Blogger Archive

Gonnabe.com or Be Productions gives PlattFomers a nice change of pace. Specializing on one type of client does have its advantages, but everyone needs a break from the norm every now and then. That’s were Gonnabe.com comes in. The organization’s primary objective is to help young people make a career out of acting. This is a much needed service since breaking into the acting scene is very challenging. In the past you had to know someone, or receive a lucky break. Becoming an actor was such a daunting task. Today companies like Gonnabe.com can give anyone a chance to see if they have what it takes to make a career out of acting.

Gonnabe.com does more than just give child actors a chance to shine; they produce their own material and have several successful TV shows. You can see some of Gonnabe.com’s material on Revver, and more on MetaCafe.

One of the most important parts of performing well in Google is attracting backlinks to a web site. Even more important is that these backlinks come from authoritative websites with strong editorial guidelines. Even though most of our clients are schools, building links is still a challenge at times. Webmasters receive hundreds of requests a day for links and they are very busy people. They want to focus on building and managing their site, and sorting through a hundred emails to find the few gems that really deserve a link is a lot to ask.

Fortunately, we found a great resource for many of our clients and their linkbuilding needs. Findaschool.org has been around since at least 2001 (according to archive.org) and has amassed an impressive database of schools from around the world. School’s from almost every country are represented. This makes the site an especially great resource anyone investigating their options for studying overseas. They have also kept the site clean and easy to use. You’ll hardly find an ad anywhere on the web site. It’s a great site and Michael Viron of findaschool.org has helped us and our clients out on more than one occasion. We really appreciate the help, and recommend the site for anyone that is reasearching the education options.

At PlattForm we have a policy that requires each department to blog once a month. I understand why the policy is there, and it’s not too much to ask. One post per month from a department isn’t asking a lot. You don’t want to have a blog that just sits there without ever having new posts on it. The policy is perfectly logical, but is blogging on demand a good policy?

I was reading a book by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel called Naked Conversations. It’s a great book about how to best execute corporate blogging. It stresses disclosure, honesty, authenticity, and other honorable traits. The best part of the book is the Corporate Weblog Manifesto starting on page 192. It’s a concise list of 34 corporate blogging rules. You could skip the book, read the list and speak intelligently on the subject. The first 20 of the 34 results are on Robert Scoble’s blog, but here are some highlights from this manifesto that you might not have considered are:

• Tell the truth. The whole truth. Nothing but the truth. If your competitor has a product that’s better than yours, link to it. You might as well. We’ll find it anyway.
• Post fast on good news or bad. Someone say something bad about your product? Link to it—before the second or third site does—and answer its claims as best you can. Same if something good comes out about you. It’s all about building long-term trust. The trick to building trust is to show up! If people are saying things about your product and you don’t answer them, that distrust builds. Plus, if people are saying good things about your product, why not help Google find those pages as well?
• Use a human voice. Don’t get corporate lawyers and PR professionals to cleanse your speech. We can tell, believe me. Plus, you’ll be too slow. If you’re the last one to post, the joke is on you!
• Link to your competitors and say nice things about them. Remember, you’re part of an industry and if the entire industry gets bigger, you’ll probably win more than your fair share of business and you’ll get bigger too. Be better than your competitors—people remember that. I remember sending lots of customers over to the camera shop that competed with me and many of those folks came back to me and said “I’d rather buy it from you, can you get me that?” Remember how Bill Gates got DOS? He sent IBM to get it from DRI Research. They weren’t all that helpful, so IBM said “hey, why don’t you get us an OS?”

and then I saw this one:

• Don’t blog on demand. Is your marketing department demanding that your write about something? Push back. Your blog is your own. Tell the guys in the marketing department to get their own blog if they think they have something people should know. Always make sure it’s you saying something, not someone else. Your are responsible for the content that goes on your blog.

The last one really struck me because, well..that’s what I do. So what do you think? Is he right or is Robert Scoble an idiot? His argument in the book is that forced posts are easy to spot and sound forced. Is that the case on this blog? Thoughts?

Please let me know your thoughts. I’ll be following up on this post. My next one is due March 3rd.

Web Sites for larger schools can be a huge challenge for web developers and the school’s marketing or admissions department. The sheer size of these sites can sometimes make maintaining good usability very difficult. If your school’s web site has become a usability nightmare, a minisite may have its uses depending on your marketing strategy.

