Utah Open Source Planet

My brother Gabe wrote an interesting post highlighting how Google Trends searches show that Utah is a hotbed of Open Source. It reminded me that I haven’t plugged the Utah Open Source Conference that’s happening this week. This conference is something you don’t want to miss.  I think you can still get tickets.

If your business is still not leveraging open source, you need to stop by to meet some of the people that can help you make it happen.

Now, on a separate nerdy note, I wanted to echo Gabe’s post by pointing out some business terms in which Utahans have peculiar interest according to search data in Google Trends.  When it comes to industry related searches, we rank #1 for Multi Level Marketing, #2 in Outdoor Recreation, and #3 in Telemarketing.

Utah also does a disproportionate amount of searches for online business terms: we rank #1 for SEO, #2 for Internet Marketing, #1 for Web Analytics, and #2 for Internet Business.

Can you think of any other obvious top Utah searches?  I’m looking specifically for business terms; although searches for jello, meth, and vouchers are interesting in their own right.

I’d like to announce that SocialOptimize, my Social Media Development and Consulting and Apps Agency is being dissolved. I will now be assuming business under the name, “Stay N’ Alive Productions, LLC”. This, at least for now, will remain the main blog and website for my new business. What does this mean for my Social Efforts?

As you know, I have written 2 books, one on Facebook for Business and Personal Life (ranked #96 under “Job Hunting” on Amazon!) called, “I’m On Facebook–Now What???“, and another, published by O’Reilly, called “FBML Essentials” which focuses on Facebook Development from a software development perspective. (FBML Essentials should go to print around May) Recently I was featured by Guy Kawasaki on his blog, http://blog.guykawasaki.com - I encourage you to check out Stay N’ Alive, the blog, on http://socialmedia.alltop.com! I’m On Facebook–Now What??? has been listed (thanks to my co-author, Jason Alba) in the New York Times, US News and World Report, and I am receiving interview and speaking engagement requests on almost a weekly or more basis. I have consulted for some of the top 100 Facebook applications, including Paul Allen’s “We’re Related” Application (one of my favorites on Facebook!), and continue to get requests for consulting and development. That altogether takes up about 1/2 of my time - I have openings for April if you’re interested in an interview or speaker for your event!

In addition to my consulting, I would like to announce that I have teamed up with a development agency (more to be announced later) which will be able to provide development for those projects I consult on. If your company has development needs please contact me and I will introduce you to them and stay with you through the process.

For the second 1/2 of my time, I am building a network of communities on Facebook. I am working with several budding startup companies, along with a few apps I am building currently, to integrate into a large network of niche communities, all 100,000 users or less, perhaps a few with more, that cross-integrate and share features with each other. I will work with those in the network to provide consulting and development, at cost (and some less than cost depending on need and what we can work out), and in exchange you will get access to cross-promote, and gain access to many of the tools we will be providing, along with a great brand we will be building to promote the network. My goal is to make each application in our network as successful as possible according to your business needs. If you have an application you would like to include in my network, or need a way to build up your app further on a small budget, please contact me via the links on the right and we can discuss further how to best include you.

You’ll also see me doing several activities on a volunteer basis that I think will bring more of a focus to benefiting society through Social Media. Stay tuned for some of that, and in the meantime, visit Beth Kanter’s blog for a good resource.

So whether you’re looking to build up your small business under a budget, or need consulting, development, interviews, or speakers for your event, despite that I am no longer with SocialOptimize, I am still very much involved, and alive in the Social Media and Networking space. I am still “The Social Media Guru”. Give me a ring and let’s talk!

I’ve been on the Google Reader band wagon for a long time now. I currently subscribe to about 150 feeds, and I read or skim over probably near 1,000 or more feed items a day. Reading my feeds is how I stay up on the latest and greatest, and how I am able to give the best advice to my clients. Instead of me going to news, now the news comes to me, which, despite the amount of news I read in a day, has made me actually more productive.

Google Reader has recently added a friends feature. Now, all those on your GMail or Google Talk contact lists that use Google Reader will appear in a Friends list to the left of Google Reader. You can choose to turn your friends’ feeds on or off in the settings (upper-right of Reader), and even invite more friends to begin using Google Reader. As your friends “share” the feed items that they like, you also get to see what they are sharing. This feature in effect has actually started bringing me even more news. It will be interesting to see the SEO effects of this as people no longer subscribe to blogs, but rather rely on their friends sharing their favorite blogs with you. Personally, I think it will improve the odds, as now more people will see your blog due to the viral nature of this system, and more people in result will be persuaded to subscribe to your blog - this time through Google, improving the SEO chances of you appearing in Google personalized results for that individual.

