Make Your Website Look Official With Its Own Custom Favicon

Make Your Website Look Official With Its Own Custom Favicon is a post by SEO expert . For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

How to Make a Favicon

A favicon is the little custom icon that appears in the browser tab just to the left of the page’s title. It is most often just the logo for a website shrunk down to 16 X 16 pixels. Below is an example of a site that has a favicon and one that does not.

Favicon

When someone bookmarks your site, your favicon will appear with the page title in their list of bookmarks. This is an effective way to stand out and give your website a nice, professional image.

If your website doesn’t have a favicon yet, this simple guide will help you create one and explain how to display it when visitors come to your site. Even if you’re not real tech savvy, creating your own custom favicon is actually much easier than you might think.

Step 1: Create Your Image
If you already have a logo or an image that represents your site, simply open that file with an image editor like Adobe Photoshop or Fireworks. If you don’t already have such an editor on your computer, there are other options available, like pixlr.com, a great online alternative that is free to use.

If there is a lot of extra white space around your logo, be sure to crop it out. If your logo is a little more complex and does not display well as a 16 X 16 image, you may need to simplify it, or even use a different image altogether. However, if you go that route for your favicon, you should still try to incorporate the same primary colors of your website into the new image. While it is acceptable to use a different image, it is recommended that you use your logo if at all possible to help with the company’s branding efforts.

Once you reduce the image size to 16 X 16 pixels, save your file as a .jpg, .png, .gif, .bmp, or .tif.

Step 2: Convert Your Image
You now need to convert your image to a .ico file. There are several online tools that you can use to accomplish this. A good, free icon generator is available at prodraw.net. Simply upload your image, select the icon size, and voila. You can download your brand new .ico file.

Step 3: Upload Your Image
Now that you have your favicon.ico file, you can upload it to the root directory of your site. Do not place it in any folders. The image should be visible when you go to www.yourdomain/favicon.ico after uploading it (of course replacing “yourdomain” with your actual domain name). Do not place the favicon in an image folder such as: www.yourdomain/images/favicon.ico.

Step 4: Add Basic Code
Most modern browsers can detect that your favicon is present in your root directory and display it in the browser tab. While you don’t need to add any code to your pages, you will still want to add include simple code in the <head> section of your HTML to ensure that all browsers display your favicon properly. Below is the code you’ll need to add.

Keep in mind that there will be other elements in the <head> section of your webpage, such as the title tag and meta description, as well as references to any CSS files you have. The above code can be added anywhere between the beginning <head> and ending </head>.

Note: The “vnd.microsoft.icon” MIME type has replaced the older “image/x-icon” type as the official, standardized favicon MIME type for .ico files on the web.

 

Favicons For Apple Devices

You can also create favicons for Apple iOS devices. You’ll simply need to create 4 different sizes of your icon, and save them as .png files. The default size is 57 X 57 pixels. Apple also recommends that you use 90 degree corners instead of rounded corners when creating these images. After these image files have been created, you’ll just need to add this code within the <head> tag of your HTML.




If a static favicon isn’t quite cool enough for you, here is a great guide on creating animated favicons http://www.wikihow.com/Make-an-Animated-Favicons.

There are several other great online tools as well as different ways to create a custom favicon, and if you have a better method or favorite tool, please share your ideas in the comments below.

Get Internet Marketing Insight For Your Company - SEO.com

Make Your Website Look Official With Its Own Custom Favicon is a post by SEO expert . For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.


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June 19, 2013  Tags: , , , ,   Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing  No Comments

How to Completely Ruin (or Save) Your Website with Redirects

Posted by Cyrus Shepard

Have you ever redirected a page hoping to see a boost in rankings, but nothing happened? Or worse, traffic actually went down? 

When done right, 301 redirects have awesome power to
clean up messy architecture, solve outdated content problems and improve
user experience — all while preserving link equity and your ranking
power.

When done wrong, the results can be disastrous. 

In the past year, because Google cracked down hard on low quality links, the potential damage from 301 mistakes increased dramatically. There’s also evidence that Google has slightly changed how they handle non-relevant redirects, which makes proper implementation more important than ever.

