New Site Media Group

2012 ALCEA Mid-Year Presentation on Paid Traffic

Steinar — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:28:57 +0000

Thanks to everyone who attended my session on paid traffic.

Here’s the link to download my presentation: http://bit.ly/wEFDsH

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Keeping Momentum in Social Media

Steinar — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 20:58:09 +0000

Here’s a good article from Corporate Executive Board on the realities and best practices of executing a social media platform in your company …

While many companies are enticed by social media, most struggle to sustain successful initiatives, particularly when it comes to utilizing new mediums to mobilize their workforce. Companies recognize social media’s potential as a powerful tool for internal communications and thus move forward yet fail to get the anticipated employee-participation levels.

via Keeping Momentum in Social Media – BusinessWeek.

In my experience it comes down to strategy & engagement. The tools and channels will change – that’s a given. It’s your strategy and the level with which you can generate buy-in that impact success.

How Search Engines Rank Web Pages

Steinar — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 23:13:38 +0000

Search for anything using your favorite crawler-based search engine. Nearly instantly, the search engine will sort through the millions of pages it knows about and present you with ones that match your topic. The matches will even be ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first.

Of course, the search engines don’t always get it right. Non-relevant pages make it through, and sometimes it may take a little more digging to find what you are looking for. But, by and large, search engines do an amazing job.

As WebCrawler founder Brian Pinkerton puts it, “Imagine walking up to a librarian and saying, ‘travel.’ They’re going to look at you with a blank face.”

OK — a librarian’s not really going to stare at you with a vacant expression. Instead, they’re going to ask you questions to better understand what you are looking for.

Unfortunately, search engines don’t have the ability to ask a few questions to focus your search, as a librarian can. They also can’t rely on judgment and past experience to rank web pages, in the way humans can.

So, how do crawler-based search engines go about determining relevancy, when confronted with hundreds of millions of web pages to sort through? They follow a set of rules, known as an algorithm. Exactly how a particular search engine’s algorithm works is a closely-kept trade secret. However, all major search engines follow the general rules below.

Location, Location, Location…and Frequency

One of the the main rules in a ranking algorithm involves the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Call it the location/frequency method, for short.

Remember the librarian mentioned above? They need to find books to match your request of “travel,” so it makes sense that they first look at books with travel in the title. Search engines operate the same way. Pages with the search terms appearing in the HTML title tag are often assumed to be more relevant than others to the topic.

Search engines will also check to see if the search keywords appear near the top of a web page, such as in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text. They assume that any page relevant to the topic will mention those words right from the beginning.

Frequency is the other major factor in how search engines determine relevancy. A search engine will analyze how often keywords appear in relation to other words in a web page. Those with a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than other web pages.

Spice In The Recipe

Now it’s time to qualify the location/frequency method described above. All the major search engines follow it to some degree, in the same way cooks may follow a standard chili recipe. But cooks like to add their own secret ingredients. In the same way, search engines add spice to the location/frequency method. Nobody does it exactly the same, which is one reason why the same search on different search engines produces different results.

To begin with, some search engines index more web pages than others. Some search engines also index web pages more often than others. The result is that no search engine has the exact same collection of web pages to search through. That naturally produces differences, when comparing their results.

Search engines may also penalize pages or exclude them from the index, if they detect search engine “spamming.” An example is when a word is repeated hundreds of times on a page, to increase the frequency and propel the page higher in the listings. Search engines watch for common spamming methods in a variety of ways, including following up on complaints from their users.

Off The Page Factors

Crawler-based search engines have plenty of experience now with webmasters who constantly rewrite their web pages in an attempt to gain better rankings. Some sophisticated webmasters may even go to great lengths to “reverse engineer” the location/frequency systems used by a particular search engine. Because of this, all major search engines now also make use of “off the page” ranking criteria.

Off the page factors are those that a webmasters cannot easily influence. Chief among these is link analysis. By analyzing how pages link to each other, a search engine can both determine what a page is about and whether that page is deemed to be “important” and thus deserving of a ranking boost. In addition, sophisticated techniques are used to screen out attempts by webmasters to build “artificial” links designed to boost their rankings.

Another off the page factor is clickthrough measurement. In short, this means that a search engine may watch what results someone selects for a particular search, then eventually drop high-ranking pages that aren’t attracting clicks, while promoting lower-ranking pages that do pull in visitors. As with link analysis, systems are used to compensate for artificial links generated by eager webmasters.

Emedding Youtube Video Options for Your Website

Steinar — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 18:52:28 +0000

YouTube Videos

The cleanest option is to create a video pop-up from within your text (click here)

However, you may wish to create a pop-up from an image, such as this (click on the image)

Creating a pop-up version of your YouTube video is a great option if you want a more streamlined look and feel to your site, rather than intruding on the flow of the text with large blocks of video. It’s also great if you want to reference a video to make a point but readers don’t necessarily have to see the video to understand a specific concept.

Pop-ups with shadowbox format such as this is also considered more cutting edge and elegant to some due to it’s departure from the standard embedded video options provided by YouTube and other video hosting services.

YouTube Embedded Video (click on video below)

Embedding your video is the standard approach to including a YouTube video on your site. There are many options, including size, color, and framing to create an attractive appearance that meets your taste and website style.

