JeremyChow.com » Search Engine Optimisation

The other reason for website social media buttons

Jeremy — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:34:13 +0000

If you browse your site statistics (you should have these and if you don’t, why not?) after adding social media buttons, you will often find that services attached to these buttons – which aren’t always the vendor themselves – will often appear as bots indexing the content of your site.

Obviously, this is good news as this new scraped content will be aggregated somewhere and redistributed, meaning that your content is finding new channels of distribution. They are a little like self-homing ping devices that also allow your readers to share your content with their friends and followers.

The example I found, specifically, was the Tweetmeme button (as found on this site, but my discovery was actually on another site) which invites the Tweetmeme bots to your website party.

As a side note, I have found it helpful to install these buttons yourself, rather than using an all-in-one plugin that can often be found for installations such as WordPress or Movable Type. Firstly, this allows you to cherry pick the social networks that are most appropriate for your business, and secondly gives you the flexibility to position them carefully on your page templates, rather than the generic positioning (or lack of) that most plugins offer. Obviously this takes a little technical effort, but if you have a web designer, insist they install these buttons manually. It’s worth the extra effort.

iPhone Webclip Icons without Photoshop

Jeremy — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 13:06:12 +0000

If you are looking to mobilise your website – and if you haven’t thought about this already, you really should – then it’s likely that you may have considered creating an iPhone-specific site which would of course include creating an iPhone webclip for your customers/readers to save an optimised bookmark to their homescreen.

There are many .psd Photoshop templates flying around the internet, but if you are stuck for time or just can’t be bothered to make one then this site will make your day.

Simply go to Flavor Studios here, decide which type of icon you would like to create and upload your desired basic image. The website will then create the logo with the right dimensions and the glare effects that make the iPhone icons unique.

Once you’re done, you will be given a little zipped package containing .ico and .png files with your new site webclip.

When you’re ready to add the webclip to your site for your visitors to use, simply add the following code to the header of your page(s) within the tags, obviously replacing the address with that of your new webclip:

Once this is in place, you’re all done!

WordPress – More Than Just a Blog

Jeremy — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:17:35 +0000

For quite some time now, I have been utilising the WordPress system as a CMS or content management system for a number of clients in order to manage the content on their websites by themselves. Although there are many platforms – open-source included – on the market that do more than WordPress, there are a number of things that make WordPress a clear winner in my opinion. To make a summary of this, I’ll list them in bullet form:

Ease of use – looks just like any other blog backend
Familiarity – due to the free WordPress.com offering
Flexibility – built on PHP so easily extendible for almost any type of use
Community – WordPress is arguably the largest scale project in the open-source CMS arena with a huge amount of support
Plugins – leading on from the last point, there are also an enormous amount of plugins to enable quick and easy site expansion

The last point is really important as this ease of expandability is what creates the framework to allow WordPress to become a true platform and not just another user-installable blog.

So what kind of sites can be built in WordPress? The truth is, there isn’t really a limit to what can be built; its only limitation is with the developer that is using it. Between static pages and looping posts, WordPress really does have everything covered.

E-Commerce is easy with plenty of integration with popular shopping cart options and even full-on e-commerce platforms that have realised that their clients want to use WordPress to manage content. Audio and video integration also have a plethora of options including various Flash player options and YouTube and Vimeo integration. I have even used a plugin that allows basic video editing from right inside the player itself. Social media plugins aplenty can be found, which allows fairly complex API integration with many of the top social media platforms in just a few clicks.

The best part of all though, is the way in which the data is organised. It’s so search engine friendly; Google loves sites built on WordPress. After installing just a few helper SEO plugins and a little online marketing, Google will pick the site up in a matter of days (if that long).

If you have been questioning the ability of WordPress as a capable CMS and have been contemplating Drupal, ModX, Joomla et al, then you really should take some time out and look at what WordPress has to offer. I have yet to hear any real complaints.

Check it out here.

The Experiment

Jeremy — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:22:19 +0000

One of the reasons I started this blog was to make sure that any interesting discoveries or ideas that I stumble across are written down for future reference.

A second reason was a realisation that if I’m a marketer with a specialism in online or e-marketing, potential clients wanting to find more information about me, or my work should be easily able to find me on the internet. This notion prompted a quick search on Google for the term “Jeremy Chow”, which resulted in a random array of results including some LinkedIn profiles for various professionals around the world with the same name as me, a few Facebook profiles and some interesting other places where my name has been picked up including forums.

So, the experiment is this; can I make my name – and this site – appear at the top of the notorious search engine for my name. Jeremy Chow.

Will it work? Let’s check back in a few weeks/months…

Update 19/11/2009

This blog has finally been listed on Google and this post has made it to the front page (although the bottom), which is great! We shall see what happens in the next few weeks.