Before you put your fingers to the keyboard to start creating that profile, you should think through the main purpose of your profile. What is your main purpose and how would a LinkedIn profile specifically help you accomplish your goals? What audience are you trying to reach? Thinking through these foundational questions will help you accomplish your goals and develop a successful LinkedIn strategy. 11 tips for creating a successful profile: Grab your personal url and add that to your e-mail signature. Here's some steps to doing that: http://www.handshake20.com/linkedin.html Make sure you have listed your correct website and e-mail address (use your corporate account). Add links to your twitter account and company blog (if applicable) LinkedIn recommends the following strategy as you think through your profile's headline (the section that appears at the top of your p...
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When I first learned of Pinterest, I had little interest in it. Another social networking website? No way - I already wasted enough time on Facebook; I wasn't interested in joining another social outlet. However, I eventually found myself suckered in and clicking around on the website. When I began to think of Pinterest as not only fun but resourceful, I was sold. I am a pretty average Pinterest user: 25 (ages 25-34 make up the largest percentage of users), middle class, bachelor's degree ('some' college is the highest percentage of users at 60%, which makes me think that many of the users are still in college), and oh - yeah... female! (Women make up 80% of the user database). I use Pinterest to plan weekly menus (with my husband hanging over my shoulder giving his recommendations by pointing to photos of bacon-this-or-that), to learn how to take care of my young gar...
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When discussing SEO, it's impossible not to at least think of Google. Why? Because Google engineers invented the concept of "SEO" and also its “rules.” By “rules,” I mean the algorithms that determine which websites land on the first page of the search results. Lately, Google engineers have honed in on the concept of "freshness," or placing greater emphasis on returning the freshest web content for most queries. So now you're probably wondering: what makes a website fresh? Here are 7 important elements to focus on as you manage your site. 1. Date of inception. The inception date is the first time Google indexes your page, or puts it into its database of pages. Unfortunately, the inception date degenerates over time. So, the older a website is, it lessens in freshness. It might go without saying that if your site was created over 5 years ago, you may be due for a websi...
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Google is making headlines again, as they begin to reveal information about the next generation of their search engine. Google is trying to stay on top of the search market, which includes competitors Bing, Yahoo, Apple (now with Siri), and certain aspects of Facebook. In coming weeks, you should begin to see snippets of change in the way search results are provided. Google will start favoring sites that have more relevant content vs. sites that are simply overly optimized. While you don't want to wait to start optimizing your site to Google's new standards, top execs at Google say (source: The Wall Street Journal ) that it will actually be a couple of years for its changes to be fully in place. What will the new search engine look like? Google's plan is to provide increasingly relevant search results. For example, if you do a search for a set of home audio speakers, ...
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In today's world of online shopping, search engine results are critical for nearly every website owner. After all, "googling" has become a new verb in our vocabulary, according to most dictionaries. The majority of the populace first turn to a search engine when they are seeking information on a product or service or looking to buy. With our game-changing CMS product, Backstage, we have made it easy for you to cover all your basics in optimizing nearly every part of your website for the search engines (SEO). Here are 4 simple steps you can take today to create an optimized site. 1. Create a keyword-focused page title. It's simple to create your own keyword-driven page titles that will help you rank better in web searches. After logging into Backstage, and clicking on the page you would like to optimize, click on the "Optimize for SEO" option on the right-hand panel of...
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The blogosphere is abuzz this month because Google has unveiled an "update" of sorts to it's search engine, called "Search Plus Your World." The basic premise of the new search platform is that Google will combine the regular search results that we are used to with personalized search results based off of your Google+ social networking account. Graeme McMillan, at techland.time.com, gives a pretty good breakdown of the specific "changes" here, but I'll also list out some of the new features for your benefit, based on his info: -Personalized search results based on your Google+ information -Auto-complete prompt based on that same Google+ information -Google+ promotion on the right-hand sidebar of your search results page (for example, linking you to Google+ conversations about your search query) Don't fret: you can apparently turn off the option to have your search per...
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Search Engine Optimization is a hot topic in our industry right now. Our clients seem to have become more aware that they need some sort of SEO for their website, but they are not always sure what constitutes good, productive SEO practice. In our experience and research, we have become aware of two major players in SEO: keywords and functionality. Keywords seem to be a well-known component of SEO. The idea with keywords is to identify what a potential customer might plausibly type into a search engine if he/she were looking for your service/product. Many website owners already know to use meta-tags on their homepage with relevant words relating to their product/service. However, there is certainly more depth to using keywords to generate traffic than just meta-tags. "The best keywords are words and phrases that are being searched, but that may have been overlooked by ...
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