It seems that a number of organizations have gotten hip to the practice of using brand names (other than their own) as targeted keywords for ad placements.  Generally this is because either the brand name has become common usage for a product or service or simply because the brand is far better known and has much better organic placement in regular search results.

So what can you do if a competitor is targeting your trademark brand in Google searches?

The answer is mixed.   If someone is using your trademark in the actual text of their ad then you can file a trademark complaint with Google here.

However, if someone is simply targeting your trademark as a keyword AND DOES NOT use your trademark in the actual text of their ad, then you essentially have no recourse.   Google Scope of Investigation document states:

“Google is dedicated to providing relevant advertising to our users, advertisers, and publishers alike. Accordingly, our trademark policy aims to provide users with choices relevant to their keywords. At the same time, we investigate trademark violations in ad text, both as a courtesy to the trademark owner and to ensure that ads are clear to users.”

They then provide a list of countries in which their policy of allowing trademarks in targeting keywords applies… they list all but about 8 countries.

In addition, while they do not allow direct ad copy that includes trademarks, they will allow – and I quote – “We do not take any action in situations where an advertisement is being triggered by non-trademarked terms, even though the search query contains a trademarked term.

The example provided shows that you can use the term ‘shoes’ as a keyword for your ad and Google will send you traffic from people searching for  “Nike shoes”

Confused about how this can possibly be legal?

While I am not a lawyer (apologies to my parents), the sense I get is that a direct ad title with a trademark brand is a very black and white area legally.  So Google has no choice but to disallow (if you go through the dance involved in complaining to them).  However, the rest of the issues on targeted keywords without trademark text as well as query strings including trademarks are sufficiently grey that they can afford a legal fight more than you can.

Then Google’s new algorithm took hold and they took a slight dip.   Then Google learned about how they were managing their SEO and manually intervened… essentially burying them from search engine results.

A lesson in why to avoid SEO practices or vendors that seem too good to be true.  A must-read for all site owners, marketing professionals and we folks alike:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1

Webpro news posted a great article discussing Walmart’s latest Facebook campaign called ‘CrowdSaver’.

Basically, it lets fans of their facebook page vote for potential deals that Walmart suggests as possible.   Once enough people vote for a deal, it becomes reality.

Genius!   They create, buzz, brand loyalty and use the popular deal as a sort of loss leader, getting people into their store where they might as well stock up on everything else they need.

Read the article here:

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/10/27/one-thing-small-businesses-can-do-just-as-well-as-walmart

Anyone who has ever attempted to use photoshop to save a document as a pdf has encountered the dreaded conversion limitations of photoshop when it comes to saving a file as a pdf.

Long story short, documents with even the smallest images in photoshop result in tremendously large file sizes in the finished pdf document.   Working your way through the compression options and format selections, you will eventually run into the fact that you can either have a good looking document or a small document… not both.  This article shows you a quick and dirty method for generating a very small sized pdf for your site.

If you search online (even at the adobe website) for techniques to reduce the file size you will see many suggestions to use the ‘reduce file size’ option in acrobat.   Yet starting with a 5mb photoshop file you will be lucky to end up below 3mb after using their suggested technique.   A quick, dirty and efficient alternative is described below.   To use this method, you must have Adobe Acrobat installed on your computer.

1. Open your psd document (in my case I am using a document 6mb  (8.5 x 11 Canvas Size at a resoultion of 300dpi).
2. Reduce your resultion to 150dpi (this is for moderate image useage… if you have large, important images you may want to keep it at 300dpi).   This is done via the Alt + CTRL +I command or Image – Image Size menu option.
3. 
4. Next, select File – Save For Web and Devices from the menu options.
5. We will save this file as a gif using high quality options (and preserving transparancy if it exists)
6. 
7. Find this .gif file and right-click.  Select the ‘Convert to Adobe PDF” command.   *Note: this assumes you have adobe acrobat installed on your system.  If you don’t… well then you’re in some trouble…

Using my example, I now have a pdf 142kb in size.   This is a massive size savings and allows me to have a pdf that web surfers can download and print.

There are some downsides to this technique.   First, you cannot preserve text as text for use in acrobat… so you cannot allow electronic editing and the pdf itself is not editable.  To make changes you need to go back to your original psd file to do so and then repeat this technique.

So as long as you do not need the pdf to be electronically edited and submitted and merely need a small, downloadable and printable document for your website you are good to go.

While WordPress comments are fine for communicating with readers of your blog they suffer from one great downfall… while they can keep current readers engaged, they don’t do a great deal to help attract new visitors to your site.

This issue is solved with Facebook’s new development tools that allow you to harness the social networking power of facebook right from your wordpress blog.   While there are a number of apps available for immediate use (or to be refined into your own customized apps), probably the best of the bunch is the Facebook Comments App.   This allows you to let visitors who are signed into Facebook, comment right on your blog post… and their comments show up on their own activity list within Facebook itself.  This allows that visitor’s entire friend list to see what they have said, along with a link to the page on your Blog they are referencing.

Needless to say, this is a very big deal.

