Tag Archives: WordPress

Make your website your communications hub

At the end of the day, none of us owns anything we do on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus. What we do own is our personal properties.

No matter how many hours I spend at the Java Shack or Peregrine Espresso, I am just a customer. Social media and its social networks may feel like a home to some of us, but they’re really just private public spaces, similar to coffee shops, the Politics & Prose reading area, or the ballroom at the Rosslyn Marriott.

At the end of the day, none of this is yours. These places, while filled with amazing opportunities for connection and growth, mean nothing if you can’t bring it all home, be it sales, self-promotion, networking, creativity, marketing, education or brand building.

Ultimately, your home is your business and yourself

What is home? Well, in a practical sense, your online home is your web site; maybe your blog. More philosophically, your home is your business and yourself.

I was installing a new personal consulting website over the weekend and I was reminded of this. I chose to use Drupal, a content management system (CMS) that is similar to WordPress, though known less for being a blogging platform than a content platform. I chose a database-backed Web application instead of a Flash-based or flat file site for several reasons, all of which had to do with making my online brand identity work as hard for me as possible.

Some of the core functionality that drew me to Drupal is how well it connects to Cron, sort of like a server’s timekeeper. It keeps my website primed not just when I am available, it can also work on my behalf even when I am on a plane or asleep.

What do I mean by this? Well, Drupal is open source software, so there’s not only a lot of useful functionality built in but also thousands of modules and plug-ins that easily and readily extend the functionality of my site out the wazoo.

So, there’s a built-in aggregator that I can set up to suck in all the RSS feeds of all the blogs to which I contribute, including Twitter. This allows me to write for Tumblr, other blogs, and Twitter and have as much or as little of the content brought back into my business home site, and shoved into my own database for my own posterity.

Sharing doesn’t happen by happenstance

Another thing it lets me to do is add a plug-in that easily allows me to offer all my visitors the ability to effortlessly share my content to Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and more. This makes it easy to add and remove different buttons as social networks go away (good bye, Google Buzz!) and add them as they’re introduced (hello Google+, for now).

And remember, it’s always better when other people share your stuff. Just like compliments, it’s always better when other people say how pretty and smart you are. Also, by design every share will include a link to your content, to your brand, and to your contact info. It’s genius! You’re also not prohibited from sharing from your own site as well — nobody said not to.

Another reason why I chose Drupal is because Google gets Drupal and Drupal gets Google. Unfortunately, too many people roll their own sites. Generally speaking, these are some flat file sites, some bizarre proprietary solution some Web guy peddled you, or a pretty minimal WordPress install, designed by a graphic designer instead of a coder.

The flat file and the proprietary solution are alien to Google, at least for a little while. While Google has seen a bazillion Drupal, WordPress and Joomla installs, it might take a while for Google to suss out what you’re about on your proprietary or brochureware site, if ever. This is especially true if you’ve also designed the entire site in Flash or a sliced-up Photoshop file.

On the other hand, Drupal is very aware of classifications, user-readable URLs, customizable title, keyword and description tags. I have already installed a module that connects to Google Webmaster Tools via a dynamic XML Sitemap, to Google Analytics, and to all the Ping Servers (do people even use those anymore?). What more, I’ve installed an SEO module that will help me further explain myself and every page I make to Google.

Drupal can prevent you from being Sandboxed or De-Listed

And since the Drupal community is so Bright White Hat, they make several modules that audit your site to make sure you didn’t do something evil that might be perceived by Google as being Black Hat, resulting in your site getting either Sandboxed (pretty darn bad) or De-Listed (devastating).

All the work you’ve ever done on social media is likely to vanish unless you spend time capturing your work, words & creativity

Since I have my own server, I have access to server logs, which are great ways to look deeper into how people are interacting with my site than even Google Analytics can go. That said, Drupal does a pretty good job of being able to actively and dynamically promote similar and popular content to my visitors so that anyone who comes in looking for Blogger Outreach Services because of one search will be offered all the pages that are similar to the topic that are available on the site, hopefully keeping folks on the site until they’re convinced that they want to hire me.

