The winter doldrums are officially here. Momentum for New Year’s resolutions is fading fast. The trees are bare; grass is brown. It’s time for an Internet marketing pick-me up! And what better way than to reflect for a moment on things that make you smile?!?

Here are 20 things that make us smile at NetStrategies. We hope you will add your happy thoughts to the list too!

Photo Credit: peyri/www.flickr.com/462244646

1. Our great customers. You are the reason we are in business (our number one happy thought). Thank you for trusting NetStrategies to lead your Internet marketing efforts.

2. Teamwork. Each member of our team is a leader in their field and augments everything we do. Our talents span from SEO, PPC, Analytics, Development, Social Media, Content Writing, Video, Managed Web Site Hosting, editing, kayaking, ice hockey, grilling, and scone baking!

3. The Internet. Thank you Al Gore for inventing it. After all, there would be no Internet marketing without the Internet!

4. Our vendors. Great vendors like Applicure, Cisco, Dell, and Parallels allow us to better serve our customers.

5. Occoquan Harbour Marina office space. We enjoy a gorgeous view every day from our desks overlooking the Occoquan River in Northern Virginia.

6. Google Analytics. This wonderful, free Web analytics tool allows us to do what we do best, measure results.

7. Experts who share their knowledge. Books, blogs, Webinars, videos…all free resources you share online and off.

8. Twitter and all its applications. We find valuable content every day from those we follow. Twitter gives us a valuable social platform to share our content. All those wonderful free applications like HootSuite and TweetDeck make using Twitter a snap.

9. Graphic designers. You make everything look so much better!

10. Programmers. Your HTML skills make anything possible. The phrase of 2010 has got to be “There’s an app for that!”

11. Instant messaging. This handy little feature draws our remote employees just a keystroke (and an emoticon) away!

12. bing’s photo of the day. If you don’t visit bing every day to learn about a new place, you are missing out.

13. Good coffee. No one in our office could make it though the day without our java jolts from Caribou Coffee in Lorton.

14. Flavored creamers. Funny, everyone makes fun of the hazelnut and vanilla latte creamers, but they need replacing every week.

15. MacBook Pro. (Sorry fellow PC-loving NetStrategists…had to slip in the Mac.)

16. Google Alerts. This handy free program helps us with reputation management and to watch the spread of our content. (Always a reason to smile!)

17. Collaboration. Outcomes are always better when we take advantage of shared talent.

18. Interns. NetStrategies supports local intern programs like Training Futures in the DC metro area. It is exciting to share our passion for Internet marketing with a budding new professional while benefiting from their hard work.

19. TubeMogul makes our videographer smile! He uploads our videos to this one site and it is distributed to many more automatically.

20. Internet marketing the NetStrategies way. Everyone on staff smiles when we help a client succeed with measurable results. Whether we launch a new Website, improve an existing one, boost the search results, or help a pay-per-click campaign take off, it is rewarding and fun ALWAYS!

What makes you smile at work?? Please share!

Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals | Stacey Morgan Smith

Yeah, sorry to say it, but please — don’t get hung up on your rankings. Just because you are number one in Google for your search doesn’t mean you’re number one in Google for your customer’s search.

As I mentioned in my post on personalized search, Google customizes your search results based on your search history.  Test it yourself. Google something. Now find a friend and Google the same thing on her computer. Most likely your results are different… unless you’re both in the same field and mostly do the same searches.

The point is (and I do generally have one) — your site content has to sell your product, whether you show up above the fold or below in the rankings. If the 5 sites above you don’t help a searcher solve his or her problem and you DO, you get the sale…and the 5 competitors get the honor of “being ranked top 5″ Great. Let them take that to the bank while you close another sale.

– Stacey Morgan Smith

Last week while visiting my grandpa in Panama City, Fla., I accompanied him on his daily ritual — the errand run.

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ooohoooh/

That day I was overwhelmed with southern hospitality. It made me consider how fantastic it would be if social media, or as I prefer to call it, online relationship building, followed the lesson of the simple errand run.

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn — and a thousand other similar applications are merely tools. The challenge for us all is to use these tools effectively.

1. Engage people often.
2. Learn about them.
3. Laugh with them.
4. Look out for others.
5. Share your good energy.

And remember as grandpa told me years ago, “You can’t email a handshake.”

I welcome you to share your favorite customer service experience!

A press release is a great way to present newsworthy content for your readers. However, the cost can be prohibitive for a small business or association to subscribe to the big press release distribution sites. Before you shell out $350 or more to get your news noticed, you might consider registering for a few of the free directory websites. While the free sites do not normally contain links, video embeds, or graphic images, they do receive notice via Twitter, blogs, and search engines.

