ONERank Internet Marketing Blog

Because Facebook privacy is such a hot topic lately, I thought I might write something so you know where you can check your privacy settings, or at least get a laugh out of what other people aren’t making private. With the amazing (that’s right, I said A-M-A-Z-I-N-G) capabilities of open graph and all the changes that came with it, we all want to make sure we are keeping our personal lives under wraps. After all, no one REALLY wants to know your bathroom habits via status message unless they’re purposely friends with you. And even at that… really?

Open Book- remember the aforementioned website where you can laugh at other people’s expenses due to what they are displaying publicly? Yep. This is it. This uses the Facebook API available to developers. All you have to do is type in something to search, and it will bring you random updates with that word. I won’t even get into what you COULD look up but…go try it out. It might make you double check your settings.

Facebook on Zesty.ca- This is pretty simple. You need to know your user ID…and if you don’t know it, there’s a little search box on the right where you can find it. Once you find your ID you can see what is visible from your events, posts, groups, pages etc. It’s simple and straight to the point.

ReclaimPrivacy- This is a pretty awesome service. Go to the homepage and follow the instructions. Drag the little button into your toolbar and click it when you get into Facebook. It will show you what’s connected, what’s not connected, and give you the option to fix it. I had instant personalization turned on and it gave me the ability to turn it off right from the results, but I think there must be an error because it didn’t fully deactivate. I bet Facebook is blocking it. ReclaimPrivacy is quick to fix errors so full functionality for that one option will most likely return ASAP. There is also a small disclaimers saying that ReclaimPrivacy is not held accountable for any troubles we might run into with Facebook due to use of this. Hmmmmm.

I hope these few sites will give you some confidence (and laughs) about privacy settings. After all, Open Graph is our future; we should embrace it. What you choose to share, and not share, can be controlled by you. Even though Facebook is shady-like and automatically opts you in to their changes (ask me how I feel about that. I dare you), you do have the option to opt-out.

Move over Nike. New public saying of 2010- “Just opt-out!”

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Get your Facebook Privacy Under Control

While there are countless sites on the web that are making good money, more often than not sites are not performing as well as they could/should.  They aren’t living up to their potential.  If these websites were employees, we’d probably fire them.

So, what do you do when your website isn’t living up to its potential? Give up?  That is one option.  But a better option is to sit back and do an honest assessment of your site.

So what are some of the things you should look at?  I’m glad you asked.

Here are some key things to look at if you feel your site isn’t being all that it can be.

Start by analyzing your web stats.

• Figure out how long people are staying on your site.
• See which pages they are leaving from most often.
• Look at the keywords they are using to find the site – if they aren’t coming in on targeted keywords that it isn’t that surprising that they aren’t converting.

Identify a few actions you want people to take on your site (place an order, sign for your newsletter etc) and go to your site yourself and go through the steps it takes for people to complete those actions.

• Was it easy?
• How many clicks did it take?
• Did the text compel and guide you along?

It’s sometimes hard to determine this for yourself since you are so familiar with your site, so ask a few friends or colleagues to go through the exercise and give you honest feedback.

Your most important info should not be more than a click or two from the homepage.

But don’t forget, people could be entering from pages other than your homepage – so if your special offers and newsletter sign up aren’t on every page, people may miss them.

You may want to find a way to list your special offers (or at least a banner mentioning that you have special offers) as well as your opt-in on every page of your site.  Not everyone wants to do this and sometimes it’s an intentional strategic decision not to (maybe you want to keep the pages simpler and not have anything to detract from the particular call to action on that page) – and that’s OK.  As long as you understand and knowingly decide that.

What can you do to get people to come back to your site?

Create a plan for content addition – keeping your site current with fresh content is good for the engines and your site visitors.  People need to see your site as a resource so they have a reason to keep coming back.  Give them interesting, important, funny, newsworthy info and you’ll see your repeat visitors start to increase.  The more times someone visits your site, the more likely they are to buy.

