What is a Title Tag?

A title tag is the text that appears at the top of your browser and is what appears in the clickable link on the search engine results page.  If you take the time to improve your page title tags, you  may actually improve your click through rate.  You can aim for 10-12 word but keep it to 70 characters or less.

What Goes in a Title Tag?

I am a firm believer of keeping you company name in most, if not all, of your title tags.  There is some debate if it goes first or last.  Each case is different but probably put your company name first if you are branding your actual name and people are searching by that name. An example might be Wal-mart, where people are actually searching for the company perhaps before the products. In other cases if it is your product or service that people will be searching for, you may do better to put your company name last.

Use your keywords in your title tags carefully.  Make sure the title tags stays relevant to the content on your page.  Don’t over stuff it with keywords. Keep your title tags unique. Every page is unique, so therefore, every title tag should be unique. Title tags do not have to be grammatically correct but they should read easily. It is not necessary to populate your tags with excess punctuation.

After you have selected your keywords and the text has been written for the page, your next step should be to craft your title tags.  Take the opportunity if you use Wordpress to create your own title tag not just use the one that Wordpress creates for you.  Just this one change can make a difference in your website responses since title tags are known to be an important part of the search engine algorithm.

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Without a doubt FireFox is my favorite browser. One thing that makes it so beneficial is the add-ons and extensions that are available for enhancing its use. Here are 3 of my favorites.

Read It Later

“Read It Later allows you to save pages of interest to read later. It eliminates cluttering of bookmarks with sites that are merely of a one-time interest”. I search the Internet often and I always find posts or articles on other topics I am interested in while searching. I hated having to bookmarking them before I have even read them. This add-on sits in your browser window and saves items to a list so you can read them later on or offline. You can then decide if you want to bookmark them. Very easy to use and one of my could-not-live-without-it add-ons.

SEO for Firefox

SEO for Firefox is actually  a free extension and a must have for people serious about SEO. It provides an entire list of information about every website you search. It sits in bottom of your browser tray and is turned on by simply clicking it. Information such as Google page rank, social bookmarking, age of site, technorati, links and more is displayed for every search you execute.

Firebug

Firebug combines with Firefox to be a great help to web developers. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. It is simple to install and sits in a bar at the bottom of your browser. I am still learning all the possibilities for this free tool but I am totally amazed at how it allows you to change ANY website you are on, see the results and nothing is permanent. It is extremely beneficial in web-design.

Next post we will look at  three more of my Firefox favorites. Share with us in the comments below any of your favorites.

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I recently earned my Inbound Marketing Professional Certification from the Inbound Marketing University. I have had numerous people ask what exactly does that means.  In a nutshell Inbound marketing is the concept of drawing people to you verses outbound ( traditional)  marketing which is hunting down your prospects. This is a great explanation by Hubspot Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing. The courses were uniquely taught by experts in each of the areas of concentration.

The Inbound Marketing Certification acknowledges the recipient’s proficiency in Inbound Marketing principals and best practices. In order to receive the Inbound Marketing Certification, the student engages in a variety of courses and pass a comprehensive certification exam, demonstrating subject matter expertise in the following areas:

• Advanced Search Engine Optimization and Ranking Improvement Strategies
• How to Blog Effectively for Businesses
• Social Media and Building Community
• Business Applications for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other Social Networks
• Viral Marketing and World-Wide Raves
• Creating Strong Calls to Action and Effective Landing Pages
• Inbound Lead Nurturing (Turning Leads into Sales)
• Successful Email Marketing
• Analyzing Results and Demonstrating ROI

This is an example of the efforts of the team at CreeksBend Media to continual learn and engage in new techniques and strategies to help your business grow. If you want more information on Inbound Marketing feel free to ask questions or discuss in the comments below or contact us directly.

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Have you ever sat down and created a description of your ideal customer or persona? I recently took some Inbound Marketing University classes from Hubspot. I was extremely impressed when they showed us an example of their ideal persona for a particular product they were promoting. It was detailed down to the income bracket. I admit although I have made a generic description of my ideal clients, I had never gotten detailed about it.

The logic behind this task is overwhelming practically and a bit obvious. How to do you attract people if you don’t know who they are? It is like aiming for a target with a blindfold on. Once you have created the persona then you aim your efforts in marketing toward that description. Of course, you can do business with people outside that description but it helps to define your marketing efforts.

The questions you would need to ask yourself when establishing your ideal persona will be different from market to market and industry to industry. I was recently talking to a publisher client about their persona and we came up with some questions like these.

Who is your ideal persona or target customer?

