My son is an avid San Francisco Giants fan and loves Pablo Sandoval and Tim Lincecum. So I told  him that Clay Shirky to me is like Tim Lincecum to him.  He immediately got it, smiled and went back to playing Call of Duty satisfied that I was getting to do something that is coveted, comforting and entertaining.

Clay was all of that last night and more.  He extolled the detriments of HR googling potential new hires and trimming the talent pool to getting us to understand that developing countries are developers and are cranking out useful tools for the world (it’s not just silicon valley anymore – so don’t be surprised).

I picked up his latest book – Cognitive Surplus I highly recommend it – the guy is a genius when it comes to relating the social aspects of media today to how we can live and thrive in this three ring circus.

His latest twitter Bio give some insight into what Cognitive Surplus is all about:

Twitter Bio: Bald. Unreliable. Easily distracte

Enjoy!

Dynamic Linking, Anchor text and Reputation

Ok now let’s talk about the yin and yang – if the user experience is the yin then we also need the yang to balance it all out. That’s where you set the pages up to allow the search engines to find your pages and love them.

There is something called the Page Rank Checker (http://prchecker.info), put together by Google of course, that can give us a little insight to how well we are doing. Page rank takes many factors into consideration and the better you have your pages set up for Googles spiders the higher your page rank will be on a scale of 0-10 (10 being best).

If we allow some of the “no value” pages to get good ranking or have value in Googles eyes it hurts our pages that we want to have the highest value and traffic (no value pages – i.e. privacy policy, terms and conditions, etc.). So we can tell Google (and the Page Rank Checker) which ones we want to have the value and the ones we do want to have any value.

Be sure to read this twice – if you give all of your pages an equal shot at ranking on Google the ones you may not care about ranking will take some of the rank from your “high-value” pages. How do we control this?

Use “no-follow” tags. That way we can tell the spiders which ones to take a look at and rank and which ones to ignore. Beautiful! But HIGHLY UNDERUSED!!!

This leads to our section on Dynamic Linking.

Dynamic Linking

This is a concept that allows you to focus that page rank on the pages you want to rank well and get attention by the search engines.

The next 2 statements are important – a page that has incoming links is getting page rank from each of the links coming in. The higher the page rank of each link coming in the better for that page and higher the page rank goes.

On the flip side as that page links to other pages it divides page rank between each link it sends out. Therefore with too many links going out the rank is diminished with each link. So there is a slight balancing act to be employed – get high links coming in and give a few high value links going to the right pages. How can you control it = no-follow tags. Assign this tag to those pages you don’t care if they rank (terms & conditions, privacy etc.) and you can increase the value of other links and the overall page rank in general. Now you are dividing page rank between fewer pages.

Here is what it will look like when using it in your HTML code;

<a href=”terms.html” rel=”nofollow”>Terms and Conditions</a>

Ok that’s it! Simple

But where do you use it, how often and why?

Top Level Rank Development – Your Index/Home Page

Lot’s of links flow to and from the Top Level Index/Homepage so here is the SUGGESTED and RECOMMENDED areas for no-follow tag;

• Add no-follow on all of the links to your “overhead” pages. If you have a shopping cart, this includes the link to the cart.
• Add no-follow on all of the links that point to other sites, unless you have a logical reason to give a direct link.
• Do not use no-follow on the link to your site map page, if you have one.
• Do not use no-follow on the link to your “resources” page, if you are exchanging links.
• Do not use no-follow on the links to your second, third, and fourth level pages, unless you don’t want them to show up in search results for some reason.

Second Level Rank Development

• Add no-follow on all the links to your “overhead” pages, as above, unless you want some of them to get indexed.
• Add no-follow on outbound links to other sites, unless you have agreed to a direct link, or want to pass some “link love” along to that site.
• Add no-follow on all links to the site map. From the spider’s perspective, the site map is only linked from the home page.
• Add no-follow on the link to your “resources” page, if you are exchanging links. The resources page is only directly linked from the home page.
• Do not use no-follow on links to your second, third, fourth level pages, unless you don’t want them to show up in search results.

Third Level Rank Development

Typically with so much of the linking going from the top level to the second level it will keep the third level from developing much page rank. But this can be where many of your product purchase pages or information pages are. Here is what you can do to drive page rank a little deeper;

• On all second level pages, add no-follow on all links pointing to other second tier pages – unless you’re trying to boost a specific page.

Simple isn’t it? So on a shopping cart site, this means that your “category pages” still link to each other, but you use no-follow. From the spider’s perspective, your navigation is different on the second level from the top level.

