We often forget that no every speaks, or reads, English. The US, Canada, Australia, UK, Ireland and Guyana are the only areas that speak English as the main language. There is a handful of other countries that speak English, but not as their primary language. Then there is everyone else.¹ There are billions of people who don’t read English, yet few blogs offer translation options on their site.

To easily translate your blog from one language to anther you can add a Google Translate menu to your site and let Google handle the translations on the fly. They may not be perfect, but they are better than having none.

I like the Google Translate option as it’s easy to install and doesn’t cause any duplicate content issues. Plus it will work on any blog or website.

Another option is the Global Translator WordPress plugin. This one adds flags into your sidebar and creates sub-directories for all the translated content. All these sub-directories are then indexable creating a lot of additional pages on your site. They are duplicate content, yet in different languages, so I guess it’s up to the search engines to figure out how to handle that.

No matter how you do it, offering up your content in different languages opens up your site to a larger audience.

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The only way to avoid being criticized is to never have been alive.

As history books have shown, even the dead can’t escape criticism. So, those of us who are alive must simply learn to deal with it; even as we often try to avoid it.

As much as we hate it, criticism isn’t all bad. Criticism, regardless of how it was intended, can help us adjust and adapt to situations. It can provide useful insight, justified or not, into our lives and give us the opportunity to become a better person.

Rarely do we enjoy hearing it, but criticism is a needed component for growth as a person.

There is an old Arab proverb that says, “if one person calls you a donkey, forget it. But if five people call you a donkey, buy a saddle.”

Or, take a lesson, and perhaps try a different approach.

In most circumstances, you can freely ignore criticism coming from a single source, or perhaps a few dubious sources. But be careful about ignoring criticism from someone who knows you pretty intimately and is likely point out things that other people won’t–or can’t.

Regardless of the source, if you find yourself hearing similar criticisms from multiple avenues, it might be a good idea to take stock in what’s being said. Failure to do so will only result in the same mistakes being made time and time again.

Of course, not all criticism is justified. Sometimes we get criticized for things that other people don’t understand. Often ignorance or lack of information, combined with a healthy dose of bias, can bring someone to criticize something that they really don’t get. I have recently found this to be true of myself. People just don’t know the full story of what is going on in other people’s lives, but they often find it easy to criticize anyway.

Preacher, Henry Ward Beecher stepped up to the pulpit one Sunday morning to deliver his sermon. As he put his bible on the pulpit there was a paper with the word “fool” written on it. He lifted the paper for the congregation to see then announced, “Generally I receive letters from people who write letters and forget to sign their name. This letter is different. The person signed his name but forgot to write the letter.”

There is nothing you can do about unjustified criticism other than to let it roll off your back. Don’t let it get to you, don’t let it bother you or change you. But take note of what you hear; if the same criticisms keep coming up from multiple and trusted sources, then it may be justified. In which case you need to accept it, learn from it, and change what is necessary to become a better person, employee, business owner, spouse, parent, grandparent, friend, etc.

Criticism is a part of life. But, what we do with it makes us who we are.

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Why you might be scratching your head at my analogy(and they are not always the best), there is quite a lot of validity in this statement considering that organic traffic increases can be much like that shiny car, pretty on the outside and hollow on the inside. For the most part, any SEO firm at some point can perform enough basic SEO and content creation to lift a site’s traffic simply because at some point you will drive so much long tail traffic that referrals will likely increase. What so often looks like a great report should have additional questions posed.

A review of your site analytics and these factors in mind can paint a better picture of whether your SEO program is targeted appropriately.

What site sections are driving traffic?

       -   Site sections such as a blog can drive a lot of traffic for a blog but often are virally motivated and this traffic can result in a 80+% bounce rate. Your traffic should be landing on your homepage or key pages that are a starting point for your conversion funnel or a page along this pathway.

How do organic visitors consume your content?

       -   Only in a perfect world does someone stumble upon your site and immediately become so enthralled that they instantly perform the intended action you are attempting. From an organic-wide view you need to ensure that page views, pages-per-visit and time on site are gradually increasing. This is also a way to show that site content has been developed for search engines but also for human visitors as content is compelling and there are links and calls to action to help propel visitors throughout the site.

