WordPress Installs and Blog Evaluations

Hey, do you need a WordPress blog installed, upgraded or evaluated to see if your blog is running safely and optimized for use-ability and search engines? Tatu Digital Media is offering a WordPress blog install sale to really kick off 2010 with a bang.

The team can evaluate your existing blog, create a custom design, help you migrate from WordPress hosted services or just set up your blog and show you how to use it. There’s no excuse anymore….Get blogging!

Do need to learn to use social media?

You can’t afford not to learn about social media these days. It’s everywhere and it’s the most inexpensive way to boost your visibility both on-line and off-line. Search engines love social media sites because the information is “organic” coming from real people and every time a link is shared it’s value increases.

Surveys show that people are suing social networks to make buying decisions like their next video camera, tv or even car. Perhaps more important to the small business owner users are deciding where to go for coffee, find the nearest bookstore or dry cleaner using social media on their cell phones.

OK, all that’s good, but you’ve got a business to run right? You don’t have time to spend all day on Facebook or Twitter or to learn how all this stuff works. Doesn’t it take hours per day? How do you even begin to learn all this? Well, you could just ignore it and hope it goes away, or you could decide to add social media to your marketing strategy and learn how to use social media through the Social Media Coaching Center.

The coaching center brings together some amazingly talented social media practitioners who teach how all this really works in small easy to digest pieces. The site helps you decide which social media sites will work for you and build a social media strategy for your own business that really works. Want to learn Twitter? Visit the quick start pages to get the basics down and then dive into the Twitter category for more advanced information. The same goes if you want to learn how to use Facebook, learn LinkedIn, how to use video in your social media strategy and much much more in the social media tutorials. New content is added often and the team is always on top of the latest tools.

As if that isn’t enough you can ask any social media questions you like on the ask us page and the team will research and find the answers for you. In many cases they even build a step by step social media tutorial to show you how to do it!

So? What are you waiting for? Take this opportunity to learn about social media for skilled practioners at the Social Media Coaching Center.

Listening in social media – Free Webinar!

Before you dive into social media for any reason, listening should be your first step. What are people talking about and where are they doing it? Is there buzz out there about you or your product that you didn’t know about? Who should you be connecting to? Has there been a recent event you want to find out more about?

Setting up listening tools from free to paid versions can give you a tremendous amount of information and help you find even more things to talk about. I’ll give working examples of listening tools, outline a strategy for effective listening and give you some ideas to use this information in a real world setting.

This short 30 minute session will include links to both free and paid listening tools and creative scenarios for use. September 1, 2009, 4 PM PST.

You will learn how to:

* Set up a set of listening tools to cover multiple platforms
* Identify the right listening tools for your own needs
* Identify the best networks for you to participate on
* Evaluate what you find
* Creative ways to engage and communicate your message
* Find new topics to populate your blog and online discussions
* Evaluate how effective your social media campaign is

Sign up now on BrightTalk!

Read more: http://janetfouts.com/social-media-listen-webinar/#ixzz0PbYUnISW

WordPress SEO and Plugins

One of the major reasons to use WordPress is SEO, and lots of other people have added to my knowledge base over the years. Remarkablogger put out some really awesome  tutorials a while back and I learned a lot from him as well as many others.

Rather than keep all that SEO goodness to myself I thought I share it with you. Take what’s useful and add your own favorite WordPress SEO tips and tricks in the comments! Keep in mind that you may or may not want to use all of these. I’m running most of them and don’t have any conflicts, but plug-ins have been known to conflict with each other or the themes you’re using, so take it easy.

Plug-ins

WordPress All in One SEO Pack has been the acknowledged leader for some time, but Platinim SEO Pack gets even better. The biggest diffeence is now you can change your permalinks without getting dinged by Google or losing page rank. Platinum SEO will issue a 301 re-direct to the new location. VERY cool.

SEO Friendly Images Let’s face it, we all forgt to put in those important alt and title attributions, but it really can be a tool to get you better SEO. This plug-in does it for you when you forget.

Google XML Sitemaps creates a Google compliant XML sitemap nd updates the map with every new post or edit.This is a good thing and not just for Google. Most of the major serach engines appreciate an XML site-map.

Speaking of search engines. They really do still like robots meta tags. Robots Meta will add them for you. It will also create nofollow category listings to prevent the dreaded Page Rank leakage.

Cross-linker allows you to pre-select words you want hyperlinked to defined URL’s. Don’t over use it, but this kind of linking can help you get better SEO and help users find tose deeply buried treasures in your blog. Remembr though to keep your keywords to a minimum. Loading up a post with criss-links can make it painful to read through, and after all, content is still the point!

Google Positioner lets you track your keywords in Google and see how you are performing.

