Go Beyond MLS – Page 4 – Internet Marketing Tips

Blogger.com not too good for web 2.0 marketing

A minor point of irritation, for me, was to discover just how badly blogger.com treats things like meta tags.

Now I know full well that meta tags are not exactly ground breaking for SEO but when it comes to social linking several tags can be quite important. Specifically the meta description tag. When posting a link in facebook the meta description is the first source of content for describing the link.

I first noticed this when working on my Face Link tool which was created to make facebook link links for blogs. Here is an example of a good looking link to my blog. You can see that the tool was able to get a title and a description

The fantastic site of Lord Matt

The realm of Lord Matt – Lord of vast imaginary tracts of hyperspace.

Generated by Face Link Tool with thumbnail by BitPixels

Beyond making my little applications work the meta part of a web page also impacts of the quality of your search engine results listing. The description being used most often as the text that goes with the search result.

As such in a competitive market not using a description tag is a fatal mistake that your competitors will take advantage of.

So the result is not just that pretty much all blogger blogs produce rubbish looking links in facebook but that they have a significant disadvantage when the going gets tough. After searching for a while I have concluded that there is not really a decent solution to this aside from putting Google off with duplicate description and keywords.

In short blogger.com is not, in my opinion, suited to the world of web 2.0 nor business marketing.

Go Beyond MLS Facebook Page

After Matt’s fantastic introduction to what I think will be number series of posts about Facebook Marketing– it is finally time to announce the Facebook Page of Go Beyond MLS, even thought Matt did it in some ways. The main reason for not promoting this page before, was my own confusion about pages an apps on Facebook.
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Facebook Marketing: Initial Case Study

Go Beyond Facebook

What I am going to do int his first article is simply look at the Facebook fan page for this website and use it to explore Facebook pages in general and what they can do for your blog (regardless of niche).

Vlad tells me that apart from setting up the page he has not actually done very much with it least of all tell anyone about it.

This, for this article’s purposes, is fantastic! It means that we can actively measure what I am about to have said (keep on reading or you might miss it) and watch what happens as we implement the theory. Over the next few months I’ll revisit the topic of Facebook and representing your blog therein reporting on our efforts to go beyond just having a page and to actually getting traffic from it.

As I write there are 3 fans. In three months let us see if we can get over 100.

The page as it is

As the page stands there is nothing obviously “wrong” with it. The blog posts are being added to the page and there is a graphic that matches the website theme. However, as you can see, there is a lack of variety and this makes the page visually unappealing and repetitive.

In other words we have settles down to making Facebook a very expensive feed reader. That’s fine but it’s not exciting enough to get the average Facebook user to do much by way of interaction.

According to something I was reading (somewhere) the average Facebook user fans two pages a month. That means to see growth in the page’s fan base some work is going to be needed.

Then the page must add value to the user’s day and if that was not enough it must actually be interactive enough to get enough interaction to show up in the news feed of the fans who have added it.

Facebook promotion is no walk in the park. Keep reading for an insight into using pages.

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More Nofollow Tags On Twitter: Is This Beginning Of The End For Twitter?

UPDATE, March 2, 2010: After experimenting with a plugin for Google Buzz, I have decided not to use on at this time. All available plugins as of now offer to ad comments to Google Reader items- this potentially can scatter the discussion all over places. Hopefully a better solution will be implemented soon.

With the arrival of Google Buzz, I began to question whether or not I should continue to concentrate on Twitter. I hope I am not the only one. Two days ago Twitter decided to intruduce even more “nofollow” attributes this time to their internal linking structure. I understood (but did not agree) when they introduced the first round of nofollow attributes to their links, I guess as young startup you needed to do what you needed to do.

So today I have replaced the Tweetmeme button (courtesy of Tweetmeme ) with new and shiny Google Buzz button (courtesy of Hameedullah Khan). The Tweetmeme button was moved to the button of each post. This is just a symbolic gesture of my personal dissatisfaction of the way Twitter is “innovating”, I have nothing but love for Tweetmeme.

Twitter has bigger issues to deal with….

For Twitter trying to manipulating the flow of the Google juice at this stage of the game is really childish, and if that is the reason for the latest change I just feel sorry for Twitter. Really guys, is this the best you’ve got? Now if the recent change was made as a further attempt to eliminate spam my question is the same, is this the best you’ve got? There are ways to eliminate spam without punishing your users.

There is also another factor, and I maybe completely wrong about it… I appears to me that many of my online are starving for a more meaningful way to keep the conversation going (which in my opinion is impossible to have on Twitter). So if you compare Twitter and Google Buzz from that perspective, Google Buzz wins hands down, and if you thought Google Buzz is no threat to Twitter you should really think again.

Now back to the new and shiny Google Buzz button- you need to use your GMail/Google Reader to interact with it. You can also follow Go Beyond MLS on Google.

Optimize Your WordPress For Smart Phones With WPTouch

The cell phone I currently have is not exactly what you can call a “smart phone”, but every so often I like to check and see how my websites and blogs look on my phone. According to Google Analytics, I am not the only one to try and access my blog on my cell phone. During last year there were 83 attempts to access Go Beyond MLS using number of mobile devices:

While the above numbers are not something to brag about, I still was surprised to learn that there were attempts to view this blog on mobile devices.
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