Don't Be Afraid to Take Chances

I was rooting for the Saints. Their coach, Sean Payton, grew up in nearby Naperville, Illinois. They were underdogs. After a shaky first quarter, they clawed their way back into the game by halftime. I figured, if they just play sound, fundamental football from here on, they’ve got a chance. So what does Sean Payton do? He runs an onside kick to open the second half. Unheard of. Crazy.

And what happens? The Saints catch the Colts off guard, recover the kick, march down field, score a touchdown, take the lead, steal the momentum, and win the game.

B2B Can Use Social Media to Steal the Momentum

One question I hear frequently from B2B owners and marketing leaders is, how do we stand out from the crowd? In a lot of sectors, companies conduct marketing activities in pretty much the same ways – trade shows, “billboard” style websites, brochures, press releases, print advertising, etc.

What would happen if such a company ran an onside kick at the start of the third quarter? What if they started a serious Twitter or LinkedIn campaign? What if they began to blog in earnest? They might score a quick touchdown. They might take the lead.

But more important – they might steal the momentum. They might lock in a sustainable advantage over competitors by building strong customer relationships and attracting entire new segments of the market.

Anyone who has participated in team sports knows this – once you lose the momentum, it’s hard to get it back. You can stay in the trenches and slug it out with more powerful competitors, or you can do the unexpected. For anybody who watched Super Bowl XLIV, the choice is obvious.

And Don’t Be Afraid to Make a Mistake

And by the way – Coach Payton took another crazy chance earlier in the game. Instead of kicking a chip shot field goal, he elected to go for a touchdown on fourth down at the Colts goal line. The Colts stopped the Saints cold. Would your company take a chance like that? And, if you did and it failed, would you shake it off and come back a few days later , taking an even wilder chance?

Most folks wouldn’t, I guess. But winners do.
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Chicago based SEO copywriting, blog consulting, and content marketing.

Friday Fun and Link Love

This is more of a designee flaw ...

And while we’re in this milieu, what about the restrooms? We now have motion activated flushing mechanisms. Motion activated soap dispensers. Motion activated towel dispensers. And on the way out – your hand has to touch a door handle. What could be more germ infested than a public restroom door handle? Design flaw.

Enough of that milieu. Last week I reported a milestone: my 800th Word Sell post. Having received much congratulations from readers, I now find myself in the awkward position of having to retract my announcement. Apparently, when transferring to my new WordPress theme, several posts were duplicated. Design flaw. I’m still a tad shy of 800. Oh well, I’m one closer than yesterday.

What everyday design flaws have you noticed lately?

Link Love

Robert Hruzek, the consummate story teller, just launched his latest group project, What I Learned From Children. Robert’s projects are fun to write, fun to read, and loaded with link love. Submission deadline is February 7, 2010.

One blogger I really need to spend more time reading – Liz Strauss. Don’t you think she’s great? She packs more punch in her posts than just about any writer I know in the social media and marketing space. And incredibly generous, to boot.

Attention, writers. My blogger friend Emma Newman was interviewed this week on Collective Inkwell. She talks about the art of writing and some of her creative marketing methods. Her novel, Twenty Years Later, will be published soon.

Finally, I have to give one of my clients another plug. Kay Plantes started blogging recently, and writes brilliantly about business model innovation. If you want to see the big picture – and see it clearly – take a look. Her writing will transform the way you think about your business and your customers.

Enjoy the weekend, and go Saints.
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Chicago based SEO copywriting, blog consulting, and content marketing.

SEO Basics – Optimizing Images

“Every Picture Tells a Story” – Rod Stewart, Ronald David Wood

Here is an unoptimized image.

Here is an optimized image.

Think Carefully about Optimizing Your Images

Can you tell the difference?

Image Title. Hover over the top image and you’ll see “pic20471″. That’s an image file name you might see on a stock photo website or for personal images in your own hard drive. A lot of folks will upload images into their blog with those titles and leave it at that. Hover over the second image and you’ll see “image optimization merits thought”. I optimized this image for the phrase “image optimization”. Upper / lower case composition is OK, but I use all lower case mainly out of habit. Avoid all caps – it’s off putting to human readers when the title displays in search results. Title tags should be relevant, though, again for search and human readers. That’s why I tacked on “merits thought”.

