Finding Images for Presentations and Blog posts

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fresh watermelon photoImages, layout and design do more than make your presentations and blog posts look better. They can help you emphasize a point, conjure a feeling or emotion, get a complex idea across, help you resonate with your reader/audience and so much more.

There was a really good presentation on Slideshare recently about Simple Design (I have embedded it below). We shared it around the office and then talked about a few of our favorite places to find images for our blog posts and webinars.

Here is a short list of what we came up with and why we like them:

  • Flickr – An old standby, Flickr has a large collection of photos and a decent Advanced Search option. Using the Advanced Search, you can find Creative Commons licensed photos that you can use.
  • Creative Commons Search – Speaking of Creative Commons, they have their own image search service. It is easy to use and has a large selection of photos.
  • Photo Pin – Photo pin also pulls from the Flickr API to find Creative Commons licensed images but the interface is a little easier to use. Two things I like is that one of the ways to rank the images is by ‘interestingness’ and they provide the HTML for your photo attribution.
  • Google Image Search – Google Image Search also has some great advanced search options. You can search for particular sizes, colors, phrases and usage rights. As much as I like the bells and whistles, I have a hard time actually finding an unlicensed photo that I can use for commercial use. I still like to check it out every once in awhile though.
  • Pixabay – This one is new to me but we have been testing it out. Pixabay is a site offering photos without copyrights that do not need attribution. There is no obligation to have an account either. Users who want to submit their photos need to log in and waive their right to the photos that they upload.

Hopefully with a few options you can really spruce up your presentations and blog posts! Did we miss one? Do you have a photo search tool that you like to use? Let us know.

photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography via photopin cc

Top Posts of 2012 – All About Facebook, Infographics and Google Analytics

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I don’t know about you, but 2012 was a busy one over here! I think it is always fun to look back on the past year as we prepare for the next. I thought it would be fun to put together a list of our most popular blog posts again (determined by Pageviews in Google Analytics) from the previous year.

Here is the rundown of the most popular posts from 2012:

10 – What You Need to Know About Facebook Cover Images

Facebook had a crazy year – growth, user experience changes, advertising updates, IPO, and its fair share of controversy. A big change this past year was how business pages worked and looked. Adding cover images was a huge change to the look of business and personal pages.

9 – Understanding Google’s Disavow Tool – When and How to Use it

Do you know what your link profile looks like? Do you have unwanted spammy links coming in? In this post we look at how to assess both and if you need to use Google’s Disavow Tool to clean up your link profile.

8 – Should You Delete Bad Facebook Comments?

One of the scariest aspects of social media for businesses is that barriers are down and anyone can say anything (good or bad) about your business. When someone leaves a negative comment on your business Facebook page, should you remove it?

7 – Facebook Timeline Switch is Today

Facebook’s switch to the Timeline format was a major change in user experience. We listed some resources to help you figure out what the change meant for your business.

6 – How to Grow Your Mobile Presence [INFOGRAPHIC]

2012 was the year infographics exploded on the scene. In this infographic we use images to show how your business can grow its mobile presence.

5 – Responsive Website Design – What is it? [INFOGRAPHIC]

Responsive website design also was a popular topic in 2012. With the use of mobile phones and tablets on the rise, creating a site that has a good user experience on any device is more important than ever.

4 – Landing Page Optimization – Produce Better Conversions [INFOGRAPHIC]

Landing pages are a great way to increase conversions on your website. You can tailor content to be specific to what the user needs and is looking for. In this infographic, we break down the keys to successful landing page design.

3 – SEO at a Glance [INFOGRAPHIC]

SEO can seem very complicated. In this inforgraphic, we broke down the biggest elements of SEO that every website owner should be paying attention to.

2 – How do I exclude my internal traffic from Google Analytics reports?

To get the most accurate picture of how your website is performing, we recommend excluding your internal traffic from Analytics. This post shows you how to do just that.

1 – How to Turn Your Personal Facebook Page into a Business Facebook Page

Our most popular post again deals with the most popular social network – Facebook! With all the changes to Facebook over the years, some people made the mistake of setting up their business page as a personal page. This year Facebook gave us the opportunity to flip those without losing your page’s audience. This posts shows you how to make that switch.

