The massively popular social media micro-blogging website Twitter (http://twitter.com) began another attempt at making money yesterday, starting a feed called @earlybird.

“[@earlybird]…are special time-bound deals, sneak-peeks, and events that are promoted by the official Twitter @earlybird account.”

The idea is that advertisers will pay Twitter to put out an update that links to their product. Twitter states that most of the advertisers will be large international brands at first, advertising nation-wide (USA) deals. They plan to look into area-specific deals down the road.

Twitter also claims that their focus is on picking deals that users find valuable and interesting.

Will it work?

The deals that Twitter selects are going to be crucial to this model’s success. They need to pick some extremely buzz-worthy deals from the start and then keep them coming. If they put out a bunch of deals like $2 off coupons for dish detergent, I think the concept will fail.

I’m also not confident that sales resulting from the @earlybird tweets will be enough for big multinationals to keep coming back to buy more advertising. However, I could see this being a great way for mid- to big-size businesses to clear out leftover inventory or create an outrageous loss leader promotion to create publicity.

My gut says that Twitter will get a couple hundred thousand followers to the account quickly–mostly people who love Twitter, people interested in the medium wanting to see how/if it will work, and people genuinely interested in the deals. A few folks will actually buy.

Social Media using old profit models

This will be similar to television advertising: a national audience, no personalization, no localization, and only those tuning in will see the offer. The one difference is that friends have an easy way to tell you about an offer they saw that you might like by retweeting it (forwarding it on to their followers).

Part of me thinks this is akin to when banner ads first swept the Internet. Sites displaying advertising banners on their pages initially charged advertisers hundreds of dollars per thousand views (or sometimes clicks) of their ad, following the standard print fee model for newspapers and magazines. Over time advertisers and websites both discovered that banner ads didn’t work anything like print in terms of return on investment. Now you buy banner ad space priced for less than a penny per thousand views.

What’s this mean for your social media?

Unless you’re a large multi-national, this doesn’t mean much to you for now. I recommend following the development to see how well the model works and understand how it works, because if it does you’ll start seeing it all over the place.

For more information direct from the source, check out Twitter’s description at http://support.twitter.com/groups/31-twitter-basics/topics/111-features/articles/208505-what-is-earlybird.

SEO Headline Example

In search engine optimization, headlines are one of the most important factors in letting search engines know what your page is about.

Remember, your goal is to get the highest ranking possible for the specific search phrases you’re targeting. The search phrases you’re targeting should be those keyword phrases that you believe (or have research to support) your customers are using to find your type of products or services.

On this blog post you’ll notice that my headlines are focused on letting search engines know this page is about search engine optimization and headlines.

What is a Headline?

A headline in terms of search engines is any text that is defined as a headline in the source code (like <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, etc.). A headline can also be text that is emphasized by being made larger, italicized <em> or <i>, or bold <b> or <strong>.

When viewed in a browser, headlines can practically look like anything–from small and normal-looking to huge and headline-looking.

On this blog some of the headlines appear in a browser like this:

h2

h3

h4

h5

How To Write Great SEO Headlines

The best practice for letting search engines know what your page is about, is to:

• use the heading tags in descending order of importance with <h1> being degrees more important than <h6>
• only use one h1 tag per page
• use the keywords in your headline that you’ve decided are the most important for you to rank well for that fit with the content on your page. For instance, if you sell wheat beer, headlines on a page talking about your cultivation might be “Wheat Beer Cultivation” and “How our cultivation is different” and “Why wheat beer tastes better.”
• use words in your headlines that match up with the words used in the page title, meta keywords, meta description, and text on the page. The more consistent you are on each page, the more confidence search engines will have in what your page is about, the higher you’ll rank for that keyword phrase.

Contact us here if you have any questions.

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One of the main ways the search engines find your site is by looking at how your title each page.  This is a lot like going to the library and looking at the titles on the shelves or the titles and the old card catalog or the titles in their electronic search system.

If you look at the top left hand corner of your web browser (like Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox) you’ll see the title of the web page. In this case, it’s similar to the title of this post: “Quick Fixes for Big Search Ranking Improvement: Title Tags.”

Just like in the library, if the title is obscure or doesn’t use the words that you expect it to, you probably won’t think it’s the right choice.  Because search engines work mostly of the text the same thing is true for them.  If your web page title does not match up with the content on your page or the words that you hope people use to find you, it has much less of a chance coming up high in the search results.

And just like in the library, it’s important that each book–or in the case of a website, each page–has its own title.  It will do you no good if every page of your website has the same title.  In fact, if search engines discovered duplicate titles on a web site they’ll sometimes try to come up with their own title instead that will likely not use the keywords you want.