1. Do they need to write for a specific genre if so which one?
2. Is your target male or female or both?
3. What income bracket do they need to be in?
4. How many books have they published?
5. What is their technological ability?
6. Do they have an agent?
7. Are they open to new media marketing?
8. What is the age bracket?
9. What is their publishing budget?

This is just to give you a few examples. You also can have more than one target persona. Back to my publishing client ,they are also interested in targeting retailers. Therefore ,we also worked on a persona for the retailers they want to attract. Sometimes all your marketing can be rolled into one site with an emphasis on two different target if it is logical to combine them, but sometimes it may mean you need two totally different strategies. Unless you determine your target or targets you won’t know how to aim. Clarifying your target will also help you evaluate your analytic to see how well you are doing against who you are aiming for and allow you to make strategic tweaks to your campaigns as you go along.

Come on show me some comment love and tell me have you created a written description of your ideal client and how has it helped you with your marketing efforts. Anything else we need to consider when look at the ideal persona?

photo by cliff1066

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As you progress deeper into social media you begin to be enthralled by sites like Digg, Stumbled Upon and Friendfeed.  Today we will take a look at Friendfeed.

Friendfeed Basics

Friendfeed has the ability to aggregate all of your social media and social networking feeds into one place. I have a CreeksBend Media Friendfeed account but have only just begin to understand its full benefit.   This article by Ben Parr at  Mashable on Friendfeed is a  good step by step intro. I think the 5th step regarding organizing your feed, ” Build  Friend List to Manage Flow”, is an important one and an easy one to think you will get back to.  As you add new people take the time at that moment to organize them into your existing list. It can quickly become an insurmountable task if you put it off to do later, which I admit I am guilty of doing.

Update on New Interface

Below is a video supplied by  TechCrunch regarding the new Friendfeed interface. It is not a how-to as much as the new stuff and why they implemented it.

Why Friendfeed?

As you read in the Mashable article the advocates of Friendfeed claim it to be one of the most commuinty-oriented social areas you can become involved in. I am just starting to get more involved at Friendfeed but I have found it to be a great way to see what topics are trending and see what the people I follow are looking at.  I am still learning about marking favorites and being selective about subscriptions. I did  join a couple rooms to see how the conversation works in these areas. Comment below and tell me what you like about Friendfeed and of course pass on any tip that will help us use it better.

Image thanks to cambodia4kidsorg

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Business blogging is becoming pretty much a standard practice. Blogs allow fresh content, which is a search engine favorite, and they allow a way to connect with your commuinty.  Once you have bought into the concept that a business blog will help grow  your business, the inevitable next questions are going to be: What do I blog about and how to I find the time to blog? Let’s look at the first question.

What Do I Blog About?

There are all kinds of way to find topics. Start by reading blogs by other people in your industry to see what they are writing about. This is a great post from Chris Brogan’s blog 100 Things to Blog About. You can’t get any more straight forward than what Chris includes in the post.  Another helpful post is from Problogger 13 Things I’ve Learned about Successful Blogging. Both of these men have successful blog and you can benefit greatly by frequenting them no matter what stage of blogging you are in but especially as a novice.

How Do I Find Time to Blog?

Blogging is work and anyone who tells you it is not must have a way better plan than me. I have found what helps me the most, and I am by all definitions a novice, is to create a blogging calendar.  Decide how many times you think you want to post a week, create a calendar and start adding topics as you research and plan. You are not tied to the calendar so if something comes up you feel your audience would benefit from then by all means blog about it.  A calendar does, however, help to prevent writer’s block when you finally have time to sit down and write you are not struggling for a topic.

Some bloggers write all their blogs for the week at one time. Sites like ping.fm allow you to post your blogs and set the dates you want them distributed, along with scheduled tweets about your blog.  In fact, you can set the date inside the Wordpress.org blog for the date it is to be published. To me this type of scheduled writing makes the most sense, I have just not been able to get more than one or two post ahead. That is my goal for the next few months – to try to have at least a few post ready to go at all times.

Share with us in the comment section below ways that you find topics to blog about or ways you find time to blog. I know I can use all the help I can get.

Other post you might find helpful: Beginning Blogging Lessons from Pooh

photo credit: dimnikolov

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4 More Ways to Optimize LinkedIn

Last post we talked about “‘Adding Video to Your LinkedIn Profile”. Here are several other tweaks that will help you to better utilize the opportunities in LinkedIn

Update your websites.

