One of my personal passions is sustainability. I firmly believe that if we each commit to doing what we can to change our eating habits, and consume more local, seasonal, and ethically grown/raised foods — we can change the world. Since you didn’t come to this site to see me preach from my little soapbox, I’ll get to the part where Google’s new “My Maps” feature comes in.
My friends know that food is a passion for me, and many of them want to make some efforts to eat more local foods — but they don’t know where to start. They do know that I seem to buy a lot of my food at local farms and small producers. When they asked me if I’d create a list of resources for them, I decided to do it using Google Maps. That way, they would not only be able to see where I shop, but also the locations, get directions, and all kinds of other great information. (Check out the Map)
I found that it took me all of 45 minutes to create my custom map of the Washington DC region, and was able to use icons to denote the different types of resources. I was also able to add details, links to websites, and a few pictures. Another great feature is that Google Maps now has a Google Earth export (KML). This is an incredible way to give anyone a virtual tour, and a few non-profit organizations and small business are making great use of Google Earth already.
Whatever your passion, take a look at how to use Google Maps and Google Earth to share it in new and engaging ways. What I’ve done is only a small amount of the customization that is available and easy to do right on Google Maps, so get creative and share your world!
It seems like one of the basic tools of search engine optimization (SEO) is falling through the cracks, when it’s become more important than ever. I’m really surprised how many sites, are failing to deploy unique titles and descriptions on every page of the site. While there is debate in the SEO community about how search engines, and Google in particular, make use of the description tag — it’s critical for solid interactive marketing.
Why you ask?
Let’s put the basics of good search engine optimization aside for a moment, and look at the new reason to care: social bookmarking sites. All those sites that you see under the “share this” link on my site and so many others — that’s why you care. When you click on a social bookmarking link, it pulls the page title and description. If it’s blank — you leave it to the visitor to fill it in. If you’ve pre-filled it with helpful, accurate information — most people just leave it be. If you fill it with inaccurate, self-serving crap, a lot of people will change it.
Still don’t think it’s important? Well, here is a screen capture of what I got when I tried to bookmark an article on blogging giant Shel Holtz’s site. Can you tell what article I was looking at? Can you tell what category of the blog I’m in? Me neither? Now, I have to type in everything myself or decide how much I REALLY cared about this article and if I still want to save it for later reference.
Now you may say — who really cares? So, CarlenLea’s bookmarks won’t be snazzy for her. Hmmm…okay. But what about the search and visibility value here? Social bookmarking sites provide those lovely in-bound links we all love. People like me share my links with hundreds (or thousands) of other people. So, do you really want to just let me write my own message here, or would you like to guide me a little? I’m actually really shocked that this fell through the cracks with some like Shel Israel.
Let’s look at Social Media Optimization guru Rohit Bhargava’s site and see if he missed this important little tidbit. I’m actually crossing my fingers here, because I really respect Rohit and he knows his stuff. So I’m going to be happy if his titles and descriptions are really optimized for social bookmarking.
But, sadly — they aren’t. Rohit’s are better than Shel’s but, it’s still a generic description not article specific, and the name of the article comes after the name of the site. Okay — that’s really just personal preference, but I really like to have the post title first on blogs. And very weirdly, some has added additional HTML text to the description which then appears in the description field of the bookmark. I have no idea where that bold and italicized text is supposed to appear.
This makes me very sad, and here’s a frowny face to prove it.
So, now I’m going to put my site up to the test. I’ve installed the “All in One SEO Pack” plugin for Wordpress, so it should be pretty decent. I’m using the last article I wrote, which apparently wasn’t interesting enough to merit any comments — but that’s an issue for later discussion.
Hey look at that! (to the right –>) Custom titles and descriptions on article pages! Now, I know perfectly well that my title is too long by search optimization standards, but I can live with that.
So what have we learned here? Social media optimization and search engine optimization go hand-in-hand. The same rules really apply. Develop high quality content and pay attention to those titles and descriptions. Not only is Google using them as a way to see if you have duplicate content, which is bad, but they also matter because of all those thousands (millions?) of people who use sites like social bookmarking sites like:
So figure out how to get article/page specific titles and descriptions on EVERY page of your site, and be sure to spend 10 minutes reviewing SEO best practices for title and description tags so you are sure to get the most benefit out of them.
This is a new find that I discovered while seeing if anyone else had written about a new idea I’ve had. Not only did I find no one writing about this idea (yeah!) but I stumbled upon SlideShare.net. And of course, Rohit Bhargava and Jesse Thomas already were there, which is great because Rohit had posted this great presentation! (below)
While tooling around on the site I also notice that over 4,000 people have viewed this presentation. 4000. Got that?