Third Level Linking Strategy

If you have a second level that is a category unto itself and the third level beneath it is common to the second level category only you can link the third level together in a ring.

A couple of things to keep in mind when using no-follow;

• If you are using no-follow links from “page a” to “page b” then you should probably go ahead and use no-follow on every link going from the “page a” to the “page b” i.e. if your are using no-follow from the “home page” to the “terms of use page” then you should have all links going to the “terms of use” page as no- follow.
• If you are using multiple links from “page a” to “page b” the only link that will count for link reputation utilizing the desired anchor text will be the first one that appears in the code. So be sure the first link in the code is the keyword you desire to rank for and get indexed on the search engines for.

Don’t try to do too much with your internal linking strategies. Keep it basic as in this post and you should do well. Again these are recommendations and suggestions.

Are you an SEO Superstar?!

Creating a structure that works for the search engine spiders as well as your visitors is the ultimate balancing act. But if you ever want to lean to one side or the other ALWAYS lean to the side of giving the visitors an excellent experience.

So in other words build your site for people not automated robots and spiders. With that being said here are some structure principles to live by;

• Usability – Build your site for visitor usability and ease of use not just for spiders.

• Dynamic Linking, Anchor text and Reputation – When making sure the spiders can crawl the site with ease be sure to do that by having an internal dynamic linking strategy between the pages, using anchor text, that are the most important to you. So not all of the pages will matter if the spiders get to them i.e. about us, terms of use, privacy policy etc. Optimize for the pages that you choose to rise in rank and reputation and tell the search engines to leave the other pages alone.

• Page Penetration – Get as many pages ranking and being indexed on the search engines – the more that are on the engines the better = Page Penetration.

Per the above structure principles lets dig a little deeper into each one (Usability is Part One for now);

Usability

The main thing to consider when developing pages is keeping your keywords in mind as you design and develop a web page and content; however, be sure to also keep in mind that a human user looking for a product or information will be reading and looking at your web page.

So always make sure you write for the human users before you write for the search engines. I would rather err on the side of making sure that the words and information on the page allow the user to have a great experience than have the search engines find it, index it and have a user leave the page quickly because it doesn’t make sense from a user standpoint.

Top Level – Your Index/Home Page

This is the page most will see when they find your website therefore it needs to give them a “clean and clear” view of what your site is about and where they can go to get deeper information (second and third level)

So clean navigation and a clear overview is paramount to your success in keeping a new visitor on the site as well having them “click-though” to other pages and get deeper into the various levels on your site.

Second Level – Funnel/Category Page

This level of pages funnels the user down to specific categories of information or products (if it is an e-commerce site). Again this level should give a clean and clear message and where to go next. This level will boil it down so your user can find their product or information in the next click from this level.

Third Level – Information/Product Purchase Page

These are the content and product pages. These are the pages where action takes place for the user. A product can be purchased, an e-book can be read or downloaded or the information the user was searching for is found. Sometimes these pages can be accessed directly from the top-level homepage depending on how important or how popular the third level page is.

If you find a third level page getting accessed more than all of the other pages on your site you may want that direct link from the homepage to bring your users there without an extra second level stop over before allowing them access to the third page.

The third level in a lot of cases is deepest you will have to go on your site. If you do need to go deeper then there is a lot more work involved to get the deeper pages indexed and found by the search engines.

Watch for Parts 2 and 3 which will detail Dynamic Linking and Page Penetration…..

During my head-bobbing experience which wouldn’t allow me to sleep much I was thinking about my last blog post regarding Social Media Experts/Gurus and how they seem to be popping up everywhere.  The thought that kept me ruminating on the post was that there aren’t many professed SEO experts or guru’s that have only been around a few months. Why?, Check it out;

1. SEO isn’t something you learn overnight.  SEO is continually changing and it’s not something you “jump into” and call yourself an expert.  There is On-Page SEO (an art in itself) with no-follow rules, internal page linking strategies and all of the associated tags.  There is Off-Page SEO (which includes Social Media) requiring back link strategies, bookmarking, authority acquisition and content development strategies to support your On-page SEO. Most importantly, you actually have to prove that you can get results.
2. SEO is more science than marketing.  You can’t wave your arms extolling the benefits of transparency with fancy terms such as “media assets can be created on various platforms to increase your reach and interaction”.  SEO is working with raw data, interpreting the effects, testing and implementing additional strategies to get results – lather, rinse, repeat.  Social Media will be a contributor, however, I haven’t seen Social Media lower an average site Alexa rank 25,000 spots within a couple of months.
3. SEO isn’t for the weak or timid.  You charge a client money and you better get results – more traffic, more visitors, more conversions and have the numbers and knowledge to back it up and adjust to get predictable outcomes.  Social Media is engagement and testing messages but rarely do you see intensive backend tracking for social media campaigns – unless they were truly a social media expert/guru.