LinkedIn allows you to add up to 3 links to your profile. Many people add their company website and/or blog.  The trick is to select the “Other” option because this lets you label your link instead of using the default name provided by LinkedIn. You can get more visibility for your website by customizing with your name instead of the default “My Website”.

Create a vanity url.

On your public profile page when you sign up to LinkedIn you will have an assigned profile name that has a series of number. Edit that to be your name on LinkedIn. In my case “cindyrhelton”.

Update your status and set the privacy to “everyone”.

You should also frequently update your status so people who visit your profile can see what you are doing. The status update also appears in the Network Updates stream for your contacts and if you set the privacy to ” everyone” , when people view your profile they can see your status.

Add your company

You need to add your company  and the information you want to share about it in addition to your own profile. This a fairly new feature and is still in Beta but is well worth having your company listed.

If you have you additional tips for optimizing LinkedIn, please share them with us in the comments below.

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LinkedIn is a online professional community that is quickly gaining in popularity with over 38 million members. As a small business owner, you need to consider not only adding yourself but your company profile to LinkedIn.  The next couple of post we are going to be talking about ways to optimize your LinkedIn profile.

Adding a Video to Your LinkedIn Profile Using Google Presentation

1. Be sure the video you want to use is already on YouTube.
2. Go to your LinkedIn Profile and Select “Applications”. Then select “Google Presentation”  and add it to your profile. You may have to browse  “more applications” to find it.
3. Creating a Google Presentation -If you don’t already have a presentation, then click “Create a Presentation”. This will take you to a Google Document’s Presentation Page where the first slide is already up on the screen.
4. To insert your video-From the first slide, click ” Insert”. Several options will appear. Select “video”.  You will get a YouTube search window. Scroll to find  your video or the video you want to add and  select it. You may need to change the size of the video for this presentation.
5. To insert the link you created select the “Text” button and add the text you want to add. Select the “Link” button and add your URL to the link.
6. You then need to share the Presentation-Select the “Share” button and choose “Share” or “Embed”.
7. You will see two windows… select your presentation from the screen on the left
8. Click “Post To Your Profile”

That is all there is to adding vidoe to yout LinkedIn profile.

Here is a good video explanation by  Talmadge Boyd at Reel Social Media

photo credit Mario Sundar

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Google Adds Tasks to Calendar

I admit it, I love to make list. Yes, I am also guilty of adding items to a list just so that I can mark them off and feel productive. Google has stepped it up and made this list maker happy. Google recently add Gmail task list to their calendars. When you open up the calendar  you will see ” tasks” on the left side. Once you click on it you will see the same task format you see in Gmail with some cool extra stuff.  You can now add a task due date that will appear on your calendar. You can sort the task by date so you can see what is coming up.  You can easily drag a task to another date just like you do any event on the calendar. The all important to a list maker option: you can mark a task complete when you are finished.  I still would like to be able to see a reminder option for the task like the events have. Even us list makers some time need to be reminded. I have not tried to see if the task will sync with my blackberry, but I assume it will just as the calendar does.   Check out the Google blog for more details .

photo credit Fanboy30

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I hear over and over again from small business owners that they are “waiting for their webmaster” to update their website. Or I ask someone how often they update their site,  they tell me it is too much trouble so they do not update it often. This can be the case for most small business if they do not have a webmaster on staff. Web designers may get thousands of dollars for creating a website and then you have to rely on them to update it. This is not always a viable option for a small business.

Another option is a free content management system, WordPress,  that will allow you to have more control over your web presence. WordPress is very popular as a free blogging tool but what people are  starting to realize is that WordPress can make a valuable website with or without a blog.

5  Advantages of Using WordPress as Your Website

1. Easy to Update Content. WordPress allows you to post and change your content without having to know virtual any code or special skills.
2. SEO- Since search engine optimization is influenced by fresh content, the ability to change content easily will influence your SEO.
3. Customization- With literally thousands of widgets and plug-ins available , you have the freedom to make the software do whatever you need it to do for your business. You can create things like forums, contact forms and track analytics with only some tweaking.  With such a large community involved with WordPress, it is easy to find support or a developer if you need to do something a bit out of the ordinary for your site.
4. Constantly Improving- With thousands of developers giving input into the evolution of WordPress, the software is constantly improving.
5. Easy to Be Social- Since WordPress is a blogging platform, it makes sharing your site with social networks relatively easy, as well as having many social plug-ins and widgets available.

If you still don’t want to tackle WordPress yourself, there are people that will install and customize WordPress for you to match the needs of your company, and still cost you much less than a traditional website with the added advantage of being able to update the content yourself.
photo credit Andrew Abogado

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