As I am writing this the soft-launch of Google+ is just a day old and the blogosphere and Twitter are abuzz with opinions, ideas and assessments. The nay-sayers remember Google’s failed attempts to create social networks before. Google Wave fizzed out and Google Buzz is, well, there. While, it’s true that Google failed with these it’s important to remember a couple of important facts.
As an author I get hundreds of emails each week telling me how useful one of my books has been, making suggestions for titles or content and asking questions.
Success stories always catch my attention because they are the litmus test by which many of the practical books I write, are judged by. This one happened to come on a day when I was swamped with requests for articles and the sheer pressure involved in completing the edits for my next book were taking their toll and I was beginning to lose perspective.
One of the subjects I frequently get emailed about is authors asking me how to promote their book using SEO. SEO Help has been on the Amazon best-selling charts for 79 weeks since it was published. At the time of writing it is#32 at Amazon.co.uk, #36 at Amazon.com and #54 in Amazon.ca. Online Marketing Help is #27 at Amazon.ca and in the top 50 in the UK and the US and Brilliant SEO is at #65 in the UK a full dozen days before it even became available to buy.
As I am writing this it’s Friday. The week has been hectic and I am preparing for the Google conference in Manchester. There are dozens of details which need to be finalized, I started the day with over 50 emails which will need to be answered, a magazine is asking me for an article on search and a website I usually write for has launched a new section on social media for which they have asked for content.
This is a borrowed title from Ian Lurie’s blog. Ian works in online marketing and I have been reading his writings for some time. He has a sense of humour which is disarming and I always find reading what he writes refreshing, particularly if I have just come back from a meeting with a corporate client where we have discussed ‘ROI’ (Ian hates the word) and ‘end-user interface dynamics’ (often I find myself wondering what the hell that really means).
In current SEO thinking there is always the question regarding the effectiveness of on-page SEO. Just how important is it? Google discards these meta tags and BING and Yahoo! have been giving them less and less importance. There is a tendency to ignore them which I always believe is wrong. Well, this month I got the chance to find out.
Just a month or so ago I wrote a post on how much is a first page position on Google worth to your online business.
Online reputation management is a huge issue right now but here’s a crash course you need to nail on your office wall: 1. If you engage in blood sports keep it private 2. If you engage in blood sports do not link your company name to it 3. If you violate rules 1 & 2 do not then use childish arguments to justify what you did.
I have a confession to make. Back, in some other life I actually worked as a journalist (I still have my NUJ PRESS Card because I believe in supporting what the NUJ does for journalists). Now that I’ve come clean I can go ahead and tell you that I have never understood why people whose brains are uniquely designed to process masses of information, assess it from an editorial point of view, evaluate it from a reader’s point of view and then make the crucial decision of what combination of personal interest, global news value and average reader curiosity will work best in order for a news item to be included, cannot ‘get’ the web.
It’s bad enough that Facebook has become the trawling ground of HR staff and potential employers vetting their employees Twitter now has the power to cost a fortune.