From Dr. Pete’s post - An SEO’s Guide to HTTP Status Codes

Semantic relevance 101: anatomy of a “perfect” redirect

A
perfect 301 redirect works as a simple “change of address” for your
content. Ideally, this means everything about the page except the URL
stays the same including content, title tag, images, and layout.

When
done properly, we know from testing and statements from Google that a
301 redirect passes somewhere around 85% of its original link equity.

The
new page doesn’t have to be a perfect match for the 301 to pass equity,
but problems arise when webmasters use the 301 to redirect visitors to
non-relevant pages. The further away you get from semantically relevant
content, the less likely your redirect will pass maximum link equity.

For
example, if you have a page about “labrador,” then redirecting to a page
about “dogs” makes sense, but redirecting to a page about
“tacos” does not.

A clue to this devaluation comes from the manner in which search engines deal with content that changes significantly over a period of time. 

The famous Google patent, Information retrieval based on historical data, explains how older links might be ignored if the text of a page changes significantly or the anchor text pointing to a URL changes in a big way (I added the bold):

…the domain may show up in search results for queries that are no longer on topic. This is an undesirable result.

One way to address this problem is to estimate the date that a domain changed its focus. This may be done by determining a date when the text of a document changes significantly or when the text of the anchor text changes significantly. All links and/or anchor text prior to that date may then be ignored or discounted.

If these same properties apply to 301 redirects, it goes a long way in explaining why non-relevant pages don’t get a boost from redirecting off-topic pages. 

301 redirecting everything to the home page

Savvy
SEOs have known for a long time that redirecting a huge number of pages
to a home page isn’t the best policy, even when using a 301. Recent statements by Google representatives suggest that Google may go a step
further and treat bulk redirects to the home page of a website as 404s,
or soft 404s at best. 

This
means that instead of passing link equity through the 301, Google may
simply drop the old URLs from its index without passing any link equity
at all.

While
it’s difficult to prove exactly how search engines handle mass home page
redirects, it’s fair to say that any time you 301 a large number of
pages to a single questionably relevant URL, you shouldn’t expect those
redirects to significantly boost your SEO efforts.

Better alternative: When necessary, redirect relevant pages to closely related URLs. Category pages are better than a general homepage.

If
the page is no longer relevant, receives little traffic, and a better
page does not exist, it’s often perfectly okay to serve a 404 or 410
status code.

Danger: 301 redirects and bad backlinks

Before
Penguin, SEOs widely believed that bad links couldn’t hurt you, and
redirecting entire domains with bad links wasn’t likely to have much of
an effect.

Then Google dropped the hammer on low-quality links.

If the Penguin update and developments of the past year have taught us anything, it’s this:

When you redirect a domain, its bad backlinks go with it.

Webmasters
often roll up several older domains into a single website, not
realizing that bad backlinks may harbor poison that sickens the entire
effort. If you’ve been penalized or suffered from low-quality backlinks,
it’s often easier and more effective to simply stop the redirect than to try and clean up individual links.

Individual URLs with bad links

The
same concept works at the individual URL level. If you redirect
a single URL with bad backlinks attached to it, those bad links will then point to your new URL.

In this case, it’s often better to simply drop the page with a 404 or 410, and let those links drop from the index.

Infinite loops and long chains

If
you perform an SEO audit on a site, you’ll hopefully discover any
potentially harmful redirect loops or crawling errors caused by
overly-complex redirect patterns.

While
it’s generally believed that Google will follow many, many redirects,
each step has the potential to diminish link equity, dilute anchor text
relevance, and lead to crawling and indexing errors.

One or two steps is generally the most you want out of any redirect chain.

New changes for 302s

SEOs typically hate 302s, but recent evidence suggests search engines may now be changing how they handle them — at least a little. 

Google knows that webmasters make mistakes, and recent
tests by Geoff Kenyon showed that 302 redirects have potential to pass link equity. The theory is that 302s (meant to be temporary) are so
often implemented incorrectly, that Google treats them as “soft” 301s.

Duane Forrester of Bing addressed this in a recent tweet.

So, not only do search engines limit us when we try to get too clever, but
they also help to keep us from shooting ourselves in the foot.

