Last night while browsing Facebook’s iPhone app,  a little message popped in at the top of my News Feed informing me of a new Facebook iPhone app devoted to managing the pages you are an admin on all from one place.

While the number of smartphone users continue to grow daily and as social media interaction is developing into a major factor in the credibility of “great content” in Google’s eyes; I decided to head over to App Store and give it a try.

     

The Application looks virtually the same as the regular Facebook iPhone Application but instead of any type of personal information, it is devoted only to the pages that you are an admin on.  By clicking on the menu navigation in the top left corner, you can quickly switch between the different pages you have and see different aspects of those pages.

 

 

Features:

• Post new updates and photos as your Page
• Get notifications about new activity on your page when it happens, no matter where you are
• Respond, post and comment as your page while you are “on-the-go”
• Manage all Facebook Pages from one interface
• View all of your latest Page Insights

 

 

 

After using the App I do think that it is a good idea and with some added functionality in the future I could see myself adopting it for use with our business pages.  For now it is still a good resource for quickly checking the statistics or making some quick slight edits to your Facebook Pages from your phone.

Issues I have / Functionality I would Like to  see Added:

• Messages are not currently supported in the App
• Can Not currently look through photo albums in the App
• Event Management has not been incorporated (Can’t Create or Manage Events)
• App has not been updated to include the Timeline View (This is the default view for pages now and I would like the content to be displayed in the app the same way it is displayed for our customers and fans)

With The use of mobile phones and the importance of social media, I can only assume that these issues will be quickly updated by Facebook in the coming versions of the Application.

App Store Download Page: Facebook Pages Manager

Rich snippets are all the rage these days. Ever since Google started
enhancing their search results with these extra tidbits of information,
everyone is rushing to update their web sites with the metadata to
enable them. So what is the benefit of having a “rich” search result for
your site? Good question. Other than giving the search engine user a
little bit of extra bit of detail, I suppose there’s also a subtle
psychological factor that kicks in. Someone might be more inclined to
click on a search engine result that has a 5 star rating and a friendly
face than one that doesn’t. Plus, they’re just plain cool. Who doesn’t
want to add bling to their search results? But this only scratches the
surface. There’s much much more to them than that.

Instant information aggregation: It’s only a matter of semantics

Rich Snippets, as Google calls them, are actually semantic markup. The
idea of marking up some sort of document with meta information for the
benefit of machines is not a new idea. Semantic markup is as old as
information technology its self. For example, a Word document contains
metadata about its author, and a digital photo contains meta data about
the camera it was taken with. You might, for instance, store your
digital snapshots in a photo archiving program which uses this semantic
data to filter your photos by date taken, lens type, flash used, etc.
So, in essence, metadata is data about data.

It’s should be clear, then, how this “data about data” can be extremely
useful to search engines. It can provide a search engine the ability to
derive a semantic meaning from a document’s meta
information rather than having to rely purely on the abstract, human
understandable, concepts within the text of the document. Searches can
become less about keywords in text documents and more about
relationships between semantical data types.

To illustrate this point further, consider the following search: Find
all restaurants with a 3.5 star or better rating on the Las Vegas strip
that specialize in Italian OR Mexican cuisine AND are open after 11 PM
on Sunday nights AND do NOT require reservations. On the
semantic web, rather than a list of links to restaurant web sites that
may or may not match your given criteria, you might get a list of
“restaurant result objects” that DO match exactly
that criteria and never even have to visit the restaurant’s web site.
This is where the real power of semantic data lies. Instant information
aggregation.

This “semantic web”, also, is not a new idea. In fact, Tim Berners-Lee
himself envisioned the world wide web as a kind of “Semantic Network
Model” and even the earliest HTML specifications included the concept of
meta tags, which you are undoubtedly familiar with. Later iterations,
such as XHTML, took this idea a step further. Most notably is the RDFa
specification, which has been around for quite some time.

Read the rest of this entry »

 

 

While watching the recent free video release from Distilled I got to see Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz’s true feelings about XML Video Sitemaps.  I decided that it required a true visual representation.

 

 

dynoTable: A JQuery plugin for creating editable tables

A while back I was working on a project that required the GUI
to allow the user to dynamically add, remove and rearrange various form
fields contained in table rows. The tricky part was that the UI needed
to have this functionality for several different types of elements
across several different forms. For instance, one set of fields was for
adding and removing specifications to a product while another set of
fields was for adding images to a product. Thus, I needed a solution
that would be flexible enough to work across virtually any type of form
elements.