Caption. You’ll notice the second image has a caption. I love captions. They give you another opportunity to insert keywords, and they allow you to tell a story with your image. Stories engage readers. A captioned image makes readers curious to read your post. For b2b sites, captions are especially important for identifying products and services. It helps readers associate the image of your product with its name and one or two important benefits.

ALT Tag. The alternate description of an image, or ALT tag, displays when the image is not available to be viewed. ALT tags have been devalued by Google and other search engines, so are not a high value SEO element. However, they are very important as a courtesy to readers! The ALT tag for the second image is “Standing woman, rubbing chin, looking perplexed.” A good ALT tag describes the image and follows standard punctuation and grammar rules, so that someone who can’t see the image can easily get a mental picture of it. It doesn’t hurt to include keywords. You can see the ALT tag text by “viewing source” of this page in your browser, or by right-clicking on it and “inspecting element”.

Image Links. Note the second image links to a relevant page of my website. If an image is a snapshot story, give readers an opportunity to read the full version, or take them to a page on your site that allows them to inquire or order. Images can be gateways to conversions. And – a robust internal linking structure strengthens the SEO performance of your site.

Why Image Optimization Is Important for B2B and B2C SEO

Image search is getting more popular by the day. Check your stats – have you noticed an increase in referrals from image searches? People want to see what products look like. If you have a striking image and it displays on the first page of image search returns, you’re going to get qualified prospects clicking through to your web pages. Any product or service that has a visual element in the making a sale should have well optimized images – and that includes an awful lot of stuff, from apples to zithers.
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Chicago based SEO copywriting, blog consulting, and content marketing.

Focusing on SEO Tactics Is a Titanic Blunder

You’ll Smash into an Iceberg Thinking Tactically about SEO

You have to think strategically about SEO. A lot of companies fall in love with tactics rather than embrace strategy. This is a big mistake, one made regularly in every sort of marketing discipline I know of.

Companies will read an article on social media and start setting up Twitter accounts. Or they will hear about a competitor cleaning up on YouTube and start producing video. Or watch a slide presentation on content marketing and feverishly start composing a bunch of landing pages.

And you don’t have to be an idiot to fall into this trap, believe me. Marketing techniques are fascinating. I find myself, for instance, falling in love with stuff like the nuances of punctuation marks in title tags, instead of looking at the big picture. I know better, but it’s easy to do.

You Got to Have Links

Let me give you an example. A client – a sophisticated, market savvy client who knows his way around online marketing – was talking to me about a content creation project to support one of their websites, to move up in the search rankings. I was excited – I had already found a couple clever angles while doing preliminary keyword research. But after we had spent more than a few hours on the project, I thought, this website doesn’t have any links coming in! We can create all the content we want, but until we engage in some serious linkbuilding, we’re not going anywhere on Google other than south. The correct sequence of activity on this project was clear – links first, then content.

Every SEO scenario is different. It’s not only important to evaluate what needs to be done, you have to lay out the proper sequence of events, the correct staging of activities. The Titanic should have built the lifeboats before the ship sailed. It’s not good to make this kind of mistake with SEO, because there might not be a lifeboat handy. Need help with your content marketing strategy? Submit this form – let’s talk.

Chicago based SEO copywriting, blog consulting, and content marketing.

Friday Fun and Link Love

Don't Let This Be Your

It was a whopper – a half page ad, color. The ad announced the grand opening of a gourmet restaurant, and the copy made me hungry – and thirsty. They’d be featuring wines from Argentina and Brazil. The head chef – showered with awards from various culinary institutes and a winner of a regional Iron Chef competition. The graphics were elegant, inviting. And to top it off, free dessert at the grand opening when you present this ad. Perfect strike on the target market, plus a scrumptious call to market. I was ready to go.

BUT

There was no phone number or address on the ad.

