title tags on their websites.
URLs and Title tags provide information that helps describe your page and website to search engines and visitors so keeping this information relevant and accurate is one of the first major steps to making your website search engine friendly. So as a quick reminder or even a mini-lesson in SEO, here are a few examples for URLs and Title tags that serve to clarify what is good and bad in the world of search engine optimization.
URLs
URLs should be descriptive, yet brief. Visitors should be able to get an idea of what kind of information will be on the page just by looking at its URL. If the page is at the end of several levels of sections of your website the URL should also reflect this. For larger companies it may seem easier to have a series of numbers and letters define each page but that does nothing for visitors or search engines, the two most important entities your company is serving.
URL Comparison for Sony 32" LCD HDTV
The Good: http://www.nextag.com/sony-32-lcd-hdtv/shop-html
While nextag.com is a comparison shopping website, they do a great job of formatting their URLs to accurately describe the information on each page.
The Bad: http://www.amazon.com/Sony-Bravia-XBR-KDL-32XBR4-HDTV/dp/B000RUNZVO
Amazon is a large company and often labels products with letter and numbers instead of using their actual name. However, at least a visitor or search engine could determine that this webpage has something to do with the Sony Bravia HDTV from looking at the URL. If only I could decipher the meaning of B000RUNZVO
The Ugly: http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=9252002
Walmart, like Amazon, is infamous for labeling products with numbers. While that may be conducive to their system of inventory, I, nor any search engine crawler, has any clue what Walmart is selling on this page.
Title Tags
Title tags are most recognizable as the bold blue ink text that appears for each search result. They not only aid in defining keyword terms but also help drive click-through-rates from search results pages. Some title tags are generic; others attempt to name every detail on the page.
The Good: Milton S. Hershey - HERSHEY'S
The Hershey's Company does a great job of creating great title tags for all of their pages, even the ones that share the history of Hershey. This page operates as the starting point to learning anything and everything about the man who built the Hershey Chocolate empire. Subsequent pages are well-titled and direct such as the page on Catherine S. Hershey titled "Milton Hershey's Wife".
The Bad: Animal Guide - Kids Corner - Georgia Aquarium
The Georgia Aquarium does a good job of keeping their institution's name present in almost all of their title tags, but this page is actually about the American Alligator. The aquarium should consider removing Kids Corner from the title and add the name of each animal instead.
Nice, Circuit City. I had to read through a listing of almost every possible electronic device before I even realized you were the company selling it. Instead of trying to run the gamut on everything your site offers, use your company name for the Title of your main website and keep your description for the meta tags.
Diving into search engine optimization can seem daunting and leave you feeling overwhelmed, but by taking small steps and changing a few key words here and there can make this task a much more manageable one.
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Websites are Wild Beasts: A Wrangler's Guide
As a biology major gone web developer, I though I’d offer an organic perspective: websites are wild Beasts. Come with me on an adventure into the Web Wide World and I’ll share my knowledge on wrangling these Beasts.
Understand Your Beast
Websites are simple Beasts. They compete, evolve, and, ultimately, live out their existence in a place known as the World Wide Web. Thriving in this world doesn’t mean survival and reproduction. It means pageviews. Thousands of pageviews.
To compete for these page-views, Beasts must evolve. While Darwin’s evolution is driven by an unintelligent natural selection, website evolution is purposely driven by intelligent, web developer demi-gods and occurs at a much faster pace.
Web beasts live in an ecosystem
Web Beasts live together in specific ecosystems, such as the jungle of non-profits, the plains of political campaigns, or the steppes of social media. A Beast living on an island with no outside connections (often called “links”) dies. Conversely, the more links a web beast maintains, the more likely it is to thrive. All Beasts must occupy a useful niche in their ecosystems to thrive. Some offer unique services, humorous original content, or a convenient way for humans to communicate. Furthermore, the niche occupied by a beast is constantly threatened by competition, which brings up the next point.
The competition evolves
Ecosystems change overtime and new beasts come on to the scene better equipped to thrive. For example, search engine’s criteria have shifted, blogs have revolutionized the news ecosystem and the Twitter Beast is redefining the nature of social media ecosystems. In addition, new standards of design sweep the World Wide Web and your beast begins to look outdated. Essentially, it’s a fact of life that beasts become outdated every few years. Fortunately, I have some tips on how to better keep your beast up to speed with the pack.
