View from The Edge

After months and months of talking about getting a blog set up, I finally bit the bullet this week. I know, I know… I’ve spoken endlessly about the importance of regularly posting to a blog with my clients, but never quite got there myself… until now that is.

Oh there are many changes afoot for The Edge. We very recently began quietly working on our first newsletter, we are relocating to Austin, TX and now a blog!

It was actually while researching topics for the newsletter that I stumbled upon this interesting article, Blogging for SEO.

If you have a small business blog, or are thinking of starting one, you should be aware of the ways you can use your blog to drive traffic to your Website. It’s simpler than you think.The first thing to understand about your blog is that each entry is counted as one Web page. Even if you have your blog set to display 10 blog posts on the same page, each of them is counted as a separate Web page by the search engines. That’s why it is important to treat each blog entry as an SEO tool. The following tips should be kept in mind for each blog entry in order to optimize them for the search engines and drive more traffic to your Website from your blog:

1. Optimize each blog post around a single keyword
2. Make sure your keyword is in your blog post title, preferably at the beginning
3. Use subheads with or tags that also use your keyword
4. Include 1-3 keyword links (anchor text) in your blog posts
5. Sign every blog post with a signature link that uses your keyword
6. Use bold and italics effectively to emphasize certain keywords and phrases
7. Be sure to ping the directories
8. Include tags for all of your blog entries
9. Use categories effectively
10. Make links appear natural by linking to internal pages of your Website

Because each blog entry is a separate Web page, the search engines will crawl them and index them just as they do your Web pages. Optimize each one heavily around a specific keyword related to your Website and that’s an extra doorway into your Website for each page indexed at the search engines. Also, by adding anchor text to a couple of those keywords and pointing those links to relevant internal Web pages of your Website you are improving the SEO effect of your blog entry. A poll of top SEO experts by SEOmoz revealed that a majority of those SEO experts said these type of keyword links are among the top 10 most important SEO factors for ranking Web pages. Don’t give up on keywords and anchor text.

You’ll also want to include keyword tags with each blog entry. Those tags will be used by the search engines to index your pages appropriately for your keywords. Also, social bookmarkers will find it easier to tag your blog entry if they like it and this makes it easier to share among their social group.

Your blog category should indicate an important element of interest as well. Unlike tags, you should only choose one category for each blog post. Don’t use “main” or “uncategorized.” Those are too generic. Use a specific keyword-related category as that will make your blog posts more crawlable by the search engines.

There are more than 100 blog directories that you can ping to let them know you have updated your blog. I suggest you do this every time you update your blog. With WordPress, and several other blogging software platforms, you can input each directory into a field and the software will send out an automatic ping each time you update your blog. If you are not using WordPress you should go to Ping-o-Matic and use it to ping your blog for free.

Finally, if you sign your blog posts with a keyword-rich signature that points to a relevant internal page of your Website, this will make your Website more crawlable and give you another anchor text link. Use something like, “Find Out More About Keyword.” Then add another link that points to your home page.

The important thing to remember about keywords and links, whether on your blog or your Website, is to make them appear natural. The benefits are enormous.

If you’re attacking your market from multiple positions and your competition isn’t, you have all the advantage and it will show up in your increased success and income. - Jay Abraham

Here at The Edge, we despise spam. Anyone who owns an online business knows how frustrating it can be to open your email in the morning to find that you have 200+ emails waiting for you. Of course, you know that about two-thirds of those are spam messages, but your heart sinks for a moment as you roll up your sleeves to separate the wheat from the chaff.

In addition to working on a newsletter for The Edge, I have spent most of the week working on setting up a newsletter for a client of mine. I work with newsletters frequently for other clients, but all of them came to me with a service provider in place, I was excited to get the chance to research other options out there and really find the best possible service provider for this client.

After some digging and asking around among my Virtual Assistant colleagues, AWeber came up tops in the feedback. I put them forward to my client and we got started on setting things up.

Boy oh boy were we in for a shock! We encountered issue after issue, all in the name of CAN Spam compliance. The final straw came when we went to import my client’s contact database — a list of clients and contacts collected over a period of two years — the system rejected the import citing a “Dirty list” as the issue.

I immediately contacted customer support and was informed that this list had not been “cleaned” in two years, so they would not be able to import it. She happily suggested that I send an email to each of the almost 2,000 addresses and check which were still active and then try and import again. I disconnected the conversation and just sat here, staring at the screen in disbelief.

I spoke with the client who was not keen on troubling her clients with a further email just to check if they were still around. She asked me the same question I asked AWeber, “If you can see that there are addresses on the list that are old or outdated, can’t you just reject those and import the rest?” I am afraid not.