Tracking and numbers are everything and social media, to me, is very much a part of the overall plan for a company or a client; however, it must be measured for it’s overall effectiveness based on the client’s needs, products and audience.

I think a better term for anyone in the industry would be to stay away from being a Social Media Expert/Guru and become an Online Marketing student working to become an expert.  Learn all of the various ways to get a client tangible results that bring traffic, conversions and revenues that can be tracked back to all of your online campaigns. Learn how to adjust a complete campaign not just one aspect of the campaign (i.e. Social Media).  Those who take this approach and get extremely good at it will be the ones who will be revered as the complete package in the online world and will never have to look for work even in a recession.

A good article by Shoemoney – SEO vs Social Media

Oh yeah, and I will blog about DEMO too which was an incredible experience!

I attended Alex Mandossian’s reunion this past weekend at the Marriott in Millbrae.

A great event and Alex is a fantastic speaker.  There were numerous take-aways such as productivity, mental strengthening and much more.  The disappointment I experienced was from a standpoint of expectation.  I thought there would be much more about the “nuts and bolts” and how to get various aspects of systems in place to get traction in your business and on the internet.

I do agree though, you need the mental piece because without it, the “how-to’s” don’t matter.

The experiential nature of the event was good, however, it was very much geared to gratuitous networking and self-promotion.  Not that I’m opposed to it, but being a first timer I was a little taken aback and definitely not prepared to have 150 business cards to hand out and have my “pitch” honed to attract buyers (previous attendees were well prepared with special cards designed for the event).

The most interesting thing I am finding at events, like Alex’s, today are the number of “social media experts”.  I’m tired of hearing of another social media guru.  Anyone who has been on Facebook for the past 9 months is now a social media expert,  anyone who has been able to build their way to a 10,000 or greater following on twitter (which can be gamed extensively) is now a social media guru, anyone who lost their job in the past year is now a social media expert/guru.

I’m excited about the future of where we are going but social media experts should understand that social media is more than just Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and various other places online to attack users with bad marketing messages.  I recently met a 9 month social media guru who was giving talks, booking speaking engagements and teaching groups how to “find their voice” online and in social media circles without having any idea of how to actually engage their audience to get traction and achieve results.

Social media is going to need some major overhauls to clear out the experts, gurus and riff-raff that might know something about social media but have no idea how to develop an overall online strategy to use all aspects of marketing, message development, traffic development, on-page/off-page SEO, website development and a comprehensive plan to fully engage their audience beyond just social media.  Social media is a place for transparent, interactive and engaging relationships and conversations but it should not be treated as the final frontier for monetization.

I look forward to the day I can go to a seminar and the social media guru’s I meet are really social media guru’s.

Here is a link to Aaron’s blog/video post – http://www.theaaronist.com/regarding-social-media-experts/

And here is the video – good stuff!!

Regarding “Social Media Experts” from Aaron Lewis on Vimeo.

After watching the video the messaging and slide deck that was created was far, far superior to what could have been produced if I had not seen the video.

If you are in sales, marketing or any customer facing position this is a MUST SEE. Take the information, absorb it and then revamp all of your messaging documents immediately!

Simon Sinek’s TedxTalk dives into the triggers that will pull your clients in at a much deeper level. Everyone speaks to features and benefits and now everyone is starting to sound like Charlie Browns mom – wah, wah, blah, blah….the ROI of the results based decision model allows you to fully engage your target audience through the recent development of, wah, wah, blah, blah……

Folks – you need to hit people in a place that makes sense to them rather than making them sit through a blithering, acronym laced slide deck of dross making them wish they were sitting through a breakout session on 401k benefits and how they relate to social security in 2015.

How many times have you seen the customer or prospective client glaze over and start drooling from the mouth never to return to your “land of torture via powerpoint”. You have to quietly slip out the door and hope no one noticed the coma you induced.

Take 18 minutes right now and understand the “sweet spot” that will fully engage a person to the point of them asking you “Please tell me what is it that you have to offer I want to be a part of what your company does!” Caveat – this only works if you really mean what you are saying and management is behind the “vision” that you are sharing.