- Ensure your Beast is born with a decent content management system. This will allow you to update content and news on each of your pages. And having fresh content attracts pageviews.
- Feed your Beast only the freshest content. A blog is an excellent source of powerful content.
- Connect your Beast to social media through such mega-Beasts as Facebook or Twitter.
But a Beast’s time does come. Therefore, I recommend having a team of experts on hand to put down your old Beast and craft a new one.
Forget the leash, grab a lasso
The Web Wide World has come a long way since multi-celled tables. Beasts are now dynamic creatures with features such as server-side scripts and database functionality. Beasts are quicker and more powerful than ever before. They have helped elect presidents and empowered revolutionary political movements. A few final words of advice: Beasts serve humans by providing useful information. Figure out what “useful” will mean tomorrow and hone your Beast accordingly.
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HTML 5: Should we be excited yet?
Update 7/2/2009: I incorrectly credited Jeffrey Zeldman as the creator of HTML5 Doctor. Instead, the actual creators of the HTML5 Doctor website are Bruce Lawson, Rich Clark, Jack Osborne, Mike Robinson, Remy Sharp, and Tom Leadbetter as described at http://html5doctor.com/about/. This change has been made below.
It's an exciting time to be a web developer. The browser wars are in full swing, reminiscent of the mid-90s. Firefox 3.5 was released only yesterday with plenty of cool, new features including HTML5 support for
audio,video, offline and local storage, andcanvastext. Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari are blazing fast, already sporting cutting edge HTML5 features. The HTML5 draft specification, although years from completion, is already influencing web browser development and will revolutionize the way we develop for the World Wide Web. The future is here! But should we be excited yet?Microsoft's Internet Explorer still boasts a 65% majority share of the web browser market as of May 2009, according to Net Applications Market Share1. Older versions of Internet Explorer are still very much in use: version 7 with 41%, version 6 with 17%, and version 8 with 7%. Only in Internet Explorer 8 did Microsoft provide near-complete CSS 2.1 support. But Internet Explorer 8 still falls far short of its competitors in terms of features and speed. Yes, Internet Explorer 8 makes our web development lives easier assuming we are content with CSS 2.1, and assuming Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 users choose to upgrade to Internet Explorer 8. But what about HTML5? What about CSS3? Forget about XHTML: it is a lost cause that can be directly credited to lack of development and Microsoft's refusal to support the standard in its Internet Explorer web browser. Even Dave Shea from Mezzoblue says HTML5-ready HTML 4.01 is the way forward2. Unfortunately, I fear the future of the World Wide Web is at Microsoft's discretion.
What Do We Do?
This is not a rhetorical question. I want to know what you think. Some suggest web developers begin charging for Internet Explorer 6 support. Andy Clarke proposes a bare-bones IE6-only style sheet that provides adequate support for the aging browser3. Others express a more blunt technique best described by John Gruber of Daring Fireball:
Firefox 3.5 is out, and, among a slew of major improvements, it now supports the HTML 5 <audio> and <video> tags. I don't post many video clips to Daring Fireball, but henceforth, when I do, it'll be with the <video> tag. IE users can suck it.
John Gruber - http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/06/30/ff5
Still, my question remains unanswered: when should we get excited about HTML5 and CSS3? When will it be truly realistic to develop cross-browser compatible websites using these modern technologies? Even Microsoft has released online advertisements4 encouraging users to upgrade from "
browsers several generations old
"... Microsoft, er, might you be referring to your Internet Explorer 6 web browser? Here is the Microsoft advertisement called "GRIPES" featuring Dean Cain of Lois and Clark fame.This humorous and well-intended video is proof that even Microsoft wants users to ditch its Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 products in favor of its much-improved Internet Explorer 8 web browser.
Start Now!
We must usher in the future of web development. If your business model permits, drop support for Internet Explorer 6. Start learning HTML5.