Before you launch into submitting your press release to any directory, ensure it is well written and targeted directly to your key online audience. David Meerman Scott writes extensively about online press release value. Here is a link to his blog post, the new rules for press releases.

Once you write your release targeted to your key audience, using your keywords, you can use hubspot’s press release grader to determine whether you have some revising to do.

If your social media budget is tight, register for free press release directories to share your content online.

www.24-7pressrelease.com
www.i-newswire.com
www.pr.com
www.pressbox.co.uk
www.przoom.com
www.free-press-release-center.info
www.clickpress.com
www.prlog.org

If you use a free press release directory and would like to share its domain, please add to the list!

Next we’ll take a look at distribution for high value “big news” announcements.

Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals | Stacey Morgan Smith

Google announced on its official blog last week that it is “extending personalized search to signed-out users worldwide.”

Generally, this means that Google will use a “cookie” to customize your search results. If you often search for Internet Marketing Services and usually choose NetStrategies (which you do, of course), Google will remember your preferences and might display NetStrategies higher in your search results.

Google has utilized personal search for signed-in users for several years. If you have a Google account (gmail, etc.) and are logged in to search, your results are personalized to reflect your preferences. In an SEO course I took last year, the instructor used the example of searching for Java — depending on what you click most often, your results could contain mostly coffee sites, programming sites, or tourism sites. This change only brings that personalization to all users.

Keep in mind, though, that in addition to changing the way YOUR results are displayed, this will obviously change the way your potential customers’ results are displayed. So how can you ensure they still find you?

Be proactive! Follow best practices around writing your content and structuring your site. Your rankings may change user to user, but when a potential customer clicks on your site, if your page answers their question or solves their problem, you’ve taken the first step toward converting that searcher to a customer.

Remember that rankings should be viewed as a trend and not as a hard number. If you see your site pages fall week by week in your own search results, it’s time to review your content and SEO strategy. Let us know if you need any help!

– Stacey Morgan Smith

Photo credit: mykpwedding, Flickr

Your organization’s Web site is often your first chance to impress. Since thousands of Web sites clamor for your visitor’s attention, you need your site to entice in a number of ways. This checklist covers the minimal basics for a healthy Web site. If you cannot answer “yes” to each one, your Internet marketing team has some work to do!

1. Does your page load quickly?
Don’t count on a busy Web surfer to patiently wait while your site loads. Beware of the back button!

2. Does your text speak to your customer and his/her needs?
A Web surfer visits your site looking for specific information to solve a problem, not to discover that your organization is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Your text should include more you’s and yours than we’s and ours.

3. Can your visitors find useful and relevant content in your Web site?
As in #2, your visitor came to your site seeking specific knowledge. Today’s online surfers are researchers. Discover what information they seek and provide it. If you don’t, someone else will.

4. Is all the important information on your home page “above the fold?”
Again, Web surfers love the back button. Make sure it is obvious your site contains the solutions they seek.

5. Do you add/update your content on a regular basis?
Ideally, regular is weekly. If “regular” means only when you perform a complete redesign of your site, meet with your team and develop a more prolific content plan!

6. Is your text legible?
A 10-point font is too small for most readers. More than three fonts on a page are too many. ALL CAPS ARE DIFFICULT TO READ.

7. Is there a clear call to action on every page?
Don’t expect your visitor to “figure it out.” Make very clear what you want them to do.

8. Do all your links work?
Broken links frustrate visitors and scream, “We don’t navigate our own site, why should you?”

9. Do you have an easy to use site search?
This is another usability feature that makes your site easy to navigate. Visitors can use site search to quickly find the exact information they seek without delay.

10. Does your Web site pass the 4-second rule?
In other words, do your visitors know what you do and how to contact you in the first four seconds of entering your site? Make life easy for your site visitor!

11. Can visitors navigate your site on a PDA?
Many Internet surfers use their PDA rather than a computer for online activities. What does your Web site look like on a PDA screen? Can your visitor still perform all your site’s functions from a PDA?

12. Do you use Web analytics to measure success?
This critical measurement tool allows you to see which pages succeed and which ones do not. You can set benchmarks, monitor key performance indicators, and work toward your goals with real concrete data. Otherwise it is all guesswork!

13. Is your site indexed/crawled by Google, Yahoo!, and Bing?
Don’t leave indexing to chance. You can submit Web pages to the search engines proactively.

Your Web site is more than a business card. It can set you up as a leader in your industry. However, first your online presence must stand on a solid and healthy foundation. What basics do you look for in a healthy Web site? Add your comments and help this list grow!

Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals | Stacey Morgan Smith

My final Tuesday session at SMXEast in New York addressed “Universal & Blended Search Opportunities.”  Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land, moderated the session. Highlights from the speakers include:

Todd Friesen, VP of Search, Position Technologies
Nobody was using news, blog, images and vertical services directly so Google jammed them into the regular search results. Blogs don’t show up as much as news, video results. Optimize your titles for SEO – use a keyword or two at the beginning at the title.  Optimize your images!

Eric Papczun, VP of Client Services, Performics
Take full advantage of how to exploit the results to dominate the page results for your brand. How do we tell our story before others try to tell it for us (possibly negatively).  BE PROACTIVE!!!! If you have a quicklink, see what is on that page. If it loads slowly people may bounce off.  Constantly create news about yourself and refresh it often.  As news updates throughout the day, push it out.  Attack the noise around your brand.

Larry Cornett, VP, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search, Yahoo!
Blended search is all about little doorways that go to the content of the web. You can leave it in the search engines’ hands or take it into your hands. Use Search Monkey – blending data inside a result – partners to enable you to manipulate your listing in the yahoo search results: reviews, pictures, social info, etc. Also use Search Pad — can tell when you’re doing research and enables you to add notes that you can print out and take with you or post on Facebook, etc.

Jack Menzel, Google Product Manager, Universal Search, Google
It’s all about relevance. It’s not a window for people to abuse.  Get people the answer to queries fast, comprehensive, and best summary of the content.  Things will become more and more local, which is a source of a lot of quality win.
Search is far from solved. There are still lots of things that need to be fixed. Make sure Google can find your content!

As searches become more sophisticated, the engines have to be able to provide the best information to answer the query. Universal or blended search provides video, blogs, pictures, etc. This session provided useful information on optimizing that content.

– Stacey Morgan Smith

An afternoon session on Tuesday at SMXEast in New York allowed us to “Ask the SEOs.” This session, moderated by Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief of Searsch Engine Land, gave us the opportunity to get opinions from and discuss SEO questions with some very talented Internet marketers. The speakers included Greg Boser, President and CEO, 3 Dog Media; Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.; Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land; Todd Friesen, President, Oilman SEO; Rae Hoffman, owner, Sugarrae Internet Consulting; Stephan Spencer, President & CEO, Netconcepts; and Aaron Wall, Author, SEO Book. Notes from the Q&A include :

Duplicate content that’s scraped – how to deal with this?

• Stephan: Make sure you link to the canonical URL of an article within an article.
• Vanessa: Make sure the links are absolute. Go to google DMCA page to report scrapers.
• Greg: Remember the site with the most juice wins. Scraper stuff is spammers, so you usually won’t see a negative impact.
• Rae: If a scraper site is outranking you, you aren’t doing your SEO right.
• Bruce: File online to get a Federal electronic copyright number issued ($45). If you send your info out, the site that is syndicated may outrank you.
• Stephan: With a registered copyright, you can sue for statutory damages.

Google caffeine thoughts.

• Vanessa: Primarily an infrastructure change, not a rankings change. The new infrastructure may be allowing more content to be indexable, which is what could be affecting rankings.
• Todd: A lot of universal search things seem to have changed.
• Greg: Stronger trend toward using homepage instead of internal pages that may rank on regular Google … kind of like Alta Vista, may be returning best site instead of best page.
• Bruce: Found pages in caffeine that are older than pages in normal Google index. Regular index is being updated faster. If you’re seeing rankings change, your competitor could have been spidered but you haven’t been.
• Vanessa: If so, once they launch it, it might balance out.

What are the factors that influence Google Suggest – when you type and Google gives suggestions?

• Todd: Search volume, spikes, trends.
• Aaron: Stuff on Stumbleupon and viral sites that get thousands of views a day.
• Vanessa: Take advantage of suggest – optimize for the things that Google Suggest brings up.

What’s the difference between Alexa rank and Google PageRank – why are they so disparate?

• Vanessa: They are the same because they’re magical, mythical numbers.
• Stephan: You can download a piece of software to improve one but not the other.
• Danny: It’s as if two reviewers give you two different reviews.
• Vanessa: Based on if you download the toolbar from Alexa, so certain types of sites have higher rankings. Google pagerank is vaguely based on value of links. It’s not updated very often and not super accurate. Search engines don’t use Alexa at all for anything.
• Aaron: Link diversity is going to usually win.
• Rae: If you’re spending time trying to figure out value, you’re wasting time you could be spending improving your site.

Breadcrumbs – are important. all agree!

How do you determine if a site is authoritative?