Google says:

“Make sure that each page on your site has a useful and descriptive page title (contained within the title tags). If a title tag is missing, or if the same title tag is used for many different pages, Google may use other text we find on the page.”

How To

We’ve already seen how you can check what the title of a web page is…just look in the upper left hand corner of your web browser for that page.  Now’s take a look at how to change a web page title.

Changing your title tag depends on what system you’re using.  If you’re using a content management system like WordPress or Joomla you can usually change the title tag from the edit page view.  If you’re using a web site development software like Microsoft Front Page or dream weaver or Intuit’s homestead, you can edit the title using the page options.  Or, if you only have access to the HTML code, you can change the title by editing the title tag, which looks like this:

<title>Your title here</title>

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If ranking well in search engines is a priority for you, you need to know about robots.txt. It’s something so small and so simple that it’s easily overlooked by even experienced web developers and search engine optimization folks.

A little history

When search engines started reading public websites, they soon realized that some people didn’t want their information shared all over the world. Instead, some websites have a need to keep some or all of their content private.

To accommodate this, reputable search engines came up with a simple solution where they basically said, “You just tell us what you want public and what you want private, and we won’t index the private stuff.”

Robots.txt

Which brings us to robots.txt. Search engines decided that if you make a text file (a file with the extension “.txt”) and name it “robots,” they’ll look at it and do what it says.

They went on to give us a specific way how to tell them what to allow and what not to allow. You can see those specifications here.

The most basic robots.txt file will look something like this:

User-agent: *    # applies to all robots
Disallow: /      # disallow indexing of all pages

The instructions above would tell all search engines to not index any pages on the website.

Some website hosts and software have this setting to disallow all search engines as the default. Others allow you to set it in an admin area (like WordPress or Joomla). Still others allow you to do whatever you want with it, which means you have to create it, define it, and upload it yourself.

Here’s the Rub

How does all of this affect you? If you or your web team has accidentally left the disallow default set or defined the instructions incorrectly, search engines are be leaving you out of their results altogether.

This single, tiny mistake will absolutely obliterate all your other search engine optimization investments.

Check for Yours

So, right now, go check to see if you have a robots.txt in your main web directory. Do this by typing the following into your browser’s address bar:

http://www.put-your-domain-name-here.com/robots.txt

If you don’t have one, that’s okay. By default, search engines will include you in their indexes.

If you do have one, make sure that it doesn’t have any instructions to disallow search engines from adding your site to their search results. It may have the word disallow and that’s okay, as long as that word isn’t followed by anything else, especially a slash “/”.

If you’d like someone to take a look and see if yours looks alright, feel free to give us a call.

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While driving in the country the other day we passed several cattle guards.  I was struck by how they work. Basically it’s just a few piece of steel separated by a few inches each.

Like any good piece of engineering, the cattle guard is simple yet effective.

If I had been asked to design a way to keep cows out let cars through easily, I probably would’ve come up with something very complex involving gates, hinges, levers, pulleys, or some sort of electrical engine.  Just think about all the potential points of failure in my complex design. More complexity equals easier to break and more maintenance required.

A cattle guard, on the other hand, is not likely to fail.  It has no moving parts, no engine, and is made of steel.  All while accomplishing its main objectives.

Online Marketing Plans

This made me consider typical marketing plans.  I know I’ve created some that were extremely complex with hundreds of pieces.  You could argue that I was just trying to cover all the bases and that it’s smart to get leads from as many sources as possible.

But I recall the complex plans causing a lot of stress while trying to manage all the details.  I also recall the large majority of the leads coming from only one or two sources.  What if I had kept it simple and really focused on those one or two sources?

One brilliant advertising campaign that comes to mind on the national level, is Coca Cola’s Olympic polar bear campaign.  If you recall, the ad had very little music, some arctic creatures, and no voices whatsoever.  This meant that every country understood it and Coca-Cola only had to make one version.  Simple yet effective.

I think one reason we create complex online marketing plans it because it’s easier and it takes less time.  Mark Twain once wrote something to the effect of, “Sorry for the long letter, I didn’t have enough time to write a short one.” Oftentimes producing a simpler marketing plan means spending more time on it.

What does your online marketing plan look like?  Is it pages and pages of Excel spreadsheets?  Or, is it so simple and effective that you can put it down in just a couple lines?

Shoot your plans our way and show us how brilliant you were able to be.  We’d love to help consolidate, reduce points of failure, and take some of the work load off of your mind.