I believe that Drupal also offers the ability to auto link text in its core or as an extension. I can write my copy with abandon without having to worry about linking text or whether those links will go dead or change over time. Every time my article explicitly says “Blogger Outreach” the server will turn that phrase into a hyperlink and that link will go to the page on Blogger Outreach. If I change things up, I can change the point-to link to somewhere else and it will change every instance instantly.

Drupal also offers dynamic meta-tag titles, descriptions, and keywords; it can connect directly with other web applications via XML, RSS, or ATM, both read or write, if you set it up correctly. It can also cross-post whenever you post something on your site — be it news, something bloggish, something sales or hiring, or something PR — out and about, automatically: to Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, or wherever.

And, if there’s anything you can imagine that you might want to do, there’s probably an app for that (well, a module, really). Now that Drupal has been accepted widely and has matured over time, anything that may well be missing can be created for you by extending an application that already exists (by either joining the team and adding features or by forking the code into your own thing) or by hiring a Drupal developer to do it for you. Since it’s “just scripting” (PHP and MySQL, really), you won’t be stuck behind that proprietary wall of opacity. There are lots of options and developers of all levels of talent, skill, and experience (back when I started, PHP-coders were rare and Drupal developers were like unicorns).

Make your website your communications platform

OK, I am a total geek and I am so psyched to be elbow deep in Secure Shell (PuTTY), FTP (FileZILLA), vi, chmod, wget, and tar xvf that I would like you to forgive me for this article (I should be talking about social media marketing and digital PR, after all). However, I have been in the PR world now for 10 years and most PR websites really suck. Your own personal web site should be more than just a landing page for decision makers. It’s also your own personal platform for communication, engagement, sharing, and for square-dancing with lovely spiders and bots of Google, Bing and the gang.

Take some time to become better than yourself. You make not be a geek like me, but you really need to take advantage of all the cool stuff I can do. The setting up of all the back-end stuff only took me one dedicated Sunday, so it’s not rocket science.

Good luck and remember that all the work that you do and have ever done on social media in support of your brand is ephemeral and likely to vanish into thin air unless you spend some time capturing your work, your words, and your creativity somewhere you can keep it and keep on using it.

It might as well be in your own online home, your website.

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Want to be a social media pro? Learn by doing

While Malcolm Gladwell suggested in his book Outliers: The Story of Success that you need to engage in a challenging 10,000 hours of experience and practice before becoming a master, don’t let that theory overwhelm you. The belief that you need to accrue all 10,000 hours of practice and experience before you sell yourself as a social media maven isn’t necessarily accurate.

All you need to do is know more than the person who hires you to become a professional. It is in taking the risk upon yourself to fake it till you make it, to make mistakes while you’re making magic, and in learning and knowing more so that you can win clients who are smarter and more sophisticated.

If people are asking you for help with Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, reddit, blogging, Tumblr, WordPress, or anything else, you’re ready to charge people for your time, expertise, insight, and creativity. Remember, 10,000 hours signifies mastery of the sort that is considered world-class — do you need to be the best in order to make a living?

No, you don’t.

You also don’t need to know the answer to everything in order to be ready to go pro. Your friends are resources as is the Internet and your larger social network. With experience comes an innate body of knowledge. But don’t be fooled. Medical doctors and lawyers don’t know the answer to everything either but they puzzle it out.

You can, too.

While 10,000 hours of increasingly challenging study of the viola da gamba might get you to Carnegie Hall, is your goal transcendent mastery or are you happy to play well enough that you can make a living being a musician?

Gain mastery through practice

Additionally, I believe that people are a little misinformed about Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 Hour Rule. It’s not like scuba diving or flying an aircraft: the 10,000 hours of mastery are not accumulated like number of dives or flight time. That 10k is not billable hours you burn through by punching time cards.

If you are pursuing mastery (of social media, marketing, PR, light aircraft, diving, or the viola), then you need to constantly step it up. To become a master, you need to not only put in the time — of course, there are no shortcuts, it’ll still take you all of those 600,000 minutes — but you need to constantly challenge yourself, take risks, try something new, innovate, interpret, create, expand, and move well out of your comfort zone.