Here’s how to integrate facebook comments in your blog:

**Based on some feedback from users I should add the following point:
-When you copy and paste the code from this page to your site editor there is a chance that some characters will not copy as intended. Specifically, some people have had problems with the quotation marks. When you paste the code into your site editor, make sure the quotations transfer as intended. If they don’t, then replace them with in-code quotations (‘ and “)
****

1. Sign into your Facebook Account (hopefully you don’t need more instructions for this item)

2. Sign up to create a Facebook App here: http://developers.facebook.com/setup/

Don’t use the http://  with your site url.  Just use the format www.websiteurl.com/  (include the trailing slash)

3. Once the application is approved you will see your Create an Application Page. Note application ID and Secret ID (you will need the App ID later)

4. Click on Developer Dashboard link.  Allow Facebook Permission when it asks.

5.Now go to this url:  http://graph.facebook.com/your-username  (user your facebook username here… if you don`t have one, go into your facebook account settings and set one)

You will see your Facebook user ID that you will soon need.

6. Go to your current wordpress theme folder on your system and for steps 7 – 9 edit the header.php file.

7. Change the <html> tag to the following:

<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xmlns:fb=”http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml” xml:lang=”en” lang=”en”>

8. Add the following between the <head> and</head> tags
<meta property=”fb:admins” content=”USER_ID”/>
<meta property=”og:title” content=”<?php wp_title(‘ ‘,true,’right’); ?>”/>
<meta property=”og:site_name” content=”YOUR SITE NAME”/>
<meta property=”og:type” content=”blog” />
<meta property=”og:image” content=”URL TO YOUR THUMBNAIL IMAGE”/>
<meta property=”og:description” content=”<?php bloginfo(‘description’); ?>”/>

9.Add the following right after the body tag

10. Go the Facebook Social Plugin page http://developers.facebook.com/plugins
11. Select the Comments Plugin
12. Select the number of comments you would like to show up on the page at any time.
Do NOT enter informatino into the unique identifier field (unless you know what you’re doing.)   Leaving this blank will make the id the page url by default.  99% of you want it this way unless you are
including blog comments from a single post across multiple pages.

13. Click the get code button.
14. Place the snippet of code exactly on  the page you want it on.   This will generally be in single.php directly above or below the default comment code.

If you want to remove wordpress comments entirely, you can do so be editing comments.php to be a single line break in place of the existing code (hint: make a copy of comments.php first in case you change
your mind.

Keep in mind that this same process can be done to integrate facebook comments into any website page you wish.   Allow comments on product pages, site homepages and more.

Sounds good but you’d rather have us do it for you?  We’d be happy to.  Click the link below and we’ll take care of this for you.

**** UPDATE JULY 2011 ****

Facebook continues to drive us all mad by no longer allowing the functionality they originally gave us.  They are getting rid of this method of integrated facebook functionality.

For the time being you can use a migration snippet to keep it alive if you experience errors.  To do so, add:  migrated=1 to the fb comment code.  example:

<fb:comments numposts=”15″ migrated=1></fb:comments>

While it has become second nature to webmasters and designers to include sitemaps in their site files, many amateur site builders or site owners who lack a useful webmaster don’t necessarily know how important a sitemap is.

XML Sitemaps are a protocol allowing site owners to inform the search engines about the pages on their website.  In addition to listing the pages that you would like the search engines to know about you can also specify some additional information such as the time a page was last updated, its importance relative to the rest of the site and how often the page is expected to change.

Accessible via the Google Webmaster Tools, you can tell Google that something has changed simply by prompting Google to re-download your sitemap.  Even if you don’t perform the prompt, Google (and other search engines we pretend to care about) will download the sitemap every time they re-index your site.

Why do we care about Google knowing we have updated a page?

Well, one of the most important ranking factors in the Google algorythm is how fresh your content is.   A site that has frequent updates to content is considered a trustworthy site that someone is taking care of.  In a world where content is king, it is crucial to let the search engines see update is changing as soon as possible.

While using a sitemap does not guarantee that the search engines will index all pages of a site, they provide better information for the search engines to make use of when they do come visit.

And now for the best part of all… Making a sitemap is easy thanks to automated sitemap generators like the one here:

Automatic Sitemap Generator

Google today announced the release of their new search index, called Caffeine.

This is not an update to their existing system but rather a completely new system.

The biggest change with Caffeine is that Google no longer separates the indexing of the web from the updating of search engine results. The previous Google index would crawl the entire web (or close to it) and store the results in a massive series of databases. Periodically, this stored index would then be used to update the search engine results. This resulted in a noticeable delay in getting new sites indexed and changes noted.

The new system will crawl the web in chunks and offer near immediate updating of the search engine results. News sites, twitter feeds, blogs etc will all be crawled with more frequency and the results made live very, very quickly. Web sites with rapidly changing content will also be noted and crawled with more frequency.

So the big question is “what does Google Caffeine mean to site owners?”