Image via Wikipedia

I recently had the pleasure of visiting the little book cliffs wild horse area.  We planned the trip for a couple of weeks ahead of time and looked forward to it with great anticipation. We had a great time driving around exploring and discovering several of the horses.

As we passed several easily viewable horses in pastures on our way home I wondered what made wild horses so different that I was willing to suffer car sickness, cold weather, and high winds to see them from a great distance when I can pull over almost anywhere and see the same animal up close and in comfort.

Wild horses are just horses, or are they?

What separates wild horses apart from ordinary horses is that they have a story behind them.  We don’t view them like a common horse in a field.  Instead, they get a special place in our hearts and minds because we think of them as courageous, mysterious, and untamed.  Their story is one of untold trials of instincts, survival, family, and life.

This gives us a romantic sense about them.  It allows my imagination to kick in and to wonder just how I’m going to encounter them.  Am I going to find life, death, action, or just simple eating?  Either way, I feel like I’m the one who discovered it.  That I’m taking part in something as unique and short-lived.

I don’t experience that with a common horse and a field.

This recent Sherman’s Lagoon illustrates the point well.

Stories Matter

What kind of story are your products telling?  Are they telling any story all?

Or, are they simply been common?  And in the end, do you think you could have more success if your products did tell stories?

So right now, pick the one product that you really want to sell and write a quick story about it.  Then share with us, we’d love to hear what you came up with and see how it can impact your online marketing.

Today Google told the world about their new method for organizing and displaying the world’s information. In their announcement, Google said:

“Today, we’re announcing the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.”

So What?

When Google changes what they focus on to sort search results, it can dramatically affect your website’s position in the rankings. Let’s say before Google caffeine your website came up 1st for the past year when someone searched for “custom tile.” After caffeine your site might now come up 10th.

Google’s focus is always on giving you the best possible search result. That way you keep using Google and then they can keep selling ads, which is where they get the bulk of their revenue. This change in which search results you’ll see has the same intention of providing the best result. It has just added weight to the recency–the newness–of the information.

So, realistically your website’s ranking may not change at all. You might still come up 1st for “custom tile”–just as long as your website still has relevant, quality information. The one BIG CHANGE is that your site is now helped more than ever by RECENT CONTENT.

What To Do for SEO Now?

So, what do you do for search engine optimization to make sure you keep coming up high in search results? Here are a few suggestions:

• First, check your rankings for keywords you’ve been tracking and see how you’ve been affected.
• Continue creating relevant, helpful content on your website
• Start a blog to keep churning out new, keyword specific content
• Add more pages to your site each month–as long as it makes sense to
• Be found other places than your website, like on social media sites and social media bookmarking sites
• Continue getting more and more websites to link to yours using keywords you care about

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You will be astounded by some of these facts. They’re amazing even if you don’t use social media.

In the end, the points are:

1. Social media is an incredible tool most people are using
2. It has a chance to make or break your business
3. You should start using some mix of it

Web Malama has been on the social media bandwagon for a while now and we’ve had mixed success and learned along the way.

Give us a call if you’d like to hear some of our successes and failures, or if you’d like to tell us yours!

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The beauty is, no one really knows. Search engines keep their formulas secret because it means no one can take advantage of or manipulate the rankings (which I’m personally very much for).

Ideally, your website should just be set up well with honest links in, accurate descriptions, helpful information, and well laid out, thereby helping search engines to see you for what you are and deliver traffic accurately.

So, how do you get ahead on the search engine Serengeti and survive another season?

For a couple of years now, SEOMoz, an industry search engine optimization leader, has published a list of what SEO leaders they surveyed believe to be the most important factors in search engines ranking your website.

The idea is that these factors seem to make the biggest difference. Follow these rules and you’ll likely come out ahead of 95% of other sites.

1. Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links
2. External Link Popularity (quantity/quality of external links)
3. Diversity of Link Sources (links from many unique root domains)
4. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag
5. Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains (e.g. TrustRank, Domain mozTrust, etc.)

Check out the 2009 full report here.

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Website Development Challenge: Setting PHP Cookies While Using WP Super Cache

When I created the Referral Coupon Code Generator, it seemed like it should be pretty straight forward: check for a cookie with a referrer and set a cookie with the referrer if there’s not one. Then, simply grab the cookie whenever it’s needed and calculate a referral coupon code.

So, I wrote the code using PHP’s setcookie() function, put it place, and tested it. Everything worked like a charm…until I logged out of my WordPress admin account. That’s when I noticed some really strange things happening. Most notably, when I was not logged in as an admin, the cookie did not set. After a few hours of narrowing down the problem, I pinpointed WP Super Cache.

