“ISYOT” is a concept I learned from a fantastic online social media guy – Paul Colligan.

“ISYOT” = “I’ve Seen You Out There”

It’s the response you want people to have when they meet you in person for the first time. It should help you decide where to focus your social media marketing. If you want people to say they’ve seen you “out there”, where will you be? Wherever they are looking. If your ideal customer is on facebook, be on facebook. If they’re also on twitter and youtube, but not linkedin, you should have a strong presence on twitter & youtube, but not worry so much about linkedin. You get the idea.

ISYOT as a marketing philosophy is about building trust with your prospective customers over a long period. It’s the complete opposite of the long, direct sales letter. It’s about many light brushes, rather than trying to deliver a knockout blow with only one hit (not that I’m advocating hitting your customers, or anyone lol. It’s a metaphor people! Sheesh ).

In my opinion ISYOT perfectly embodies social media marketing or any other form of relationship marketing. It’s just common sense that people will buy from people they know and trust, over someone they’ve never heard of, particularly in today’s world of increasingly sophisticated scams.

A further investigation of ISYOT as a marketer suggests that you should pursue ISYOT without trying to sell. At all. For starters, it just won’t work if you’re all sell, sell, sell. Also, it requires you to build relationships that you may help some time down the road, even if that opportunity didn’t exist when you started the journey with them.

A fantastic book I read recently is by Lesley Dewar on networking. Though it doesn’t use the term ISYOT, it is firmly built around the principle of ISYOT and hey, it’s free (signup to Lesley’s email list required)! Click here to get the ebook Networking To A Plan – you’ll have to scroll down to where it says “Click here to request your copy of Networking To A Plan“.

What’s a gravatar? Gravatar stands for “Globally Recognized Avatar”. It’s the picture you see, particularly in the comments section of blogs.

Why should you get one? Well, would you rather get into a conversation with someone who’s picture was a white chess pawn on a grey background, or with someone whose face you could see? A gravatar essentially puts a name to the face. It helps build your online presence because when (for example) you’re at a conference and you meet a blogger whom you’ve interacted with online, there’s a better chance they’ll recognize your face, giving an “ISYOT” response. This is a  good thing

It’s free to setup a gravatar and it couldn’t be easier to setup. You only do it once and that’s it forever.

How does it work? Gravatar essentially matches a picture with an email. You don’t need to give gravatar your name. When you use that email address to comment on a website, if the website supports gravatars, your picture will come up after your comment is approved. So simple! WordPress supports gravatars automatically, as do many other blogging platforms.

What’s the benefit to you? People will remember you and your contribution to the conversation a lot better if they see your face. That’s why places like Facebook and Twitter have profile pictures for users of their sites.

So what are you waiting for? Go here and enter your email address, upload a photo and you’re done! See the gravatar site for more information on gravatars.

The Title tag is THE most important SEO element on your site.

Read that again, I’ll wait…

Ok. Now to explain.

The Title tag is at the top of the html code for each page on your site. It is the words between <title> and </title>.

You can see it at the top of your browser. In the google listing of that particular page, it is the headline, the clickable part which catches a searchers attention.

Having the same Title tag across your site is a big mistake and testing has shown it to be the biggest cause of the duplicate content penalty. Think about it… if you have 5 documents and you tell someone that all of them are about the same thing, they probably won’t bother reading past the first document. That’s what happens if you have the same Title tag across your site. Just don’t do it. Make them different.

Your Title tag should be no more than 65 characters or 10 words. Why? That’s how much the search engines display. You don’t want a searcher reading half your headline and wondering what the rest of it…

LOL. See what I mean?

The best way to work out what to say in your Title tag is to think of it like a newspaper. The Title is like the headline. It should be catchy, grab people’s attention and get them to click through to your site.

Your keyword should be in the Title. Which keyword? Well you should only be targetting one keyword in any one page… so it would be that keyword

Leave your company name out of the Title tag unless you are a famous brand, or trying to become one. And even then, you should consider having your brand or company name only in the Title tag for your homepage and nowhere else. Searchers usually don’t care who you are – they just want the answer to that query, whether that is information or a product.

The easiest way to find out how good your Title tags are is to search on google using:

site:yourdomain.com

Obviously replacing yourdomain.com with your domain (hey, some people don’t get it).

That search will list all the pages on your site that are in Google’s index. It makes it really easy to scan and see how unique each Title is.

So what are you waiting for? Do they need fixing? Then what are you still doing here?

From time to time, it’s a good idea to clear out twitter accounts that have gone stale. These are people that haven’t tweeted for a while. They do no harm, but why follow someone who isn’t there?

This would be practically impossible if it weren’t for a fantastic service: UnTweeps

With UnTweeps, you authorize it using Twitter’s OAuth function, which means you don’t need to give out your username and password (which you should NEVER do!). It then goes through the people you follow on twitter and lists the ones that haven’t tweeted for awhile. You set how long that period should be, but the default is 30 days.

