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Internet Marketing Class Notes

 

The following notes are supplemental information for the material presented in class. Copies of presentations made in class are available on the "Past Clinic Topics" page at the end of each class description. Current information of interest will be added to my Internet Marketing blog.

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8/24/2011	Review of a WordPress site Tonight's class was a review of the elements of a WordPress-based web site using Innovative Nurses and Sitters as an illustration. The presentation covered the basic structure provided by WordPress, along with comments about the ease of use of the platform and its strengths as a platform for presenting information that will be well regarded by search engines. Elements of a WordPress installation such as choice of a template and the availability of "plug-ins" to enhance the feature set provided by the template were discussed. A number of useful plug-ins used on this site were pointed out. These included: Custom Permalinks Custom Post Type UI Dagon Design Sitemap Generator Fast Secure Contact Form Google XML Sitemaps Akismet Include It WordPress Importer Another plug-in was discussed, which did not show up on the plug-in list of the web site because its features had been incorporated into the template used for the site. The template used on this site is Gazette Edition 2.8.1 by WooThemes, which was referred to in class, but not specifically talked about or shown. That plug-in is "All in One SEO Pack", whose features included the ability to customize titles and descriptions for pages of content. These plug-ins, and many others, can be found by navigating to the "Plugins" section of the dashboard interface and selecting the "Add New" button that appears at the top left of the page next to the word "Plugins". Selecting this button will bring up a search box where you can enter a keyword phrase relevant to the name of a plugin, or a feature that you are seeking.
3/9/2011	Notes about Linking To illustrate some points about how linking can work for you, I provide a few examples. First, I searched Google for "tennis court lighting japan". I am attempting to demonstrate the power of linking by using rlldesign.com as an example, so I looked for a Facebook listing for that site. The 5th site listed (organically, we are not interested in paid listings!) referred to "Tanamatsu, Tagawa Japan- Tennis Court Lighting Case Study | Facebook", which I knew to be the kind of page I was looking for. Clicking on that listing brought me to a Facebook page describing the building of a tennis court in Japan. I opened the source view of the page and did a search for "rlldesign" in the code and found ten occurrences. In other words, there were 10 links on this single page back to various pages on the rlldesign site. This demonstrates how "link rich" creating Facebook pages can be. I noted that the source code reflected that all the links were tagged as "nofollow", which should indicate that these links are not helpful, but other evidence counters that. The Wikipedia article on nofollow tags points out how complex the rules are for the application of this tag. The bottom line is that it is not determinative, but can be applied in different ways. A Google search for links to rlldesign.com found at least 4 occurrences of Facebook pages in the listing. This demonstrates conclusively that Google is, in fact, indexing the links from Facebook pages and including them in a site's link count. Another good source of links can be found in sites that accept articles for publication. The link search cited above returned a number of locations where articles are creating links for this site. A partial list includes: www.readarticlesonline.com               multiple! www.articlesfree.co.uk www.articleshmarticle.com www.articledirectoryzone.com             multiple http://www.reference.com/topic/Commercial-Exterior-Lighting www.informationhut.com                      multiple http://headkeys.com/TENNIS+COURT+CAD       multiple www.mimrepost.com http://contractorlicenseservice.net/commercial-exterior-lighting-fixtures-and-design-services www.thefreelibrary.com www.pacificlightingsystems.info             multiple www.articlesbase.com                            multiple www.encomer.com                                  multiple www.article-buzz.com The occurrence of these sites in the search results indicates that articles have been placed on the sites linking back to rlldesign, and that those articles are, in fact, providing link value to the target site. The recent Google "Panda" update changed the effectiveness of many of these sites, but the data is not really in yet on which survived the change and which did not. The goal of the update seemed to be to reduce the impact of low quality sites like these, while leaving intact the significance of higher quality sites in the group. Current reporting seems to indicate that there were some "hits" and some "misses in the strategy, with commentators asking why certain sites that seemed to be higher quality took a hit while others of lower quality did not. This debate will certainly continue, and there may be some adjustments to the algorithm on the way. This list could be considered a guide to sites where articles might be effectively placed for your site, but the caution that goes with that statement is that you have to look for indications of quality in the articles that you see on the site before you invest your resources in placing articles there. Later there may be more information available on which of these sites were really affected by the update and which were not.
1/26/2011	What Makes a Site Work? This presentation deals with Bing and Facebook changes and refers back to earlier presentations and to Facebook pages for additional information and examples. On January 12, Jay presented his insights to configuring Facebook for business. On December 8, 2010, he covered Bing and how that would effect the search engine market. In January, he illustrated his remarks with his own Facebook pages for RLLD. His primary Facebook page is named "commercial.lighting". That page illustrates the basic setup of a commercial page on Facebook. An additional page illustrates how more information, in this case, a case study about tennis court lighting,  can be made available through this media. Beth Guide, one of the participants in the class and a frequent presenter, has also created a page that is worth review. Her page is named "web.hosting.search.engine.optimization".