The Issue

The issue is that by default WP Super Cache loads different pages to admins than non-logged-in visitors. For a non-logged-in visitor, Super Cache serves up a cached page, like it’s supposed to, in order to save your server work and round trips between the visitor’s computer and your website.

This means:

• Plugins in wp-super-cache/plugins/ are loaded *before* any of WordPress is
• PHP setcookie() will not work correctly with Super Cache “out of the box”
• Cookies and WP Super Cache can work together, you just have to change some stuff

To get the referrer, I used $_Server['HTTP_REFERER']

When my plugin ran without being logged in this was the rough sequence of events:

1. Page begins loading
2. WP Super Cache returns page
3. My plugin grabs the $_Server['HTTP_REFERER'] and sets it in the cookie
4. Other WordPress plugins run
5. Page is returned to the visitor

This meant that the referrer was always my root domain. Regardless of where I actually came from, because Super Cache loads first, the last referrer is now my domain.

So, the question became, “How do I set a cookie before WP Super Cache loads?”

The solutions

Luckily, a few other developers had encountered this same WP Super Cache cookie issue and pointed me in the right direction, although some of what worked for them didn’t work for me, hence the reason for writing this post.

The solution that ultimately worked for me was option 5 here: setting the cookie using JavaScript.

Option 1—Turn off Super Cache

If you’re having a big enough issue and need a specific functionality, unless Super Cache is really helping you out, ditch it.

Option 2—Write your plugin in WP Super Cache’s plugin area instead of WordPress’s

WP Super Cache gives the option to use a specially created cache plugin area to make it play nice with other WordPress plugins. When you use the super cache plugin area, it will load those plugins first.

This uses the commands do_cacheaction() and add_cacheaction(). You can see the specs on how to use these here.

For some reason unknown to me, after re-writing my plugin to be a Super Cache plugin, it still didn’t solve the problem.

Option 3—Use the Super Cache “Half-On” option and edit wp-cache-phase1.php before line 110

A good post on the WordPress Hackers mailing list by William Canino gives instructions on how to edit the phase1.php file to set the cookie earlier:

header( 'WP-Super-Cache: WP-Cache' );
// <-- add your Cookie-setting PHP here. Go nuts.
if ( $meta[ 'dynamic' ] ) {
include($cache_file);
} else {
readfile( $cache_file );
}
die();

Again, for some reason, this did not work for me.

Option 4—Edit your .htaccess file

Michael Kimb Jones’ post WP Cache and Cookies do not mix details getting rid of the offending .htaccess code.

Most of us though, cannot choose to ditch the .htaccess details. So, others on the Internet (I can’t find their posts now) say that simply adding the name of your cookie to the list of super cache cookies in the .htaccess file fixes the problem 95% of the time.

It looks like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !=POST
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*=.*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !^.*(comment_author_|wordpress|wp-postpass_).*$
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Encoding} gzip
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/index.html.gz -f
RewriteRule ^(.*) /wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/index.html.gz [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !=POST
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*=.*
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*attachment_id=.*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !^.*(comment_author_|wordpress|wp-postpass_).*$
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/index.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*) /wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/index.html [L]


RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Specifically at issue are the 2 lines with HTTP_COOKIE in them:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !^.*(comment_author_|wordpress|wp-postpass_).*$

The theory is that if you add your cookie name to the list you should be good to go: “(comment_author_|wordpress|wp-postpass_|your-cookie-name-here)”

However, this also did not work for me.

Option 5—Set the cookie using Javascript

This is the one that worked for me.

Setting a cookie in Javascript takes place apart from Super Cache. This means that the page loads completely, the browser keeps the http_referer we want intact, then we set the cookie with that information.

To use this method:

• Write the JavaScript to get, check, and set the cookie (see examples at w3schools.com)
• Write the plugin to use the cookie in PHP
  • Once the cookie is set by JavaScript you can now use PHP isset() and $_COOKIE to retrieve it for your purposes
  • Use wp_enqueue_script to point to your JavaScript file
  • Use add_action(‘init’,'your-function-name-here) to load your JavaScript file at initialization

Conclusions

1. It takes some extra work to get cookies, http_referer, and WP Super Cache to work together, but it is possible.
2. There are several possible solutions.
3. My recommendation is to set the cookie using JavaScript, thereby bypassing Super Cache

I hope you found this post helpful. Contact me if you have any questions or other suggestions.

Aloha.

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