The problem is that due to Twitter’s terms of service, they can no longer have a “select all” function. Now that’s fine if you are only following 30 people, but when you have the sort of numbers many of us do, it can be awfully time consuming selecting every checkbox. So I haven’t done it for quite a long time. But it was time to take the plunge. sidenote: do you like how I’ve broken all the rules of English in this paragraph? lol

So rather than click each of the thousand or so checkboxes, I went and found a firefox greasemonkey script that would do it all for me.

It’s over at http://www.squarefree.com/2005/04/13/checkrange/. It’s ridiculously easy to install and run. If you haven’t got greasemonkey running on firefox already, head over to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748/ and follow the prompts. Then go to squarefree and install the CheckRange script. As of the time of writing this post, there are no problems with firefox compatibility and the script was safe for me.

Once that’s all done (you may have to restart your browser if you didn’t already have greasemonkey), head over to UnTweeps, follow the steps til you get to the list of ppl to unfollow. Select the first checkbox, then scroll to the bottom and select the last checkbox while holding SHIFT (or equivalent on a Mac)… And Bob’s your uncle, all checked!

Make sure you go through the list and unselect anyone you might still want to follow. One of my friends, @AdrianPavone hadn’t tweeted for a few weeks because he was away and I would have unfollowed him if I had not gone through and checked. That would’ve made things awkward as I wouldn’t have realized I’d done it, but he’d know.

As with anything, just be careful how you use it and you’ll be ok.

This is something that I can’t believe I haven’t heard other people talk about yet, but it’s so simple and easy to implement!

When you’re surfing the net, catching up on the news, reading your favourite blogs, etc – if they have a comment section, take an extra 2 minutes and comment on what you just read, linking back to your site.

So many people finish reading the blog post and just move on that it baffles me!

Leaving a comment does three things:

1. You get a link back to your site
2. You build your network
3. You make the writer feel more motivated to write.

It doesn’t get better than that.

You Get A Link Back To Your Site

If you’re like most people, you are already spending time and money building links to your site. Commenting on blogs in this way is an excellent way to give a bit of a boost with natural looking links. Of course the reason they look natural is because they are natural.

Sometimes we get so lost in checking for a high PageRank and dofollow that we lose sight of normality. Don’t worry if the blog post is a PageRank zero or whether the link to your site would be nofollowed. Don’t worry about putting keywords in the Name area. Don’t worry about putting your url in the comment section. Just be like a regular person:

• Enter your real name (or nom de plume if applicable),
• Real email address (I use a free yahoo one for all my social media posting to keep spam out of my “proper” email accounts),
• And website – you can put a particular page in the website section, as opposed to your homepage, but I generally can’t be bothered going to get the exact link – it’s meant to be as quick and painless as possible.

Your comment should add something to the conversation. Say what you liked or didn’t like about the content of the blog post. I try to think what would I say if a friend handed me an article and I read it in front of them – you’d be expected to say something about the article when you handed it back to them, wouldn’t you?

Don’t worry about whether the comment links are nofollowed (if you don’t know what that means, read my post on the Death of Nofollow). I’ve seen for myself in the last few months that Google doesn’t actually listen when someone says a link is nofollowed.

If you don’t have a website, link to a favoured charity and help them out.

You Build Your Network

By commenting on blogs, people see you about and get to know you. If the blog has comment moderation, you can guarantee the owner (or an assistant) sees your name every time you comment. I go to pretty much every site to check the person out before accepting a comment on any of my blogs. Who knows, you might even be invited to do a guest post on that person’s blog, or they may give you free promotion, simply because they like your stuff.

In this web 2.0 world, everything is about connections, networking, talking to people, etc. Don’t get left behind.

You Make The Writer Feel More Motivated To Write

Most people spend a lot of time on their blog posts. It takes time to research and write them and almost as long to edit it and come up with a good header

Most blogs that fail do so because the writer isn’t motivated to write any more. The main reason for this is:

1. They don’t feel like anyone is listening, so why should they keep writing?
2. It’s not financially worth their time.

By leaving a simple comment on their site, you can almost single-handedly take out the first reason! The second one is for them, not you, to worry about (just thought I’d make that clear lol).

So what are you waiting for? Go comment on the articles you read. You can start by commenting on this post Thanks for reading!

URL shorteners like bit.ly and tinyurl.com are great, particularly if you are active on social media. They are also great for tracking how much traffic any particular link generates as well as other cool statistics like what country the visitors are from.

The problem I see with using such URL shortening services is that they could just up and vanish, leaving you with a whole lot of broken links. Not only can it happen, but it has happened (remember tr.im?) and will happen again.

The way around this is simply to get your own URL shortener. It’s really cheap to do and requires practically no running. If you’re not comfortable with code or ftp, get someone who is to set it up for you.

I’ve tried a lot of URL shortening software, both free and paid and the best, in my opinion is YOUrls. It’s free, easy to use, allows link customization, has great stats and some handy bookmarklets for your browser. Pretty much everything you could want in a URL shortener.

You can get it at http://yourls.org.

You’ll need:

1 short domain (the shorter the better).

1 hosting package (unless you already have one). Make sure it has a SQL database free.

1 person to install the software.