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June 18, 2013  Tags: , , , ,   Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing  No Comments

#MozCon Speaker Interview: Aleyda Solis

Posted by Lindsay

Today I’m pleased to bring you Aleyda Solis, Madrid-based International SEO at SEER Interactive, a Moz Associate, and State of Search blogger. We’re excited that she’s bringing her international perspective to MozCon, where she’ll lay out how to make the bold but lucrative move into the international market. You definitely don’t want to miss her talk, “International SEO and the Future of Your ROI,” if you’re interested in growing your online business.

Tell us about the presentation you have planned for MozCon.

It’s going to be an exciting adventure, guiding the audience to discover their international SEO potential and what could be the future of their ROI. 

It will be beyond the “ccTLDs vs. subdirectories for country targeting” type of session (although best practices with examples and tactics will be also shared). It’s meant to answer frequent questions I get from strategic, operations, and business perspectives, like: “How do I connect with international audiences and develop an attractive offer and assets when I don’t even speak the language or know anything about the country?” Or, “How can I develop original, localized content for all of these non-English websites if I don’t have enough resources?”

If this is an issue for your business, then it’s highly likely that your international SEO strategy wasn’t planned and established well enough from the beginning, allowing your investment to become cost-effective and scalable in foreign organic search markets.  

I started to cover international SEO from this perspective in a SEER post I wrote about establishing an international SEO strategy. 

Why would it be unwise for someone to miss your presentation?

Because I will be giving away delicious Iberian ham that I will be bringing from Spain to selected audience members in my session! :D (I’m kidding!)

I really wish I could do that, but unfortunately it is forbidden by US Customs. (Nonetheless, you might want to ask for a change in customs law to make it friendlier to Spanish gastronomy so I can do that in the future.)

Seriously, though, it would be really unwise to skip my session because I will be sharing what could be the next step to grow your online business. You definitely don’t want to miss that.

What types of businesses should be thinking about international SEO, and why?

All businesses that might have an audience in other countries or that speaks other languages should be thinking about it. 

Sometimes people think that only huge businesses that already have a multinational physical presence should be thinking about an international web presence and search marketing activity. But this is far from true and is just myopic. For more, take a look at this Moz post I wrote about discovering your international online potential.  

Regarding international SEO, what is the most unexpected thing you’ve learned along the way?

Maybe not unexpected, but unfortunately usually overlooked: The characteristics of audience behavior in each country.

Beyond language differences, there are many cultural, economic and sociological factors that can affect the success of many aspects of your SEO process, like the level of response from a link-building campaign, for example. At the end, beyond search engines that serve as a bridge, SEO is about the people.

You can have a better understanding of what I’m talking about in this post I published at State of Search about different aspects that drive an international SEO industry and audience research.    

What do you do at SEER Interactive?

My activities at SEER are quite diverse: On one hand, I’m helping to grow the international SEO business, giving SEER more visibility by speaking at diverse events in Europe, identifying and validating leads, giving pre-sales support, and establishing and coordinating the best organization and processes for international SEO. On the other, I’m also developing and helping to implement international SEO processes for current clients.

Tell us about the places you’ve lived.

I’m from Nicaragua, a small, tropical country with a lot of volcanoes, lakes, and beaches on both the Pacific and Caribbean coasts in Central America. Nicaragua’s natural landscape is breathtaking; here’s a photo of Momotombo Volcano (one of the 12 volcanoes on the Pacific coast of the country):  

Photo from Flickr (under Creative Commons): http://www.flickr.com/photos/garrettziegler/7355295166/

I grew up, studied, and worked there until I left to study in Salamanca, Spain in 2006. It’s a beautiful student town full of history, with students from all over the world (a lot of people go there to learn Spanish). It’s also home to the University of Salamanca, the oldest university in Spain (where I went to study), which was founded in 1218. Its front building looks like this:

Photo from Flickr (under Creative Commons): http://www.flickr.com/photos/paullew/3855579280/

I ended up staying in Salamanca after finishing my studies, and got my first SEO job at an online marketing company. I lived in Salamanca for a bit more than 4 years — until I came to Madrid, the city where I live now. 

I came to Madrid after accepting an SEO manager position at a company here at the end of 2010. Madrid is an amazing place, since it has the great alternatives that big cities offer, and at the same time allows you to have a good quality of life. Here’s a view of Gran Via, one of the main streets in Madrid:

Photo from Flickr (under Creative Commons): http://www.flickr.com/photos/nico_/6887000482/

What is it about Madrid that keeps you there?

