4. Competition: Both you and your customers can gain competitive advantages by being plugged into the chatter around your company. Be sure you are monitoring and have the necessary authority in place, or have access to such authority, to move quickly. – 5 Cs that businesses should consider to avoid business disaster online (Communication Overtones)

Google determines the language of a website by the Title and/or the Meta-description.

Have a look at these search results. The first thing you notice is that the Titles and Meta-descriptions are in Italian. The second is that Google is offering to translate every page. Click on anyone one of the search results however and you will see the page it wants to translate is in English. You see the same thing occurring with the French language portion of the website. – How Google detects language (Econsultancy)

What’s the most effective ad you’ve ever come across?

Think about this for a second. Not the best ad, which might encompass creative masterpieces, three-minute epics, or jokes and sight gags that still have you laughing a week later. These certainly get and hold your attention. But the true measure of an ad is its effectiveness in selling a product, promoting a brand, or otherwise driving action. For example, the long, drawn-out “wassup” from a Super Bowl ad long ago stills own a place in our vernacular (to be fair, mostly because “The Office” revived it), but can you recall the brand that created the ad? – SEM: A Call to Action (Search Engine Watch)

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Scribe SEO (affiliate link) works with WordPress blogs and websites to provide easy-to-understand SEO copywriting recommendations.  Even if you know SEO, this tool provides feedback right on the blog post interface, making it easy and quick to optimize any post.  I’ve been using Scribe for over a month now and I have been very happy with the results.

How it Works

Scribe SEO requires either the Thesis theme (paid) or the All in One SEO plugin (free) since it uses the functionality they provide for rewriting titles, descriptions and keywords.  Once you have Scribe installed (which is as easy as any other WordPress plugin), you’ll see a couple of columns in your post dashboard: scribe optimizer & primary keywords, which will be filled out for any post you’ve used Scribe on.  There will also be a Scribe Content Optimizer box in the upper right corner of individual post editor.

After you’ve written a post, you’ll need to fill in the Custom Title Tag & Meta Description fields (which are provided by the Thesis theme or the All in One SEO plugin).  While meta description fields aren’t used as part of Google’s algorithm, they are useful in providing descriptions to people in search results (people are who we’re interested in, right?).  The box in the upper corner will have 3 green checkmarks when the content is ready to be analyzed.

Analyze the post and you’ll get back 6 tabs of useful SEO recommendations and information.  The first tab is the SEO score, which shows your overall score plus analysis and recommendations for your title, description and content.  Scribe is fairly specific about what you should do to improve your score, which makes it very easy to get a high ranking score.

The keyword analysis tab will show you the primary and secondary keywords for your post, with the frequency, prominence and density for each.

If you’re not happy with the primary keywords, the Change Keywords tab gives you information about how to change the post to change the prominence of keywords.

Next is the Tags tab which gives you a list of relevant terms for your content.  These are helpful for adding to the post tags.  I’ve found that not all the tags are really super relevant – mostly because some are too broad for my target, but it’s easy to add them all to the post tags and remove the ones that don’t work.

SERP shows you how your post will look in the results of search engines (SERP = search engine results page), which is nice for making sure the listing makes sense to people.

Finally, the SEO Best Practices tab gives you some basic information that you should consider when optimizing your posts (very informative but not specific to the post that was analyzed).

Does it Work?

I’ve been using the Scribe plugin for over a month – not on every post, but on many of the posts I wanted to promote.  Taking a look at the post we’ve been following in this post: Understanding Facebook Page Insights – it’s listed on the first page of Google for the keywords “facebook page insights” – not bad.

Another post I optimized, Vanity Searches Should Be an Important Part of Your Routine is on the first page of results for the keywords “vanity searches“. Pretty good.

What’s more exciting is that traffic from search engines is trending upwards in the past month.  While not providing conclusive results (yet), Scribe clearly is having an influence on my rankings with Google.

Recommendation

SEO isn’t about blindly following a tool – you should instead use them to make informed decisions.  But if you’re looking for a tool to make it much easier to optimize your blog posts or website, I highly recommend giving Scribe SEO a try (affiliate link).  Plans start at $27/month for 30 evaluations (which may be enough for most business bloggers) and run up to $97/month for 300 evaluations.  You can use the service on an unlimited number of websites since they count only the number of evaluations (evaluation = clicking the analyze button) and can cancel anytime.  Even for those of us who know SEO, Scribe makes it much easier to optimize a post which means you’re more likely to do it.  While optimizing an entire site structure may still require a consultant, Scribe provides an easy, cost effective way to optimize posts as you write them.  Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Have you used Scribe SEO? What do you think?

Note: Links to Scribe SEO above are affiliate links.  While I may get a few bucks if you signup to use the service using the links, I only recommend products which I feel provide good value to you and that I’ve used or tested.  Please feel free to go to the website directly if you prefer.  Either way, I’d love to hear your feedback on the product.

