Corporate Blogging: Too Legally Dicey To Allow?
This article at CNET, “Corporate employee blogs: Lawsuits waiting to happen?“, caught my eye. Large corporations definitely feel nervous about allowing all their employees to have a public voice, but I think it’s now something that must be allowed, and good common-sense management can be used to help avoid some of the risk of lawsuits such as the one mentioned in the article involving Cisco.
Some companies’ legal departments think that blogging is just too risky to allow, and that it’s not worth the time and administrative headache to try to manage. The problem that I see with this is that it causes a company to be stuck in a Business 1.0 world of the past, disallowing the grass-roots-level public relations that employees can provide — blogging allows a big corporation to have a human face and can help explain and communicate what the company is up to. (more…)
Popularity: 4% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 03/26/2008 | Permalink | 
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Filed under: Best Practices, General, Newsblogging, corporate blogging, employee blogs
Network Solutions Guarantees Search Engine Rankings
I received a note from Network Solutions today with the subject line of “Good Luck Isn’t a Guarantee - Getting Found Online Is”, promoting their search engine optimization services. Nothing remarkable in that, since lots of large hosting companies and related firms are pushing SEO to small businesses as another line of value-add services. However, what is remarkable is that they push this promotion out with a guarantee of top 10 rankings in major search engines:
“Guaranteed Top 10 Rankings on Major Search Engines”
Now, if you’ve been around the search marketing industry very long at all, you’re probably aware that most of the guides for “picking the right SEO firm” or “how to choose an ethical SEO” recommend staying away from companies which guarantee rankings. For instance, check out the advice from Shari Thurow, David Wallace, MarketingProfs Thought Leaders Summit, and Chris Sherman.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 03/03/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Best Practices, Worst PracticesKeyword-Rankings, Network-Solutions, search engine rankings
Online Reputation Management Through Search at SMX West
I was interested to hear the presentations in the Reputation Monitoring & Management Through Search session at the SMX West Conference yesterday in Santa Clara, and the five presenters didn’t disappoint.
First up was Andy Beal, who I was particularly interested in hearing since this presentation came just after he announced his new online reputation management monitoring service, Trackur, and he also announced he’d have a number of free copies of his book at a booth in the exhibit hall later.
Additional speakers included Chris Bennett, Veronica “Niki” Fielding, David Wallace, and Jonathan Ashton.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 02/28/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Best Practices, Conferences, brand namesOnline Reputation Management, Reputation Monitoring, reputation-management
LinkedIn Beta Tests New Homepage Layout
So, I’m at the SMX West conference tonight, hopping around networking with people and every so often updating my Flickr pix or sending work emails when I noticed that LinkedIn is apparently beta-testing a new homepage layout on me. Check out the screengrab of what I see now when I login to LinkedIn:
So, they want feedback on their new design, so I’ll give it here.
Popularity: 11% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 02/28/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Best Practices, Design, Social Media Optimizationlinkedin, Social-Media, website-design
Organic Search Marketing in 2008: Predictions
If you’re even the slightest bit aware of what’s been going on in organic search marketing, you couldn’t help but know that Google made a number of changes during 2007 which impacted the natural search marketing programs for many webmasters. So here’s my little post predicting where I see the trends pointing and what we can expect in 2008 and beyond… (more…)
Popularity: 37% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 01/10/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Best Practices, Design, Google, SEO, Search Engine OptimizationGoogle, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Social-Media, usability, User-Centered-Design
Advice on Subdomains vs. Subdirectories for SEO
Matt Cutts recently revealed that Google is now treating subdomains much more like subdirectories of a domain — in the sense that they wish to limit how many results show up for a given keyword search from a single site. In the past, some search marketers attempted to use keyworded subdomains as a method for improving search referral traffic from search engines — deploying out many keyword subdomains for terms for which they hoped to rank well.