Madrid (followed by Barcelona) is where most of the bigger types of business activity happen in Spain, from trade shows and professional networking events to a wide range of cultural activities. There’s also good weather (there’s always sun, although it might be a bit cold during winter) and great culinary offerings (delicious tapas everywhere!), so I’m happy here at the moment. Although, of course, I’m quite open to experiencing new places to live in the future. I love to travel and experience new cultures.

Are you doing what you thought you’d be doing when you were growing up?

I had the somewhat common “dreams” among children of being an astronaut (I really just wanted to go to space, it wasn’t necessarily because I knew what an astronaut actually did). So that’s really a pending point in my life: going to space! I definitely need to start saving more for that.

What is the last thing that you have seen/heard/experienced that has inspired you?

I’ve recently had two experiences that have been inspiring in different ways.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to go to Israel to speak at KahenaCon and had the great opportunity to spend a Saturday walking around Jerusalem Old City. It was a truly inspiring experience, seeing places with such a rich historical and also religious background, like the Western Wall, the Holy Sepulchre and Dome of the Rock. Even if I’m not religious myself, it was a somewhat magical experience.

Photo from Instagram: http://instagram.com/p/Zucpg1N8yT/ 

Another (and totally different) inspiring moment happened a week ago when I had the chance to try Google Glass. I felt like I was already living in the future, interacting with that small, translucent movie theater-like interface in my glasses with just my voice. Truly amazing.

Photo from Instagram: http://instagram.com/p/Z8tuxJt8yd/

What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

To ask myself “What’s the worst that could happen?” when I’m making an important or scary decision. This question allows me to get my risk-averse considerations under control, and gives me a great opportunity to start assessing a new situation with more balanced criteria. By asking this, I’ve been able to go out of my comfort zone more frequently and live new experiences.

Thank you, Aleyda! It was great to learn a bit about your background and how international SEO matters for all types of businesses, not just the big multinationals.

If, like us, you just can’t get enough of Alyeda, you can find her as @aleyda on Twitter (where she juggles Spanish and English).

Still don’t have your #MozCon ticket yet? Reserve your spot now!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!


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June 17, 2013  Tags: , , , ,   Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing  No Comments

Meet Your Community-Building Team

Posted by Mackenzie Fogelson

Building a community around your brand isn’t just about the strength of your social media presence. It’s not about how you manage your social media outlets or whether you’re on Facebook, Google+, or Twitter. It’s not about how many blog posts you write or how often you use video or email marketing.

It’s about building a company.

A thriving community — one that brings visibility, targeted traffic, trust, credibility, conversions, customers, and ultimately revenue — is built upon a solid business that is investing tirelessly in its products, its services, and improving the experience it provides for its customers. 

If you want to build your business and a community around your brand, you’ve got to provide value. You’ve got to create the right content. You’ve got to effectively integrate SEO. And, most importantly, you’ve got to have the right team. 

And I’m not just talking about your marketing team.

 

Time to drop the silos

If you want your team to be successful at building your community and your business, you’ve got to think differently. And you’ve got to drop the silos.

 

 

Your team’s specific jobs and designations are important to the day-to-day running of your company’s business (otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered writing this post). But there is one big overarching truth for each and every person associated with the company: In the broad scope, it doesn’t matter what your job title is, what department you’re in, or what your job description is. Your role is to do whatever it takes to make the company thrive.

Everyone who works in your company is on the same team: the team that wants to accomplish the stuff that matters and will make your business a success.

So who’s gonna do the work?

As we’ve worked with companies (in many different industries and all with unique challenges) to build their communities and their businesses, we’ve been asked to help them understand the roles that are involved and also provide guidance as to best structure their team.

 

 

In our experience, what follows are some of the roles that are necessary to have on your community- and business-building team.

But before we get into that, please note:

  1. I’m not suggesting that you hire one person for each of these roles. Depending on the size (and the goals) of your company you may have many people doing many things. This is simply a rundown based on our experience with both small and large companies who have embarked on this community-building extravaganza. My intention is to provide some general guidance that you can then apply to your unique situation.

