Technology
 Lee Kirkby on
Technology
Is a blog or RSS feed part of your company
communication plan?
Blogs and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) are two newer means to
provide personalized and company-based communication through the web. A
blog is usually a personal log or diary of the thoughts of an individual
on a topic or area of expertise. Wikipedia defines them like this: “A
blog (short for web log) is a user-generated website where entries are
made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.”
Rick Spence, the former editor of Profit magazine,
who writes on entrepreneurship at http://canentrepreneur.blogspot.com is
one blog I watch periodically. Through a blog a person can establish
their point of view on topics where they have knowledge to share or
opinion to express. They are usually much more personal in focus than a
typical web page and have frequent updates, often daily. A blog can help
you establish your personal expertise and obtain feedback from
interested people who read it and participate in dialogue about your
postings. CEO-authored blogs are starting to become popular as a way to
more informally deliver information from an organization.
A great way to stay on top of specific rapidly-changing
information
RSS feeds are similar to blogs, but they take the
need for you to log on to a specific location out of the process. With
an RSS feed you can subscribe to newsletters, blogs or even web sites
and have the updates from that feed sent directly to a piece of software
on your computer where the information is collected and displayed. This
RSS reader then provides you with an easy list of the articles or
material in the feed for you to review. They can be a great way to stay
on top of specific rapidly-changing information with less
administration. Many of the newer browsers are starting to have RSS
readers built into them. Windows Explorer 7 is one of these. If you
would like more information on how an RSS feed works you can go to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/rss/default.mspx.
What are the implications for business with these two
tools? First, they can make it easier for you to keep connected to key
opinion leaders in your industry, if they blog or provide an RSS feed
link from their site. They can potentially become a means for you to
disseminate important information or opinion to your own group of
listeners. They are one more electronic tool for helping to filter and
define the vast information flows that we all have to deal with each
day. Carefully and responsibly used they become one more vehicle for the
dissemination of important information.
(L. Lee Kirkby is Vice President
of Leppert Business Systems Inc., a Burlington based
company specializing in assisting companies with
better managing their important business documents.)
How Search Engine Optimization works—Part 1
The Internet has exceeded 100 million websites and more than 175,000
blogs are created everyday. The machine that used to catalogue these
sites, index them and rate their importance has grown up. In the late
90’s, search engines relied on a primitive database of keywords. There
was an honour system that said if your website had certain keywords
stored in the Meta Tags, it was indexed as such.
This system had two major flaws. There was no honour
on the Internet and after one hundred thousand websites on gardening,
the keyword “gardening” didn’t mean much anymore.
As time went on, the biggest development was the
storage capacity of search engines. The second biggest development was
the computers’ ability to make sense of a web page. In order for a
search engine to index 100 million websites, it needs to establish some
rules to create a reasonable index. The most reliable method of indexing
when dealing with so much data is relevance.
The major search engines of the world are no longer
as selective as they used to be seven or eight years ago. In those days,
if you submitted URL’s for consideration, people actually looked at
your website, or at the very least, a machine read your keywords and
your index page. It could take up to six months to be listed on a search
engine. Today, it can take as little as four hours for a new website and
as little as 10 minutes for an established major news site.
Web designers and programmers used to embed Meta Tags
and Meta Tag descriptions into their websites in an effort to increase
their chances of being picked up by the various search engines. In the
earlier days of search engines such as Yahoo and Lycos, smart
programmers would bury keywords in web pages by using the same colour
font as the background to achieve the same effect. As search engines
became and continue to become more intelligent, these and other similar
tactics no longer work and, in fact, hinder the ability to be recognized
by these search engines. Unfortunately Google has become the gorilla of
the search engine industry and its heuristic algorithms for indexing
websites has been more closely guarded than KFC’s seven herbs and
spices and McDonald’s secret sauce combined.
Given the above, no one has a crystal ball that can
make a website appear as the first non-sponsored website in a keyword
search on Google or any other search engine but there are a few things
that companies can do to improve their position by understanding some
simple concepts about how Google and others are evolving.
Simply put, search engines have been evolving into an
almost artificial intelligence entity. They no longer look for Meta Tags
or simple words buried in the content of the site to determine the
website’s ranking. Search engines now use relevance and popularity to
determine ranking. Therefore companies need to determine how to increase
both relevance and popularity to improve their websites ranking in
desired keyword searches. Although relevance and popularity are
considered mutually distinct topics they should be considered
symbiotically to build importance.
What does this mean to your business? It means
business. In a nutshell, if you have a $100,000 website that has 20,000
interlinked pages on automotive parts, a search engine is more likely to
consider your site a source of expertise which makes you highly relevant
and more likely to be on the first page of someone’s internet search.
JSY INNovations provides practical and tactical
marketing solutions that create identity, build awareness and increase
positioning by providing a unique service that addresses the fine
balance of web site/internet optimization with marketing for
small-to-medium-sized businesses. JSY INNovations uses Internet experts
who have created web sites for over 10 years and developed methods for
maximizing exposure to search engine algorithms using existing Internet
structure and web page content. Expertise includes consultation in the
hospitality, tourism, not-for-profit, computer chip, high tech and
semiconductor industries.
(Contact: Julie Sutton-Yardley, JSY INNovations
Phone: 905-633-8508, or visit: http://Hospitality-Marketing.blogspot.com
or Carl Bachellier, MRBACH PC, Phone: 905-659-4669, or visit http://carlbach.blogspot.com)
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