If you give good PowerPoint, SlideShare.net could be one of your best ways to prove your expertise online. That is, if you give good PowerPoint — and most of us don’t. But, if you have a killer presentation and aren’t afraid to share it. Post it to SlideShare.net and let me know! I promise I’ll give it a look, possibly a mention, and give you my honest opinion on it.
Linkedin.com is a professional networking site. Think of it as where you go after Facebook. Or if you’ve never heard of Facebook, think of it as an online, ongoing networking event. Most of the people I know who have joined LinkedIn, including me, have then sat there staring at the screen saying, “now what?” Part of that had to do with early adopters being presented with few options other than job hunting. Now that’s all changing, and LinkedIn has a variety of new tools for ongoing business networking.
One of the issues with LinkedIn, is that it does require you to understand the basic value of networking. As bizarre as it may seem, I’m actually quite bad at it — except online. So LinkedIn has presented me with a challenge up until they started having the new “Answers” area. Now I get it. Now I can see what questions other people have and engage them in conversation. That, I’m good at. The new Firefox and Outlook plugins that now let you see how you are connected to the people who email you, is adding a whole new interesting social networking element.
I also find that just seeing how other people choose to present themselves professionally on a site like this is helpful. How do they describe their jobs? What interests, both personal and professional, do they post? Who else do they know? How many contacts do they have? Can they possibly know all of those people or are they just big LinkedIn whores? I also like seeing who’s hiring and what the jobs are. It’s not that I’m looking, but that I like to see what’s happening and what kind of jobs are developing. As someone who spends a lot of time looking at information and analyzing trends — you’d be amazed (or not) at how much you can learn about a company or industry by who and what they are hiring.
So dive in and get started on LinkedIn.com. Give yourself time to get over the “now what” phase, and see what you can do. If nothing else, it’s a great way to establish a professional presence online.
The timing couldn’t be better. Yesterday, I talked about Flickr, and one of the few things missing from Flickr is photo editing. You can use the resizing features, but that takes a little more know-how, and it’s only default sizes.
Margie over at EcologicalHope.org emailed me this morning about a problem she was having, which turned out to be related to her posting images that were just too big. So I went digging in my Ma.gnolia archives to find the online photo editors I’ve been collecting, snipshot.com being one of my favorites. Then I see SnipShot profiled on Craftzine today, and well, I decided that it was fate telling me to share this fabulous resource with others.
One of the biggest problems people have when they first start their own website or blog is photos and images. It’s an entirely different tool set for people. Understanding the formats and optimal physical and file sizes for images can be more complicated than I usually expect, and frankly most photo editing software is ridiculously complex for civilians! That’s where handy tools like SnipShot come in. I recommend it to my social media coaching clients and to my clients at CDG. It’s really one of the easiest ways to edit your photos for online use, and let me stress this — it’s for online use — not print.
I love that it now has a Firefox plugin and works with Flickr. That just makes it even better and easier to use. Seamless integration between different services is a hallmark of Web 2.0 — give a little and get a little.
Learn how to create connections that work. I’ll guide you through the world of sites, techniques and technologies and walk through what they are, who uses them, how you can engage on them effectively and honestly.
Twitter Me This:
Twitter Me This:
Through the Years
This site has been through many iterations since I first launched it in the Summer of 2000. Every iteration since 2001 is actually captured in the Internet Archive.
One of my personal passions is sustainability. I firmly believe that if we each commit to doing what we can to change our eating habits, and consume more local, seasonal, and ethically grown/raised foods — we can change the world. Since you didn’t come to this site to see me preach from my little soapbox, I’ll get to the part where Google’s new “My Maps” feature comes in.
Let’s put the basics of good search engine optimization aside for a moment, and look at the new reason to care: social bookmarking sites. All those sites that you see under the “share this” link on my site and so many others — that’s why you care. When you click on a social bookmarking link, it pulls the page title and description. If it’s blank — you leave it to the visitor to fill it in. If you’ve pre-filled it with helpful, accurate information — most people just leave it be. If you fill it with inaccurate, self-serving crap, a lot of people will change it.
Still don’t think it’s important? Well, here is a screen capture of what I got when 
Let’s look at Social Media Optimization guru Rohit Bhargava’s site and see if he missed this important little tidbit. I’m actually crossing my fingers here, because I really respect Rohit and he knows his stuff. So I’m going to be happy if his titles and descriptions are really optimized for social bookmarking. 
So, now I’m going to put my site up to the test. I’ve installed the “All in One SEO Pack” plugin for Wordpress, so it should be pretty decent. I’m using the last article I wrote, which apparently wasn’t interesting enough to merit any comments — but that’s an issue for later discussion.