While I completely understand and respect the need for CAN Spam compliance, a simple tweak in their system could have saved us a bundle of time and effort, (and would have saved them a client… we moved the newsletter elsewhere pretty quickly.)

We have moved on to greener pastures now… *warning: shameless plug ahead* Vertical Response. While I had some issues with them in the early days when they first launched, they have recently updated their service offering and I have to admit, I am quite smitten with them. If you have heard me raving about the importance of newsletters and you’re thinking about setting something up, do yourself a favor and check them out!

P.S. They do postcard mailings too!

I’ve been on about marketing this week, back links, blogs and newsletters. How about those networking sites? There are a few of them out there, Ryze, Myspace, Facebook and LinkedIn.

I just discovered LinkedIn recently and signed up today — Oh, I hear you asking where I’ve been that I didn’t hear about them sooner. What can I say? I’ve been busy! — Anyway, I now have a profile, link to me if you have one too.

I’ve been working on the website quite a bit lately. I’ve been in business for a year now and I felt it was time to shake things up a bit over here and add some examples of work I have done this year, share some of the wonderful testimonials I have received from clients and just bring the site up to date in general.

There were a couple of clients from whom I had not yet requested a testimonial, so I got in touch with them and requested a quick one-liner when they got the chance. This morning I received the most beautiful testimonial ever and I am so proud of it that I wanted to share it here:

I want to take just a minute subsequent to your on-the-spot resolving of our most recent “need yesterday panic thing” to let you in on a little secret I have shared with my partner, and with referrals I have sent you over the past months. Ros, you are the best I have ever seen. I mean it. You know I have expressed gratitude for your incredibly skilled and crisis-driven help as we built up my company’s website and cleared up many other things together since the last half of 2006. What I have not shared with you is what I really tell these folks – that in all my years as a CPA in public practice, in international banking and as CFO of several industrial concerns, I have never worked with anyone so easily and effectively as I have with you. I will never forget those late nights when I would send you a chat message asking your opinion on some copy, graphic brainstorm or problem, and – there you were. You kept up this amazing flow of brilliant angles, astonishingly quick and professional execution, and a willingness to actually take a call and go over ideas together – at midnight. Spontaneously. (Make that 3am your time.) I realize this is not your normal mode of operation, but I also realize that your awareness of my time crisis resulted in your rising to the occasion again and again, always congenially and with no hassles. (This is an absolute miracle since I am not exactly the easiest guy on the block to work with.) How you got so much done so quickly while helping other clients is just beyond me. And I want you to know it means everything to me and our company. Thank you again, and congratulations on your upcoming move to Austin. We will rely on you for as long as we are both in business.

The Very Best to You,

Mark Wight, CPA, MBA

President

Lumina Consulting Group, Inc.

Someone recently posted a link to this article on the Virtual Assistant Networking forum where I am a member. It comes from www.useit.com, Jakob Nielsen April 2007Alertbox newsletter. (A very interesting bi-weekly newsletter for all you techies — and wannabe techies).
Summary:

It’s better to use “23″ than “twenty-three” to catch users’ eyes when they scan Web pages for facts, according to eye tracking data.

We’ve known the basic guidelines for writing for the Web since our earliest studies in 1997. A key finding is that most website users don’t read all your words. Instead, they scan the text and pick out headlines, highlighted words, bulleted lists, and links. Scanning is even more prevalent for readers of email newsletters.(There are a few exceptions to this rule: lower-literacy users can’t scan, while higher-literacy users read the entire page if they’re really interested or in desperate need of the information. But it’s the height of arrogance to assume that all of your customers are extraordinarily interested in everything you write — more likely, they’ll read a few pages and scan the rest.)

One of eyetracking’s greatest benefits is that it lets us follow users’ reading behaviors in great detail, especially when we watch slow-motion gaze replays after test sessions. Our recent eyetracking studies have given us new insights into how users read various website elements, including bulleted lists, the table-of-content-style list of links at the top of many FAQs, and those rare advertisements that actually attract fixations.

Among our discoveries was that numerals often stop the wandering eye and attract fixations, even when they’re embedded within a mass of words that users otherwise ignore.

• Why do users fixate on numerals? Because numbers represent facts, which is something users typically relish. Sometimes people are looking for specific facts, such as a product’s weight or size, so product pages are certainly one place where you should write numbers as numerals. But even when a number doesn’t represent a product attribute, it’s a more compact (and thus attractive) representation of hard information than flowery verbiage.
• How do users’ eyes locate numerals while skipping past words? The shape of a group of digits is sufficiently different from that of a group of letters to stand out to users’ peripheral vision before their foveal vision fixates on them. 2415 looks different than four, even though both consist of 4 characters. (As the previous sentence shows, stating the number of characters as a numeral makes it stand out, even without the bold highlighting.)