If you haven’t read Outliers, Gladwell brings up the Beatles. They accrued their 10,000 hours by performing live in Hamburg, Germany, over 1,200 times. Not by practicing part time but by really getting out there are working. They were professional musicians while they became masters.

When artists and businessmen annoyingly talk about how important their suffering, depression, mental illness, and failure were to their ultimate success, I believe that some of the most important hours of those 10,000 hours are the hours when you really want to break that Stradivarius fiddle over the music stand but don’t. Or do, but persevere. I believe that those manic all-nighters when you’re swept away by the Muse or just focused on solving an impossible riddle are essential to the craft. However, that’s not instead of practicing 8-hours-a-day, it’s in addition.

So, go out there: You have 10,000 hours to pursue something right now — and not for free. Please do not let preordained notions of mastery get in the way of being better than the people around you. Temember, just because you think something’s easy or simple doesn’t mean that it is. It may only be easy for you. Other people either don’t care enough to do the work like you have, don’t have your gift and natural affinity, or they’re just too dim.

Good luck and if you’re going to aspire to mastery, take advice from John, Paul, George, and Ringo: Do it for money.

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A great title is essential if you want your blog post read

Image via CrunchBase

Long blog post short: please be as descriptive as possible when titling your blog posts. In today’s decontextualized world of walls, feeds, RSS, email, diggs, reddits, Stumbles, tweets, and retweets, you need to attract your potential reader based only on the appeal of your title and nothing else, especially if you’re new to blogging and don’t happen to be Seth Godin.

Use all 70 characters that Google indexes for each post title but make sure the most important message of the title are nearer the beginning of the title. Don’t bury the lead in the post and don’t bury the lead in the title, either. Tweetmeme and other sharing services chop off long titles so while you should always go long, keep your essentials right at the beginning.

I wrote Blog so you can be taken completely out of context in which I discussed how essential it is to make sure each blog post you write needs to be completely self-containted and self-referential; now, I notice I missed the most important part of every blog post: the blog title.

With Twitter, Facebook, Google+, retweets, sharing, and RSS via Google Reader, all anyone ever sees is the title of whatever’s shared, especially if you’re not Beth Kanter, Kami Huyse, Seth Godin, CC Chapman, Shel Israel, Geoff Livingston, Richard Laermer, Olivier Blanchard, Christopher Penn, Chris Brogan or Brian Solis. If you’re one of these bloggers, your title is a little less important; however, your name may well be stripped by the confines of a 140-character world, so a good title is a good habit even for our hallowed celebrities since their personal brand doesn’t always move as fast as the share.

So, though we’re all tempted to indulge in puns, in humor, in wordplay, and in breezy cool, please try to keep put your editor hat on every time you post to your blog. Who, what, when, where, why, and how. Four Ws and an H.

Also, remember that the title you choose needs to be both appealing, compelling, accurate, and trustworthy to both your human readers and also to machines: the spiders and bots that Google, Twitter, Yahoo!, Bing, and the other search engines send to visit your blogs and everyone else’s shares.

I hate it that WordPress really wants a title first because the title should be one of the last thing one provides. I like to save my summary paragraph and my final title until the last minute and two of my editors, Mike Moran, here, and JD Lasica, over at Socialmedia.biz, almost always provide my posts with even more focused titles and summary paragraphs. Of course, these two gems are reformed journalists, so I benefit greatly from their experience.

For this post, I chose “A great title is essential if you want your blog post read” though I would have loved to choose something more cheeky like “All you got is your title” or “You need to have them at hello” or “Bait your blog post with a great title,” though I wasn’t sure. (And we’ll see what Mike does with the final version before it goes live)

I know how I consume blogs, twitter, and my Facebook wall, and 70% of my click-throughs are based on the title of the post. The other 20% is based on the person who does the sharing — including the blogger — and the final 10% is the blog it’s on, such a Mashable. That’s my percentage, but an excellent title can draw me to a blog and blogger I have never heard of via a tweeter I don’t know — even to a blog that is obviously a promotional platform.