Not long ago, I wrote an article on how some local directory sites were using subdomains in an attempt to achieve good ranking results in search engines. In that article, I concluded that most of these sites were ranking well for other reasons not directly related to the presence of the keyword as a subdomain — I showed some examples of sites which ranked equally well or better in many cases where the keyword was a part of the URI as opposed to the subdomain. So, in Google, subdirectories were already functioning just as well as subdomains for the purposes of keyword rank optimization. (more…)
Popularity: 29% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 12/12/2007 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Best Practices, Content Optimization, Domain Names, Dynamic Sites, Google, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Site Structure, URLs, Worst PracticesDomain Names, Google, host crowding, language seo, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, seo subdirectories, subdomain seo, subdomains
Google’s Advice For Web 2.0 & AJAX Development
Yesterday, Google’s Webmaster Blog gave some great advice for Web 2.0 application developers in their post titled “A Spider’s View of Web 2.0“.
In that post, they recommend providing alternative navigation options on Ajaxified sites so that the Googlebot spider can index your site’s pages and also for users who may have certain dynamic functions disabled in their browsers. They also recommend designing sites with “Progressive Enhancement” — designing a site iteratively over time by beginning with the basics first. Start out with simple HTML linking navigation and then add on Javascript/Java/Flash/AJAX structures on top of that simple HTML structure.
Before the Google Webmaster team had posted those recommendations, I’d published a little article early this week on Search Engine Land on the subject of how Web 2.0 and Map Mashup Developers neglect SEO basics. A month back, my colleague Stephan Spencer also wrote an article on how Web 2.0 is often search-engine-unfriendly and how using Progressive Enhancement can help make Web 2.0 content findable in search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search.
Way earlier than both of us even, our colleague, P.J. Fusco wrote an article for ClickZ on How Web 2.0 Affects SEO Strategy back in May.
We’re not just recycling each other’s work in all this — we’re each independently convinced of how problematic Web 2.o site design can limit a site’s performance traffic-wise. If your pages don’t get indexed by the search engines, there’s a far lower chance of users finding your site. With just a mild amount of additional care and work, Web 2.0 developers can optimize their applications, and the benefits are clear. Wouldn’t you like to make a little extra money every month on ad revenue? Better yet, how about if an investment firm or a Google or Yahoo were to offer you millions for your cool mashup concept?!?
But, don’t just listen to all the experts at Netconcepts — Google’s confirming what we’ve been preaching for some time now.
Popularity: 18% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 11/07/2007 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Best Practices, Google, SEO, Search Engine OptimizationAJAX, Google, Mashups, Progressive-Enhancement, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Web-2.0
Dealer Locator & Store Locator Services Need to Optimize
My article on local SEO for store locators just published on Search Engine Land, and any company that has a store locator utility ought to read it. Many large companies provide a way for users to find their local stores, dealers, or authorized resellers. The problem is that these sections are usually hidden from the search engines behind search submission forms, javascripted links, html frames, and Flash interfaces.
For many national or regional chain stores, providing dealer-locator services with robust maps, driving directions and proximity search capability is outside of their core competencies, and they frequently choose to outsource that development work or purchase software to enable the service easily.
I did a quick survey and found a number of companies providing dealer locator or store finder functionality: (more…)
Popularity: 12% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 09/13/2007 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Best Practices, Content Optimization, Dynamic Sites, Local Search Optimization, Maps, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Site Structurechain-stores, dealer-locators, Local Search Optimization, local-SEO, store-location-software, store-locators
Double Your Trouble: Google Highlights Duplication Issues
Maile Ohye posted a great piece on Google Webmaster Central on the effects of duplicate content as caused by common URL parameters. There is great information in that post, not least of which it validates exactly what a few of us have stated for a while: duplication should be addressed because it can water down your PageRank.
Maile suggests a few ways of addressing dupe content, and she also reveals a few details of Google’s workings that are interesting, including: (more…)
Popularity: 11% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 09/12/2007 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Best Practices, Dynamic Sites, Google, PageRank, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Site Structure, URLsCanonicalization, duplicate-content, duplication, Google, Search Engine Optimization, SEO
Resurrection of the Meta Keywords Tag
Danny Sullivan did a great, comprehensive examination of current status of the Meta Keywords tag, and his testing showed that both Ask and Yahoo will still use content in that tag as a relevancy signal. Both Google and Microsoft Live do not. His clear outline of the history, common questions, and contemporary testing of the factor were really helpful.
However, I think there’s still a case where Google may be using the Meta Keywords tag… (more…)
Popularity: 6% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 09/07/2007 | Permalink | Email
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