Searching around on the web I found a few that seemed to work well. McMurry University has a pretty good minisite for their school . A local art school, Kansas City Art Institute also has a good one [WJ2] [WJ2]. Both are smaller with better usability and can make navigating around the site a little simpler than their respective ‘large’ sites with hundreds, even thousands of pages.

When to Hold Them, When to Fold Them

These can be great landing pages for ads, and other direct marketing. These sites can also do well for SEO. The key to making these sites perform well in SEO is to link out to them from your main school web site, which shows they are working together to produce one great product for users.

These sites, however, should not be a school’s primary SEO focus, but can be a good marketing supplement to the main site. As always, make sure your primary school web site is well optimized before trying to boost the SEO performance of a minisite.

The key is to have a good online presence on the web, and a minisite can help with that, as long as a proper online marketing strategy is implemented.

by Webster Jorgensen

For the fourth part of this series on Universal Search we will look at image search. In the past, Google would return some images at the top of the search results for queries like “explosion.” Later this year Google may start being more aggressive in how the push image results into the rest of the search results as well. Now that we know Google is returning these results, we need to know how to optimize for them and use them to acquire traffic.

Which keywords will return image results?

Google knows this by what people search for in their images search section of their site. If they see a certain keyword is searched for in the image search section of Google, they will start pushing these pictures out to the main results. Google also uses user data to determine when images should be returned in the main search results. If Google returns some images to the main search results and users click on the images, Google knows that those results are providing value and will return more of them.

Research for images and SEO

The most important part of optimizing for image search involves research. You have to think logically about what kind of keywords will return images and what people are looking for. Optimizing text pages is a lot different than optimizing images. In the education vertical for instance, a common keyword that would be used for a text page about medical assisting may be “medical assistant programs” or “medical assistant schools.” These keywords show intent to find a school and are also searched for frequently. However, these are keywords that are not likely to return image results. People are rarely looking for images of medical assistant programs. People often know what a “program” looks like and other kinds of content (text, video or news) will often provide a better result. Another possibility would be “medical assistant pictures.” This is more likely to return an image result, but the problem is very few people search for that term. The ones that do are probably graphic artists and web designers looking for stock images.

If I was going to optimize some images for medical assistant pages I would probably start with the keyword “how to become a medical assistant.” This is a keyword that is searched for fairly often and has great image search potential. Becoming a medical assistant requires a process. This process could be illustrated much like a flow chart. Lines, arrows and boxes letting the user know all the steps that need to be taken to achieve their goal.

Optimizing the image

Now that we have done our research and have a solid plan we can start optimizing the images. When creating the image you want to be sure and use the keyword in the images file name. Make sure and separate words by dashes. After creating the image I would name it:

how-to-become-a-medical-assistant.jpg

When coding the image into HTML, make sure and use the keyword again in the alt tag. This would look like this:

Not only will this help the image rank, but will also improve usability since the screen readers used by blind people use these alt tags to determine the subject matter of an image.

The next step is to create some text content on the page around the image. This copy should contain the keyword being optimized. This step simply involves performing the normal steps for optimizing a text page. When Google downloads that page they will use the text surrounding the image to help determine its subject matter.

Linking and images

The final step in optimizing for images involves linking to them. This step is a little tricky, but is a potent ranking factor image search. Normally, links will always go to a specific web page, but when optimizing for image search we want to have some links linking straight at the image itself. Here is an example on the PlattForm blog:

This link is going to the home page of the PlattForm site:

PlattForm Advertising

This link is pointing straight at the logo on the home page:

PlattForm Advertising

See the difference? Also notice that I used the text (anchor text) “PlattForm Advertising” in the link. This will help the logo rank for the term “PlattForm Advertising.” Using your keyword (in our example “how to become a medical assistant”) in the anchor text will help the image rank for that keyword.

One efficient way to create this kinds of links is to create an image site map. This would be a catalog of all of the images you want to perform well in search results. Simply create a list of links that link to the images, and of course, use the keyword in the anchor text.

Conclusion

Performing all of these steps will put you well on your way to acquiring traffic when Google returns image results in their main search results page. Using keywords in the file name, the alt tag, the surrounding copy, and proper linking is needed to optimize for a given keyword. However, the most important part is picking the right keyword. It is important that an image ranks for the right keywords. Keywords that are searched for frequently, embody the proper intent, and will provide value when served to the user. This is where good research and a little ingenuity can make all the difference.