Standard (Medium) Size

Smaller Size

Joomla 1.6 – a great CMS for building online communities

Steinar — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 04:30:12 +0000

It’s no secret that we’re huge fans of Wordress, primarily due to its ease of use for those looking to blog, sell some stuff online, or build a loyal following of fans.

Joomla on the other hand is considerably more complexm not only in it’s capabilities but ease of use as well. Once thing that impresses me is the ability to deploy a robust online community portal wherein users may register & participate in the site experience in a much more integrated and meaningful manner vs. WordPress.

The community behind the open source content management system Joomla released version 1.6 earlier this week.

Along with WordPress and Drupal, Joomla helps make up the group of “big three” open source CMS applications. According to statistics from W3Techs, Joomla powers 2% of the web and holds 11% of the CMS market.

Joomla is used for front facing and internal sites for companies like eBay, Citibank, General Electric, IHOP and more. With Joomla 1.6, the goal was to make the package more user-friendly and powerful.

via Joomla 1.6 Offers New Features for Designers & Admins.

Let us know if your company is considering a new site design. Joomla might be the right solution for you.

Apple Mac App Store Screencast Walk Through and Review

Steinar — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 19:23:33 +0000

The new Mac App Store is finally here …

http://www.apple.com/mac/app-store/ With the Mac App Store, getting the apps you want on your Mac has never been easier. No more boxes, no more disks, no more time-consuming installation. Click once to download and install any app on your Mac. The Mac App Store is now available as a software update for any Mac running Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

Google Search Considerations When Optimizing Your Content for SEO

Steinar — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 18:00:49 +0000

When people search on Google there are a variety of results shown, including Local, News, Images, Video, Blogs, and Real-Time social media content.

To maximize your website’s exposure it’s important to understand the implications of optimizing your content for SEO to appear in several of these categories simultaneously. For example, instead of just showing up in the standard website index, you might also drive significant traffic from Images, Blogs, or News.

Depending on your subject and niche, I recommend you start by picking two or three of these categories to start. The simplest is blogs. Setup a free blog at wordpress.com or blogger.com and start writing. Link to your website and pages within your website. Include your keywords in your content. Include at least one picture in every post and populate the title, description and alt tags with your keywords. This tactic alone should increase your search engine traffic.

If you have a physical location go to google.com/merchants and register your company with Google Local. This will enter your address and company information into the Google Business directory and possibly land your listing in the Google Local results set when someone searches for your business. This is important since most users click on the Google Local listings before scrolling down to high ranking organic results.

Advanced users should consider optimizing for video as well. Upload a few videos to Youtube, which is owned by Google. Include your keywords in the title, description, and tags within the video post. If your video is well ranked by Google, you might actually secure the #4 position in Google search results, which they reserve for videos.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. What do you think? Are these good strategies to consider for DIY SEO?

How search engine traffic stacks up and what this means for your internet marketing strategy

Steinar — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 14:00:00 +0000

Much has been speculated about the future of search engine marketing, especially with the increased reliance on social media networks to find more relevant information from trusted sources.

A review of the search engine landscape illustrates that the market for search is still tremendous on a global basis. Google search leads in total number of searches and maintains a market share leadership position.

If you are looking to revamp your search engine marketing strategy consider focussing on Google. Most of the optimization techniques you apply will have a positive impact on your ability to rank well in less popular search engines, such as Yahoo and Bing.

Use WebsiteGrader.com to check if your site is Optimized for Search Engines

Steinar — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 00:00:32 +0000

To check if your site is optimized for search engines I recommend you start with a free service called WebsiteGrader.com

This service uses the following criteria to grade your site based on millions of other sites previously reviewed:

Content

Blog Analysis
Blog Grade
Recent Blog Articles
Google Indexed Pages
Readability / Grade Level

Optimization

Metadata
Heading Summary
Image Summary
Interior Page Analysis (3 pages)
Domain Info (Age)
Crawl Date
Inbound Links

Promotion

Delicious Bookmarks
Twitter Links
Twitter Grade

Conversion

RSS Feeds
Conversion Forms

Check out websitegrader.com for more information.

September Workshop at PVCC: How to Cost Effectively Drive Audiences To Your Website

Steinar — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 18:37:27 +0000

I’m very excited to host an upcoming workshop at PVCC. If you’re in Charlottesville and would like to learn hands-on how to drive traffic to your website, please register!

How to Cost Effectively Drive Audiences to your Web Site
Thursday, September 30, 9 a.m.- noon
PVCC Stultz Center for Business and Career Development
Instructor: Steinar Knutsen

This workshop is designed for marketing directors, business owners and senior sales pros that need to make their web sites centers of revenue growth. This important and timely three-hour workshop led by industry experts will give you the knowledge and step-by-step techniques you need to succeed online, including how to:

Drive people to your site for FREE using organic search engine marketing
Target and interact with clients-to-be on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook
Quickly tell if your site is search engine friendly and how to fix it if it isn’t
Use a blog or publishing platform and a publishing strategy to attract qualified visitors

Chamber Member Price: $42 (Class Nbr 58984) Register now

Non-Member Price: $65 (Class Nbr 58983) Register now