Being in a different town several miles away, we had no clue how to get there. Perhaps the ad was targeted to folks who lived specifically in that little community. Too bad. They might have pulled in lots of customers simply by adding one line of text to an otherwise brilliant ad. Result. Instead of soaring to heights of marketing brilliance, these folks crash landed right in the heart of Big But City.

Over to You

Don’t we tend to miss the forest for the trees? How do you avoid missing the obvious in your content creation and marketing activities?

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Having gotten real busy with work since the new year began, I completely missed the fact that I had published my 800th Word Sell blog post. Never thought I’d see the day, and as it turned out, I was right.

Also, a heavy workload has crimped the “Link Love” portion of this new Friday series. I didn’t have much time to explore blog posts this week, but what’s lacking in quantity I’m going to try to make up for in quality. This post from TopRank, Survey Results: Impact of Blogging on Search Engine Optimization, is a real gem. It has all sorts of FACTS that demonstrate what many of us already know – blogging is a fabulous way to improve search engine visibility for small companies, big companies, b2b companies, and b2c companies.
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Chicago based SEO copywriting, blog consulting, and content marketing.

In the midst of a fascinating, long distance Skype conversation, Robin Dickinson and I got on the subject of Blogging Focus – in other words, how do we find the right blogging formula? How do we strike the right chords in the branding, writing, and marketing of our business blogs? How can we balance the need to be authentic with the need to advance certain business goals?

Robin and I have similar business philosophies and attitudes about life in general. Since I’ve been blogging quite a bit longer, Robin thought I might be able to help him answer some of these questions, questions he is struggling with mightily right now. There was some advice I could offer, but as we talked it became obvious that Blogging Focus is a vast and complex issue. Every one of Robin’s questions raised three new ones, including many that have perplexed me for years.

We decided to continue our exploration of Blogging Focus as a series of blog post dialogs. We’re going to bounce some of our questions back and forth and see where it takes us. Our hope is, this little exercise will bring some clarity to our blogging approach, and perhaps help you to do the same.

How do you judge whether you blog’s theme and topics are successful?

Robin, this question is far more complex than it appears, partly because there are so many ways to measure “success”. Here are a few that come to mind.

1. Number of comments on your blog
2. Change in number of blog comments
3. Quality of blog comments
4. Number of RSS and email subscriptions
5. Change in number of subscriptions
6. Profile of subscribers
7. Conversions – number and quality of inquiries and sales
8. Number, trend, and quality of links from other blogs
9. Social media mentions/links
10. Invitations to write on other blogs in or related to your niche

How many others can you add to the list? I’d say that trends are more important than raw numbers – that’s for sure. Bloggers shouldn’t get discouraged if during the first several months they have few subscribers and infrequent comments. You’ve got to give blogging a good year – maybe more. If you see even a gradual increase in readers and comments, that’s a great sign you’re on the right track. If people like what you’re saying, they’ll tell others. But it takes time to make an impression. There are millions of blogs. As an avid blog reader, it usually takes two or three posts that capture my interest to really get a blog on my radar. That process could take a few weeks, or as much as several months. There are blogs that I was vaguely aware of years ago that I became a big fan of only recently. So I assume that other potential Word Sell community members look at me the same way.

When I sense that a particular topic or style is resonating, I try to stick with it. At one point, I dropped my cartoons from my blog, thinking that I should adapt a more serious, professional tone. But several of my dearest community members, including the brilliant Robyn McMaster, urged me to bring them back, so I did. Listening to your community may be the surest way to get a feel for when you are on track.

Is any of this helpful? How can we be more precise about measuring success – or is that even a good idea?

Brad, as you know, measurements and metrics are very close to my heart. It’s probably my scientific training that has me erring on the side of always seeking empirical evidence of success. You offer a comprehensive list of success measures that are very helpful. Spot on!

One point I would like to bring up is that the times when my blog metrics have been the best, I’ve felt the least successful. What I mean is this. Several times over the past year I have published an article that was a runaway success, relative to the rest of my posts. The views were well over 1000 in a couple of days. The comments were plentiful and of good quality. The subscriber numbers got a boost and their profile was right in the crosshairs of my target audience. So, why the feelings of failure?