  2. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that surrounds building your community and your business that goes way beyond defining roles and team infrastructure like earning buy-in, defining goals, developing strategy, execution and testing, and evaluating and adjusting. You can get more information about all that good stuff in my SearchLove slide deck. 



    Today, I’m going to focus specifically on the roles of the team.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled program. 

Allow me to introduce you to your community building team:

Project management


Who’s responsible

Someone to keep the entire team on schedule and on task. Even if you’re working with an external team (agency or other partners) who will take the lead on this role, you need to have someone inside your company who is responsible for being the internal project manager. 

What’s required

Although this person may not be the one doing the daily nitty-gritty client work, they will interface with all of your internal and external teams on an ongoing basis to ensure that whatever needs to get done actually gets done, and that everyone is working toward the same goals and off of the same creative strategy. 

Ideally, when bringing in an outside agency, you want to work together to clearly define the expectations for this role, how it relates to communication, and who specifically is being held responsible for getting stuff done.

Community management


Who’s responsible

Someone who can represent your brand on social media, as well as monitor and manage the rest of your team’s social media activity.

Depending on your goals, your community manager will most likely assume two identities: one as your brand (your logo is their face):

And one for their own individual presence under your brand:

 

 

What’s required

Because this role is so demanding, I would highly recommend (especially for you smaller companies out there) that it’s not filled by your CEO or someone who cannot commit their attention on a daily basis. And, please, for the love of Dr. Pete, don’t assign this role to an intern.

Community management is a lot of hard work (I repeat: A LOT). Especially if you already have a thriving community, managing it requires a great deal of attention, engagement, and consistency on a daily basis. Your community manager is on a podium every day representing your brand, so be sure to choose the person for this role very wisely.

In addition to the normal stuff like sharing value (and not just your own), your community manager will be responsible for communicating what’s going on with your company, like events and products or service stuff. They will take the lead on engaging and answering questions that may arise (with customer or product support). Even more important is facilitating social monitoring and listening (which is imperative) and probably (depending on size) handling some reputation management.

If that’s not enough, there will always be opportunities (things that they observe that could contribute to the growth of your business, or simply to building relationships) that arise in their interaction in and among the community that will require further investigation. That’s a lot of load to carry so your community manager needs to be one amazing (and capable) person.

Hands down, you’ll want to have an excellent communicator in this position as they are the social face of your company. 

If you’re working with an agency to assist with community management, you can share the load, but be sure to work together as a team to develop a plan for how management will work. Be present and involved with strategy, execution, engagement, and ensure whatever is being done is what’s best for your company and is working toward the goals that have been set.

Strategy, creativity, analysis, and direction


Who’s responsible

Someone (or a few someones) who will develop and facilitate the direction of your web marketing and community building efforts. If you’re working with an agency, you can certainly lean on them to lead this piece with your direct involvement. 

What’s required

The most important part of this role is to ensure that all teams (both internal and external) are working together to align all efforts with the goals that have been set for your whole business (not just for SEO, social, and content). Remember all of those departments I talked about above that are part of your whole team? This is where they can play a role and contribute to strategy and direction (and certainly creativity).

It’s important that this role has worked with all of your teams to break those goals down into measurable KPIs that inform the creative campaigns that will accomplish these objectives.

Of course, your efforts don’t mean much if you’re not measuring and analyzing what’s working and what’s not. The person (or people) who are in the strategy/creativity/analysis/direction role need to provide strategic guidance based on actual data so that you can have confidence that you’re moving in the right direction. 

Many of our clients also work with additional partnering agencies that drive offline or PR efforts (more on this below). If that’s the case for you, make sure that all teams and partners are on the same page, working toward the same goals and being extra careful to maintain the consistency and integrity of the brand.

Design


Who’s responsible

Someone who can create any graphic assets that you need (and make you look really, really good). This can be an internal designer or your partnering agency. If you’re working with an external team, again, ensure that you’re maintaining the consistency and integrity of the brand. 

What’s required

Your designer is going to be responsible for designing and styling things like blog posts and infographics, social media assets, email marketing templates, banners and headers, and probably even landing pages.

The deal with the design role is just like every other role on this team. Don’t silo. Your designer is more of a production person who would probably rather be doing the work than dictating strategy, but they still have creative ideas and valuable feedback that would be worth hearing in the initial planning stages. Don’t be lame. Make them a part of the entire process.