Are organic referrals branded or non-branded?

       -   Every time you go all out on an offline effort or social promotion you are building your brand. And while not every offline viewer picks up a telephone and not every social user follows a link these web users search for company through a branded term. It is very important to parse your SEO reporting by branded and non-branded segments. Non-branded development should most often be your focus as a common SEO goal is to gain visibility across popular brand/service related terms.

How well does organic search referral s convert?

       -   Yes, I know, this is obvious. However, I am still surprised at how many people do not even think about this factor but more so with the climb in traffic. A thousand visits that do not convert at all are not as important as one visit that converts (brand identity freaks excluded). Analysis of these conversion metrics will allow you to figure out the most important goal of whether visitors are doing what you want them to.

Asking these questions of your SEO firm or analyzing these areas for yourself will help you to identify if your SEO campaign is successful or if the traffic numbers are misleading. Rankings are great but if they drove hollow traffic there is no importance for having a listing in that position and driving meaninglessness traffic. Who knows, if your site is a likely candidate for the conditions above, hopefully after a little work your traffic will drop next month…and your conversions will increase.

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I wanted to highlight a little problem that might see you being outranked for your own content. I am not talking about scrapers either, legitimate situations. You may ultimately be screwed for all your hard work developing quality content. Actually, the better you do your job, the more likely it is.

In the present world of SEO (and internet marketing in general) we all know that the ‘build it and they will come’ approach just ain’t going to cut it. One way to get the word out and even build some authority is the use of content syndication. This is generally in the form of RSS. And a LOT of us use this approach.

Did you know that this might just be a bad idea? Especially with a full feed?

Talking to Googlers

Some 18 months back the folks at WebProNews asked me if they could syndicate my content, verbatim, on their family of IM news sites. Right away one has to start worrying about this as they might just out-rank me for my own content, (given that they have greater authority). Thus I decided to talk to a Googler pal to see what the advised approach for this is.

At the time I was told that as long as the secondary source had a link back to the original, things should work out fine. And this did seem to be the case 80% of the time. Occasionally I’d get outranked (oddly Google was showing BOTH identical posts 1-2 in the SERP), but that was the exception, not the rule.

Fast forward, early 2010. I was working on a project in the finance world which was syndicating content out to a variety of locales including heavy weights such as ‘the Street‘. We noticed that, even with linkage to the original, we were getting spanked in the reg SERPs and Google News.

Back to Google we go.

This time I was told that we should look to throttle the RSS by delaying it some to ensure it was the first version picked up. Ok, great, so it seems that authority sites most certainly can still kick yer ass if you’re not careful.

The Case Study

I was chatting in the SEO Dojo chat room with my pal (and social media guru) Samir Balwani whom was having some issues with his blog and this very problem. As an example we can look at the post; 5 Things I Would Tell a Social Media Professor

If we look at a search for some leader text we see this – Or a Google search via post TITLE such as this here; “5 things I would tell a social media professor“.

You can see he is getting outranked by not only SMT but FaceBook as well (where he had a full feed). This, as you might imagine is not an ideal situation. Interestingly it should be noted that both of those entries actually link to the original via redirects. As we know there is some link love loss from that which means our 20% just got even worse.

Ultimately these domains had more authority and are effectively stealing his thunder AND rankings. Sure, we all want the authority building that can come from being in these publications, but at what cost? At very least we should be controlling which content gets syndicated and which doesn’t (I have a deal with WebProNews that they don’t touch any pillar content for example).

The Fix

And so what can we do to have the best of both world? To get the name out there without having and adverse affect on our SEO efforts? A few things come to mind and have been shown to work in these situations.

• Delay RSS – this was Google’s advice although I have not found an option for this in (their own) Feedburner system. This means you need to do it via the RSS programming on your site and then hook that up to the feedburner system.

• Only use partial feeds – this is certainly another option that will also help solve the problem, though in some cases they don’t allow that. For example SMT says, “ We do not use partial feeds or content summaries or posts without a photo or avatar. We are a community, not a link referral service.”

