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Editor's letter,
With all the hype surrounding social media marketing, especially twitter, people tend to forget about the simple and yet effective tools that they've been using for years, like blogs. No social media strategy is complete, or even worth much, without a "home base" like a blog where fresh and useful content is created regularly.
Our own blog has yielded great results for us over the years in terms of increased traffic and exposure; however recently it has helped us to inadvertently become PayPal Israel experts.
Over the past year or so we posted two posts on the blog about using PayPal in Israel since we thought that this information would be useful to our readers. Now, if you do a search in Google for the term PayPal Israel, our blog appears in about the 3rd and 4th position in the results. As a result, we are perceived as THE PayPal experts in Israel - I even received a phone call today from someone with a PayPal question!
Read more about the effects of blogging below, as well as the need to take social media with a grain of salt. I hope you learn some useful tips to help your business maneuver the social web.
Thanks as always for reading!
Yours,
Miriam Schwab
P.S. If at any time you want to unsubscribe from this newsletter, please just go to the end of this email and click on the unsubscribe button.
WordPressGarage.com's change to WPGarage.com!
About a year ago, a discussion arose in the WordPress community about third-party sites that use the word "WordPress" in their domain name. We posted our opinion on this issue since WP Garage has been running (until yesterday) on a domain with the word WordPress in it. We put WordPress in our domain to show our ever-growing love for WordPress, but realized how important it is to the founders of WordPress that we take out their brand name, so yesterday we finally moved this blog to WPGarage.com instead. Come on over and take a look.
During the process, we had to do a 301 redirect from WordPressGarage.com to WPGarage.com in order to retain traffic from inbound links and search engines. It's important in this type of situation to do a 301 permanent redirect so that all of the new pages on the new site are seen by the search engines as equivalent in terms of value and ranking as the old site.
Social Media Secrets – presented at IBM for the SSVN event
Recently, I was privileged to be the “keynote speaker” (I find that term kind of amusing, thus the quotation marks) at IBM for the latest SSVN (The Startups & Societal Ventures Network) event.
The talk covers recent landmark events on twitter, such as Dell reaching $3m in sales via twitter, the success of the Iran Election protesters who used twitter to bring their cause to the world, and some other events. We looked at strategies, tips and tools for creating an effective online presence.
Without further ado, here’s the presentation: Social Media Secrets
WordPress for social media and SEO
I spoke about how to set up WordPress to be the hub of your social media and SEO activity. Here are the main points. The presentation is embedded further on:
- Your internet presence must be based on a hub which is your blog, or website combined with a blog. WordPress is a great platform for creating that blog or website/blog.
- WordPress is great for SEO. Yes, there was recently a kind of "WordPress SEO showdown" between Michael Gray and Robert Rolfe about whether WordPress really is good for SEO. Rolfe says it's not because the permalinks (URLs) that you can set up are limited and not perfect from an SEO point of view. Gray says that WP is not perfect, but its benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
Sidenote: before I got up to speak Barry told the audience he wanted them to see something. Then he searched for the term Sphinncon Israel in Google and our blog post about Sphinncon Israel two years ago appears on the first page.
- Social media should be used in conjunction with SEO, and vice versa. If you use the tactics of one without the other, you are missing out on a lot of untapped internet goodness like more keyword opportunities, diverse traffic streams, link building, long tail keywords, etc.
- Some good tools for integrating social media are Chat Catcher that aggregates all the conversation taking place about a post and publishing that conversation as comments on your blog; facebook fan box and facebook connect; flickr galleries, YouTube galleries; LinkedIn TypePad application called BlogLink for displaying an RSS feed on your LinkedIn profile - this app is better than the WordPress one because the WP one is limited to one WP rss feed while the TypePad app allows you to pull in any RSS feed.
- Track your feed subscriber stats with Feedburner. Make sure that auto-detect for feeds will find your feedburner feed URL, not the built-in WordPress feed URL. Can use a plugin, htaccess, or hard-code the header.php file.
- Don't forget about email. Use RSS-to-email service to make your life easier. Feedburner is free but you can't brand your mailings or add people to the list; MailChimp allows you to brand your mailings and add people to your mailing list, gives you more control.
- Track how you're doing socially with the following tools: bit.ly for tracking how many people clicked on tiny URLs you posted on twitter etc.; tweetmeme; Topsy (check out the Topsy page for Sphinncon); PostRank
- Hootsuite allows you to fire and forget the sharing of your blog RSS feed with your various twitter profiles, facebook profile, facebook fan page, and LinkedIn.
- Don't leave the growing mobile user demographic out in the cold: easily make a mobile version of your WordPress site with the WPtouch plugin.
- WordPress is itself a social network thanks to BuddyPress which allows you to create a social network on the WP platform. The most recent version of BuddyPress can be used on a single installation of WordPress, as opposed to only being compatible with WPMU (multi-user WordPress).
- WordPress and SEO - WordPress makes it easy to implement a lot of the SEO basics, like rel=canonical meta tags, redirect all pages to with or without www, add an XML sitemap. The All in One SEO Pack plugin helps you manage page and post title structure site-wide, control meta-descriptions, no-follow areas of the site like categories, and more. Yoast's Meta Robots Tag overlaps a bit with All in One SEO, but it offers additional features too.
- Google recently started to display breadcrumbs in search results. Add breadcrumbs to your site with a plugin or by modifing your functions.php file.
- Check for broken links in your site, and correct them on the spot, with the Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin.
- Easily add internal links with SEO Smart Links plugin that allows you to enter a word, and then tell the system that whenever that word appears on the site, it should link to a specific page. There are quite a lot more plugins that I mention, but why not view them yourself in the presentation embedded below.
- Optimize your site for speed- the speed with which a page loads is apparently considered for its ranking. Therefore, you need to speed up your pages. Check out the presentation for some ways how.
- You also need to secure your WordPress site against hackers. Some ideas for that are in the presentation too.
Ironically, even though I mention all the plugins above, if you really want to promote your site online, it shouldn't be running too many plugins since that can seriously slow the site down. Many of the plugins I mentioned can be run briefly to accomplish something, and then deactivated once you don't need them to do their deed anymore.
To check out the presentation click below:
Useful links
- You Think ‘Free’ is Only About the Price? It’s Not Mashable delves into what "free" services, products, and content really mean, and what people are willing to pay for and what they aren't.
- Transforming Digital Chaos To Brand Equity The explosion in new media channels, and the increasing ease with which consumers can react to, create content about, and generally discuss brands is challenging even the best marketers. How do you manage your brand in such a chaotic consumer empowered world? How do you ensure that consumers understand your brand equity and that you drive a single minded understanding of your brand promise? Derrick Daye describes 6 steps you can take to ensure your brand effectively engages consumers with your brand promise in this increasingly complex and chaotic environment.
- Can Israel lead in clean tech? Israel is at a turning point where it could become the world's clean tech epicenter. Due to advances made because of Israel's urgent need for reliable solutions to deal with its own environmental challenges (mainly the water crisis) the country's clean tech market has become very attractive to foreign investment. Israel must realize that clean tech is certain to be one of the growth industries of the next 10 years, but to truly lead the world in clean tech investment and innovation, there must be greater support from the state.
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