Here’s how I use Google Reader. Bloggers may want to take note, as this could provide some tips as to how to further improve your posts to fit with the power Feed readers out there.:

• Skim, Skim, Skim! - There’s no way I would get through all 1,000+ of my feed items if I read every single one of them. I skim over the headlines, and sometimes the content, then move onto the next item. Only if the article is important to me do I read the article in detail.
• Learn the Shortcuts - There are 3 or 4 shortcut keys that are essential for me. I use the ‘j’ key to open the next item and mark it as read. I use the ‘k’ key to move back to the previous item. I use the ’shift-s’ key combination to share the item I’m reading if I think those that are friends with me might be interested. I use the ’s’ key to start items I want to “bookmark” for later - this is Google Reader’s equivalent to del.icio.us. I then use the ‘r’ key to refresh the list I’m on - I like to click on the link “x new items” and read through those. Then, when I hit ‘r’ to refresh, it only shows me the new items I haven’t read yet.
• Add as many friends as you can - The more friends you have, the more information you receive. If a friend isn’t providing productive feeds, then perhaps you can take them off, but besides that, information is good!
• Stay on top of your feeds - if you don’t check them several times throughout the day, they will build up, and you’ll be stuck spending an hour or two in the middle of the night catching up. I like to use my cell phone when I’m away from my computer to go through my feeds. Google has excellent mobile tools, and Reader is no exception.
• Don’t use iGoogle - I was using this for awhile, and realized a) I couldn’t use the shortcuts, and b) I couldn’t utilize the sharing or starring features. Perhaps if they improve it I’ll go back.

Those are the strategies I use to read through my feeds in Google Reader. What strategies do you use? Please add me as a friend - you can either add me as a contact in Google Talk, or shoot me an e-mail and you’ll automatically be added to my Google Reader Friends. jessestay at gmail dot com

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Dave Bascom, of SEO.com, and also a good friend of mine, recently reminded me through a blog post of his about Danny Sullivan’s Whiteboard Daily Search Cast where he criticized Facebook ads as a “revolution”. Danny goes on to say that because search ads are being “requested” by the user, search engine advertising is much more of a revolution than that of Facebook advertising.

I respectfully disagree with Danny here. I think Danny is getting his terms confused. While SEO is the process of me getting what I have requested, search engine advertising is not that case. Advertisers on search engines do not know who I am and therefore cannot detect the best ads to send my way. Because of this, it is extremely easy for advertisers to get what I am truly looking for wrong, and especially hard to convince me that I should buy their product. Advertisers only know what I’m searching for - not who I am, not who my friends are, and therefore what search engines can deliver is extremely basic. Search Engine advertisers (note I’m not saying SEO here) are still pushing ads to me, many of which are not what I want to receive.

Facebook, on the other hand, is a search engine’s biggest competitor in the ad space. Facebook, in essence, has on top of the existing internet, created a personal internet for others to use, associate with friends, purchase from retailers, do business, you name it. People remain on Facebook (and other social networks) because it is where their friends and family are. Facebook knows these relationships, these interactions, and all about who you are and what you are looking for. Therefore, all Facebook needs to do is give a basis for businesses to do business on top of their “personal internet”, and now all users have to do is search within Facebook and they can get way better search results than a normal search engine could ever give you. Facebook has done this with their platform. They’ve done this with their “Facebook Pages”, and they’ve also done this through Beacon.

Now, add to that the ability for advertisers to convince your friends to tell you about your product. Danny, it’s not about getting into “the conversation”. Facebook isn’t just a “conversation” - I use Twitter for that. Facebook is a lifestyle - it’s a way of living. It’s not about someone, even a friend entering the conversation and saying, “hey - do you want a new iPod?” It’s about me and my friends talking about what we’re getting for Christmas, and one of my friends knows I’m looking for an iPod, and tells me about a cool deal on iPods he discovered. Facebook is not an interruption - it’s a natural evolvement of life. Well-placed ads in Facebook are those that Friends tell other friends about. They’re about me seeing what my friends are doing, and realizing - hey, my friend just shopped at Fandango (hi Phil!), maybe I should shop there too!

I am going to be blogging here really soon about a term I call Social Network Optimization (there’s also a chapter in my book), or SNO. While SEO is all about defining your place in a linked relationship between websites, SNO adds a layer to that by defining your place in a linked relationship between real people. You’ll start seeing more and more SNO as social networking becomes more and more used. Is SEO dead? I don’t think so - a good company will need to find ways to utilize both techniques to place themselves optimally on the web. SEO could eventually evolve more and more into SNO, but SEO I think will always be around in some form.

SNO and Facebook ads are the new revolution. Viral and Permissions marketing is here to stay my friends - Danny, I’m sorry, but I think you’re wrong on this one.

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I have this blog monitored through several different programs: Google Analytics, Feedburner, and Wordpress Stats. Each of these have their own pluses and reasons why I use them. Probably the most interesting and most useful is the search terms used to find the blog or posts on the blog. It can help you refine information on your blog or make you laugh (I used to be on the first page for search results for George Shrinks because of this post).