Looking back at our top posts, they seem like a pretty good reflection of what was happening in our office last year. I looked back at the year before too (Ten Most Popular Blogs of 2011). Lots of times by looking back, it can help you prepare for what is to come. Do you do the same thing? What were hot topics for your blog and business this past year?

new-year-fireworks-2012

Cheers to a successful, busy, and fun 2013!

Photo credit: redcti

5 Important Google Analytics Data Points to Watch for Your Blog

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We love Google Analytics here at Hall. It is robust, has so much information and it is free. Analytics will show you how your site is performing, how many people are coming to it, where they are coming from, what they end up doing on your site and so much more.

If you are spending your time and resources on your business blog, here are some of the biggest data points in Google Analytics that you should be paying attention to:

  1. Number of visits – How many people are actually reading your blog? Keeping track of your visits is an easy way to see if your blog is gaining any traction. Compare the data to past information (month on month, quarter on quarter or year on year) to see if more people are coming to your blog to read it.
  2. New visits – Is your blog getting new visits? New visitors are an indication that your blog is being spread to new readers. Maybe people are sharing it on social networks, forwarding it to friends, found it referred to on another website… all are good. When you see spikes in new visits, try to figure out where they came from or what post(s) had them most interested. You also may want to spend some time preparing your blog for these new visitors.
  3. Traffic sources – Where are people coming from to get to your blog? Traffic sources will tell you that. If you are spending time on social networks, this will tell you which one of those is driving traffic to your blog and which ones may not be. Traffic sources can also show you when someone has linked to one of your posts. Knowing where people are coming from can help you make decisions on where you should spend time marketing your blog more (or less).
  4. Traffic sources bringing in the most new visits – To combine #2 and #3, on your Traffic Sources page in Analytics, you can see which sources are bringing in the most new readers.
  5. Most popular content – The Content section of Analytics will tell you which content is most popular. This can help you decide which posts are working and which ones are not. Take your most popular content and find ways to expand upon it with future posts. People obviously are drawn to that topic. You may want to rework some of the content that is under-performing as well. Perhaps it was just delivered poorly, had a strange title or was missed for another reason.
  6. BONUS: Conversions – If you set up Goals in your Analytics you should keep an eye on which blog posts are leading to the most conversions. How many people contact you, registered for your email newsletter, downloaded your whitepaper after visiting your blog? Which posts drew them in?

Blogging can be great for your business but it takes time and resources. If you are using that energy on your business blog, you really should keep track of how your efforts are performing for your company. Keep an eye on these 5 important Google Analytics data points and you will be able to get some great takeaways on what is working and what is not.

Photo credit: libertygrace0

Good SEO for Your Blog

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There has been a lot of talk about Blogging and SEO and how they work together lately. Some research shows that business blogging is on the decline, while many are turning to social media for their marketing. Other people are very wound up about the latest Google update and how it is going to hurt your search rankings. I thought we would talk about both and some SEO and blogging best practices along the way.

Social Media vs. Your Business Blog

There has been a lot of talk about business blogging declining and companies turning to social media instead. Let’s look at a couple blogging pros and cons that could have to do with this switch.

BLOGGING CON: Blogging generally takes more time than social media alone – One reason businesses could be making the switch is that blogging does take up a lot of time. Writing posts regularly can be challenging and takes a fair amount of resources.

BLOGGING PRO: Your social media content does not belong to you – Say you spend hundreds of hours creating your Facebook content and building ‘likes’ and engagement. Now what if Facebook goes down the tubes in 2013? The company is going public, the CEO just turned 28 this week and many people think Facebook is just a fad – anything could happen. Your content and ‘likes’ on Facebook belong to Facebook, not to your business. Now a blog and your email marketing list… that is content and contacts that belong to you no matter what the newest craze is.

BLOGGING CON: Social Media is cheap – Updating your social media profiles is quick work. A blog takes a greater investment from your organization.