I felt I’d failed because the articles where specifically written to draw a crowd rather than to be congruent with my on-line purpose and identity. The material had been squashed and squeezed to ‘tickle many ears and please many eyes’ first and foremost. I had deliberately laundered the quality of message to appeal to the quantity of viewers.

Perhaps this is how artists or musicians feel when they write for what will sell, and in so doing deviate from their authentic picture or song. It’s a fresh manifestation of an age-old dilemma – mass appeal vs. artistic integrity.

So how do we measure for this? What standard can we apply that allows those of us who experience this tension to check our work against? I wrestle with this and have only come up with rather lame subjective ‘measures’ like: Does this post feel right? Is it consistent with my values? Is this my authentic voice and message?

It’s a topic that I would like to discuss with you in more detail, Brad. In the meantime, let’s get some feedback from your blog readers. I would love to know what they think.

Internal links are very important to the search performance of a website. For b2b firms whose websites present credentials and an overview of products and services, internal links are of utmost importance for effective selling as well as effective SEO.

Good Internal Links Help Make the Sale

They Can’t Buy It if They Can’t Find It

Here I’m thinking about potential customers who visit the b2b site to check out the firm as part of their decision making process. How do these potential customers behave on the website? First, we can assume they enter the site on the Home page. They most likely take in the Home page as a whole, sizing up whether it’s professionally designed and intelligently written – or an exercise in mediocrity. If the latter, the potential customer is gone. But if the site looks good, the next thing the potential customer will want to see is the nuts and bolts of what the b2b firm has to offer.

This is where internal linking comes in, and why it is so important.

Finding Product and Service pages on a b2b website shouldn’t be a treasure hunt, but that’s how many navigational schemes make it feel. Here are some tips for laying out internal links that will help SEO and improve the user experience. Bottom line – using these techniques will turn more prospects into customers.

Internal Linking Tips and Techniques for B2Bs

1. Avoid long drop down menus in top line navigation. Overlong dropdowns, especially with multiple levels, are awkward to click on, and once the visitor clicks through to the new page, he may have trouble remembering what the link was that he clicked on. Clumsy. If you must use these, make sure to test them in all popular browsers, because dropdowns can behave differently from browser to browser.
2. Set up universally important product and service page links on the template. For those vital pages that you want potential customers to find no matter what page of the site they are on, make them easy to find by setting up links to them in one place, either in the header or high on the left or right sidebar.
3. Set up relatively important product and service page links in another, consistent area of the page. Links to product and service pages that relate to a given web page should be displayed elsewhere, but in a consistent place from page to page. Related products/services links can appear at the top or bottom of the page, or on one of the sidebars. The important thing is to display the links in the same place on any page, so visitors don’t have to hunt for them.
4. Use descriptive, keyword optimized anchor text. Keyword analysis and knowing your customers will help you select the terms most often used to describe your products and services. These terms should be your primary search terms and used whenever possible as anchor text for your internal links. Anchor text selection can be obvious: for instance, “Bottling Equipment” is clearly better than “Equipment”. However, anchor text selection can sometimes require serious research: for instance, there could be an enormous difference in popularity between “Bottling Machine” and “Bottling Machines”.
5. Use breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs are handy navigational tools when product and services have multiple levels. Here is an example of breadcrumb navigation from the Sealed Air Corporation site on a product I did some promotional work on this year. (You can see other good internal linking practices on this page as well.) Point is, without breadcrumbs, managing your way back and forth from one product group to another can become highly frustrating for the visitor, leading them to exit on the very pages you want them to stay on.
6. Use a visible sitemap. B2b sites with 20-plus pages really ought to have a visible / accessible sitemap. It’s an excellent navigational tool and an excellent opportunity to create keyword optimized internal links. A couple of my clients regularly get a lot of traffic through the sitemap – and a very low bounce rate.

Over to You

Any other tips for internal linking? What works best on your site?
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Chicago based SEO copywriting, blog consulting, and content strategy consulting.