What do you need in your title? Simple: read your post through and try to summarize it all into a sentence. Don’t concern yourself like I do as to whether your title wraps on the blog when posts (it doesn’t matter) and also please do not bait and switch the content or stuff keywords that are no germane to the post.

And, it bears repeating, Google indexes 70 characters of each title tag so use them all, though some other services don’t so while you should use as many characters as you need to finish your thought, make sure your most important concepts are weighted towards the front of the title to make sure that the lead isn’t cut off in a retweet or share.

Let me know if you have other tips and tricks for getting folks to click through to your posts in a very competitive blogosphere and mediasphere.

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Marketers still need to learn some basic HTML

I have recently been blogging for the Huffington Post and they use Six Apart‘s Movable Type blogging platform. Moveable Type was my second blogging platform after converting from Noah Grey’s Greymatter that I started using back in 2000. Even in 2013, the Huffington Post’s blogger interface doesn’t offer a Rich Text Editor so writing in familiar WYSIWYG isn’t possible there. So, what I do is compose over here on WordPress, on its Visual Editor, and then click the Text tab and copy-and-paste over to Moveable Type. Then the work begins. I upload all of my media, photos, graphics, and whatnot to my server at ChrisAbraham.com and then align them correctly before I copy the raw HTML over — which should work perfectly, right? No! Continue reading →

Upgrade your lame agency website into your social media brand HQ

Image via CrunchBase

At the end of the day, none of us own anything we do on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+. What we do own is our own properties. No matter how many hours I spend at the Java Shack or Peregrine Espresso, I am just a customer. Social media and its social networks may feel like a home to some of us, but they’re really just private public spaces, similar to coffee shops, the Politics & Prose reading area, or the conference or ballroom at the Rosslyn Marriott. Continue reading →

Choose talent over tech for your Social Media Marketing PR campaign

In response to How to make an awesome Social Media News Release, Jonathan Rick asked me, “Isn’t this essentially the same thing that Pitch Engine offers?” Jason Kintzler then added, “Yes Jonathan, exactly! Did I mention you can do it all for free?!” (See Socialmedia.biz‘s earlier writeup on PitchEngine: A social PR platform for the new era.)

Well, my response is the topic of this post today: “The article is only about the what and why of the Social Media News Release and not the how. Pitch Engine is a how!” I then added, “Pitch Engine doesn’t take away the work: writing/collecting compelling copy and assets. You do that work” and then “Our SMNR is just a platform and structure. 90% of one’s time should be spent writing amazing content” and then, finally, “Installing WordPress, an amazing platform, does not an amazing blog make; Pitch Engine is amazing but content is king”

So, let me explain. Pitch Engine and WordPress are best-of-breed application platforms that make creating a Social Media Release and Blog seamless, removing the technology hurdle from the process. Those are good things, to be sure. However, after re-reading my SMNR post, I was reminded that it wasn’t about technology at all, it was about the collecting and presenting of relevant assets, copy, images, and videos; it was about organizing and branding an ease-of-use “steal all this content, blogger, and please post on your blog” microsite.

In fact, I made a point of showing how one doesn’t even need to spend all your time installing WordPress or some other database-backed website or web app — one can hack together a very valuable SMNR with just the most basic HTML, an inexpensive hosting plan, and a $12/year domain from a domain name registrar.

Why humanity trumps technology

It’s not about the technology, people! Hire and train people based on their ability to write and their ability to connect and engage people — who like people and care about personal, human, relationships. Signing up for Pitch Engine won’t write your SMNR for you, creating a profile on Twitter doesn’t make you an influencer, and installing WordPress doesn’t put you in the AdAge Power 150 or Technorati’s Top 100. These are all essential steps, but they’re no panacea.

If you’re spending more money on tech than talent, don’t. If you’re intimidated by technology, don’t be. If you think that Social Networking and Social Media is about apps and sites and smart phones and Twitter and Facebook and Google+, then you need to get past that and remember that it’s about people. Real fleash-and-blood folks who hunger to connect and relate. Yes, with each other, but also with you and your brand, products, and services.

