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Why Create An Infograph?

Wed, 02/20/2013 - 21:18 -- by John Cashman

Why Create An Infograph?One of the latest fads going around design circles is the use of the infograph. An infograph is simply a visual design that tells a story using statistics. But other than design appeal, why create an Infograph?

Sharing is Caring

Maybe it’s because they are one page, or they are pretty colors or tell a story very quickly, but a lot of people like infographs. Because people like them they share them on Facebook, Pin them to their boards on Pinterest and Tweet them out. Pinterest is one of the best examples of why infographs can really help website traffic and SEO. The infograph we put up on Reputation Management a week ago already has 46 repins.

Links Baby Links

Another reason infographs are great is links. While they are easy to share via social media, infograph sites like http://visual.ly can show a large audience your infograph. The Reputation Management infograph that was put up last week garned 3 inbound links back to our site and has been viewed over 1,000 times. Because infographs are pictures, it’s very easy for them to be embedded into other sites which gets you links back to your site. Links back to your site create better SEO

Show your knowledge

Infographs let you show what you are an expert on. We did a infograph on Reputation Management because it’s one of our services. But there are many subjects like cooking bread or how to hit a putt or fashion that could be subject for infographs and provide a quick bit of thought leadership to your brand.

Never Quit

Sun, 02/03/2013 - 23:21 -- by John Cashman

Never QuitOne of the lesson's from last night's Super Bowl. 

Never quit.

While the Niners didn't win and came awfully close to pulling it out, they never quit playing the game until the very last moment. It's a lesson anyone in business can appreciate. You can't just quit, you need to work at it every day, and deal with the blows when they fall. Those blows will include people who don't pay, deals that get delayed, sick days, and plain old crazy days. But to be successful, you have to always remember.

Never quit

Great game tonight. I wish it could have been a different outcome, but I am proud the Niners didn't quit and that's a business lesson worth remembering.

Google Authorship Drives the Need for More Original Content

Mon, 01/28/2013 - 09:03 -- by John Cashman

Google AuthorshipQuietly, Google has introduced a means for individuals to verify their names on the blogs they contribute to. This is important because it gives Google a means to verify the authorship of the original article and promote it above sites that may have aggregated or copied the original.

In order to verify your authorship here is what you need to do.

  1. If you don’t have a Google + account. Register for one.
  2. Sign in to your Google + account and make sure you have a headshot in your profile picture. This is what people will see in the search results, so ensure its something you want other people to see of you and isn’t a picture of puppies, dogs, or embarrassing pictures
  3. Go to https://plus.google.com/authorship
  4. Add your email address and click verify
  5. You will receive and email from Google where you verify your account

Allow for a few days for the authorship to process through Google and their search results.

Once again, we can see that Google is continuing to use Google + as a means to improve its core search business.  Google has seen click through rates 40% higher when there is a picture attached to the article.

This lends weight to the argument that Google + while it remains a rather empty social network, is becoming more important for companies and individuals who create content to have and use a Google + account, if only to ensure that content can be found in search and rank high.

Why Facebook Search is a game changer

Tue, 01/15/2013 - 22:03 -- by John Cashman

Facebook SearchToday, Facebook announced that it will start rolling out search. On first glance this might not seem like such a big deal, after all there already is a nice little search box on Facebook already. However, graph search is an entirely different search for things on Facebook. 

Presently the Facebook search box does one thing well, it helps you search for friends or people you might want to friend. It helps you answer the question, what ever happened to______? Once we find those people we are able to connect with them and start to share our lives. The next step in that relationship is going to be powered by Facebook search. And it let's you ask A LOT more questions

What graph search will be able to do (so we are told) is to search though all your friends activities from when they have been on Facebook and come up with a list of things you may be looking for. Think about it this way, it makes everything you and your friends and their friends' activities searchable and discoverable. For example:

  • People - People who live in my city and likes to hike, or people who live in my city and are single, or people who like to fish, etc.
  • Pictures - Look for a particular picture taken on a particular date or of a particular object like the Sydney Opera House
  • Places to go - Stuck in a city - find a place people in your circle have been and recommended
  • Movie, Music and TV show to watch - what shows are big with your family, close friends, or their friends? 
  • Services - Looking for a dentist? See who has recommended and how many dentists have a lot of "likes"

The search results that come back are the recommendations within Facebook. Unlike Google that redirects you to another site from its search results, Facebook wants to keep you in their walled garden a little longer. Also, all of the information in Facebook is not publicly available and is unique to you and your circle of friends which may make it a better source of "local" knowledge than Yelp or Google.