If you’re not using Platinum SEO Pack or All in One SEO Pack which let you edit the url for your posts. you should think about SEO Slugs. This one lets you remove the “stop words” that decrease the value of the page. So you can make a long file name like”/what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings” into “immediately-higher-rankings” and get much better SEO results.

WP Auto Tagger uses the Yahoo API to suggest tags based on contnet. Search engines like tags that are relevant to the content. (DUH)

Big changes at Tatu Digital Media

It seems most of the work I’ve been doing lately is helping people understand how to use social media. Sure, we can set them up with the tools they need, build a website or a blog, but I’m finding that people want more support than typically comes with building a site for them.

So begins a new phase in my career as a social media coach. In fact, I’ll be kicking off my new website at JanetFouts.com with a series of free webinars about social media. In future I’ll be posting more reviews of social media applications like this one of TweetDeck on my blog instead of Tatu Digital’s, creating more focused messages on the various blogs.

I’ll start writing more on my WordPress blog about online marketing too. Lately there has been a lot of call for AdWords and FaceBook ad campaign management, and we are in the process to get our Google certification. To make the ads worthwhile though, these sites must first be optimised, and we are fast becoming SEO heros to our clients.

Tatu Digital will remain the blog about the company, and there you’ll find more info about web design and new projects. We will continue to help people implement their dreams, whether that is a blog, a social media newsroom, a website, a product demo or a kiosk presentation for a show. Tatu Digital Media remains a full service web design house and our team continues to turn out award winning work.

I’d like to take this moment to thank you for working with us. Without all our fabulous clients and contractors Tatu Digital would not exist. Nor would we have had this explosive growth in the last few years. We hope that as the company grows you will find new opportunities to work with us, and we will work even harder to deliver the quality that is expected from Tatu Digital Media.

Best regards,

Janet Fouts
Tatu Digital Media
408.216.7423
How do you make your mark?

Pls follow me on * http://identi.ca/jfouts What’s not to love about open source?

Obama brings up cyber terrorism as a major threat. What do you think
about this?

Looking forward to the week. New campaigns and several blogs in the works

Fine-tune to get the most out of your AdWords campaigns

AdWords looks easy to use on the surface, and if you are only running a few ads for a very carefully written website with a fine-tuned focus, this may be true. Unfortunately, most people don’t have a finely tuned marketing machine website. We write about our products and our passion and often the keyword density or SEO “Quality” is low. The site may be quite large, with lots of pages that are related to a number of products or services. On the other hand, if you focus too much on writing a keyword dense page instead of writing for content, and you’ll probably find that users will bounce right off the page because they won’t get engaged.

So how do you create an ad campaign that will get results for a site that has a lot of ideas?

Start with your pages
Locate 1-2 pages that have the best focus on your product. Tweak the content a bit if necessary to make sure that you are very clear in what you are offering and how people can get it, but don’t try to cram in a bunch of keywords and make the page uninteresting. Better to have a riveting page about widgets than to say widget 20 times on the page with no context.

Tweak your page’s keywords to include ONLY words used on the page. Create a meta description that sums the page up nicely and include keywords there too. (I know, people will tell you meta tags are dead. Trust me, they are not! Google is not the only search engine, Yahoo still uses meta tags.) Make an appropriate title for the page. Use titles that reflect the content so that when a user bookmarks it, they’ll be able to look at that bookmark later and know what the heck it was!

OK, now let’s talk about the ads.
Ad text needs to have a good hook in it. Writing these is a bit of an art form because of the number of characters in each line. What you want to say is something that directly relates to your content so that users will want to go there, and when they land on the page find what they expect to get so they either stay there and read or buy your product. Your ad title and description should contain keywords relevant to the page.

Search for your keywords and take a good long look at what the competition is saying. Take a look at how their page is structured, what keywords they use. Use these top producers as examples and write you ads with these as a model. That doesn’t mean copy them. It means look at how their ads work and then apply that to your own content.

Ad Groups
Keep your ad groups very targeted and focused. You’ll get a higher quality rating which lowers the cost you have to pay per click. Don’t load up your campaign with keywords that aren’t relevant to your page. If there are broad categories necessary build an ad group for each one and focus it carefully.

Test your ads
The default display setting in Google is to optimize delivery. this means the best performing ads are delivered more often automatically. This seems like a good idea, but it keeps you from accurately seeing which ads are performing well and tweak the ones that aren’t to perform better. What you need to do is to see the actual responses to these ads and then fine tune every one until they are all performing at their best level.

Obviously there is a lot more to this, but this is a good start. Look for a post soon on finding placements for your AdWords campaign, getting higher quality scores, and ways to keep an eye on the competition!

Janet Fouts is the Google AdWords campaign manager for Tatu Digital Media, where she manages client ad campaigns from large corporate entities to small offices. She also consults on Social Media Marketing and Networking. Visit Tatu Digital Media to read her other blog, follow her on Twitter, Plurk, FriendFeed or Facebook.