Jeffrey ZeldmanBruce Lawson, Rich Clark, Jack Osborne, Mike Robinson, Remy Sharp, and Tom Leadbetter have launched HTML5 Doctor, a website dedicated to teaching HTML55. O'Reilly says Google is backing HTML56. And Chris Wilson, platform architect of the Internet Explorer platform, says that Internet Explorer 8 will steadily increase its support for HTML5; Internet Explorer 8 already supports a few HTML5 features such as cross-document messaging, the window location hash, and network connection awareness7. As I see it, the problem we developers face is IE-users' slow adoption of Internet Explorer 8. As much as I dislike Internet Explorer, it is imperative that we encourage, coerce, or even force Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 users to upgrade to Internet Explorer 8. Only then can we really get excited about the future of the World Wide Web.Learn More About HTML5
- HTML5 Doctor
- http://html5doctor.com/
- A List Apart's Preview of HTML5
- http://www.alistapart.com/articles/previewofhtml5
- Differences between HTML4 and HTML5
- http://dev.w3.org/html5/html4-differences/
- W3C HTML5 Draft Specification
- http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html
Footnotes
- http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx
- http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2009/04/20/switched/
- http://www.forabeautifulweb.com/blog/about/universal_internet_explorer_6_css/
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aA_PEltVTw
- http://html5doctor.com/
- http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/05/google-bets-big-on-html-5.html
- http://www.sdtimes.com/content/article.aspx?ArticleID=31806
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Three Basics of Search Engine Optimization
Almost all of our clients come to us with questions about Search Engine Optimization and how to run a campaign for their site. Most people view SEO as a deep mystery that requires years of HTML experience and an education from Hogwarts. However, while there are many intricacies to the craft that re reserved for the masters, basic SEO doesn't have to be that complicated and can be accomplished with steady committment and the help of a good Content Management System.
Here are three of the basics of SEO, ranked in order of importance, and how you can help your site rank organically high for targeted terms.
The 4 C's: Consistently Create Compelling Content. The most important element of ranking high in search engines is having great content. If you have good content that relates specifically to your organization, you'll get ranked higher for the targeted terms within your content. However, it doesn't stop with just having a baseline of good content, it's essential that you are consistently churning out interesting and informative stuff. It's important for a few reasons.
First, Google looks at how often your site is updated when judging how frequently it should spider (inspect) your site for organic rankings. So, if you are frequently creating content, you increase the likelihood that Google comes back to your site a lot to judge your content and accordingly update your rankings.
Second, every page you create is indexable by Google, helping your long tail of search terms. So, whether you're creating content in a blog, newsfeed, or somewhere else, you're increasing the amount of total pages and search terms that you'll be indexed for.
Third, good content serves as excellent "link bait," meaning that other people will link to your site. When other people link to you, it passes along their Page Rank juice, which will in turn help your site rank overall better in search engines.
Get Linked To. This doesn't mean buying 50 links for $50 from a Nigerian Prince, but it does mean trying to get valuable links to your site from others. Remember, the more legitimate and popular the site doing the linking, the more value Google will credit to that link and thus to your site.
One easy way to accomplish this task is through having multiple presences for your business online (i.e., Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, a Microsite, etc). By having these other presences and building links from them to your main site, you'll pass along valuable Page Rank points to your site.
Also, by following the first rule of the four C's, you increase the likelihood of other blogs and social media presences linking to you. Finally, don't be shy to ask for links from folks that write about you. If your featured in a local newspaper or blog, be sure to ask for a link back to your site.
The anchor text (meaning the words that form the actual link) of the links is also very important, as Google uses that to determine what keywords best describe your site. So, when possible, be sure to use your targeted terms (i.e, political web design, for us) as the text for the link.
Descriptive URLs and Title Tags. If you're using a good CMS, you should have the ability to control the URL and Title Tags (the description at the top of a browser window for a site) for each page. After content, these are the two most important "on page" elements of SEO. Your URLs and Title Tags should be optimized with targeted terms, but also should be consistent with the actual copy on the page.
One of the cardinal sins of good Search Engine Optimization are sloppy or unreadable URLs, such as newmediacampaigns.com/a98y3498.asp. It's important that you have clean URL extensions separated by dashes, like newmediacampaigns.com/clean-url-description/. By having the URL match up well with your Title Tags, Google will get a good idea of what the page is about (or what terms you want it to think the page is about).