Digits enhance the scannability of Web content. It’s that simple.

Departing from Traditional Writing Style

Traditional copywriting style guides for print publications dictate that you spell out many numbers. For example, The Chicago Manual of Style says to spell out:

• “whole numbers from one through ninety-nine;”
• any of these numbers “followed by hundred, thousand, hundred thousand, million, and so on;”
• round numbers;
• very big numbers (millions, billions, etc.); and
• numbers that appear as the first word in a sentence.

I’ve frequently said that the guidelines for online writing differ from those for writing for print. I can now add that the guidelines for presenting numbers are different for websites than for print publications. When writing for the Web:

• Write numbers with digits, not letters (23, not twenty-three).
• Use numerals even when the number is the first word in a sentence or bullet point.
• Use numerals for big numbers up to one billon:
  • 2,000,000 is better than two million.
  • Two trillion is better than 2,000,000,000,000 because most people can’t interpret that many zeros.
  • As a compromise, you can often use numerals for the significant digits and write out the magnitude as a word. For example, write 24 billion (not twenty-four billion or 24,000,000,000).
• Spell out numbers that don’t represent specific facts.

As an example of the latter, if I say something like “in recent years, we have tested thousands of users and seen their use of breadcrumbs increase,” it’s better to write “thousands” as a word than to write “1,000s” or something like that. “Thousands” is not really data in this context, it’s intended to give an idea of the scope of the research. On the other hand, it’s better to use numerals when stating the exact number (e.g., “we have tested 2,692 users”). Disclosing the exact number also increases the statement’s credibility.

Big Numbers

In addition to spelling out extremely big numbers, you might also need to explain them if you write for a non-scientific audience. You might, for example, say that a trillion is a thousand billions.Most people don’t understand numbers above a billion, and many people don’t even know what a billion represents. There’s also an internationalization issue here: “billion” represents a thousand millions in American English, but a million millions in many European languages. Thus, the guideline is:

• Explain numbers starting with a trillion for most audiences. Explain numbers starting with a billion if you write for less numerate audiences or international users (you might say, for example, that “a trillion is a thousand billions.”)

Also, in testing e-commerce sites over the last few months, we found that most users couldn’t understand phrases like “1 TB,” which some sites use to state hard-drive capacity. Few users had previously encountered storage media in the terabyte range, so they had no clue what “1 TB” meant. Thus, the guideline is:

• Explain unusual abbreviations and measurement units, particularly those representing very big numbers.

For now, sites that sell computer equipment should spell out and explain TB when they use it. In a few years, people will be accustomed to the unit and won’t need such explanations. Thus, the detailed design guideline to explain TB might remain in force for only a few years. In contrast, the general usability guideline to explain unusual units will probably stay valid forever.

Digits Boost Usability and Credibility

For specific facts, representing numbers using digits rather than letters increases usability for people who are looking for either a particular piece of information or the gist of a page. This often includes e-commerce shoppers and very often includes customers visiting B2B sites, whether they’re shopping or just doing research.Even when users aren’t scanning for data, having your facts stand out visually by presenting them as numerals is an easy way to enhance credibility by making your page seem more useful.
—————————————————

Copyright, Jakob Nielsen, Phd.

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a User Advocate and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group which he co-founded with Dr. Donald A. Norman (former VP of research at Apple Computer). Until 1998 he was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer.

Dr. Nielsen founded the “discount usability engineering” movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation. He holds 79 United States <>patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.

• Publication and patent list
• Interviews and press coverage
• Scans of selected cover stories and feature stories

In keeping with my current focus on marketing and better SEO I decided to at last give Google Ad Words a try this week. I worked through their keyword suggestion tool and found some keywords that are suited to my services, but not as highly contested as say, “Virtual Assistant” or “VA”. As I said, I am starting small while I test things out. I set a reasonable budget for click throughs and now I wait and see what comes of it. I am glad that I started small because today I came across the below article and there are some changes that I would like to make.

The Beginners Guide to Success with Google Adwords

Are you thinking of using Google Adwords for the first time or have you recently tried it and gave up because you didn’t get the results you had hoped for?There are many people who give up using Google Adwords because they are not getting the traffic they wanted or it’s costing them more money that they can afford or both!A lot of people think that to be successful with Google Adwords you either have to be lucky or practicing some black art.However the good news is that Google Adwords does work and you can make it work for you. By simply following the following steps, you will have a well performing Google Adwords campaign which will bring the right type of visitors to your website.