Pitch Engine’s job is to make Social Media Release-making as easy-as-possible, tech-free, as possible. And they do an amazing job of it. The same goes for WordPress and Facebook and Twitter. If an app doesn’t make it easier for you to connect with other people, the app doesn’t work. At the end of the day, all these web applications are top-drawer, but they just make it easier — effortless — to do your job. They do not do your job for you and they often make folks lazier, more careless, and less concise. They tend to be enablers, enabling bad grammar, poor spelling, and just good enough editing. People should always write as though going to press and being printed on paper instead of just assuming you can always edit it later.

Too many people get stuck behind the technology barrier. They spend all their budgets on building the perfect web or Facebook App, and on graphic design and architecture, ignoring the need for good writers and the best marketers.

If you’re intimidated by technology, that’s OK. Social Media News Releases and Blogger Pitch Emails are more about the quality, simplicity, efficiency, and targeting of the writing, structure, and presentation of the page. Some of the most popular blogs online are Blogger and MySpace blogs, even though there are more sophisticated platforms. Why? Because what it is to be a blogger is to be a writer and not a technologist or programer. The same thing with digital PR and social media marketing. The most effective marketing campaigns combine the ability to write clear, compelling copy; understanding the target audience and their associated wants, needs, desires, and hunger; and knowing where the sweet spot in the market is — it is not about the technology. The tech is a necessary evil that must be transcended in order to ensure that the messaging is able to seamlessly reach the market without barrier.

Reporters don’t need to know how to run a printing press, news anchors don’t need to understand how a picture makes its way, as if my magic, to my LCD HDTV, and radio hosts surely don’t need to go out to get their Ham Radio License. And you don’t need to become an iOS developer, a web application developer, or a CSS guru, either.

Too many people in this space get stuck behind the technology barrier. They spend all their budgets on building the perfect web application, the best Facebook App, and on graphic design and architecture, leaving very little if anything on the best writers and the best marketers. Don’t get stuck in that trap.

Your social media presence, digital PR strategy, and social media marketing campaigns are only as good as your writers, marketers, PR professionals, community managers, designers, and creatives — the artisans — and not on the technologies — the tools. When I teach young college marketing and PR students in their communication schools, I remind them every day that all the things they’re learning in class, though possibly dated and old school, are still relevant because human nature is human nature and people are people and technological platforms are ephemeral and fleeting.

Learn the tools, surely, but don’t become obsessed with them. Shine the spotlight where it matters: people. Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology.

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Social media marketing success demands talent over technology

Why humanity trumps technology

Learn the tools, surely, but don’t become obsessed with them. Shine the spotlight where it matters: people. Via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology.

Continue reading →

How to make awesome Social Media News Releases

Last week I dissected a blogger outreach pitch email line-by-line in A detailed analysis of a perfect blogger pitchas a way of proving that no matter how brief and conversational one of Abraham Harrison‘s blogger pitches may appear at first blush, the effortlessness takes a lot of work and the time of three senior agents. Today I plan to go through, line by line, a site we create to support all of our blogger outreach campaigns. You can call it a Social Media News Release (SMNR) or a microsite, a resource site, or a fact sheet. To those of you who are in communications, you’ll recognize the structural similarity between it and a traditional news release or press release.

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8 Steps to Max Your Google Juice using Google+

Let me boil my last post, Here’s why it make sense to use Google Plus, down to practical pieces. Part of what makes a technology premature is that you have to be careful how you use it, because it isn’t mature enough to just work no matter what you do with it. To help you carefully handle Google+ for maximum advantage, I’ve assembled eight steps that help you get the best search visibility from your Google+ posts. These tips ares simple, but some are easy to overlook. I hacked this awful-looking graphic as an example:

Here’s a list of things that you need to consider before you invest your time and energy in Google+:

Make sure all your posts are Public. You can add more circles in order to spur interest amongst your friends, but be sure you explicitly tell Google, through your willingness to share publicly, that they can index your content in their public search engine. Check this every time because sometimes Public isn’t always selected, depending on the situation. Here’s my Google+ public profile.
Use a clean URL when you add your content to Google+. Google+ hasn’t been translating URL shorteners well, so use a link from the source. This will not only allow Google to better populate the content as you see above, including the Title, Blog Name, Description, and an Image from the post, but it will also allow that content to be cross-referenced to any Google +1 “likes” from others within Google+ and the rest of the Googlephere. Site URLs are translated the way they are on Facebook. You need to paste the URL into the “Share what’s new…” text box.
Prefixing names with a plus sign links that name to the person’s profile on Google+. You can include your friends and people you’re connected to on G+ in a similar way you do in Facebook, but Google+ has a gimmick that you may know or not. In the graphic above, you’ll see a blue box around Arsh S and Jenna Levy — I did that by adding a plus symbol (+) before each name while I am writing the article. G+ then populates a pull-down, offering pre-populated names of people I am connected to. I just need to select and go. Sometimes the profile’s privacy setting prohibits the link reference to persist after posting. Linking to people is a good way to engage, inform, and initiate conversation.
Even though Public should cover your inclusion in Search, you still need friends, circles, engagement, and sharing. In the same way that increased engagement levels and shares result in a higher placement, a greater “bubbling up,” and a longer life on the Facebook Walls of the friends and Fans/Likers on Facebook, the same goes for Google+ — and with both G+ and Facebook, the greater Social Graph is much broader than just shares, likes, comments and +1s on their respective platforms, it also includes +1s and Likes and comments that from the polling on websites, blogs, newspapers, and magazines Internet-wide.
Always make sure you populate every single page of your your blogs, corporate sites, personal sites, and e-commerce sites with the Google +1 button. The simplest way is by embedding code directly from the Google +1 widget embed page. For WordPress, I like to use the Google +1 Button by Alex Moss. If you use Drupal, check out Google Plus One +1. If you use Blogger or Tumblr, you’ll need to hack the template, in which case you’ll need to hack in Google’s widget yourself.
Spend all the time needed to fill out your Google Profile as completely as you’re comfortable. The Google Profile self-creates based on a lot of little choices you have made over time. But you can always add to it and even curate and help it grow and get it right. So, check out your Profile and make it as good as you can. I recommend you give ’til it hurts because in this economy of information, Google rewards authenticity and relinquished privacy very well, historically. Here’s my Google Profile and I have surely given ’til it hurts.
Optionally, consider checking the “Also email X people not yet using Google+” check box. Consider including the people who you’re connected to via other Google apps like Gmail in the post as a way of calling “olly olly oxen free” — a form of clanging the chow bell. However, this advice comes with a caveat: only do it on your best posts and only rarely; otherwise, you’re going to elicited a negative response. I made this error and regretted the simple click made too breezily and too often, so heed my warning.
Finally, commit to participating in Google+ by becoming an authentic part of the community. This is what Google Search wants more than anything, and it will reward accordingly by ranking your relevance in a similar way that Klout does: the number of people you influence, both within your immediate network and across their extended networks; amplification of how much you influence people; and your network impact of your influence on your network.

In short, Google juice and yummy organic SEO on Google Search. And quality rules. All Google cares about is relevance and its entire search algorithm revolves around this principal.

And, it all depends on how many people read, click, share, +1, and comment — and the more the better, resulting in higher real time web search ranking results over in Google Search, optimizing your SEO.

And, in case you didn’t get the memo, the Social Graph (be it the Facebook Like embed you can put on your site or the Google +1) are part of the new generation of Link Juice. The more sites, shares, and comments that happen even outside of Google + are all part of that — even the little +1 buttons that are all over every search result you see in both organic results as well as in the current crop of Google AdWords/AdSense contextual ads.

And it could all start with jumping in, feet first, into Google+ and committing time, passion, and resources to it over the long term. And, when Google+ Brand Pages are finally launched for public consumption, you can use the gravity you’ve already built up in your private profile for your company also.