While there are many other elements of SEO, these are the three that are easiest to control and of the most importance. Have you optimized these elements and experienced success? I know we have. Also, what are some other SEO elements that you focus on with your site?
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Moving your script tags: The quickest way to improve site performance
At this point almost every web developer is familiar with YSlow. If you're not, YSlow is a Firefox extension that integrates with Firebug that analyzes the performance of webpages based on a set of rules Yahoo! has developed. By following this set of rules, you can make your website load much faster for visitors.
While working on the new NMC website, I ran YSlow and began making improvements. What I found shocked me. Perhaps the greatest gain in performance came from the easiest rule to implement:
Put Scripts at the Bottom
That's right, moving your script tags from the site header to immediately before the closing body tag can dramatically improve your site's performance. As an added bonus, this can almost always be done naively if you're using a modern javascript framework like jQuery.
So why does this work? When a browser downloads a site, it first works on the html and encounters additional components like stylesheets, scripts and images. If it can, it will download this in parallel. However, in all browsers (not just IE!), loading external scripts is blocking. The browser will not begin downloading anything new if a script is being downloaded. You can see this in effect by looking at Firebug's Net tab:
Before:
After:
As you can see, the blocking effect is dramatic. It is certainly worth moving your script tags to the bottom of your page if you can and also look into the other tips Yahoo! has.
Issues to look out for
- document.write - If you're using document.write to insert content in place, moving your scripts will be an issue. That said, this generally isn't the preferred way of modifying content using a javascript framework so it is not often an issue with newer sites.
- Timing/Appearance - If your scripts are doing any appearance manipulation to your site, you should be aware that putting them at the bottom will cause them to load later. This could make the loading process jarring for visitors.
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Utilizing New Media in the Church
Cardinal Sean Brady of the Roman Catholic Church recently encouraged (particularly young) people to use Twitter to tweet a prayer every day. I found this encouraging as oftentimes science (technology) and religion don't necessarily go hand in hand. This however, doesn't have to be the case. New media strategies can help out almost every organization, even especially the church. Here are a few ways that religious organizations can take advantage of upcoming technologies:
Get into blogging
One of the biggest hurdles in creating and maintaining a blog is the time constraint of consistently writing new content. The church however has a natural advantage here as the pastor/minister/rabbi generally writes and gives a sermon at least weekly. Why not post those sermons on a blog? This would encourage feedback which would help guide future sermons, allow for links to other relevant articles to give the sermon more depth, and provide a venue for those people who missed the sermon to avoid missing the message.
In addition to a weekly sermon post, churches could post about upcoming events, achievements by members of its congregation, and share their view on controversial issues and relevant current events.
Join the Twitter craze
One of the most popular uses of Twitter is hearing the day-to-day activities/thoughts/interests of celebrities like Shaq, Dave Matthews, and Oprah. Well the pastor/minister/rabbi is a celebrity of sorts in the community and I'd be surprised if members of the congregation wouldn't like to know what's going on in his everyday life, what tid-bits of wisdom he's got to say, and what links he's found interesting online.
But Twitter isn't only about celebrities of course. The church could be encouraging its entire congregation to utilize Twitter to better connect and interact with each other. Members could tweet about Church events they're planning to attend and learn about each other's interests to promote general community growth.
Facebook: tread carefully
Facebook is without question an impressive community and it's likely that many members of a church's congregation are active participants in that community, particularly the younger ones. So I advise churches to set up a page, have a presence on Facebook, and encourage dialogue among its fans. Facebook has recently made several changes to make the social network more business-friendly. But it's important for a church's page not to take advantage of its fan base by sending too many mass messages or forcing the page on congregation members. Facebook users, especially the younger population, view their Facebook community as a trusting one and sending too many of these messages may violate that trust and generate a negative relationship instead of one with real value.
Have an up-to-date website
A church's website is often the first place congregation members and potential new members will go to find information, upcoming events, and recent developments in the community. This first impression needs to be as current and useful as possible. The church's website should also be a portal for all the new media techniques that were already covered. Here at New Media Campaigns, we've designed websites for several churches and other non-profits and we encourage and help all of these organizations take advantage of these new technology techniques.
