Barbara Walters Price

Useful and Easy SEO Tool for Wordpress Blogs

You, dear reader, likely know that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. We work hard to produce useful content for our target market(s), so we want that content to be found via an internet search. Yet search algorithms are always changing. That's why there are firms dedicated to nothing else but helping us with SEO.

However, if your firm is like most, you are not big enough to warrant these services. What do you do? You try your hardest to include tags as well as keywords in your content in an appropriate way. 

Yet, there is a tool to help. The Wordpress SEO Plugin by Yoast allows you to quickly optimize your content for search. There is a great summary of the tool at Blogging Your Passon. Per BYP:

Once you install this plugin, there will be a new feature added just below your content box inside WordPress. This is what allows you to quickly optimize your content.

For example, Let’s say I have chosen the keyword phrase “how to become a mechanic.” If someone uses that phrase to search in Google, then I want to be on the first page and get traffic. The phrase is actual used over 1,300+ times each month.

After I write or paste my content in WordPress, I scroll down to the WordPress SEO feature. It asks for my focus keyword, so I put in “how to become a mechanic.” Now the plugin will tell me either yes or no if my blog post is optimized for the search engines. You can then make some simple changes that the plugin suggests, and then hit publish. See the picture below for a better view.

There are many advanced features as well; however, most of us won't take advantage of them. Here is the list of features for the plugin:

1. Post titles and meta descriptions
2. Robots Meta configuration
3. Canonical
4. Breadcrumbs
5. Permalink clean up
6. XML Sitemaps
7. RSS enhancements
8. Edit your robots.txt and .htaccess
9. Clean up head section

Told ya ... most of these we won't touch, yet the functionality described above is worth it. If you have a Wordpress blog, check out this tool.

Best (and Worst) Times to Send an Email

I found this infographic, created by Pure360, at Be Relevant! Email Marketing Blog by Tamara Gielen. Take a look. When do you send your email newsletters? What about client communications? Does the time of day sent affect open rates? According to this, it might.

Smart QR Codes

Check out this post by Drew McLellan - Creating Smart QR Codes. It contains good resources for QR code creators that provide good stats. If you are using QR Codes or planning to, read this post.

A Free (for now) Search Engine to Help You Improve Your Email Marketing

At Jay Baer's Convince & Convert, I found Emailium in his post "Eureka! A Free Search Engine That Will Juice Your Email Marketing." 

What is it?

Emailium is a free (for now) search engine of top emails from the leading retailers and other major senders of digital communication.

Potential Benefits

What are the potential benefits of checking Emailium out? Per Jay:

Considering that just about every company of every size sends email to its customers, this post probably applies to you.

• Do you need design inspiration? Ideas for how to make your emails look snappier, with more compelling layouts?
• Do you want to keep tabs on your competitors? What emails they are sending, and when?
• Do you want to monitor the email behavior of an industry? To determine what trends exist in marketing, offers, timing, and sequencing of emails?

If any of those appeal to you, I recommend you check out Emailium.

For a basic description, read the rest of Jay's post.

What Does Emailium Do for Professional Service Firms?

I poked around Emailium for a bit. For the majority of professional service firms, the most immediate benefit is inspiration for email design and layout.

Many of us won't find our direct competitors here and the industry search categories listed are a bit to broad for us. However, a bit of study of campaign timing and layout can be useful for us.

Check it out and see if it might be helpful for you.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Content Marketing But Were Not Afraid to Ask

As a follow on to yesterday's post which discussed content marketing and gave you a few content marketing resources, see CMI's "50 Questions Answered About Content Marketing." Enjoy.

"Thought leadership marketing is shaping up like an arms race, with no apparent goal except keeping up with the competition by churning out more of the same."

Great article by Michael W. McLaughlin on thought leadership (Is Your Thought Leadership Strategy a Waste of Time? via RainToday).

His point is basic but glossed over by many hyping this marketing tactic - that is content marketing (i.e., being recognized as a thought leader) is hard. 

Michael notes that pumping content out to the market that does not address your customer's needs, is old thinking, has no call to action, and has no support for the assertions made is not only bad marketing, it's a waste of time.

Content marketing is all the rage now. Mercer Capital (the firm I work for) has been using this marketing tactic before it had a name, as have many professional services firms. We always called it educating our clients, referral sources, and our profession.

Twenty years ago, even ten years ago (that's how long we've been marketing with content), content marketing was much more effective than it is now. There are two primary reasons:1) the marketplace wasn't so crowded and 2) the internet was not being used as the powerful content delivery tool it is today.

This means you should read Michael's article and if you are using, or considering using, content marketing as a piece of your marketing plan, focus on producing quality content. It's hard. It's very hard. It's harder than it's likely ever been. But it's worth it if done correctly.

______________________

Other content marketing sites you might be interest in are:

• Content Marketing Institute
• The Content Marketing Revolution
• Content Marketing Today
• Hubspot

Numerous other websites discuss content marketing. For a list, download my whitepaper 25 Marketing Best Practices for Professional Service Firms. In it I list the 80 or so blogs I follow. Many of them might be of interest to you.