Beware of Broken Links…

Test your site for broken links and errors – nothing scares site visitors off like a site that isn’t well maintained.  Check for typos and spelling mistakes.  Look for broken images.  Remember people will make snap judgments about you and the quality of your product or service based on how your site looks.

Test your shopping cart often to make sure there are no errors that are causing you to lose sales. Make sure it is easy to use and if possible, keep reminding people of the benefits as they go through the sales process.  You don’t have the sale until they click the final submit button.  If your cart has a lot of steps, you could lose people along the way so keep them engaged and wanting the product.

Wasted Space?

Don’t waste your thank you page – make an up-sell offer on your thank you page.  People have already bought from you and should be open to other offers, plus they already have their credit card out and ready!

School may be finished, but you aren’t done with testing!

Test, test, test.  You should be split testing or multivariate testing your pages to improve results.  The littlest things – a blue header versus a red one, the word girl versus woman can make a BIG difference (I know this because I split test everything!).  So get testing – test colors, headline text, calls to action, different photos.  With Google Website Optimizer testing is so easy.

Prominence is key.

Make your opt-in box prominent and compelling.  Building a list is vitally important to your business.  If your site converts 4%  of your site’s visitors into sales, then the other 96% of your traffic is wasted – but if you capture their contact info and can market to them on an on-going basis, you will very likely get more sales!

Blah, Blah, Blah and other Common Copy mistakes

You don’t want to be boring and drab.  You need to excite and compel people.  You also need to guide them by the hand and get them to take the action you want.

Don’t use too much jargon or confusing language.  Talk to your site visitors in a language they will understand and relate to.

Website copy is truly an art and the right words make a big difference.  Make sure you have compelling headlines and strong calls to action.  Don’t assume because your product is good people will want to buy it.  They don’t know it’s good yet – you need to convince them!

Speed Matters.

Check out load time on your site.  No one has the time or patience to wait for a slow loading site, so they may be outta there if it’s too slow.

Busy, Busy, Busy.

Make sure there is enough white space to make the eye comfortable.  Too much text and graphics can be very busy looking and it makes people uncomfortable.

There is a lot more we could talk about – including some specifics on how to write more compelling text but a girl can’t reveal everything right away!  So, for now, I’ve given you some stuff to think about and a place to start.  Stay tuned for next month, I’ll talk about some copy tips and give samples of good copy and bad copy.

As always, I welcome questions, comments and anything you want to share!

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Is Your Website A Cash Generating Sales Machine? Probably Not!

Social Networking and Bookmarking sites have become a great way to boost the profile of your website across the internet and automated sharing and posting tools have made it so easy to share links, but don’t forget that your site is the foundation of your Social Media activities and you must ensure that it’s set up to feed the information in the most useful way.

Most website owners know that meta tags have an impact on search engine results.  Those more experienced in search engine optimization (SEO) know that Title and Description meta tags have great impact in getting good results through search engines, but it seems many have overlooked how Titles and Descriptions are important for Social Media Optimization as well.

Here’s an example of posting a link from the Sports Illustrated channel of the CNN site onto Twitter, using Hootsuite’s Hootlet link sharing tool:

You can see in the source code where relevant content is used in the Title and Description meta tags:

One of the most important features of social media sites is the ability to post your own links to your account, and an even bigger benefit is that visitors to your site can post links to your site to their own networks to share with their connections.  That’s why we add Share It buttons and other ways to easily post links to our sites on the most popular social media networks.

Most social networking sites, and sharing tools that feed into them, use the Title tag as the title of the post on the site and the Description meta tag to provide a description.  You can influence how the post to your link appears on the social networking sites by making sure that your Titles and Descriptions are properly populated on your site.

If you don’t use some sort of Content Management System (CMS) to generate your site, then you have complete control over these tags and can enter the best content here for Social Media posts, as well as SEO. Just ensure that you know how to do this with whatever application you use to code your pages. Most WYSIWYG editors have an area where you can edit the meta data for your page.  If you are not setting up or updating your own site, it’s very important that the web developer you hire is aware of the importance of Titles and Descriptions, and uses best practices for SEO and Social Media as standard.