• Make sure article TITLE is linked up – while not huge, it can help to further strengthen the post itself for the core terms being targeted. Every little bit helps.

• Don’t let them link to RSS UTM – in the SMT instance, they linked back to the actual RSS feed link which get’s parsed as a 301 and certainly loses some juice to the original. Where possible, avoid this.

As you may have figured out along the trail, this is certainly something that we need to be aware of. In Samir’s case, he really wasn’t paying attention and this has been going on for quite some time. I can only imagine the traffic losses he’s suffered because of it. If you are syndicating your content via FULL FEED, you should be monitoring it to ensure that this isn’t happening to you.

And Google? Guys, if you’re aware of the problem in the search dept., why not give a head’s up to the folks at FeedBurner while we’re at it ( I tried to ) and get an option to be able to delay the feed, just for such situations. #justsayin’

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The latest SEOmoz video outlines what kind of links you need to focus on in your SEO strategy. Depending on your situation–your site, your link profile, your competition–the kinds of links you need and the things you need them to do for your site can vary significantly.

So which types of links are going to bolster your SEO efforts? Rand outlines 4 different factors that determine the type of links you need:

1. Link Juice – Quality is better than quantity. Rand says that two links from a high authority site (such as Nasa.gov) is better than thousands of links to lesser known sites.
2. Trust / Authority – Ensure that the links you get are high quality and from trustworthy sources.
3. Anchor Text – Can signal to the search engine that a page is about a particular subject even if that content isn’t on the site.
4. Diversity – The more different sources that your links come from the better. The search engines will give you more credit if you have 50 links from 20 different websites than 100 links all from the same website.

You need to look at all these factors when determining which type of links you are falling behind on. Check out Rand’s video below for more details.

If you’re looking for help in getting an SEO campaign up and running, then check out our guaranteed SEO services.

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Ideally, the link profile of your site should indicate an entity that gives and receives links. The whole idea of a “web” indicates interconnected sites that reference each other. If your site receives links, but does not give any out, then it is going to resemble a dead end or a black hole. Even if your links are fairly unobtrusive, and go to informational sites (as opposed to competitor sites) you can create a more natural looking site profile as you build your link portfolio.

Lastly, it pays to avoid complex (or not so complex) interlinking to your own sites, or to “web rings” which all link to each other. In the eyes of a search engine algorithm, these relationships are easy to spot and can work against you. Your link building profile should make your site look like a great source of information that isn’t afraid to refer users to other sites for further study. As an added bonus, users tend to go back to websites that help them find what they’re looking for, and that goes right back into the directive to “build a site as if search engines did not exist.”

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For that, the best option is setting yourself up with a self-hosted WordPress blog.

While there’s nothing wrong per se with free blogging options like Blogger or WordPress (the .com version; self-hosted WordPress is on the .org domain), they severely limit how much interaction you have with them from a user perspective. Designs are limited as well, and add-ons aren’t supported, and to make a truly effective social media hub on your blog, you need fluidity to design.

The worst thing about free blogging options is that you’re also placing all your content into the hands of a third-party. If Blogger, WordPress or any other free blogging platforms change their Terms and Conditions, you could find yourself without a blog. With a self-hosted option, all the control lies in your hands. While there are other options like TypePad and Squarespace, I just prefer WordPress for its ease-of-use and community support.

Going Self-Hosted

Just in case you aren’t already using self-hosted WordPress, here’s a quick guide to getting set up :

• Choose a domain name and a web host to host your blog. Bluehost is perfect for this, since it offers packages that set up the domain and hosting as an all-in-one package. There are several others, so Google “web host” and find the one right for you.
• Once you have your account, you’ll be taken to an area called C-panel. This is simply the Admin dashboard for all the backroom stuff associated with your site. Once in there, its simply a matter of using Fantastico to set up your WordPress account, as shown by my friend  John Haydon’s video.

Planting the Seeds

The reasons for using a self-hosted WordPress blog are numerous, but the main two (at least as far as a social media hub is concerned) are design and add-on flexibility. Since the hub is going to be both your home-base and outpost, you need a platform that can handle your needs – WordPress is perfect for this.