Content

Who’s responsible

Someone who can write a variety of content like their life depended on it, because as you know, content is not just blog posts. We’ll just call this genius the content strategist.

What’s required

Your content strategist needs to be able to adapt to the context that’s necessitating the content. And above all, the content they develop needs to be driven by the overarching goals and strategy set forth for the business.

You want a content strategist who can be creative and, well, strategic. It’s important that this person is thoughtful not only about audience but also about how to balance creativity and conversion.

Outreach is going to be a big part of your content strategist’s job, both pre- and post-launch (more on this below). The person who’s creating your content needs to think about who’s going to care about that content before they even write it (Paddy Moogan’s rule. If you haven’t, you should read his book). They also need to be connecting with the SEO in the early planning stages in order to determine how this piece of content will be optimized, as well as determining if it’s been done before (and, in that case, how it can be done different/better).

If you don’t have the resources in-house to develop the content you need, you can outsource this role to an agency. And yes, they can assist you in creating strong, quality content that effectively represents your brand, but this takes a lot of work and collaboration; you need to be present and a part of the process.

You will want that agency to understand your business, so let them ask a lot of questions. If you’re too busy to answer their questions in an email, grant them a phone interview or allow them to sit in front of the CEO (or whoever else they need information from who may not be readily available) so they can extract exactly what they need to produce stellar content on your behalf. Then, of course, provide your input and revisions once you’ve seen a draft.

Like any member of your team, your content strategist can’t work in a silo. Content plays an enormous role in accomplishing the goals you have set for your business, so make your content strategist a part of the entire process from the very beginning (starting with goals and strategy development) so that they fully understand the bigger picture of why this content needs to exist.

After the content they’ve created has been released into the world, be sure to provide them with access to the data so that they can determine how well it performed and what could be done differently the next time around.

SEO

Who’s responsible

Someone who loves research, analysis, keywords, and probably Google so that they can properly and effectively manage and lead the optimization of all the stuff. Ideally, you also want this person to have more than a passing knowledge of strategy.

What’s required

The most important thing to note with the SEO role (I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again) is that no man is an island. You need an advanced SEO who will contribute as one of the most powerful players on your team. 

Like all the other roles on your community building team, the SEO needs to be involved right from the beginning. If you have the right SEO on your team, their ginormous analytical brain will be contributing to strategy. Not just SEO strategy, but the strategy you’re using to drive your whole business. They can be relied upon to provide some left-brain steadiness to your presumably right-brained creatives.

And don’t forget content, outreach, creativity, and direction, too. 

The best thing about your SEO is that they can provide you with the information you need to make data driven decisions about your business, but they can’t do that if they’re sitting in the corner building links all day long. Whoever ends up playing this role for you, give them the credit they deserve and know they’re capable of a whole lot more than keywords.

Email marketing
 (and other stuff, too)

Who’s responsible

Someone who can design, develop, and coordinate email marketing campaigns to deliver the value your team is creating in relationship to your strategy (in other words, someone who will know how to effectively use email marketing to build relationships and grow your business). 

What’s required

Email marketing is a great way to build community with the people who want to be a part of it as well as those who already are. Your existing customers are your best brand advocates, so you’ll want to make sure that you’ve got email marketing covered somewhere among the members of your team.

And — wait for it — don’t silo this role either. Because email marketing can be used to accomplish many goals, this role requires big-picture thinking right from the beginning, so don’t leave this person out.

Certainly there will be other tools that you’ll need your team to use besides email marketing (I’m sure Phil Nottingham is wondering when the heck I’m going to talk about video). Whatever vehicles you’ll be using to execute your strategy, make sure you’ve designated someone on your team to fully embrace this responsibility so it can be used to build your community and reach the goals you’ve set for your business.

Reading and learning


Who’s responsible

Several people who are continually reading and learning about your industry, looking for the good stuff to send along to your community and any innovative or creative ideas that might just grow your business.

This role is up to everyone who’s on your team.

But that’s not to say that everyone on your team needs to be on social media. You can involve everyone in the company in the knowledge seeking and soaking portion, and then select specific people (like your community manager and others who want to work with social media) to be the face of your brand and share that information on your social media outlets.