If you do use a CMS; whether a blogging application like WordPress, a portal application like Joomla, a shopping cart like Magento, or a bespoke CMS of a web development company; you should ensure that these tags are populated in a way to get the most benefit for your site:

1. It’s best if you have complete control to add unique content for the Title and Description tags on each page generated.  If your CMS does not come with this feature you may be able to install a plug-in or add-on to allow this.  For example, there is a number of SEO plug-ins for WordPress that have this feature.
2. It may work fine for you if the Title and Description are automatically populated from a set area of your page in the CMS.  Many CMS applications will use the Title of a page/post as the Title tag and use content from the text page/post or an excerpt field to populate the Description meta tag. If you have a site with many dynamically created pages (i.e. a Shopping Cart or large directory) it is important that this content is populated automatically in an effective way.
3. It’s completely useless if you are only allowed to enter one Title and Description that’s used on all the pages of the site – or not allowed to specify these tags at all.  It would be pretty much impossible to create a single Title and Description that would be relevant for every page of your site. (You do know this is a killer for SEO as well, right?)  As noted above, you should look for a plug-in or add-on for your CMS so that you can have unique Title and Description tags – or get a new CMS!

Here’s another example of posting a link to a site using Hootlet:

The content automatically generated for the post is generic for the entire site and not relevant to this specific page, as you can see from the source code:

…and OOPS! There’s NO Description meta tag!

The use of Titles and Descriptions is also relevant to posting on Social Bookmarking Sites.

Here’s an example of a page from Wired that’s bookmarked on DIGG:

The link posted on Digg:

The code showing the Title:

…and the Description (where you can also see that Wired is using the All-in-1 SEO Pack for WordPress):

You can see that the person that posted the link to Digg kept most of the automatically generated content, but edited the title and added some ‘editorial’ at the front of the description, as many people will do, but kept most of what was generated.

It is true that in many cases users can write their own content when posting your link, but if the information automatically given provides accurate descriptive information they may just post with your chosen information or write their own comment along the same lines.

If there is no information automatically generated, or if it is irrelevant, the person may choose to not post your link at all rather than create their own text. Remember that the user is posting this content to his own account and so wants to include the most helpful, relevant information for his connections. The easier you make it, the more likely for users to post and share your link.

Along the same lines, it’s important to make sure that pages with multimedia content (images, videos and sound files) have relevant Title and Description tags.

Here’s an example of posting a link to a page with a podcast from Oprah.com onto a Facebook wall:

The user must add descriptive text on Facebook because the automatically generated content is not specific to the podcast:

Anyone else sharing the post from here will also need to add descriptive text as text the first user added doesn’t automatically get posted when shared.

You can see in the code for the Oprah.com page, the Title and Description meta tags are not specific to the podcast on the page:

Of course, YouTube provides a good example – here’s a YouTube video posted on Facebook:

Here’s the YouTube page:

…and you can see in the source code where the Title and Description are relevant to the specific video:

Looking at this source code I see that the Title on Facebook is actually taken from the meta tag Title (if included) and not from the actual Title tag itself (which begins “YouTube”).

So, if it wasn’t clear enough to website owners and developers that Titles and Descriptions are important for SEO; the relevance of these tags in Social Media is now even more ‘in your face’, so hopefully won’t be dismissed.

Funny enough, Facebook’s own pages don’t seem to have good Title and Descriptions. The link posted here was to the webpage on Facebook Pages:

(Facebook does provide information for developers on ways to ensure content is posted with accurate information: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph and http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Share/Specifying_Meta_Tags.)

Yet again, it turns out that getting back to basics and providing relevant Title and Description meta tags for each page of your website is best practice. Up until now we knew this was important to provide useful information to visitors and search engines, but now it’s important to get best exposure on Social Networking sites.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Use Titles & Descriptions to Get Best Exposure (and SEO) for Your Site on Social Media Networks