Facebook is making a big bet that the data they have been collecting will be able to inform those searches. If the search comes up empty, then Bing which is a Facebook partner will search the web. My guess is that more most things it will not come up empty. They just have too much information on what people have done over the last few years. 

What this means for marketers and business is still a little foggy as the product is brand new and will likely be improved in the months and years to come. However, what we can surmise, is that marketers and business that have invested in Facebook should be rewarded early as they will appear in search results and most likely higher in each result based on likes, the posts they made, check-ins and recommendations. Those businesses that have not invested or ignored their social media are going to be forced to play catch up in a hurry so they can get ranked in Facebook searches. 

It is not surprising given the number of ex Googlers at Facebook that they have made search a priority. Over the next couple years, this search will improve. What any business should keep in mind is that just like SEO for a website, they will need to be vigilant about their social media and particularly Facebook. Ensuring you spend time on Facebook every day or pay someone to do it for you will ensure your business is found soon via Facebook.

What is Exact Match Domain penalty in Google and how to fight it

Sun, 01/13/2013 - 22:54 -- by John Cashman

EMD PenaltyOne of the best parts about being an SEO company is when Google changes their algorithm to something new. This invariably causes a number of sites who have used shady SEO or put their eggs in one basket to all of a sudden drop in the search rankings. One of the latest changes to the Google search algorithm is something known as EMD, or Exact Match Domain. 

EMD refers to the use of a possible search term for your website's URL.  For example, howtoinvestinstocks.com is your URL. "How to invest in stocks" is an exact phrase that someone might type into Google when looking for financial advice, so Google could be penalizing a site with and exact search phrase in the URL - seeing that as an unfair advantage over other sites offering financial advice which don't use this practice.  While it may not be intentional, there are sites out there which name their domain after a search phrase in order to get found on Google.  EMD is just Google's method of cracking down on these sites.  

However, if you do have a site with some exact search names, you can still overcome a penalty simply by following usual SEO best practices

  1. Make sure you have plenty of legitimate links coming back to your site. While an EMD penalty might take away your advantage, having more links than your competition can get you to the top of the search rankings.
  2. Use social media to your advantage. In our experience, the people who tend to get hit with penalties don't use social media so they aren't getting their sites out there for people to consume them.e 
  3. Keep your site up to date by adding at least one piece of original content each week and then send it out via social media
  4. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Too many times, we have seen people lock in on one keyword only to find that later once Google makes a change they lose all of their work spent trying to outsmart Google.

As we start 2013, it's becoming clear that Google is not being shy in weeding out every low quality site technique out there to grab traffic. By creating content regularly, investing in social media and a legitimate linking strategy, will make sure you aren't penalized in the future.

 

Site speed, Image Cache and location in SEO and websites

Sun, 01/06/2013 - 22:16 -- by John Cashman

Recently, we moved our site and our clients' sites from Hostgator to Linode. We did this for two reasons: speed and localization. Beyond just moving to Linode, we also configured the websites to do a better job to cache images so the websites load faster. By increasing the speed of the site and the localization, we believe the sites will not only perform better, but also get better SEO results. 

Site speed or how fast a site load has both direct and indirect SEO results as well as direct results of the consumer experience. With Google's Panda update, one of the changes in the search algorithm was to take the site's speed into account when ranking sites. Speedier sites move up and slower sites move down. Google also measures bounce rate from search results and will push websites down that have high bounce rates from search because it is an indication people have not found what they are searching for. Therefore, by increasing the site speed less people will bounce away due to a slow website. Using Pingdom, we were able to monitor our sites and along with some clients who don't have their sites on our servers and we are able to show that moving to a better facility increased our site speed.

