While putting the polishing touches on my brand new website, I played with the cool wordcloud tool over at Wordle.net. If you want a “search engine” view of your website, with a little more organization and a lot more visual appeal, go make a wordle of your own.
Wordle's Word Cloud for WickedWriter.com
I was asked (by colleague and nature writer JJ Murphy) this weekend if a blog chain was good for marketing. She asked me several questions:
1. What is the marketing value, if any in a blog chain?
2. Does it make sense to reply back to a comment on your site?
3. Is there a marketing advantage to guest blogging?
4. Does any of this help in search engine ranking?
It’s been awhile since I’ve really “dug in” where SEO is concerned. Basically, I’ve been working under the assumption (a fairly good one, IMHO and in my humble experience online) that if you build good content, organize it well and use common sense when titling your articles, posts and web pages — that the readers will come.
For my own sites, and my client sites, it’s worked like a charm.
To be fair, I have spent a great deal of time studying SEO in the past and still try to keep abreast of any big changes. But mostly, I’ve determined that avoiding the “tricks” and the “blackhat” methods — and relying on offering a site of useful information and making it easy to find and access that information is the best long-term SEO approach. (I do keep an eye on well-crafted metas and always have an eye on local search.) Continue reading
Recently, Forbes released an article about a company offering “reputation defense” on Google, the world’s most popular search engine.
By carefully promoting positive PR on Google via SEO techniques to minimize the impact of negative Internet blogs, reviews and articles, this company accentuates the positive (to quote a favorite Disney song.) Is this the latest business model? Protection from online publication (Google-Bombing-style) and negative pieces on the first page of Google? Hmmmm.
I’ll bet that Bush’s PR guy would have been happy to pay the $10K price tag for this service last year. (The company, Reputation Defender, also offers reputation monitoring services for a much more reasonable monthly rate.)
It continues to be a brave new world (tomorrow) for service businesses that we don’t even know that we need (today) resulting from the impact of online activity (yesterday).
Most of you have probably heard of — even played with — the new Yahoo! Real Estate Search Tool, but I’d be willing to bet that very few of you have seen a “sneak peak” of the new Google Real Estate tool.
It’s still in what I’d call “pre-alpha” — although I have no idea what the Google developers are calling it — and has been discovered via the back end by some people so geeky they make me look chic!