Essentially this is yet another instance of Google catching up to what they have been telling us for a long time. For the past few years Google has been hammering webmasters with the claim that they value fresh, relevant content over static, irrelevant, or downright neglected sites. While their actual index algorithm sometimes said otherwise, it appears that Caffeine is the proof of their intentions.

In short, this new release by Google means that the focus on well-maintained, constantly updated sites is finally here. While there has been no announcement regarding the level of preference Google will show fresh content in the search engine results, common-sense would dictate that the algorithm behind the system will be more heavily weighted towards the ‘new’. If anyone has noticed the new tools and ‘side wiki’ on Google’s search pages, you’ll see that they are making a real push to be more useful at finding social media updates, twitter updates, etc.

So finally, let’s look at what you can do to harness the power of this new index.

1. Include some content on your page that updates with some regularity.   This can be a blog, a ‘latest news’ feature or a rotating content section.
2. Make sure that your site uses a sitemap, that it is properly formatted and is updated as your content changes.
3. Harness the freshness of other sites.  If your site is listed in Google Business Center, Yelp or other highly rated directories, make sure that your site links directly to your page on these sites.  This will help Google note the most useful updates on multiple sites as quickly as possible.
4. Share your updated content with the world via twitter, LinkedIn or facebook pages.

Today Google announced that they have addded site speed as a part of their ranking algorithm.
This has been expected for quite some time and Google states that they are concerned with site speed as an indicator of improved user experience on the web.

“Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs” – Google

It is still unknown exactly how much of a factor site speed will be on your site’s rankings, Google has indicated that it will lag far behind site relevance yet it can still have an effect.. .especially for users with bargain-basement hosting plans on crowded, shared servers.

If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools Google has suggested to evaluate the speed of your site:

* YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
* WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
* In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world.

By now everyone hopefully has noticed that Google is working hard to give geographical relevancy to search results.  This is done through the local search listings that now appear at the top of the search results, along with a map, when a searcher enters a search phrase that includes a geographical descripter, most usually the name of a city or municipality.

These local listings are a tremendous tool for both searcher and website owner.  Here is how to use this feature for your website:

Focus Your Efforts:

• on links and presence on local search engines and directories
• on building geographical data on your website

Step 1: Get Listed

1. Submit your site to Google Local Listings, Yahoo and Bing.  All use a similar approach.
2. Enter all informaton they ask for including images, hours, etc.  Make sure you use the map to plot your business, moving the marker if Google gets it wrong on their map.
3. Submit to any regional directories, yelp.com, superpages.com and yellowpages.com.   There are more directories out there so look around.   This isn’t just for links, Google and the other search engines keep tabs on these sites and it seems they may use it as a geographical relevancy check on their own rankings.

Step 2: Get Help

Once on the local listings, get your friends and customers to provide reviews directly from those results.  More reviews equals greater strength in the local listings when they come up.

Step 3: Optimize Your Site

1. Put your company’s physical address in the footer of your site (address, phone number and postal code)
2. Use your geographical tag in the title of the index page of your site as well as ensure that you mention your location in a few headers and in the content of your pages.
3. Make sure your contact page displays all address and phone information.
4. Use the embed function of Google Maps to embed your location on your contact page.  This is a great tool allowing searchers to find easy directions to your location.

Helpful Links

Google Local Listings: Add your business

Yahoo Local Listings

Bing Local Listings

Recently we helped a client solve a need by developing a featured staff section to his website.  This application allowed an administrator to upload text and an image for multiple staff members and then a randomizing script displays a different staff member every time someone visits the site.

Performing this task got me thinking about other randomizing content for a website.

Often we have a lot of great content that is, unfortunately, repetitive.  One such example would be testimonials on a web site.  Testimonials are an excellent feature of a web site that sells a product or service.  Real testimonials from real customers convey a sense of professionalism to your endeavor and go a long way towards building trust with potential new clients.

So suppose you wish to display some great testimonials in a section of your site but do not want to overdo it by displaying too many at once….  Here’s how:

1. Create a new folder in your root directory and call it something like ‘testimonials’
2. Open notepad and paste a testimonial into it.  If you want to have two or three testimonials appearing at a time, go ahead and use basic html formatting and paste three testimonials into this text file.
3. Save this file as testimonials1.txt in the folder you just created.
4. Repeat step2 and 3 for each text file necessary to get all your testimonials into a file.  Name each text file seperately (test1.txt, test2.txt, etc.)
5. Now we will put the display code into the desired location on one of our site’s pages:
   < ?php
$var = rand(1,3);
switch($var) {
case 1: include('testimonials/testimonial1.txt'); break;
case 2: include('testimonials/testimonial2.txt'); break;
case 3: include('testimonials/testimonial3.txt'); break;
}
?> *note, remove the space between the initial < ? to make it execute as it should. It is shown this way to make it appear on the page rather than execute*

This snippet of code uses php to randomly display the contents of three text files that we have inside our testimonials folder. Each time the page with this code is reloaded, it randomly displays a different file.

Keep in mind that you can use any html code you want, even though it is a text file. Because it gets parsed by the php it will appear on the page as the code itself, not the file.