What’s required

A whole lot of reading, learning, and sharing. Internally at Mack Web we use a Google Spreadsheet that allows everyone on the team to contribute to the knowledge that is shared with our community. This not only builds the strength of our team, but also provides our community with a lot of variety.

 

 

We each focus on a specific subject about which we’re passionate (content, operations, design, business, marketing, etc.) so that we’re not all reading the same stuff. Each day we put at least one post into the queue for our community manager to use.

I don’t have to tell you that reading and learning is imperative to the success of your business and the development of your team. It’s also integral to the growth of your community. When you’re sharing other people’s useful content, you’re providing your followers with something of value and also opening the door to a relationship with the people generating the content.

If you’re working with an agency, they can help you identify what you can read and share (as well as who you can follow) in order to build your community.

Ideally, your agency partners should be reading all of these things, too, and bringing opportunities to your attention. If you’ve got everyone on your entire team contributing with knowledge, your company will be unstoppable.

Reading and learning is probably the most important of all the roles, and can dramatically accelerate the growth of your business and your community.

Outreach


Who’s responsible

Several people who are developing relationships and helping to keep those people and the rest of your community involved in what you’re doing, so that they can partake in it and benefit from it. Call it link building or relationship building, outreach is something that your entire team can do.

 

What’s required

Outreach is so much more than getting a link, and it needs to be done all the time, not just online or via email, (and not just when you want to ask someone for a favor).

Everyone can do parts of outreach. Sales can work the in-person and the online relationships. Marketing can do its part to determine where the team is going to earn links with the amazing creative content they’re developing. The best people on your team for outreach are the ones that love combining the digital world with the face-to-face, because that’s where the magic happens.

Because the role of outreach really falls on everyone, find the people who are passionate about people, and teach them authentic ways to make it part of their natural routine at work and throughout each day.

Website stuff


Who’s responsible

Someone who is committed to executing changes on the website. Like everyone on your team, make sure whoever is responsible for this role understands the goals of the company and is part of strategy execution so that they’re able to prioritize. There are always a lot of shiny things (new plugins, new applications, other fancy new doodads) that come in the form of tiny little emergencies. Involving your webmaster with goals and creative strategy will keep things running smoothly.

What’s required

Website work could be anything from revamping the navigation and implementing user experience changes to integrating a blog and executing on-page SEO.

If you’re working with an agency to lead your community building and web marketing efforts, they will most likely provide your internal team or another partnering agency with all of the instructions for what needs to be implemented.

Offline stuff


Who’s responsible

The people who are handling all of the offline stuff like print collateral, events, and maybe PR.

What’s required

Offline stuff often affects the online stuff. Things like events, conferences, and product launches. It’s imperative that internal and external teams work together (and with the direction of the project manager) in order to ensure that everyone is effectively leveraging all efforts and working toward the same goals. 

Now go on, you — go build your team

I’m sure there’s a role I’ve missed, perhaps one imperative to the specific goals of your business. This is just a start. It may be what what works for a little while until your business undergoes a change. At that point, you’ll need to reassess and reconfigure the roles of your team into what works for you.

The biggest thing I can leave you with is this: Think differently about your team and the roles everyone plays. Expand your understanding of what each and every person and department can contribute to your digital marketing. There’s a lot more involved in building your community than managing your social media. By now you know that’s because it’s not just a community you’re building. It’s your business.

If you want all of the benefits that a thriving community brings, focus on building the best company you can possibly build. Move beyond marketing initiatives and focus on your vision. Understand your customers better, and learn what they need to make their lives better. Let the passion and drive for what you do transform your company and your community, and put the right team in place to do it.

Looking forward to your thoughts below.

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June 16, 2013  Tags: , ,   Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing  No Comments

What Fishing Taught Me About Online Marketing

What Fishing Taught Me About Online Marketing is a post by SEO expert . For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Photo of spotted rainbow trout swimming in stream

There I was standing just off the bank of a beautiful little mountain stream tucked away in the bottom of a small quiet canyon. The water was gurgling happily underneath me as I drew back my rod ready to make my  perfect cast that was going to land me that little brown trout I could see rising behind the moss covered rock just a few feet away. The sun was shimmering off my line as I drew it back carefully. Focusing as hard as I could, I started my cast it forward when…..nothing. Yep, caught the tree behind me….yes again, get off my back.