• Stephan: Does it have sitelinks for nonbrand keywords?
• Vanessa: Does the site get a lot of people to it that would want to go to your site?
• Danny: A domain can have authority and transmit that to other sites.
• Greg: The time factor is the one thing that can’t be fudged. Old sites are good.

Thank you to these SEOers for sharing their opinions with the group.

– Stacey Morgan Smith

Tuesday’s sessions at SMXEast in New York continued with “Ask the Search Engines: Best Practices Edition.” Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Land moderated, and notes from the presentations and Q&A with Google, Yahoo!, and Bing include:

Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google Inc.

• If you need to bring your site offline for temporary maintenance, what’s the best way to do it? Return a 503 with a helpful message. Google will later recrawl the URL. Google will not index the content of the 503 (the preexisting content will be available in search results).
• How do you help bots crawl your site more efficiently with if-modified-since? Respond when appropriate with 304 “Not modified.”
• Which file(s) might be good to disallow from crawlers? individual login pages and calendars
• What action(s) can reduce load time (and thus increase user happiness)? order the external scripts and CSS on your pages efficiently (external scripts load serially – all other loading is blocked -  **stylesheets above external scripts allow parallel loading – much faster)** compress images
• What is the possible result of this implementation of “other-language” versions of a page using rel=”canonical”? This can be a problem if a french searcher is searching for a site. She’ll still see english version.

Sasi Parthasarathy, Program Manager, Bing, Microsoft

• Secure Your Website – no one talks about it. Everyone takes it for granted.
• Spammers target spiky queries that follow popular events and capitalize on the popularity to make money. They hack popular sites, use the link, and then spam the queries that target those queries.
• Blogs and forums are user-generated content, which makes them nonsecure and vulnerable if not secured/monitored regularly.
• Links on hacked pages may lead to a fake malware page which actually loads viruses if you click for the antivirus.
• Forums and blogs are spam magnets.

Q&A with Maile, Sasi, and Cris Pierry, Senior Director, Search, Yahoo! Inc.

• Using javascript to fool the search engines is a recipe for disaster.
• Safest to use text links.
• In bing, linking out is NOT part of the algorithm.
• Google and bing never supported the keywords tag. Yahoo, within last 3 months, doesn’t support keywords tag. They were NEVER a major ranking factor of the search engines.
• Good ranking factors: GOOD TEXT, informative and unique, content should make sense. KEYWORDS in the title tag, in the page itself (body copy), (in past – higher on the page was helpful), presence of the words in the links or near the links that lead to your page.
• How to move a website to a new domain without affecting its rankings: webmaster central blog – best practices for moving your site, webmaster tools – change of address; 301s
• Javascript & ability to executive has been a long time coming and they are treading lightly to ensure no negative side effects. only certain types of events are found to be safe.
• Canonical tag transferrs all link properties — it’s true.
• Whatever the 301 will do for you, the canonical will do for you.
• If you change hosting, it doesn’t matter – it won’t affect your rankings unless your hoster is slow. It doesn’t matter what your backend is if your structure is the same.
• Display none by itself isn’t blackhat, but it’s walking a thin line.
• Anytime that money is changing hands, you’re safest using nofollow.

I think it’s great that reps from the big-3 search engines took the time to come answer questions from Internet marketers. It makes it easier to play by the rules when you get additional opportunity to learn what the rules are!

– Stacey Morgan Smith

Tuesday’s sessions at SMXEast in New York began with Shari Thurow and “Search Engine Friendly Web Design.” Shari is the Founder and SEO Director of Omni Marketing Interactive and has a background in design. Takeaways include:

• You build a website for your users, not the search engines.
• Use industry directories, such as findlaw.com and Thomas register
• You must communicate well with the engines so they can communicate well with the searchers.
• Remember basic rules of web design for searchers: site should be easy to read, navigate, and find; should be consistent in layout, design, and labeling, and should be quick to load.
• Remember basic rules of web design for crawlers: spider must be able to index text, follow links, and measure popularity.
• Need to accommodate searcher behavior
• 3 equal parts: keyword-rich text, site and page architecture, and high-quality external link development
• Usability tests will let you know if visitors can tell what your site is about
• If search engines can’t access your pages, those pages won’t rank
• Search engines can follow flash-based links but they’re not very good at it, and they’re improving at a snail’s pace
• splash pages are not search engine friendly and usually are not user friendly
• The first things eyes go to a on webpage is movement
• People don’t come to a website to see how wonderful you are. They come to your website to see what you can do for them.
• Press release PDFs are ok on your site, but you have to optimize them the same as you would a webpage.

Shari offered up some great commonsense usability tips, and I’ve just started reading her book “Search Engine Visibility.”

– Stacey Morgan Smith