Category: Blog

Social Media & SEO Consultancy for Busy People Blog | Peter Bennett Dot Net

How To Get More Comments On My Blog, Part One

How to get More CommentsThere are a whole bunch of reasons why people often don’t get ‘enough’ comments on their blog – lack of exposure (i.e. not enough people actually finding and reading the blog), uninteresting content, lack of interaction with existing commentators. All of which are important issues which need addressing. This post however is more concerned with setting up an ‘optimum’ commenting environment to encourage people to comment and make it easy for them to comment.

Continue reading

The Benefits of a Small Business Blog

It’s become a mantra: “you need to blog” as a way of getting a better web presence, draw visitors to your site etc. Small business owners’ eyes can glaze over when they’re hearing this ‘I don’t have the time’ being the most common objection, and that’s a natural reaction. So I thought it would be good to look at the benefits a blog delivers in terms of some specifics.

Continue reading

How to See Through the ‘Big Company Website’ Facade

Big_Company_Website_FacadeI’ve been slightly and pointlessly riled recently by a couple of websites, examples of thousands out there, that appear to be companies with numerous employees having meetings in conference rooms etc, with wide ranging resources but which turn out to be one guy, perhaps outsourcing work to moonlighting colleagues or virtual assistants in remote locations or whatever. It is more prevalent in the range of IT services – web design, seo, hosting etc than traditional offline companies.

Often the website is pretty well designed with all the bells and whistles. I’d post some examples but frankly I don’t want to give these guys the oxygen of publicity! Anyway let’s dive straight in to identify tell-tell signs.
Continue reading

The How’s and Why’s of Working with Multiple Browsers

Why work with all the big browsers – Firefox/IE/Chrome etc?

The Hows and Whys of Multiple Browsers PicLike many people I started installing the various different browser types out of a) curiosity and b) the need to test websites I was working on using different browsers. Reason b) isn’t as strong as it used to be, the heavy lifting of cross-browser testing is now using ‘browser labs’ and reason a)… hey, not so much to be curious about now!

So… I’ve got a bunch of browsers installed, and y’know, I use 3 of them pretty much all-day, every day. Why?…

Continue reading

Microdata Semantic HTML Markup – A Quick Guide

Schema.orgGoogle, Bing and Yahoo announced support for Microdata as espoused by Schema.org. Microdata helps the search engines to understand the data entities that they’re encountering as they crawl html markup on sites. This helps the search engines get more accurate results for queries and present the results in a more appropriate way (that’s the theory, anyway). Will it actually improve SE ranking? Well, as the search engines gear up to Microdata it should do, I haven’t actually proven this yet but am gathering metrics. Given the current state of HTML editors and their use in the big name blogging and CMS platforms, plus the slowness of lots of people to update HTML code on static websites, for sure there’s an opportunity to ‘get the jump’ on the competition for some time to come by rapidly implementing it.
Continue reading

Keyword Analysis to Boost your Social Media Management

Keyword Analysis for Social MediaTraditionally, keyword research relates primarily to website and blog content. The same principles also carry over to Social Media – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube etc  This post looks at how they can be applied for your business, whatever that business is, on these platforms.

1. Researching keywords

First – researching keywords. You may have some already in mind, which is good, but you can quickly find keywords and phrases using Google Adwords keyword tool. A key point to bear in mind when looking for keywords is that we want to identify likely words which prospects will use when searching/querying for our product or service. As an example below I’ve started a search for keywords based on the idea fine perfumes…

Continue reading

What to do with your Facebook Page?

Facebook page like embed

The ‘best thing to do with a facebook page’ issue is up-in-the-air right now. There was always some ambiguity and the recent launch of the ‘subscribe’ button muddies things further. I’ll refrain in this post any of those ‘x is what facebook wants you to do’  There have been false trails before from fb and I think ‘pages’ is one of them.  In particular, for ‘solopreneurs’ and small business the benefits of going for a page likes over adding friends are dubious, and now that subscribe buttons are there, still more dubious.  A benefit of pages was held to be that they push the DBA or other name of the business out there, but that can be done on a personal profile and that’s made easier with the deeper profile picture which is now possible. On a personal note, I’m now in favour of personal name rather than business name for businesses that are, or start out as one-person businesses anyway.

Sooo… what to do with your page? You’ve slogged it around and got enough likes not to throw it away.  Meaningful discussions never materialized on the wall – maybe your client base is too small and uninvolved to hope to produce that.  Right now there seem 3 possibilites:

Continue reading