The look and feel of your hub will define how useful it is to your visitors. The less cluttered the look, the more effective the hub can be, although some folks prefer a more information-led design. This is where WordPress and a premium theme comes into play (a theme is just a pre-designed look or framework for your blog) -  you can choose a template, page, sub-pages, sub-domain or any number of design options to present your hub.

There are benefits to each option:

• A page holds everything in one area, although it could get cluttered.
• Sub-pages allow you to set up different niche hubs (more on that tomorrow).
• Sub-domains offer a completely separate hub altogether, but still tied to your blog’s main domain.
• Templates allow a different look and feel from your blog design, and help give that unique hub feel.

What you choose will mostly be determined by how many resources you populate your hub with. How you populate these resources is up to you; again, the great thing with self-hosted WordPress is that the flexibility of design is limitless, thanks to plug-ins.

Social Media Plug-Ins for Your Hub

WordPress is an open-source community, which means that there is a whole community of developers making really cool applications (or plug-ins) every day. These are released to the WordPress userbase (almost always free of charge) and you can then use them on your blog to help turn it into anything you like.

Some of the best ones for a social media hub (and ones that I’ll show you examples of in the design post coming next in the series) include:

• Enthropia’s Lifestream. One of the ways to show what you’re up to on different networks is Lifestreaming, and Enthropia’s plug-in for WordPress is one of the simplest. This is perfect for those that don’t want a full-on social media hub.
• Twitter Tools. Offers great integration between Twitter and your blog and vice versa, including tweet archives, posts, admin options and more.
• Smart YouTube. Ideal for video bloggers, this gives you a larger set of options than just video embedding – playlists, RSS feed support and iPhone compatibility being just a few.
• FotoBook. While there are plug-ins and widgets to integrate your blog with Facebook, one of the coolest to do this in reverse is FotoBook. This imports all your pictures from Facebook and enhances the personal aspect of your social media hub.

These are just some plug-ins that, along with your design and the existing applications from the various social networks, will make up your social media hub. The great thing with WordPress is that, no matter what you’re looking to do via your hub, you can probably find a plug-in for it. Just go to WordPress Extend and start searching – that’s where the treasure is to shape your hub, your way.

Takeaway: Make a list of how many features you’d like on your blog. Decide if you want to go for a single page, sub-pages, sub-domain and how intensive or lite you wish your hub to be. Sketch some ideas for layout, since tomorrow we’ll look at the various options available, with examples of each to a successful hub.

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These are all quotes I’ve seen from various voices recently. Each one pretty much agrees with the other – that social media is a great tool for you to implement into your business because it’s so cost-effective and will give you quicker results.

Sadly, it’s not true.

Yes, you’ll save on equivalent costings from a traditional media advertising push. Yes, you can see instant results and measurable returns on your investment. But cheap and quick? Not quite. Particularly if you’re looking at implementing a strategy and social media campaign (and yes, social media purists, you can have a social media campaign).

It Costs Money to Plan

Let’s say you have a new product or service. Let’s also say that you’ve seen competitors enjoy success using social media to launch a similar product or service. You know yours is better, so you know that social media (used properly) would further see you outshine your competitors. So, easy, right? You just set up a Facebook page, a Twitter account, maybe a video sharing channel and off you go.

Stop. Back up a little. Have you asked yourself the right questions before you start?

• Have you thought strategy?
• Have you carried out a social media audit?
• Have you set measurements in place?
• Have you determined where you’ll be and who’ll be there for you?
• Have you set aside the right budget?
• Will you be using internal expertise or outsourcing?
• Do you have to build anything?

These are just some of the immediate questions you need to be asking before even starting. Getting the answers is going to take man hours. Lots of man hours. Multiply that by the payscale of the person/people doing that research and your costs are already starting.

Social Media is Cheap. Uh… No, It’s Not

It doesn’t matter whether you’re coordinating a social media campaign internally or externally, you’re going to have to allocate budget to it. This includes costs for strategy, community management, mobile app and moderation/maintenance. Let’s see how that might pan out (based on a 12-month campaign and with earnings based on survey results).