Being the dead of winter, I don’t know what possessed me to run this cartoon about Bermuda shorts, but there it is. I wonder what brain master Robyn McMaster and innovation master Fred Schlegel will make of this little known incident from King Solomon’s court.

Speaking of little known incidents, my sister recommended The Financial Lives of the Poets, by Jess Walter. Hilarious. Brilliant. Especially if you enjoy the lighter side of personal financial crisis in this wonderful recession of ours.

Last week I did a guest post on Search Engine People – thank you, Ruud Hein. The post is called Successful Blogging in the Real Time Search World. Times they are a-changing! No rest for the wicked, or for bloggers – we have to keep learning to keep pace, no doubt about it.

This week my Joyful Jubilant Learning post was published – The Unifying Spirit of Meditation. Writing coach extraordinaire Joanna Young thinks writing about meditation, SEO, and FarmVille makes me a Renaissance Man, but I think it makes me a Man with Too Much Time on His Hands.

A few of my favorite posts from this week. 25 Women That Rock Social Media, by Lee Odden. The Gift of Written Language, by Karen Swim. Anatomy of a Direct Mail Piece, by Deb.

My blogging friend Robin Dickinson is serving up great stuff Down Under. For instance, look how he asks just a few questions and sparks a fascinating conversation with How technology is killing the way we communicate.

Less is more.

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Chicago based SEO copywriting, blog consulting services, and content strategy consulting.

SEO Basics – Title Tags

The HTML title tag is an extremely important element of a web page or blog post. Here’s a simple explanation of the title tag from a Wikipedia article on HTML elements.

Define a document title. Required in every HTML and XHTML document. User agents may use the title in different ways. For example:
Web browsers usually display it in a window’s title bar when the window is open, and (where applicable) in the task bar when the window is minimized.
It may become the default filename when saving the page.
Search engines’ web crawlers may pay particular attention to the words used in the title. [Emphasis added.]
The title element must not contain other elements, only text. Only one title element is permitted in a document.
TITLE existed in HTML Tags, and was standardised in HTML 2.0; still current.

Title tags should be no more than 60 – 65 characters.

In WordPress, the default title tag is your blog post’s headline – in other words, the text you use in the large field above the post body portion of your text editor.

Your Blog Post's Title Goes Here

There are times when you may want a custom title tag – in other words, an HTML title tag that differs from the headline that displays above the text of your post. Generally, those reasons revolve around maximizing the SEO performance and marketability of your blog post. In the post you’re reading now, the headline is How to Customize Title Tags in Wordpress. The title tag – look at your browser tab or the top of your browser – is Custom Title Tags in Wordpress | Word Sell Inc . Read this if you want to learn more about why you’d want custom title tags.

One easy way to customize your title tag is to install the All in One SEO Pack WordPress plugin. After you activate the plugin, you will see a field below the body text area of your editor, where you can type in your title tag, or Title. It looks like this -

Custom Title Tags with WordPress All in One SEO Pack

Below the Title field is a Description field where you can enter a meta description – the snippet of text that sometimes appears under the links on a page of Google search engine results.

Another easy way to insert custom title tags comes built in with the popular Thesis WordPress theme, which has a lot of good SEO features. The entry field for the custom title tag looks like this -

Custom Title Tags with WordPress Thesis

Just enter your text in the Custom Title Tag field. Similar to the All in One SEO Pack, Thesis has fields for entering meta descriptions and meta keywords – other HTML elements that help improve your search engine rankings.

That’s it! By paying attention to your title tags, you’ll rank better and search and lead more social media users to your blog posts. If you have questions or want to discuss particulars – please give me a shout.
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Chicago based SEO copywriting, blog consulting services, and content strategy consulting.

Brad Inspects His Crops on FarmVille

Have you tried FarmVille, a recent Facebook game craze? I got curious over the holidays at family gatherings, when I’d hear cow moos emanating from laptops. At first the game struck me as incredibly silly (it is), but I decided to give it a try, if for no other reason than to have an excuse to have fun with friends and family.