All right enough – go ahead, click play and spend 18 minutes to never have to return to the land of “I’m sick of hearing sales pitches”…

Best viewed by zooming and dragging the screen to see the detail and each logo is clickable so you can jump right to their site (how cool is that – interactive too!).

Brian Solis is one of the co-creators of this Infographic – I have been involved with sponsoring some tweetups in Silicon Valley he attended. Brian knows his stuff and knows Social Media. In the land of Social Media Snake Oil (where eveyone is an expert…) Brian is the real deal.

This, of course, has some folks up in arms about safety but what does this say about Social Media? We hear that it is a passing fad and perhaps this whole Social Media thing will finally blow over and we can get back to business. But is it?

This new development from Ford seems to suggest the exact opposite of Social Media being a fad or a passing moment on the internet. But it does make sense from one perspective, Scott Monty, uber social media guru, is the Social Media Head at Ford and very much engaged in building the Social Media presence at one of the oldest brands in the world. Scott has done some “experiments” with Social Media while at Ford so far and it looks like they are getting some traction (ROI is debatable).

So, I would love to hear from you – Is Social Media a passing fad or do you have some personal concrete experience and examples to share that indicate Social Media is integral to our lives and also to businesses?

A quote from Mike Wesch about the Video & the research:

Nobody there was blindly optimistic, thinking technology was going to make everything better. They were all continually trying to figure out where we are, where we might be going, and the possible downsides and dangers of new technologies so we can use the new technologies to serve human purposes.

For anyone who is really truly engaged in Social Media or is driving to create meaningful conversations online should watch this video. If you are just online to spam marketing messages, spam comments for backlinks or “game the system: i.e. Google & others” then this isn’t for you. But wait, yes it is…actually it is more for the spammers and “hit and run” marketing message droppers than anyone else.

This is the best 33 minutes I have spent online in long time.

The internet is evolving and so are we as communicators and information-a-holics. Prior to the internet we had the one-way conversation of the TV only. And the shaping it does to our minds, trends and pop culture is unrivaled until now.

I truly believe we will see the internet eclipse the TV because of the interaction, conversation and authenticity that can now flow from one to many or from many to many.

News is not just News anymore online – it becomes a conversation – albeit a vulgar and juvenile one at times but none the less a conversation that can breathe and give life to a story, event or occurrence.

The video by Mike Wesch, of The Machine is Us/ing Us Fame with over 10 million views and counting, really asks some questions that many of us are not considering but should be given that the internet is playing a HUGE role in our lives and the lives of billions around the planet.

Social Media and the internet have a place now and we have personal control of where it goes and how we choose to interact with it and others. We will always have the juvenile and immature behavior online but we also have a chance to really make decisions to be authentic and connect like we have never had a chance to before.

We can now connect without;

- feeling subconscious
- someone laughing in our faces
- telling us that our thoughts or ideas are irrelevant, or worse – stupid
- feeling the repercussions of revealing more than we would normally reveal face-to-face

This opens up huge opportunities to be authentic and supportive of each other thereby creating new conversations and communities that would have never been formed due to the potential for the lack of authenticity from a one-way conversation (TV), a face-to-face conversation or the distance that would normally separate us geographically.

We all now have a chance to create communities and be something more than what we may show, say or act like when at work, home, school or other face-to-face social situation.

Watch the video and then start your journey to be authentic, be real, create new conversations and create new communities. And then we can potentially create a new future of what social media can truly become.

I think a lot of people will perceive this as a release of “just another search engine” if they just read a press release or post and fail to go to the site. That couldn’t be further from the truth with this new version of LeapFish. This is the first search engine that allows socialization of all discovered content at the click of a button.

Social media adoption is at unprecedented levels and content is truly becoming “king” as engines like LeapFish allow a simple sharing mechanism that is integrated into the search stream.

From the Press Release:

“Aside from the Web’s growing size and variety there is an emerging duality of “real-time” and “traditional,” which now requires a completely different search experience. One that includes both the content and the “contributor” in the search experience, such that both traditional and real-time searching and sharing are integrated seamlessly in our use of this Living Web,” said Ben Behrouzi.”

This, in my opinion, was the missing step to a much larger movement in the search industry that is now moving away from static links and search results to a more dynamic search and socialization experience.

The best part of this release is that the combined searching and sharing functionality is only one of the incredibly innovative features that users will have access to when using LeapFish. My favorite feature is the customizable homepage that have feature-rich proprietary Twitter and Facebook apps that allow me to interact with my social communities without leaving my “personal dashboard to the web”.

Go to http://www.leapfish.com/ dive into this new experience and start Living the Web.