The Result
Imagine a family that has recently moved to the area and is looking for a new church to join. They go online and look at the websites of several local churches. Most of them are similar but one has a blog that's updated several times each week. They read the last few posts and see what events the church has recently held as well as a few planned for later in the month. They also read the pastor's last sermon and like the message he's trying to send. They see the pastor is on Twitter and look at his last few tweets. They see that he's actively interacting with members of the congregation, giving advice and asking questions. None of the other churches in the area have a community that's as alive and connected. That's a community they want to be a part of. That's a community that stands out. That's a community only possible through embracing the world of new media.
What other ways can religious groups use new media? What other organizations are poised to move into the new media world?
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Amazon Shuts Down Associates Program in North Carolina
"We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to notify you that your Associates account has been closed as of June 26, 2009. This is a direct result of the unconstitutional tax collection scheme expected to be passed any day now by the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) and signed by the governor."
What is the Amazon Associates Program?
Amazon Associates is a Amazon's referral program. Bloggers and webmasters who place links to Amazon on their website will get some percentage of each sale that is generated by traffic from those links. It's Amazon's equivalent of Google's AdSense. Many bloggers and webmasters use associates as a way to support their blogs and websites.
Who does this affect?
To understand the significance of a program like associates shutting down it is worth first answering: how do blogs make money? The upper-crust, say the top 3-5% of blogs, sell their own ads or are involved in small advertising rings. These sites demand a premium for their ads and have full-time staffs writing for their sites and selling advertisements. The long-long-tail blogs, the lower 40-60% of blogs, don't make any money or run at a loss because of hosting costs. These are mostly personal blogs, or the just-getting-started blogs.
So who is most affected? The mid-level bloggers. Amazon Associates and Google AdSense are the two leading ways of monetizing mid-level blogs. Monetization is actually too noble of a word: covering hosting costs is more like it. These blogs typically don't generate enough revenue to be full-time jobs for their authors, the money is simply a reward for producing really solid content and obtaining respectable audiences. The best written, most interesting content of the blog-o-sphere comes not from the most popular commercial blogs but from the mid-level bloggers whose writing is a labor of love.
If programs like Associates and AdSense start shutting down due to state legislation the most interesting and insightful bloggers and blogs will suffer because of it.
The Full 6/26/2009 Amazon Email
"We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to notify you that your Associates account has been closed as of June 26, 2009. This is a direct result of the unconstitutional tax collection scheme expected to be passed any day now by the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) and signed by the governor. As a result, we will no longer pay any referral fees for customers referred to Amazon.com or Endless.com after June 26. We were forced to take this unfortunate action in anticipation of actual enactment because of uncertainties surrounding the legislation’s effective date.
Please be assured that all qualifying referral fees earned prior to June 26, 2009 will be processed and paid in full in accordance with our regular referral fee schedule. Based on your account closure date of June 26, 2009, any final payments will be paid by September 1, 2009.
In the event that North Carolina repeals this tax collection scheme, we would certainly be happy to re-open our Associates program to North Carolina residents.
The North Carolina General Assembly’s website is http://www.ncleg.net/, and additional information may be obtained from the Performance Marketing Alliance at http://www.performancemarketingalliance.com/.
We have enjoyed working with you and other North Carolina-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program, and wish you all the best in your future.
Best Regards,
The Amazon Associates Team"
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4 impressive ways people have used Twitter to help their cause
I wrote a few days ago about how different people are using Twitter. Another growing use of Twitter is petitioning. One of Twitter's strengths is content sharing both in the form of links and retweets (RTs). As the popularity of retweeting has grown and Twitter has improved its search capabilities, many people have come up with some creative and powerful ways to take advantage of the Twitmosphere to help fight for a cause. Here are 4 particularly impressive ones:
1. Twitter Petitioning
Twitition.com is a neat service that allows you to create petitions that people people can sign by retweeting a message. While it seems like a simple concept, a Twitition for lower iPhone upgrade prices got over 10,000 RTs (the first link ever to do so) in just over 78 hours. Check out the graph below to see the steady stream of retweets:
Less than a week ago, more than 6000 people signed a Twitition asking Google Earth to update satellite images of Tehran. Within 24 hours, Google responded with up-to-date images. Mission success.