That’s it. Total cost is around $20 per year all up (less if you’re adding it to hosting you’ve already got). It’ll take about half an hour (max) to setup and you’re good to go. YOUrls lets you have multiple users, but you have to set them up in the config file. You can change them any time. The only thing I don’t like about YOUrls is that everyone sees every link, but if it’s just for yourself, that’s not an issue.

I’m pretty sure it was Don Crowther that put me onto this, but for the life of me, I can’t find the article, even though it was only a few days ago. Ah the perils of massive amounts of information!

The article was about tracking actions on your site from the different promotions you do. As it was Don, the focus was understandably on Social Media.

The basic idea is to track all your links. Obvious? Yep. Do I do it? Yep. I have my own url shortener so I have full control over my tracking and full confidence that all the links I put out there will continue to work, whether or not the tracking company goes out of business (hey, it can happen! And then where would you be?).

But Don, being the master he is, ramped it up in a unique way. Ok maybe it’s not so unique, but I’ve never heard of it and I’ve generally got my ear to the ground on these things. It’s an advanced technique/tweak for when you use Google Analytics. It goes like this:

Go to the Google Tool: URL Builder. It will look like this:

Enter the information into the fields and it’ll create a longer url with various paramaters attached. Something like:

http://www.mikehaydon.com/analytics/google-analytics-advanced-tracking/?
utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social%2Bmedia&
utm_campaign=googleanalyticsadvancedtracking

The final step is to take that extremely long link and turn it into a much shorter one, using a link shortening service. Either create your own link shortener or use one of the free ones like http://bit.ly or http://tinyurl.com. I know Don uses http://budurl.com – it’s a paid service, but one of the benefits of a paid service is that they are a lot less likely to go out of business than a free one.

I’m going to implement this tweak and see how much of a difference it makes to my understanding of my analytics.

In writing my SEO 101 series, I noticed I throw around the term PageRank a lot (with good reason). Then it hit me that, as this is SEO 101, I should probably explain what that is

PageRank was coined by the founders of Google to describe the algorythm they use to… well… rank pages.

PageRank (or “PR” as it’s often called) is essentially a mathematical way for working out the likelihood of a random internet surfer going to any particular page. The higher the PageRank, the more likely, according to the formula, that someone will find the page.

Pages, not sites, receive PageRank. It’s a common misconception that a site receives PageRank. If you hear someone say their site is a PageRank 5, they are actually saying that the homepage of their site has a PageRank of 5.

PageRank is usually expressed as a whole number between 0 and 10, with 0 being the lowest.

Each level of PageRank is worth about 10 times as much as the level below it.

If you were to only have PageRank 0 pages linking to a particular page (not recommended, by the way), you would need 10 incoming links to move your page to a PageRank 1, 100 incoming links to a PageRank 2, 1,000 incoming links to a PageRank 3, etc.

The beauty of PageRank is that links from higher PageRank pages pass a higher amount of PageRank. Basically, if it takes 100 PageRank 0 links to take your page to a PageRank 2, it would only take 10 PageRank 1 links to do the same thing.

The formula isn’t exact, so allow for a little more links if you’re really set on a particular level of PageRank. And don’t worry about damping factors, percentage of PageRank bleed and other intricate details that you really don’t need to know unless you are a professional SEO consultant…

One of the most important factors in getting your pages ranked higher in the search engines is the number and quality of incoming links.

The value of links to your page is related to the PageRank of the page that links to your page. The higher the PageRank, the higher the value. However, the increase in value isn’t in a straight line… It seems that each level is about 10 times more valuable than the level below it.

So focus on getting quality links, rather than quantity. Or better still, if you can, focus on quality AND quantity.

Even if you know nothing about on-page search engine optimization, your site can still rank quite well just by having enough quality incoming links.

Lots of quality incoming links can even compensate for not having the keyword on the page. What do I mean? Usually, if you want a page to rank for red widgets you need to have red widgets mentioned somewhere on the page. But with enough links, you can rank #1 for something that doesn’t appear on the page… even if there are millions of sites in the search engine index for that term. Just google “click here” and look at the top results if you don’t believe me

To sum up, if you’re not ranking well for a particular keyword, your first step should be to get more links to your site. Don’t worry about anything else until you have that fixed.

I was recently surprised to find out that people still pay a lot of attention to the “green bar” – you know, the PageRank indicator on the Google toolbar.

This person was worried that they were doing a whole lot of linking, but their green bar showed they were a PageRank Zero.

Just don’t worry about this if you notice it on your site. The green bar has been broken for years. Google in it’s *ahem* “infinite wisdom” doesn’t want people to know exactly how they rank pages or what the pages rank is at any one time. This isn’t a conspiracy, it’s more that they made a business decision to do make it extremely difficult (if not impossible) to reverse engineer their system. This is good in a way because it limits how much people can game that system. That leaves the playing field more competitive for those of us without million dollar advertising budgets.

In the beginning of the Google toolbar, the green bar was updated about every three months. But back in 2007 we noticed it was longer and longer between updates. Even when it did update, it seemed to be an incomplete update. These days, it is updated so infrequently, it may as well not exist.

That’s how it should be for you – just don’t pay attention to it. “Step away from the little green bar”