Also check out the book, Content Rules, by Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman.

LinkedIn Company Pages - A Step-by-Step Guide

As I posted earlier, if your firm doesn't have a LinkedIn Company Page, it should.

Visit that post and this post from Content Marketing Institute - New LinkedIn Company Pages: A Step-by-Step Guide for Content Marketers - which provide further good information.

Did You Know that You Can Remove Google Personalization from Google Search Results?

Part of my job as a marketer is to keep up with our firm's search engine keyword positioning. We track our positioning on a variety of keywords.

I've noticed, and I bet you have too, that Google is increasingly trying to "help" us. Google seems to know where we are and returns search results that are supposedly geographically relevant. It also returns results based on our past search/click activity and pulls from our social network (social circle, as they call it) including our Google Reader subscriptions.

Bill Hartzer at Search Engine Marketing has a very helpful post on this and explains: 

If you search Google and find that you are increasingly faced with personalized search results from Google, you are not alone. Not only is Google personalizing your search results when you are logged in, they are also determining your location and personalizing your search results according to your location. For example, Google “knows” that I am in the Dallas area. So, when I search for “moving” I get search results that are tailored as if I am in Dallas and moving to another location in Dallas, even if that is not the case.

From Google Accounts Help:

Google sometimes customizes your search results based on your past search activity on Google. This customization includes searches you've done and results you've clicked. Since personalized search treats signed-in and signed-out users differently, the instructions for turning off search history personalization are a little different in each case.

Any big brother concerns aside, this "help" has frustrated me. I want to be able to do quick "depersonalized" checks to see where we might truly be ranking on Google on a certain search term without deleting cookies or without signing out of Google. Deleting cookies and signing in and out is too cumbersome. However, without turning off the personalization, it's easy to believe you are faring better on Google than you actually are if the personalization feature is skewing the results.

We are working hard to move up in the rankings on a few key search terms and, therefore, when I do a spot search, I don't want Google's help. (When determining search keyword rankings, we have used the tool Rank Checker from SEO Tools. See this post on it.)

Bill's post provided the key I have been looking for in how to turn off Google's personalization service: 

So, at the end of the search results URL (in my web browser) I have to add “&pws=0″ to the end of the URL, hit “enter” and Google will de-personalize the search results for me.

This is how you can accomplish:

• turn off Google's Instant Search 
• search Google as normal for keyword(s)
• in the URL bar, append &pws=0 to the end of the search URL
• hit enter and look for any changes in results

Let me be clear that I am NOT an SEO expert. I am merely a marketing professional who is trying to gain some understanding of how all this works. I am posting this because I have experimented with this tool for a few days and it seems to be helpful. 

Give it a try and keep this in your toolbox as you do spot keyword checking.

For more information, bookmark Bill's blog and see Google's site for help. 

Why Haven't You Updated Your LinkedIn Company Page?

Late last year, LinkedIn began offering Company Pages.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with LinkedIn's Company Pages, they are described here (via LinkedIn's Learning Center):

Company Pages are a company’s profile of record on LinkedIn and a powerful way to speak to millions of professionals through word-of-mouth recommendations and trusted testimonials. It’s like a LinkedIn profile for a company.

For LinkedIn members, Company Pages are a great way to research companies you’re interested in, follow them to stay updated, see what kind of people work there, and even review the products and services you use.

For companies, Company Pages present an opportunity to reveal the human side of your company. Provide a peek at the individuals behind your brand and highlight how members use your products. Your Company Page offers tools to bring your brand to life.

Why is using the Company Page benefit important? Company Pages are a great way to brand your company, highlight specific service lines, highlight your professionals, and can be a powerful recruiting tool.

Company Pages contains four tabs:

1. Overview
2. Careers
3. Products & Services, and
4. Analytics (visible only to the page "owner")

The Overview tab is basically a "dashboard" of summary information about your company, key employees, and company metrics (you can also add a Twitter feed if your company tweets). You can post job openings in the Career tab.  The Products & Services tab allows you to hightlight service lines (10 of which show up on the first page) and further allows you spotlight any of those service lines such that the spotlighted item appears at the top of the page.  The Analytics tab tells you how many people have visited your Company Page and compares it to other firms in your industry.

People can also "follow" Company Pages. I follow all our competitors (of whom only a few have taken advantage of the Company Page benefit) as well as some key client companies and referral sources. When updates are made to their Company Page, I get notified.

People can also recommend your company through these Company Pages, just as they would recommend you as an individual.

Updating your Company Page is easy.  Just log in and follow the directions. Take a look at Mercer Capital's Company Page for an example (be sure to log into the site to get the full effect).

If you haven't used this tool yet, you should.

Another Helpful QR Code Video

QR Code Mini Workshop

View more presentations from IQ the innovation lab of GSW Worldwide