Naturally, I turned to JQuery. I first took a look around within
JQuery’s plugin ecosystem to see if perhaps there was already a plugin
that might do the job. While I did find a few different plugins for
adding removing form elements, none of them did exactly what I
needed, specifically re-arranging items… So, I was left with either
trying to hack the functionality into an existing plugin, or roll up my
sleeves and write my own. I choose the later option, since JQuery’s
excellent extension mechanism makes writing plugins a fairly
straightforward process. The result is the plugin below, which I call
dynoTable.

What the plugin does

DynoTable makes an html table editable. With it you can:

• Add rows
• Remove rows
• Clone rows
• Click and Drag to Re-arrange rows (If you have Jquery UI included on
  your page)

Getting started with dynoTable is a snap. First make sure you have
JQuery, and the dynoTable plugin, included in your page like so:

Read the rest of this entry »

Track any client side event with google analytics

By: Bob Tantlinger

I’ve recently been doing some work integrating social media events, such
as facebook likes, with google anayltics and was pleased to find that
Google gives you a deep level of control over what you can track. It
occurred to me that since a social media “event” is not really much
different than any other client side event, why not use google analytics
to keep tabs on any event the visitor might trigger.

With just a few lines of code, you can take your analytics a step
further and get some fine grained details about not only your visitors,
but their interaction with your web site. Using the techniques I show
below you can answer questions such as:

• Did the user scroll a section of your page into view?
• Did the user start filling out a form?
• Did the user encounter an error while interacting with your site?
• Did the visitor move their mouse over a particular page element?

These are just few examples off the top of my head for how this could be
useful, but you get the point. The sky is virtually the limit on what
you can track.

Get Tracking with _trackEvent

So, let’s dig in with a quick and dirty example that shows how to detect
if a user mouses over a a specific image on your page. To get started,
you’ll need:

• A google anyltics account (Obviously)
• The google tracking code installed in your sites head
• JQuery included in your page

When you include google’s tracking code in your html, it brings in a
global variable named _gat
(Google analytics tracker) . Using this variable, we have a handle by
which we can get all trackers that have been included on the page. Using
the tracker objects, we can push arbitrary events onto the _gaq
(google anyltics queue) to be tracked. They can be anything. Their
meaning is entirely up to you.

After an event has been pushed onto the queue as an event, you can
monitor them under the “Events” section in your google analytics
account. (If you’re the pointy hair type, it’s probably neat idea to set
up goals for your events!)

So, the steps thus far are:

• Decide what arbitrary events you want to track
• Get a handle on all trackers included on the current page with _gat
• Use the tracker to send an event to GA.

In our example, we will present the user with some images of food and
ask which is their favorite. We want to know when a user mouses over an
image, what type of image it was, and which food they select. With this
in mind we might write with some code such as this (Take note of
comments) Read the rest of this entry »

Tracking Pins With the Pinterest Button

By: Bob Tantlinger

Recently I was tasked with logging social media interaction on a site
utilizing the “buttons” (what do you call those anyway) of Twitter,
Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

We wanted to be able to record not only when a social media button was
clicked, but when an actual share, like, or whatever took place. In
other words, we needed to know that the user actually did the share.
Nothing very difficult. Most of the big players in social media have
handy APIs that let you subscribe to events they fire off when a share
takes place, which makes this fairly straight forward. In a perfect
world it WOULD be easy, but there’s -always- a monkey wrench lurking
around the corner ready to ruin your day. In this case the monkey wrench
was a royal “Pin in the Ass.” I am referring to, of course, Pinterest.

Pinterest is the newest social media fad, so their button is popping up
all over the place at an alarming rate. Everyone is rushing to get their
images pinned to the worlds biggest pin board. But there’s a problem.
While Pinterest’s “Pin it” button works fine, they offer no offical API,
so unlike the other social media services, there’s not much you can do
with the Pin It button. You can stick it on your site, and that’s it.
You cannot track events, such as when a “pin” occurs, or even when
someone simply clicks on the darn thing.

The good news is that Pinterest is working on an API, which should
hopefully be ready soon. Parts of it are apparently in “Read Only” mode http://tijn.bo.lt/pinterest-api

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-03-26/tech/31238519_1_mobile-apps-twitterrific-hootsuite

Sadly, until then, the best you can hope for is a hack like the one I
will document below.

