Month: March 2014

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The Clarity of What You Write Matters a Lot

Matt Cutts has some great words of wisdom for bloggers and website owners in this video on how technical you should get in content and blog posts. You can watch the video at YouTube.

In a nutshell, here are the takeaways on this important topic.

1. Clarity of what you write for your website or blog really matters to Google as it will determine relevancy and what queries your content will match in the Google index.

2. If you cannot make the content easy for people to understand then you do not really understand the content yourself. Matt says this not me! This does not mean that you need to “dumb down” what you write, but content should be informative and written in a manner that attracts those that may not have the depth of experience on a topic to your site to learn more.

3. There will always be a special place for higher level content on a topic but as far as Google is concerned the broader the appeal the better your placement will be.

4. When you make your content too technical or statistical heavy you lose the understandability of your content unless your audience is particularly coming to you for higher level information. Matt Cutts says err on the side of clarity and I say, write for the high school graduate in the bulk of your writing.

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Watching Movies on Your Kindle Fire

Amazon's Kindle Fire
Amazon’s Kindle Fire

I have a Kindle Fire and use it to watch videos and TV shows that I have purchased from Amazon, but my husband likes to buy DVDs on Amazon and so these are not available for me to watch in the Kindle Cloud.

Here’s how to be able to watch the DVDs you buy on Amazon on your Kindle:

1. Go to the Kindle app store and get the free app called Flixter. Install it on your Kindle Fire.

2. When you buy the DVD from Amazon, you’ll get a coupon with the DVD package that allows you to use Digital HD Ultraviolet as your on-demand cloud storage to watch the video on any of your devices. Go to www.movieredeem.com and enter in your special unique code to add the Amazon movie or DVD to your collection. I selected as my merchant Flixter, as this is my Kindle Fire movie watching app.

3. Once you enter the code you will set up a Digital HD Ultraviolet account AND a Flixter account. Both work together to allow you access. Once your accounts are confirmed by email, you will now see your digital cloud copy of the movie you own in the “owned” section of both apps.

4. When you want to watch the video on your Kindle Fire, just open the Flixter app and stream your newly purchased video anywhere and anytime.

As you own the video online plus have a DVD copy, you can watch offline. It is really the best of all worlds!

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Should You Still Post on Facebook?

Glass of Chocolate Milk with Two Straws
Make Sure You Share Long Enough on Facebook!

So many businesses are wrestling with what makes sense to them in regards to social media and specifically Facebook.1. Some have decided that it is too much trouble and that their likes and follower numbers are too hard to grow and so have abandonned Facebook entirely.

2. Some have decided that Facebook is the place they want to be and have dropped Twitter, LinkedIn, and in some cases even blogging to invest more time on Facebook.

So how can you decide if you should still post on Facebook for your business?

1. Before you drop Facebook, make a careful analysis of where you are connecting with your customers and prospects. If you are posting regularly on Facebook and you have under 80 followers after posting for 6 months to a year, you may be able to easily move out of Facebook and invest your time elsewhere. A great place to move is to a Google+ Community, starting as a member of an existing community before you spin off into one of your own making.

2. If you have 80 or more followers and you are having regular monthly follower growth, I would consider staying with Facebook and making an effort to improve your activity there both with a minimum of two updates a day and some level of follower/fan interaction such as likes, responses to posts and private messages.

3. If you just have a Facebook page and have never done regular updates I would try first for 6 months before you totally abandon Facebook.

Here’s what I’ve seen personally, with regular quality updates for over a year we took an account that had very few likes and activity into one that is growing over 20 new likes a month. As more time goes by, the follower/like numbers have started to increase from 20 to over 30 a month and are still climbing. For this client, out of all the social media platforms that they are using, Facebook is the most active, even more popular than YouTube. But, it took a while to really identify that Facebook was the place for them to be. The important take away from this is that it is important to evaluate long enough to be able to clearly discern which social media platform is best for your own business.

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Does Google Love or Hate Links in Their Ranking Algorithm?

Are Links Important?
Are Links Important?

Over the years Google has valued links in their ranking algorithm by boosting sites with more links to a higher position in the organic or unpaid search results. By valuing links Google created a cottage industry that SEO’s jumped on and really milked with clients. Some SEOs charged exorbitant amounts to clients with very little accountability in regards to the price a client was paying for the number and quality of links they received.This past year Google has addressed this cottage industry by “smacking it down” stating that links from spammy resources, article directories, and forum postings would not be a good fit and encouraged site owners to start moving away from link building and into content creation and site optimization that focuses on improving the users’ experience.

However, Google has admitted that even though they themselves have a love hate relationship with links, that the results in their own search engine are better and have more relevancy to readers when Google does include links in their placement algorithm.

I feel that quality links that point to a website and shares of links do allow Google to evaluate the popularity and relevancy for readers so there will always be a place for links in the Google algorithm but link numbers are getting less important than a review of the whole picture which include links, social shares, co-citation, and blog mentions.

To further explore this important topic I would recommend that you watch this video from the MOZ blog. It provides two differing points of view on are links valuable to Google or not. The take away from this blog post is that yes links are still valuable but less valuable than they have been previously.