Archive of October, 2007 Posts

The answer: NoFollow Free WordPress Plugin

This plug-in, developed by Michele Marcucci, is a great solution to the problem of giving good commenters with relevant comments (and links) some “link juice” while preventing spammers from taking advantage of it.

Here are some of the features of the plugin:

• Remove No Follow from: Author Link, Registered Authors Link, Comment Text Links, and/or Registered Comment Text Links
• Customize a prerequisite number of comments needed before no follow will be removed
• Blocked words that will never have no follow removed (to prevent spamming)

After my alarm clock went off this morning I got up, turned on my computer, checked my work email, Gmail and Hotmail accounts, opened up Bloglines to see what was new on my favorite blogs, checked out Google News, Dugg a few articles, submitted a story to Sphinn, checked my MySpace and Facebook messages, sent an IM and then decided to take a shower and eat some breakfast.

OK Casie, thanks for an update on your morning…but what is the point? Three years ago today my day started NOTHING like this. I lived in a different city, I had never even heard of Gmail, Google News, Bloglines, Digg, Myspace or Facebook, Sphinn didn’t exist and to tell you the truth, the letters “SEO” meant absolutely nothing to me.

I just responded to a B2B Search Marketing Survey from Business.com and thought I’d share two of the responses I submitted (just in case they don’t make their way into the white paper that is going to be distributed to Business.com clients, prospects and B2B advertisers starting the last week of October):

Question:
What Advice Would You Give to B2B Pay Per Click Advertisers to Maximize Their ROI?

Answer:
In the end it all comes down to the landing page experience. While keyword selection, adding tail keyword terms, developing ad copy that resonates (and testing that ad copy over and over), and bidding strategies are all important, it is the experience that a user has on the first page a user sees that has the highest impact.

Heading from NYC last night, I started thinking about what I would tell the rest of my colleagues as it relates to how and what was learned from SMX Social Media.

Well here are some things that didn’t happen:

• I still don’t feel comfortable adding Danny Sullivan or Neil Patel to my Facebook network.
• No one gave me the social media “quick fix” idea that I thought would be worth risking my profile or IP getting banned in respective communities.

(…and you haven’t even had a sip of your morning coffee)

One of the intimidating factors businesses face when engaging in a social media strategy is the potential for negative press and/or the differing opinions that arise in relation to an expertise or strategy. Buzzing through the social media networks last Friday, I happened to see Hubspot’s Website Grader hitting Sphinn, specifically in reference to an article, “Why Website Grader is a Bad Idea“. Since KoMarketing Associates has worked with Hubspot on a joint strategy with one of our clients, I am aware of their products/web applications and naturally, the story caught my eye. Whether or not you agree with either party, the discussion shows why the people over at Hubspot are intelligent online marketers and what you can learn from the situation, particularly when your company, website or opinion is challenged with adversity online.

The folks at Closed Loop Marketing have a comprehensive post on optimization techniques for your blog strategy, covering everything from feed optimization to blog structure to posting techniques. While these recommendations all provide excellent opportunities for enhancing the user experience and getting visibility in relevant communities and locations, would-be bloggers need to consider how search engines like Google and Yahoo will react when they reach the blog and how their blog content will be crawled, understood and indexed.