Whoever coined the term “Harder than it looks” must have been a fly fisherman.

About that same time it hit me, to be successful on the river or in the internet marketing world not only is it harder than it looks but it also takes the same time, preparation, tools and presentation to gain the traffic or fish we so dearly covet.

The Perfect Fly

There are lots of little things you need to be successful on the river your rod, reel, line etc. Even if you have all that without the right fly the slimy little devils are just going to turn up their ugly noses and laugh as it drifts by. You have to be precise and I really mean precise to make it look so much like that hot fudge sundae they won’t have a choice but to gobble it up. It better be the right pattern, color and size or just like me you get nothing. Isn’t this also true of the content we produce?

We have all written articles that just look like they are God’s personal gift to the net. Amazing, helpful and well articulated material we cast it out there and then….nothing. So what is the next step? Always start by reassessing your target market and what needs they may have, then ask yourself is this something directly relevant to what they would be looking for? As marketers I have found that sometimes we tell our customers what they need, instead of listening and letting them tell us what they really want. No matter how amazing we think an article, video or whatever we are creating is, it simply will not catch on if it is not what our market desires. We need to take the time to do our homework through persona research, competitive analysis and detailed surveys to find the voice, concerns and questions of our market and make sure what we are producing fits their needs and not our egos.

Picture Perfect Presentation

Fly Fishing and MarketingTalk to any accomplished fly fisherman and they will tell you how you present your fly will make all the difference in the world. Without pin point accuracy we have very little chance of getting that fish to slide over and take a look at our bug. Even though we have done our home work and nailed the fly pattern choice down to the last feather. If we are casting it over and over again in nothing but a sloppy heap….nothing. Trust me on this one I have extensive experience.

A good idea would be to take that content and use the latest and greatest hot term and repurpose it! It may not perform the way you would like it to as a traditional guest post but it might be perfectly suited to something like a micropost, a step by step Slideshare or maybe even taking the extra time to put it into video form. By simply changing the outlet you use means that we can totally change the presentation and the perception of the content we have. Now, you have the perfect fly the presentation is flawless but…

Find the Big Fish

No matter what the presentation and what fly (content) we use, if we are not putting it in front of the right eyes we won’t get the results we are working so hard to obtain. Most of us will tell you this might be the most crucial part of the process; to catch the biggest baddest trout in the stream we have to find the perfect place to throw our big juicy fly. But just like in fishing, the trick is knowing exactly what to look for!  When fishing we look for places on the river that are more likely to hold fish. This can also be applied online to help tell us where our customer base is spending their time on the web. Here are some things we can look for when we are looking for the right places to post.

Figuring out the domain authority of a website is always a good way to determine the quality of a site. Try a site like Majecticseo.com or Opensiteexplorer.com, run the site your thinking of posting on and they will both give you the pages domain authority out of one hundred. Remember the higher the number the better. Next look for social engagement for example Facebook likes, tweets and my favorite blog comments. These will really help us get a feel of how many eyes are actually on the page, and the comments can also help determine if those people will want to share it through their own personal social networks for even more engagement. Lastly, fresh content will give us an idea how often the page is updated and maintained. If we can find a site with these 3 things and there is a great chance to increase our rankings, traffic, conversions, and more importantly fish!

Timing

Last but not least is our timing. On the river each time of the season dictates what type of fly you use, whether it is a giant hopper in the heat of summer or the smallest of nymphs in early spring. But what does that teach us? Just like on the river timing can be everything. We need to make sure that our content is on topic from what’s going on around us and in the industry. No one wants to read an article or watch a video about something that happened three months ago, I mean how awesome in Gangnam Style right now? Be sure to react quickly and offer a new viewpoint which will attract more readers.

There it is my friends whether its fishing or marketing the same game is being played. It’s up to us to perfect our process and put in the time to catch fish or traffic. Someone tell Google to name their next update Brown Trout so at least maybe then I can tell someone I know how to catch one!

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What Fishing Taught Me About Online Marketing is a post by SEO expert . For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.


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June 16, 2013  Tags: , , , ,   Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing  No Comments



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