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Technorati tags: SEO, marketing, Scribe SEO, search, search marketing, business

While Twitter promotes their open developer platform, Social Times has confirmed a number of new deals which involve 6 figure monthly fees for access to the Twitter stream. Both Google and Bing recently announced deals which involve the exchange of access to the public stream for significant sums of money, yet it wasn’t clear that this practice continued on down the line (of smaller developers). While the stream may appear free, if you consume too much information from Twitter, you will be billed. – Twitter Charging More Companies For Access To Firehose (Social Times)

A challenge many B2B organizations face is consistently creating content that’s unique, relevant and resourceful – all at the same time. Learn to write killer B2B blog posts with these 5 tips… - 5 Ways to Write a Killer B2B Blog Post (Marketo)

After spending just an hour with my clients, I had a significantly deeper sense of who they were, how they operated and their personalities. All of which will make me more productive in working with them in the future. Besides, when I email them now, or speak to them on the phone, I can see their faces in my mind’s eye. - Why Face-to-Face Meetings Still Matter (WebWorkerDaily)

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Real time search engine, Sency, who we’ve reviewed previously, just launched 4 international search engines to help users browse real time content in other languages. The real time web is alive – there are over 50 million status updates posted to Twitter every day. With all of these updates, a slew of real time search engines have launched in an effort to help users see what is being said right now.

The great thing about real time search is that you don’t have to be a member of any social network to access the data. So, you can search the 50 million daily updates to see all of the current gossip and chatter in real time.  With this in mind, Sency launched a Spanish real time search engine, a French real time search engine, an Italian real time search engine and a German real time search engine. Offering search results in 4 new languages will make it easy for users to see what is being said in their respective language.

As more and more users flock to the web – and post updates which are released in real time – these types of resources will be of even greater use to internet users, business owners and marketers. Because if you want to see what is being said right now – a real time search is the easiest way to aggregate information across multiple networks.

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With one or two exceptions (most notably Dell, which has claimed several million dollars in revenue from Twitter), few businesses have used Twitter to drive significant sales. Studying the Twitter profiles of some major UK online retailers and analysing available data suggests that, as far as business is concerned,Twitter is yet to live up to its hype.

The ‘wrong kind’ of followers, low follower numbers and a general disinterest in e-commerce sites on Twitter has meant that so far Twitter is far from proven as an effective tool for business. - Is Twitter any use for retailers? (Econsultancy)

Foursquare means business. The 1-year-old startup now has a huge brand — Starbucks — using its platform to test out an experimental customer rewards program.

Starting today, frequent Starbucks visitors who check in at retail locations using Foursquare will earn customer rewards. Although there’s no financial incentive or free coffee to begin with, customers can unlock the “Barista badge” after five checkins. - Foursquare and Starbucks Team Up to Offer Customer Rewards (CIO)

Over the past couple days, we’ve been able to put together a decent picture and identify some knowledge gaps and points of confusion for many would-be social media experts. But first, let’s address why some of the RWW staff – and many of our readers, some of whom must hire social media experts – feel it’s important for even the most marketing-oriented of consultants to have a rudimentary understanding of the workings of the Web, including its ecosystem of companies and applications. - What Do Social Media Marketers Know About Tech? SURVEY RESULTS (ReadWriteWeb)

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So you’re joining all of the social networks you keep hearing everyone talk about. And now that you’re here, you’re not exactly sure what you should be saying, or to whom. It can be daunting, confusing and time-consuming, to be sure.

Of course, it is possible to use a third-party application, such as Tweetdeck, to integrate all of your online profiles and update them all concurrently, but I would advise against it. There is a danger in taking the easy way out, as there always is. - Rules of Engagement on Social Networks (Identity PR)

Microsoft’s Bing search engine may still be a bit player in the lucrative online search business dominated by Google, but it’s slowly and steadily gaining users. And it appears that Bing’s share is coming at the expense of both Google and Yahoo, the latter of which recently teamed up with Microsoft to be more competitive in online search. – Bing Gains Again — Should Google Worry? (CIO)

As we’ve seen in the previous two parts of this series (covering characterization and plot), using storytelling techniques to help communicate your personal brand can make for clearer, more consistent, more compelling branding efforts. In this final part of the series, let’s look at the storyteller’s other tools — narrative and description — and see how they fit into the personal branding picture. – Use Storytelling Techniques in Personal Branding: Narrative (WebWorkerDaily)

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Wondering what people are saying about you or your brand?  One of the most powerful tools to keep up what people think is to do a vanity search from time to time.  A vanity search is a search (usually on Google) for your name, company name or brand name (really should be doing all of them).  Ideally you should own the first page of results – meaning you’ve written or posted everything there. But when a results from someone else shows up, it’s an opportunity for you to take action.

Brands are still figuring out how to react to the social web.  Consumers have much more power in the purchasing decision than ever before.  Things happen that consumers aren’t happy about – and they’re going to share that with their network.  Unfortunately the negative usually gets posted about much more than the positive – which is just the nature of business.

You may think that ignoring a few negative comments may be ok, but many large brands have found out the hard way that’s not the case (motrin, dell, southwest, etc).  Usually people comment about a bad experience because they want it to be resolved.  In which case, responding is actually the best thing you can do.  Even if you can’t do anything for the person, just listening may be enough.

This isn’t to say that you want to give free things to everyone who tweets something negative about you – that’s a slippery slope.  But listening, responding and improving your service are always good for business.

Regularly doing vanity searches as part of your social media routine will help you find what people are saying so you can adequately respond and correct as needed.

How do you use vanity searches? or do you?