• Social media strategist: 10 hours per week @ $100 per hour = $1,000 per week. Total for 52 weeks – $52,000.
• Community manager: 30 hours per week @ $60 per hour = $1,800 per week. Total for 52 weeks – $93,600.
• Micro-site build (if not using existing platforms) – $15,000.
• Mobile application (more than 70% of web browsing is via mobile phone) – between $20,000 and $150,000 depending on functionality.
• Ongoing moderation and measurement using third-party specialists – between $30,000 and $80,000 depending on frequency.
• Total = $390,600.

Now I’ve given you worst-case scenarios, since you probably won’t need a social media strategist for the whole time during the campaign. You might only need a community manager half the time mentioned above. You can also build micro-sites for less; the cost will depend on how interactive you want the site to be.

But even if you halve the total cost used in my example above, you’re still looking at $195,300. Almost $200,000 for a year-long social media campaign.

Compare that to a print ad that may cost anywhere between $50,000 and $100,000 for one run, and yes, it’s clear that social media offers a comparably cost-effective solution. But to say that it’s cheap and quick? That’s setting you up for a flawed approach from the start and will only bite you in the long run.

How about you? How expensive (or inexpensive) have you found social media, both from a financial and time management angle? I’d love to hear your experiences.

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Testimonial link building really is a win-win scenario for both sites and usually has a much higher approval rate than your standard link request emails. The contact gets another testimonial to place on their site, while you get a new incoming link.

Another good feature of testimonial based links is that they can be often found on core product pages or even the homepage. This means they’re going to have a strong positive influence in your overall link popularity.

Getting started is as simple as writing an email to a few of your suppliers. Explain to them how happy you are with the service and offer to write a few lines they can place on their site.

If they accept, write something specific and ask if it would be ok for them to provide a link to your site. You can make it simple for them by showing an example of how you would like the link to be created:

Hi Supplier name,

“This is an example comment praising the suppliers business.”

Your Name, CEO of Company name – a leading provider of example services.

While this can be a great strategy, only offer to write a testimonial if you are genuinely happy with a supplier’s service! Happy link building.

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I think the best way to handle this is to give the SMB all the information they need. What I am going to do over the next few weeks is touch on each of the areas that my SEO audit tool, SEMCheck, hits and why it is important to the search marketing health of any website. Today it’s about content.

Content will always rule for the simple reason that it is the true information that searchers seek thus there can never be enough and what exists can always be improved upon. Many small businesses have sites that are woefully short on content that will satisfy the search engine’s requirements. SEMCheck uses a simple cut off of 350 characters of readable text on the home page as a bare minimum. When I say bare I mean bare. You really need more than that. The first paragraph of this post was about 451 characters alone!

So how do you get that great content on your site? Here’s a few quick tips.

1. Mine the information that you already have in print. Many traditional companies have plenty of material about their industry and their offerings that simply were never digitized and put on the web. Take what you already have an incorporate it INTELLIGENTLY into your existing site.
2. Do a redesign of your site. Many SMB sites are vintage 2000 and it represents the company in a terrible light. Take advantage of the downturn and reposition yourself online t look like you exist in the current market. As you do this, write new copy and incorporate your existing materials into your great new design.
3. Start a blog. If your industry lends to it and you have the human capital to pull it off start writing to your existing clients and prospects via a blog that is part of your corporate site structure. This is the most efficient way to update content on your site by far but it is a can of worms that requires a lot of thought before you crack it open
4. Think big. Try to step outside of what you have traditionally seen your company information as being. Do the research to look at your company from the outside in. This means you have to take the blinders off and take the risk of actually seeing your company the way the market does and not how you THINK it does.
5. Look at your competition. Are you getting stomped in the engines by a competitor? THEN FIGURE OUT WHAT THEY ARE DOING AND START DOING IT YOURSELF!

There’s more. Believe me there is a lot more. The thing you need to know is that when you have a living breathing web site that presents itself to the world as if you really give a crap about how you look and what you say then the search engines will reward you.  It’s more simple than you think. So don’t think about it; do it.

SMB Takeaway: If you are faltering in the search engines and your site has limited, old or just plain bad content then you need to do something. You can whine all you want about not having rankings but they don’t happen magically AND they require real effort on your part.

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