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Five tips for making a company Linkedin page

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I’m always amazed how often I see the words “If you’re not already using LinkedIn”…there is no excuse not to be.

It’s an essential.

If you haven’t already included LinkedIn in your company’s online social media efforts, then you should certainly consider adding a LinkedIn company page to your web presence arsenal. LinkedIn is considered one of the most influential social media platforms on the web, and can make a huge difference in terms of your business’ social media marketing strategy.

A LinkedIn page can connect you with a really wide net of potential partners, customers, suppliers and helpful contacts, and requires a lot less regular attention than many of your other social media accounts.

via 5 Tips for Creating Your Company Linkedin Page.

Honestly, there are so many good reasons to be using it. I accept that if you’re used to the concepts of social networking that you’ll pick up using Facebook or Twitter it can seem a bit odd, but it’s networking, it’s social, and has a built in professional audience looking to make money.

What does your website look like to search engines?

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The short answer is “pretty bland”.

While photo recognition, and language techniques are getting more advanced all the time, the raw data most search engines (including Google and Bing) see when they do a first pass on your site is very sparse.

Text will almost always be the most important Search Engine Optimisation feature you have (buy all the link pyramids you want, but if your site doesn’t have key, unique, relevant writing you’re achieving nothing) and using software like Lynx is an excellent way to test it.

Lynx as a browser pre-dates pretty-much every browser you’re likely to have on your computer, and is the browser a lot of search engine spiders use.

You can use it on Linux easily, or save yourself the hassle as use a web based version:
http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html

Check to see that the text on your site is readable in it, that your menu structure shows (and works), and that the text it does show makes sense. That might seem odd at first, but  you’d be surprised how many sites do not make sense when viewed in simple text (i.e. they rely too much on graphics to do their talking) and search engines like to read things they can understand; that a human will make sense of easily.

It’s a little SEO tool in what needs to be a big arsenal.

petermahoney.com as it appears in Lynx

Is that name taken?

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A fantastic, really quick way to see if the username you want is available at a swag of social networking sites. It’s a very easy way to choose your person brand name.

Check to see if your desired username or vanity url is still available at dozens of popular Social Networking and Social Bookmarking websites. Promote your brand consistently by registering a username that is still available on the majority of the most popular sites. Find the best username with namechk.

via Check Username Availability at Multiple Social Networking Sites.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a lot of signing up to do!

SEO, for so many reasons

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Reason number {insert bizarrely obscure number here for comic effect}. Branding is highly important, but most of your site’s traffic likely comes from organic search (visitors stumble across you after searching Google, or Bing) and while you might have a fantastic scheme for converting them into customers, unless they can find you in the first place, your scheme means nothing.

Yes, branded search converts at a higher rate since the visitor was looking for you, but what power does non-branded organic search have beyond basic non-branded keyword filtered conversion reporting?

Once again, we step further into analytics and take a look at what wasn’t so apparent on the surface of keyword referral tracking. Look at the Multi-Channel Funnel section of Google Analytics. By assessing the top channel groupings assisting each other to conversions you may quickly see a picture such as this:

via How to Prove the Value of SEO in 10 Minutes – Search Engine Watch (#SEW).

Get people to your site. Make sure they can find you. Otherwise you may as well stick with an advert in the Yellow Pages. (For anyone under 25, the Yellow Pages was a brick like tome made up of thousands of pieces of yellow paper, containing adverts for businesses. And using it SUCKED).

Piracy, drones and dreaming.

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As controversial as they may be, I have to hand it to The Pirate Bay, they certainly keep themselves at the forefront of technology.

Our data flows around in thousands of clouds, in deeply encrypted forms, ready to be used when necessary. Earth bound nodes that transform the data are as deeply encrypted and reboot into a deadlock if not used for 8 hours.

All attempts to attack The Pirate Bay from now on is an attack on everything and nothing. The site that you’re at will still be here, for as long as we want it to. Only in a higher form of being. A reality to us. A ghost to those who wish to harm us.

via The Pirate Bay – The galaxy’s most resilient bittorrent site.

It used to be said that the pornography industry drove innovation, but I would say for the past few years it’s been the file sharers.

The Pirate bay have looked into hosting their sites on a series of flying drones, that operate over international waters. It sounds incredible (in the, “that must be made up, it’s too incredible” sense of the word), but it’s quite achievable. In fact, they wouldn’t even be the first to do it.

I’ve longed imagined a distributed form of web server, which is a step beyond even what they’re doing here–where the web server software doesn’t even live on one computer, but is shared around the world.

On the one hand that seems inconceivable to most people right now. And while what they’re doing may be questionable at best, I choose to keep thinking the undo-able can be done, I think with the flying drones, and the metaphors for deity.

If we stop dreaming, we stop creating.

Let’s make stuff instead.

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