Now that I’ve been at it for a couple weeks, I’m starting to see that how we build our farms tells us a lot about our strategic selves.

How to Play FarmVille

Before I get into that, here’s a little bit about how FarmVille works. You get a plot of land, and you put farm stuff on it. You can buy crops, trees, animals, and all kinds of buildings and decorations. When you harvest the crops or milk the cows, you earn points and get game money. As you accumulate money and move up in points, you have access to more crops, trees, etc.

Being on Facebook, FarmVille is naturally social by nature. You can ask your friends to be neighbors, and do nice things like give them gifts and fertilize their crops. Doing these good deeds earns you money and experience points – very much in the spirit of social media marketing, come to think of it.

What’s the point of FarmVille? To tell you the truth, I’m not completely sure, which is a startling confession for a post about FarmVille and strategy. Do any of you know? Best I can tell, the point is to move up in experience and expand your farm as quickly as possible. But there’s no pressure – you can be a gentleman farmer if you’d like, taking it easy, living off the fat of the land.

From what I can tell, some folks play for keeps, and others are just coasting along having fun.

Your Farm Reflects Your Strategic Nature

FarmVille starts you out with a blank canvas. You have lots of buying options and can put things anywhere you want on your land. Some of my neighbors have highly organized farms, with everything systematically and efficiently arranged. Other farms look like a giant bag of farm toys fell out of the sky and splattered across their acreage. Some farmers run lean and mean, with just a few high yield crops and maybe no animals at all. Other farmers have estates that look like something out of a fairy tale, with ornate manors, holiday decorations, lush flowers growing on their hedge lined plots, and every animal under the sun roaming around everywhere. And while some let their animals roam free, others cram their livestock into impossibly small pens.

Here are some things I’ve learned about my own strategic nature playing FarmVille. I share them in the hope these insights may help you uncover your own strategic self in ways that you can apply to your business.

I’m a ready, fire, aim strategist. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for me to ask family members how to play before diving in. I could have acquired brilliant tips from these experts. Instead, I just started playing and making all kinds of mistakes. And I’m fine with that. Why? Because I’m unlikely to make those mistakes again; whereas, had I simply taken notes from a FarmVille pro, the lesson wouldn’t have sunk in and I’d be less aware of the dangers.

I’m content to let my vision come into focus over time. It doesn’t bother me to play FarmVille without knowing the point, or having worked out a master plan in advance. For me, the journey is a reward unto itself. I’m elated when a neighbor gives me a cow, even though I have no idea why I should want it. On the other hand, I get great satisfaction from gradually understanding the game, and making moves that have ever more strategic value. Yes, the journey is rewarding, but the destination still matters. Yes, I don’t mind wasting resources – as long as I’m wasting fewer and fewer over time.

I’m a committed tinkerer. Now that I’ve figured out how important conserving space is in FarmVille, it drives me absolutely nuts wherever I see wasted space on my farm. I can’t stand the fact that I left a narrow strip of basically unusable land between my border and first row of crops. Fixing that is going to be a real pain, but for me, a pain full of pleasure. This little streak of perfectionism probably explains my attraction to SEO copywriting and content optimization.

Hold On to Your Chickens

I like complexity. The idea of churning out one cash crop day after day has no appeal for me. I prefer a lot of crops, a variety of trees, and plenty of happy little animals. I’ll hold on to my chickens even if I know cows put more money in my pocket. And it’s not just sentimentality – if the rules change (and apparently they do), or if something goes awry, I don’t have all my eggs in one basket, so to speak.

I’m a good observer. I’ve learned a lot about the game by studying my neighbors’ farms. I can spot great ideas … and steal them. I can see the spirit behind the thing as well. Is a farmer fun loving or serious? An organized thinker or a wanderer? Detail oriented or visionary? How farmers arrange their farms speaks volumes to me.

Over to You

So how about it – do you play FarmVille? What have you learned about your strategic self in the process? And whether you play or not, how does knowing your strategic self make you more effective in business?

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Chicago based SEO copywriting, blog consulting, and content strategy consulting.