Bending Pinterest to your will (Almost)

When you include the Pinterest button on your page like they want you
to, you include their javascript file:

http://assets.pinterest.com/js/pinit.js

and a simple link where you want the button to show up:

        
<a href="http://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/" class="pin-it-button"
count-layout="horizontal"><img border="0"
src="//assets.pinterest.com/images/PinExt.png" title="Pin It" /></a>
        
        

All well and good… BUT when the pinterest javascript executes, it
takes the simple link, removes it from your DOM, and replaces it with an
IFRAME. (an embedded html document right in your page where the button
goes) So the pin it button is not actually a button. Rather, it’s a
small html file loaded from Pinterest’s CDN embedded in your page. The
transformed code looks like this:

        
<iframe scrolling="no" frameborder="0"
src="http://pinit-cdn.pinterest.com/pinit.html?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmysite.com&amp;media=http%3A%2F%2Fmysite.com%2Fpic.jpg&amp;description=Neat+Pic&amp;layout=vertical"
style="border: medium none; width: 43px; height: 58px;"></iframe>
        
        

Because they put it in an IFRAME, it’s like putting a brick wall around
the button. The IFRAME is pointing to
http://pinit-cdn.pinterest.com/pinit.html, which is obviously different
than your domain… Thus, you run up against the browser’s same origin
policy (A security measure browsers implement which ensures scripts from
two different domains can not interact with each other.). So, I was
stuck. I could not get through the IFRAME brick wall, so I decided to go
around it completely.

Read the rest of this entry »

I wanted to publicly thank Bill Slawski from SEO by the Sea I recently hooked up with Bill in a Google Hang out which was hosted by and old mate of mine Dejan from DejanSEO. After listening to him talk about various SEO related topics, I knew I wanted to hear more. I fired off an email offering to take him out to lunch and he responded promptly (maybe he was just hungry?), we sorted out a day and time for me to come down to meet with him.

It was a pleasure to chat with an industry veteran and share some war stories. I am looking forward to learning from and working with Bill in the future. If you have the opportunity to listen to Bill speak, listen very carefully and take notes .

 

 

 

All this discussion about “Negaitve SEO” reminded me about a blog post that I wrote in 2008 on the same topic:

I have been reading and studying the term negative search engine optimization (SEO). I find it quite funny how people at Google in particular (Matt Cutts) says Google Bombing or negative SEO is difficult or nearly impossible without high jacking someone’s website. This is totally wrong, but then again he is the same guy saying you need links to get your site to rank, but don’t buy them… (If I hear that loaded answer one more time!).

Google is very smart. What they do is rely on a human being’s general perception that if something is deemed wrong or is generally unacceptable, that most will avoid it. They have been pounding down everyone’s throat that paid links are bad, if you buy links your a bad person or evil webmaster. They talk about penalties and banning websites. In the past penalties were very rare, but recently I have seen several link buyers penalized.

As soon as I see a client penalized, I see the clear path to negative SEO. Each and every time I see or hear about a website penalized for off site SEO work, I create a log of what transpired and what the effects were. Does Google think SEO’s or people involved in search engine optimization are dumb? Well we are not. I have a list of places where links are penalized, I have a list of the types and quantities of links that have been penalized, I know how long it takes and how to avoid it or how to cause it.

I am not talking about buying links for Viagra for a number one ranked website for the search term homes. But you know if the site that ranked #1for homes, ranked between 4-6 for home sales, sell homes, buy homes etc., and that these are the keywords that a top quality website can be penalized for, then you simply build just a few too many really good links. Do not be obvious, do 100% legit SEO (buying links is OK in my book) work for the target site, just do a little too much, a little to quick, and guess what they will be given a -30 or a -45, for several of the over optimized keywords. They will not be penalized for their primary keyword which would require a 100% hand removal from Google or a Hand Penalty from Google, but it is not difficult to get them hammered for their 2nd tier search words.

Needless to say, I can present Google with multiple instances of proof that this is a fact, and I can certainly repeat the results if required.

Google is crossing its fingers that the general SEO community will frown on the part of negative SEO, because of the bad Karma, but in reality what is the difference between getting your site to rank higher (therefore lowering your competitors site) or simply lowering your competitors site so your site ranks higher?

