Category: News & Trends

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Scribe SEO Plugin Reviewed

I thought I would run the Scribe WordPress plug-in through its paces and let you know my thoughts and if it is worth the monthly subscription fee.

First, I bought the publisher level and paid a discounted fee of $17 a month instead of the regular price of $27 per month. The plug-in touts itself as SEO made easy. You will need to have one of several themes in use or piggyback on the All in One SEO plug-in to use Scribe. For more information you can visit the business’ website. I think that if I had paid $27 a month, I would be very unhappy, but as I only paid $17 a month I am willing to continue through this weekend to test the options.

Once installed, you will see several new fields in the left hand sidebar of your blog: a Scribe Keyword Research Tool where you enter in your potential keywords for your blog post to get suggestions, the Scribe Content Optimizer, and Scribe Link Building tool. From the website, it sounds like this is a great tool to help you do all these things to improve the content of your blog post to get better placement, but in reality is is just a reminder checklist of things to do. It will green light that yes your blog post has content. Whoops, you forgot to write a custom title tag, but get this without suggestions and without automation. Hey, the All In One SEO plug-in will write both your meta title and meta description tag for you FOR FREE!

Once you perform the analysis of your blog post, which is where your subscription fee comes into play giving you a word count, readability scan, the tool will make some recommendations of blogsites where you can go and try to get back links. It does not help you get back links, just gives you a shortlist. It will then give you some suggestions of social media sites you can try to get links from too. What the tool does not mention to you is that all WordPress applications and most forums will do not follow your links.

Do I think that this plug-in is worth the money. No, I do not. I feel like for me as a professional blogger, I can write my own post it note, did I put a title on my blog post, and did I install the All In One SEO pack for WordPress and set up automatic generation of the meta description tag without paying $17 a month. I can’t wait to install this one.

Oh, by the way it gave a 95 rating to this blog post.

 

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Facebook Business Pages – The Hidden Tabs – Can You Find Them?

Wow, it took me days to figure this out and I don’t consider myself a Facebook newbie at all. On business pages the new tabs are not tabs at all, here’s the lowdown. Underneath your cover photo are several text links that are spread out across the width of the page. Everyone gets a maximum of five links but you can change the order of some of the links. By clicking the down button on the very last image above the last link you can open an additional field that will show more apps and tab options.

Although Facebook calls these links tabs, they certainly are not. Remember when Facebook business pages first came out and you had real tabs at the top of your page? That was not so long ago and I liked the real tabs much better than this nearly hidden set up.  In fact, if you don’t have your own business page and just had a personal profile, you would never ever even think to open the list up or dig around to uncover these hidden pages.

When you do happen to click one of these five text links under the cover photo, you are taken to a mini website backend that is now a part of every business page. This hidden section is navigated by a drop down menu on the top left just to the left of the page’s name. Man, talk about hidden! All your apps and pages are stored in this drop down. This is the new place where your welcome page, promotion, notes, events, and the new like page now reside. See how long it takes you to find them when you migrate your own business page to the new timeline!

Based on what I see and how long it took me to figure this out, I would consider that these hidden pages will get very little if any real traffic. You can however link to many of these hidden pages if you create a Facebook advertising ad. It will be very interesting to see if big brands start to develop these hidden pages and how they will be using them. For now the new business page layout and Facebook page changes have simply caused serious grumbling and complaining in my industry.

I will reserve judgment on my end how I like these new changes, until I see if I get more or less interaction from fans. I like the visual appeal of the new timeline, but think that many of the changes will force business owners to move into Twitter and Google+ and abandon Facebook in the long run. Sorry Facebook, but I just don’t think that any business in reality is going to sit down and fill up the timeline from business inception to now and that fans will even care to read about that company history in the long run.

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Facebook Advertising Options

Along with the new changes that Facebook announced to the timeline for business pages on February 29th, was an announcement that advertising options would change as well allowing more pages to use advertising options that had only been open to really big advertisers. So far I have only seen a few changes in my advertising control panel.

For most business page owners, you will see the same advertising options that I see for my own business page, and this is due to fan base size. I see the option to do Facebook pay per click advertising or sponsored story advertising. The additional new option that I see in my account is that I can actually select a specific update to promote as an ad. The new created ad then allows others to like my ad or to share the ad. Liking the ad will show the ad and information on all their Facebook friends profiles as will sharing the ad. This is an important new viral way to get your message out.

I have not yet seen advertising on my personal wall or timeline, but Facebook tells us that it IS coming. At this time it appears that you can still do regular pay per click advertising and use an external URL for the landing page which is good news. New options now also allow you to select a specific tab in your Facebook business profile such as your resume, links page, notes tab, etc. as the landing page for your ad as well.

Facebook advertising is still a good value at this point, but my feeling is that you may get more value by actually advertising in the Google Display network than from Facebook at this point.

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A Real World Guide to Twitter and Facebook Featured at SiteProNews

On Monday February 27th, SiteProNews featured Nancy McCord’s newest research paper called “A Real World Guide to Twitter and Facebook on their home page.” You can read the full article at SiteProNews. The SiteProNews newsletter is one of the preeminent publications to the webmaster professional community and reaches over 600,000 subscribers three times a week.

In addition to publishing Nancy’s research paper on their website and sending it out to their 600,000 subscribers, the SiteProNews Editorial Staff has asked Nancy to write more exclusive articles for their publication on a monthly basis.

We are excited that Nancy’s most recent research paper has gotten this exposure and will keep you posted when she publishes additional articles for SiteProNews.