Stats for hosting

Looking at some of the stats above for clients not on our servers, you can see that they are wasting up to one second of load time on just getting the server to respond!

The second reason we moved to Linode was due to its proximity to our offices. As search becomes more localized, we feel its important for people to have their site as close to their core customers as possible. We believe this helps not only because lag time has decreased, but also because Google takes the local IP into account as people search.

Once we had moved our servers, we started to look for better ways to cache our images. One of the main drivers in site speed being slow or fast is how many images are on the page and whether or not those pictures are large files or small files. Using an image cache we are able to tell a browser to download our images that are used on every page like our logo. When the user asks the browser to go to the next page, the browser doesn't have to request the image again and can load that much faster. This takes load off of the server because it isn't doing repetitive tasks and everyone using the website gets a site that loads faster. The second thing we did was look at each individual page in Google Analytics to see which page loaded slowly. Typically this was due to many images being on the page or an image that was not optimized meaning it was over 200 kb in size. Saving those files so they are smaller in memory size but not actual physical size helped use reduce the load time on those pages.

While we still have many more images to optimize and more tuning to do, the first month's results speak for themselves with the avg. page load time decreasing by 46% and the avg server response time decreasing 62%.

Improvement in site speed

 

 

 

 

 

Digital Firefly Marketing Announces New Reputation Management Service

Thu, 12/20/2012 - 12:30 -- by John Cashman

Reputation ManagmentDigital Firefly Marketing is pleased to announce the availability of their Reputation Management Service. Reputation Management monitors the name of brand or individual for news and reviews, and in some cases works to counter information of a slanderous or libelous nature.

With organizations and individuals at the mercy of the 24/7 online media, it is critical for an organization or individual to monitor news, reviews, blogs, etc., for unflattering content and even outright lies. Reputation means everything in the online world and it only takes a few steps to destroy what an organization and/or individual has spent years building and cultivating.

Consider the following statistics:

“Reputation Management is a service that will provide a tremendous amount of value for our customers,” said John Cashman, President and Founder of Digital Firefly. “Many organizations are not aware of the potential damage that can be caused by a negative reputation. We are able to help monitor what’s being said about someone and recommend steps that can be taken to correct any negative content.”

Digital Firefly’s Reputation Management Service includes the following:

Digital Firefly's Reputation Management service is available to customers both domestically and internationally. 

 

 

WordPress v. Drupal

Tue, 12/18/2012 - 19:36 -- by John Cashman

Drupal v. WordPressAlmost every site we build is in Drupal, so invariably we get questions from people about how it stacks up against WordPress. First off, WordPress is a great Content Management System (CMS) that allows people to create compelling websites very cheaply and easily, but it does have its limitations that should be realized before any build. So a couple of things about both WordPress and Drupal.

  1. Themes - WordPress has some awesome themes that you can buy. So if you aren't a designer, it might be beneficial to buy a WordPress theme and roll from there. However, Drupal has a number of base themes like Omega and Fusion that create a very customizable framework to build some pretty cool sites.
  2. Time to launch - A WordPress site can be built very quickly, usually inside of a few hours if you know what you are doing. Drupal sites can take a bit longer because there is more functionality that needs to be configured and themes to be developed.
  3. Content Types and Permissions - Here is where the two systems start to separate. Drupal is really good at detailing what content people can access and what content people can't access. This makes it much easier to set up a system with multiple users where a lot of content is cordoned off
  4. APIs and Web Applications - Where Drupal really shines is in the development of web applications that people can use to do all sorts of things both simple and complex. While at JAGTAG, our entire backend ran on Drupal and we have had really good experience developing using the APIs and using modules like Ubercart to increase the functionality.

Every company has different needs. Understanding those needs and finding a content management system to manage it is really the decision you will need to make between Drupal and WordPress. 

 

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