Google is really beginning to upset me with these link threats, and link penalties. If they continue this barrage on SEO companies, everyone will just do very low profile SEO for their client’s sites, and over optimize 3-4 of their competitor’s websites. When multiple SEO companies adopt this theory, Google is really screwed. They will lose nearly all control, and be left unable to properly address which sites should be rewarded and which should be penalized.

For now Google is OK, because of the bad Karma factors and the “it’s wrong to do this”, but it will only take Google penalizing 2-3 top clients before SEO companies will all decided it is so much easier, and more profitable to negative SEO their competitors.

I will say that it is NOT hard, it is NOT difficult. If a group of top SEO and link builders got together, they could probably get nearly any site penalized.”

Just heading to bed and noticed that out of the blue, many exact match domains have slipped in search. I noticed a number of exact match domains names have slipped somewhere from 5-40 positions in search. It was really long over due that Google fixed this issue. Exact match had gotten so far out of hand that domain names like www.health-insurance-quotes.us were ranking well.

Glad to see Google has discovered a way to tweak this, although I am not a fan of some of the recent changes Google has made, they really did need to make some serious changes.

Google has been releasing changes to it’s algorithm rapid fire, I think they updated it about 3-4 times in the past 60 days. I think they may take a breather soon, and possibly even turn back some of their changes. I think they have moved with a VERY heavy hand on some of their link updates, and have really scared everyone online.

Everyone now is worried about “over optimization” I have had nearly every client of ours contacting us about this, so needless to say it is on everyone’s mind (including mine).

If it’s your first time hearing about rich snippets you may want to read up at microformats.org first. In general though, rich snippets allow webmasters to influence the display of their website’s listings in search engines.

Like this:

Rich snippets have been around since 2009, but up until recently only a few websites could actually benefit from them. Previously, Google required webmasters to submit rich snippet request forms through its webmaster tools before anything would display differently in search results. Recently though Google has removed the manual approval process for hReview and other rich snippet code. This opens up many new exciting opportunities for both webmasters and SEO professionals.

hReview is arguably the most important rich snippet because it can pull reviews from your website and display them as stars under your search listings. Richard Baxter from SEO Gadget noticed a 5% CTR increase to his website after implementing hReview and obtaining stars in search results. 5% is an attractive number considering it takes all of five minutes to install the code.

To get the code for your website you can try the hReview Creator tool at microformats.org or simply use a template (I didn’t have much luck with the hReview Creator tool personally). Here is an example code template I drew up for my company, Evolve Creative Group.

<div class=”hreview”>

<span>

<span>Evolve Creative Group </span>

</span>

Reviewed by <span class=”reviewer”>Susie Smith </span> on

<span>

Jan 31<span class=”value-title” title=”2012-01-31″></span>

</span>.

<span>Thank you for being a great partner and delivering a world-class website.</span>

<span>After an extensive web agency search, we selected Evolve Creative Group and couldn’t have been happier with our choice. Todd Bertsch and his team demonstrated a passion and commitment to our project from the very first phone call.</span>

Rating:

<span class=”rating”>5.0</span>

</div>

This code can be placed anywhere within the body section of your source code. Make sure to use Google’s rich snippet testing tool to ensure that everything is set-up correctly.

Review stars will undoubtedly make your website more prominent in search results, but you need to be careful with how you use them or you risk getting your website penalized (unlikely) or having the snippet disappear altogether. Google’s guidelines for the hReview rich snippet state:

• The main topic of the page needs to be about a specific product or service. For example, using review markup on a page containing multiple products is not supported.
• Review of adult-related products or services are not supported.
• If the markup contains a single review, the reviewer’s name needs to be a valid name (person or Organization). For example, “50% off until Saturday” is not a valid name for a reviewer.

Google also has a rich snippet spam report form that states, “a rich snippet promoting a travel package as an event or displaying fabricated reviews would be considered spam.”

Google’s first guideline is the most confusing for many because it’s open to so much interpretation. My company could argue that our homepage is about a specific service (web design), but would Google see it the same way? Denmonlaw.com from the example above has simply moved a review from their testimonial page onto their homepage and incorporated hReview.

Assuming the review is legitimate I don’t see any issues with this practice. Only time will tell the future of this new open-ended system, but for now, we should all be taking advantage of this incredible opportunity while it’s still available. What do you think about moving a few testimonials to the homepage to benefit from hReview?