That’s all I have for now. Before we end, I want to remind you that Google is working hard to make sure you can’t just call it in to Google+ the way you can on Facebook and Twitter. And, we all know that calling it in, cross-posting, and aggregating strategies are only a smart part of a good social media strategy.

Please let me know if I missed anything. As I have learned over time, all the best tips and tricks are generally always revealed in the comments of the readers.

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Google love from Google+ in 8 easy steps

Here’s a list of things that you need to consider before you invest your time and energy in Google+:

Make sure all your posts are Public. You can add more circles in order to spur interest amongst your friends, but be sure you explicitly tell Google, through your willingness to share publicly, that they can index your content in their public search engine. Check this every time because sometimes Public isn’t always selected, depending on the situation. Here’s my Google+ public profile.
Use a clean URL when you add your content to Google+. Google+ hasn’t been translating URL shorteners well, so use a link from the source. This will not only allow Google to better populate the content as you see above, including the Title, Blog Name, Description, and an Image from the post, but it will also allow that content to be cross-referenced to any Google +1 “likes” from others within Google+ and the rest of the Googlephere. Site URLs are translated the way they are on Facebook. You need to paste the URL into the “Share what’s new…” text box.
Prefixing names with a plus sign links that name to the person’s profile on Google+. You can include your friends and people you’re connected to on G+ in a similar way you do in Facebook, but Google+ has a gimmick that you may know or not. In the graphic above, you’ll see a blue box around Arsh S and Jenna Levy — I did that by adding a plus symbol (+) before each name while I am writing the article. G+ then populates a pull-down, offering pre-populated names of people I am connected to. I just need to select and go. Sometimes the profile’s privacy setting prohibits the link reference to persist after posting. Linking to people is a good way to engage, inform, and initiate conversation.
Even though Public should cover your inclusion in Search, you still need friends, circles, engagement, and sharing. In the same way that increased engagement levels and shares result in a higher placement, a greater “bubbling up,” and a longer life on the Facebook Walls of the friends and Fans/Likers on Facebook, the same goes for Google+ — and with both G+ and Facebook, the greater Social Graph is much broader than just shares, likes, comments and +1s on their respective platforms, it also includes +1s and Likes and comments that from the polling on websites, blogs, newspapers, and magazines Internet-wide.
Always make sure you populate every single page of your your blogs, corporate sites, personal sites, and e-commerce sites with the Google +1 button. The simplest way is by embedding code directly from the Google +1 widget embed page. For WordPress, I like to use the Google +1 Button by Alex Moss. If you use Drupal, check out Google Plus One +1. If you use Blogger or Tumblr, you’ll need to hack the template, in which case you’ll need to hack in Google’s widget yourself.
Spend all the time needed to fill out your Google Profile as completely as you’re comfortable. The Google Profile self-creates based on a lot of little choices you have made over time. But you can always add to it and even curate and help it grow and get it right. So, check out your Profile and make it as good as you can. I recommend you give ’til it hurts because in this economy of information, Google rewards authenticity and relinquished privacy very well, historically. Here’s my Google Profile and I have surely given ’til it hurts.
Optionally, consider checking the “Also email X people not yet using Google+” check box. Consider including the people who you’re connected to via other Google apps like Gmail in the post as a way of calling “olly olly oxen free” — a form of clanging the chow bell. However, this advice comes with a caveat: only do it on your best posts and only rarely; otherwise, you’re going to elicited a negative response. I made this error and regretted the simple click made too breezily and too often, so heed my warning.
Finally, commit to participating in Google+ by becoming an authentic part of the community. This is what Google Search wants more than anything, and it will reward accordingly by ranking your relevance in a similar way that Klout does: the number of people you influence, both within your immediate network and across their extended networks; amplification of how much you influence people; and your network impact of your influence on your network.

In short, Google juice and yummy organic SEO on Google Search. And quality rules. All Google cares about is relevance and its entire search algorithm revolves around this principal.

Please let me know if I missed anything. As I have learned over time, all the best tips and tricks are generally always revealed in the comments of the readers.

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Chris Abraham

Because the Medium is the Message

Tag Archives: WordPress

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