BLOGGING PRO: Blogs are great for SEO – With each post you create, you are giving search engines what they crave… content. Also, with the frequency of new content, you give search engines reasons to keep coming back to your site to index content. Search engines do not index most social media content.

I am a big social media fan. I think it is a great opportunity for many businesses to reach new customers, engage current customers and get more people talking about their businesses. I think social media works best in conjunction with your blog and other marketing efforts. Your social media followers need a destination to go back to. Sending them to your site is a better option than to a news source, competitor or another website.

The new Google update will kill your search rankings!!! Pandas and Penguins… oh my!

In the last weeks of April, Google confirmed that they rolled out three algorithm changes. First there was the Panda Updates 3.5 and 3.6. These updates, as with all algorithm updates are to hopefully make your search results better. These latest updates are said to really be trying to track down low quality content and make sure it isn’t beating out good, quality content. Then there was the Penguin update (hey, I don’t name these things) that is trying to target websites that are attempting to spam the Google algorithm.

We’re continuing to iterate on our Panda algorithm as part of our commitment to returning high-quality sites to Google users. This most recent update is one of the over 500 changes we make to our ranking algorithms each year. – A Google Spokesperson

All this change making you nervous? Are people telling you that your website is going to suffer?

Your website may be penalized under the new updates if:

  • You are keyword stuffing your site content
  • You participate in link schemes to get other websites (not related to you or your industry) to link to you in hopes of ranking better
  • You use cloaking (showing one thing to users and hiding other content in your HTML)
  • You use sneaky javascript redirects to also display something different to users and site crawlers
  • You deliberately created duplicate content across domains to try to deceive search engines
  • You are using automatic aggregators to create most of the content on your site
  • You have a heavily templated website that is hard for search engines to crawl the content of

Sooooo pretty much all of those points listed above are the same things Google has been fighting for years and years. There isn’t a lot here that should worry the common business that is already using basic SEO best practices.

So what SHOULD you be doing for good SEO on your blog?

In this time of social media and search algorithm updates, what SHOULD you be doing to ensure good SEO on your blog?

  1. Create good quality content that people will find useful – This is probably the biggest thing you can do for your blog. Write good posts that people value. Once you do that, the rest will come organically. People will find it, link to it and talk about it. Search engines will see people like it, they stay on the page, they talk about it and link to it and then they will rank it even better.
  2. Make sure your blog is hosted on your website domain – Blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger are great but you want your blog content ON your website and not competing with it. You do not want your blog to be www.abccompany.wordpress.com, instead you want it to be www.abccompany.com/blog.
  3. Use categories and tags to organize your content – Create categories and tags for your posts that are industry related keywords. Tag posts appropriately to help organize your content for search engines and for your readers.
  4. Optimize for people – Paying attention to keywords is great but write for your readers, not for search engines. Search engines really weigh their rankings on how readers use your content. If your readers are turned off by keyword stuffing and complex articles, search engines will be turned off too.
  5. Use Google Analytics to see what is working and what isn’t – Review your inbound traffic and popular content in Analytics regularly. Write more of what people seem to like and analyze what didn’t get off the ground. Sometimes a ‘bad’ blog post isn’t bad at all… it may have just had a poor title or was organized oddly for your readers.
  6. Link in AND link out – When you are writing blog posts you should link to other posts people may want to reference on your site for more information. You also want to be sure to link out to other blogs and sources too.
  7. Use social media to promote your blog – Blogs were meant to be shared! Add social sharing to your company blog and be sure to share your newest (and oldest) posts on your social media profiles.

So the Spring 2012 version of good SEO for your blog is… keep doing more of the same. Search algorithms are always changing while they try to get better. Unless you are trying to scam the system, you shouldn’t get caught up in the hype. Social media seems to be here to stay. Many businesses are seeing great success from it but it can’t replace blogging or your website. Use new tools to help you amplify your staple marketing efforts. Always keep an eye on what is working and what is not for your businesses. Don’t let a report or article or guru lead you down the wrong path. SEO for your blog really hasn’t changed. Write good valuable content and the rest should fall into place!

Photo credit: smerikal and zidane_0120