2. Using Tweets to Market A Company
Less Everything is a web firm that sells an application to help simplify the accounting process. They had trouble with Quickbooks, believed other people might feel the same way, and created weallhatequickbooks.com to aggregate every tweet about Quickbooks. They're promoting transparency by allowing people to see what people are saying about their competitor (both positive and negative) so customers can make an educated decision
3. Taking down Microsoft, one tweet at a time
When they heard Microsoft wasn't planning on supporting CSS and other design standards in Outlook 2010, the Email Standards Project and Campaign Monitor took action. They created fixoutlook.org (maybe the most beautiful of the bunch) to encourage tweeple to spread the news about Microsoft Outlook's layout issues.
The site displays a wall of the avatars of every twitter user who tweeted 'fixoutlook.org' and highlights specific tweets through conversation bubbles. The site is continually updated every 16 tweets. 18,000 tweets later (the site was launched earlier today), Microsoft released this announcement. It looks like Microsoft is sticking to their guns for now. But who knows, with enough nay-sayers, maybe they'll change their mind.
4. Going Green to Support Iran Election Protestors
Twitter has gotten a ton of press in the last few weeks because of the important role it's playing as a news source for the political chaos in Iran. So it only makes sense that Twitter users have found a way to show their support, by giving their Twitter avatar a greenish hugh. Doesn't sound like much? Well when almost 8000 people band together and iran.greenthumbnails.com displays those avatars as a united Green Wall of support, it became something truly special.
These people realized the potential of Twitter far beyond 140 simple characters. The power of Twitter is its connectivity. How else have people truly utilized Twitter's potential? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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Write Your Own jQuery Mini-Plugins
Over the past couple of years jQuery has quickly become the JavaScript framework of choice for many web developers. That includes New Media Campaigns: we include a call to the Google Code-hosted copy of jQuery in our blank template for new sites. With the growing popularity of jQuery has come a growing number of plugins and copy-and-paste code examples that extend upon its base functionality. Some of these are well thought-out and high quality solutions to common development needs—jQuery Validation and jQuery Cycle, for instance. But for efficient solutions to simple problems, developers are often cheating themselves by relying on pre-built solutions and would do better to write their own custom mini-plugins.
The Best Tool for the Job
The first reason you should consider writing a custom solution to your interaction needs is to get exactly the functionality you need. It is rare that you will find pre-existing code that is perfect for your project: usually it will either force you to compromise your desired result to fit the capabilities of the plugin or it will include many lines of code to cover variations and edge cases that you will never use. By writing your own you can do what is needed—and only what is needed.
Learn Something New
The other reason to roll your own mini-plugin is that you will invariably learn something new along the way. Have you ever driven a friend somewhere, with them giving you turn-by-turn directions all along the way, and then realized you couldn't remember how you got there? Whereas if you had tried to find it on your own you may have gotten lost a few times but you would then have had the route cemented in your mind. The first time or two that you try to write your own mini-plugin for a drop-down menu you will need to refer back to the documentation frequently. But after that you will have a much better understanding of what is going on under the surface and when you need to customize pre-existing code or write more complex interactions you will have a far easier time of it.
Getting Started
NMC's own Joel Sutherland wrote about the basics of writing a jQuery plugin or, for a more complex plugin template, I refer to Learning jQuery (also see the book by the same name). I generally prefer the plugin format, since it offers cleaner syntax and is easy to reuse for multiple elements within your site. That said, in many cases it is overkill. If you know for sure that the code will only apply to one element and it is just a few lines long, I might write it directly within your
$(document).ready(function() { });block.Examples
I was going to include examples of custom mini-plugins I have written for recent projects, but since the point is for you not to copy code from blogs like this one I will just list a few common cases where you might be tempted to let Google do the work for you.
- Drop-down Navigation Menus: Make it work with CSS first, then write a mini-plugin for Internet Explorer compatibility and visual effects. Have it slide down, fade in...or some unique combination of animations.