Many advertisers do not follow these basic rules and they get there advertising all wrong. So just by making sure you follow these basic steps you will already be ahead of your competition.

Understand the link between keywords, your ads and your website.

This is the golden rule for Adwords.

Google is all about relevancy.

Google wants to be sure that when one of its customers searches for something that they find websites that are relevant to that search. So you need to make sure that your list of keywords in your adgroup work well with the ads you have set for that adgroup AND that the page you send visitors to when they click on you ad also has relevancy to the list of keywords.

Keep this rule at the front of your mind when you set up your campaigns.

Avoid Broad Searches

When you set up your keywords for Google Adwords, the default setting is Broad Match.

What this means is that Google will match your keywords against a search if your words are present in the search regardless of the order of the words, whether they appear together, are plurals, etc.

As an example if you use the term used shoes as a broad match then the following searches in Google would match to your keywords

used shoes used shoes shop used horse shoes shoes used in modern dance new and not used shoes

As you can see this can give quite a few matches that may not be relevant to your website.

You should avoid broad searches and target you keywords with phrased and exact matches.

A phrased match is one where the keywords will only match if they are used in the exact sequence of your keyword. You enter a phrased keyword by putting curly brackets {} around your keyword.

So for our example, if I used {used shoes} then

used shoes used shoes shop

would match but

used horse shoes shoes used in modern dance new and not used shoes

would not.

An exact match is one where the keywords will match only if that exact phrase is entered and no other words are used for the search. You enter an exact keyword by putting a square bracket [] around your keyword.

So for our example, if I used [used shoes] then

used shoes

would match but

used shoes shop used horse shoes shoes used in modern dance new and not used shoes

would not.

Avoid using the Content network.

You can set up your campaigns so that you ads appear on both Google’s search network and its content network.

The content network consists of websites that allow Google ads to appear.

I recommend turning off the content option when you set up your campaign because you ad may not always appear on websites that a very relevant to the ad you are running.

Only advertise to locations that it makes sense to.

When you set up your campaigns you can select which countries you want your adverts to appear to. So for example, if you sell a product in the USA that you would not ship outside then there is little point for your ad to appear to people in Europe or China for example.

Pick the times you want your adverts to appear

You can select what time of day you want your ads to appear. So if you are trying to advertise to UK buyers who are surfing during the evening, then those are the times you should be setting your ads to appear.

Organise your ad groups and campaigns

One campaign with one adgroup and one massive list of keywords is doomed. This is the one single mistake that many first time users of Google Adwords make.

Before you start using Adwords, I strongly recommend you sit down with pen and paper to plan out your campaign and adgroup structure.

What works best does tend to vary based on what you are trying to sell. However as a guide for each campaign you should aim for no more than four or five adgroups each with ten to twenty good keywords. This will give you a set of campaigns which are easy to maintain and the keywords in each adgroup can be targeted effectively.

This is only a guideline though. I’ve actually had an adgroup with only one keyword and it performed wonderfully.

Use Landing Pages

So many people make the serious mistake of sending their visitors to their home page when they click on their ads.

You really want to send then directly to the page that is relevant to the ad you are running.

So for example, if you have an online clothes shop then for any adverts you are running for men’s gloves, you really want to send them directly to the page for men’s gloves.

So, don’t use your home page unless it makes sense. Send your visitors to land on a page that is relevant to the advert they clicked on. If you don’t have a page that is relevant to the advert, then why are you running that advert!

Use more that one Advert and TEST!

Always, always have more than one advert running for an adgroup. This allows you to see which advert is getting the best clicks through rate. You can then change the lower performing adverts and try to beat your best one. You will soon find that you have some very effective adverts.

However to test properly, you need to set the adverts to rotate evenly. This is set in the campaign settings. In the ad serving option under the advanced settings, make sure you select the radio button for Rotate: Show ads more evenly.

Those of you lucky enough to get one of these tomorrow, please let me know what you think of it. It’s a bit out of my price range right now, but I’ve been drooling over this for months now.

iPhone, iPhone, I adore thee… *sigh!*

(For those of you who’ve been hiding under a rock these past couple of months, I give you iPhone)

See this button? Click it why don’t you! It’s only the greatest little gadget I’ve seen all week (apart from the iPhone, but that is NOT a gadget). An auto-pinger. It automatically sends out pings whenever I update… well no, it checks for updates every 30 minutes and if it finds one it pings… well, it pings EVERYWHERE!! *cough!* and of course it also pings everywhere every time you hit the button… as I am sure you have already discovered?A fantastic tool for bloggers!

Removed as I can’t figure out how to embed a video in WordPress