One of the search terms that came up today through Feedburner was “jeos initramfs“. At first glance, I thought it was because of my post about building a virtual appliance, but as it turned out, they all went to my post about opportunities to help the Alfresco project by providing translations for other languages. The “jeos initramfs” information was actually for a tweet I posted on twitter.

What this provides me, is a place to start learning more of Search Engine Optimization (you can always learn a new skill) and reminds me I need to post the information that I learned when I ran into problems with jeos and initramfs.

This week, off hours, I have been working on a new SEO evaluation. John Daughters, a hypnotist and hypno-therapist. He has been working on getting a web presence for his business, and has an excellent website. The only problem is, he needs more hits on his site.

He came to me and asked if I would take a look at his website and give him some pointers. The site is written beautifully, by a master web designer. But there are some things that could be added in order to increase his search engine optimization, and increase his search ranking.

Back Links
The website is beautiful, but is missing one major thing: Back links. While the website is designed well, according to the tools at SEOChat.com he does not have anyone linking to his website. Now, back links are a major need for any website and his website is no different. What can he do?

One thing that can be used is Web 2.0 technology. Blogs, Wikis, and other web presence options can be used to increase back links. One thing that I think will work for John is an entry in WIkipedia.org. Of course, the entry would need to be topical, and benefit the community as a whole (with accuracy).

Keywords on Website
Flash on a website is wonderful, but only if the flash is backed up with text on the page. John's main website is all flash, and as such it doesn't have many keywords in the body of the site for recognition. Luckily, his other pages do. That being said, he has plenty of meta tag keywords. Why are keywords in the body so important? Because Google doesn't utilize the meta tags for ranking. So page content is necessary. What counts for page content? Image Alt tags! And they are friendly to the American Disabilities Act. ^_^

Videos, Videos, Videos!
Search engine optimization is more than just getting to the top of a search. It's really all about bringing more traffic to the website. Two great ways to bring more traffic to a website is to post videos to YouTube, and/or to post podcasts regularly. If you are a performer this is ideal. It's like a free audition for your potential clients! You also want to make sure they are made well, with great angles and topical scenes. These then bring recognition to your website, and hence to your business.

If you are interested in more SEO ideas and techniques, or want to understand how an SEO analysis can work, feel free to sign up for the SEO class at the University of Utah's Continuing Education website. I hope to see you in my class! ^_^

I have been teaching a search engine optimization class through Continuing Education for a year now, and I have to say that as much as I had learned at eBay while I was there, I have learned three times more. The concept seems pretty simple: increasing your chances of being in the top ten within a specific search engine. Seems simple, doesn't it? But with the multiple ways it is possible to increase your footprint, it becomes more complex to do it the 'white hat' style.

Currently, I have been working with a rafting company, Colorado River and Trail Expeditions, who asked me to do some consulting work for them. I've never really done any paid consulting work before, though I have been rather eager to get into the consulting field. Last Thursday I had a presentation at Cyprus Credit Union, and since I would be off the clock at the U anyway, I made an appointment and headed down to their office.

I was first impressed with their site code. They hired a consultant to assist them with that as well, and he did an excellent job with their code. It was clean, concise, and a joy to look at. It made identifying locations to add keywords simple and easy.

Next, their traffic has been great overall, even without their increased Google standing. That being said, they are coming to their slow season (expected when the water is running low and Autumn is coming), so traffic will continue to dwindle because of the seasonal nature of the business. It also means that this is the perfect time to make the change.

There were a number of other marketing suggestions that I had made that will increase their back links for free, and still remain very optimal. It will be interesting to see how their footprint continues to grow during the next few months. I'll be monitoring the website for a while, and may (with the permission of the company) use their website as an example in my class.

This, of course, all comes back to the class itself. We are going to be focusing on Search Engine Marketing a bit more, which from my past students has become the real interest. It seems that people have finally come to the realization that the search engine isn't the only goal in marketing, but rather increased traffic. The class will still focus on techniques to optimize for search engines, but will now include some information on quantifying your return from search engine marketing overall.

*end shameless plug here* ^_^

A website’s goal is to convert as many visitors as possible

The number of conversions depend on two factors:

1. number of visitors
2. % of total visitors the website converts

SEO practitioners optimize web pages so the pages show up high in search engine rankings. This drives more traffic to the page which increases the number of conversions. How high a web page shows up in a search engine ranking page (SERP) is based on three factors:

1. Strength of the domain (measured by links, trust, age, and possibly some usage factors)
2. Internal and external links to the page
3. Keyword in the title tag

Other pages I found helpful to understand SEO:
If Your Page Ranks Well, You’d Better Be Messing With It
18 Questions Your CEO Forgot to Ask When Building Your Website
The Basics of Search Engine Optimization
How to Build a Keyword List
Google Ranking Factors - SEO Checklist
Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization
Lots of links to other SEO resources
Before You Launch that Local Small Business Website — SEO basics for small companies