- Tabs: Sure, jQuery UI Tabs are great and have more options and callbacks than you will ever be able to remember. But do you really want to load a 123kb (compressed) script just to switch between a two panels of content?
- Overlay: Believe it or not, you can write a simple Thickbox-style pop-up in a few dozen lines of code. And it won't look like every other site out there (unless you want it to…).
- Image Cross-Fading: If all you need is a series of images that fade from one to the next, jQuery Cycle or InnerFade might be overkill. Write your own and make it work just the way you want.
Hopefully this has inspired you to stop blindly copying and start making deliberate decisions. Please share other cases that could be best served by a custom-written mini-plugin in the comments.
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Blogging for Business Part 1: Preparing to Start a Business Blog
Business blogs are becoming a necessary element of online marketing and inbound marketing campaigns for businesses of all sizes. Our clients frequently have many questions about how to best build, write, publicize, and maximize their own blogs. So, this four part series will cover the basics of Blogging for Business, from the initial build to making sure you're getting the most out of your blog.
This first part covers what to do after you've decided that a blog would be helpful for your business. Be sure to stay tuned for the next three parts of the series.Why Blog in the First Place?
There are many reasons to start a blog for your business. The most beneficial for marketing purposes is the help that it will provide in organic search engine rankings. Each blog post is a new page on your site, meaning a new piece of content for Google to index. The more pages indexed by Google, the likelier it is that your site shows up for a variety of keywords, helping you benefit from the longtail of search results from various posts that you publish.
On top of the SEO benefits, there are many other benefits that your blog will provide to your site. First, its a dynamic element that will be frequently update and lead visitors to be more engaged and frequently return to your site. Furthermore, the blog will help establish you as a thought leader in your space and increase your firm's mindshare. Also, by blogging about your company and industry, you will be providing a free and helpful resource to your clients, of which they'll likely be very appreciative.
How Do You Know A Blog is Right for Your Business?
While a blog isn't right for everyone, it's quickly becoming a pretty standard component of online marketing campaigns. Here are some basic questions that should help you in deciding if a blog is right for your business:
- Do you have industry-specific knowledge that you're happy to share with others?
- Can you find the time to write at least one post (at least 300 words) every 10 days?
- Do most of your target customers spend significant time on the Internet, especially researching vendors?
If you answered yes to all three questions above, then a blog is likely a good investment of your time. A business blog is a free opportunity to (very) publicly broadcast your expertise, engage site visitors, raise your site's dynamism, and improve your organic search engine rankings.
Live in the Space Before Publishing to It
Now that you've decided that a blog is a good move for your business, you need to start taking the appropriate steps to bringing it online. A first step that I always stress to clients is that before you write a single word of your own, take 2-3 weeks to read other popular blogs and industry blogs.
By taking time to live in the space, you will gain a greater understanding for good standards on how to write a post, interact with commenters, and what type of content sells well on a blog. During this exploratory period, also be sure to take the time to participate in the blogosphere by commenting on posts, reaching out to other bloggers, setting up an RSS reader, and sharing good posts with friends.
This time spent researching the medium will help you become a better blogger, quicker, and it will also help you cement relationships with other bloggers in the space that will then become more likely to link out to you.How to Build Your Business Blog
After living in the space, you're now ready to actually begin the process of getting a blog set up on your site. One of the most important pieces of advice that I can offer for this stage is to make sure your blog resides on your site's domain, meaning the URL of your blog should be something like blog.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com/blog/.
This point cannot be overstated in importance - one of the key marketing benefits of your blog is the Search Engine benefits by the newly indexed pages and also the Page Rank juice generated by inbound links. If your blog is hosted on a third party domain, such as myblog.wordpress.com or myblog.blogspot.com, even though you may link to it from your main site, your actual domain will not reap any of the SEO benefits associated with the blog.
There are many ways to launch a blog on your domain. First, check out if your current Content Management System offers a blogging module, which it should (shameless self promotion: ours does). If your site isn't currently on a CMS or it doesn't have blog publishing capabilities, then I recommend checking out WordPress. They have an easy five minute installation to get a WordPress blog enabled on your domain, allowing you to easily publish your new blog to your current site domain.
