Transcript Chapter 2 - Faculty Web Sites

The term “-------” represents
media that users can easily
participate in and contribute to.
Forms include blogs, forums,
virtual worlds, wikis and
social networks.
Social media
Perhaps the biggest difference
between traditional (legacy)
media (newspapers, television,
radio, books, etc.) and social
media is the ---- and ---- nature
of the social media.
Dynamic &
flexible
The service noted in the
reading and class that is wellknow for tracking blogs is ---
Technorati
Traditional marketers are
accustomed to carefully honing
messages, allowing for control,
but difficult & costly ---- of
results. With social media,
control is shared with ---, and
feedback becomes immediate.
Measurement / ‘the
crowd’ (users)
Early positive cases
Mentos candy into Diet Coke
 Robert Scoble started blogging about
Microsoft
 March of the Penguins
 ITtoolbox Survey of 400,000 of its
members
 P & G ‘beinggirl community’
 Target’s “Dorm Survival Guide”
 “Dell Hell”

Early blunders
Kryptonite Locks
 GM ‘UGC’ ad for the 2007 Chevrolet
Tahoe
 “A Comcast Technician Sleeping on My
Couch”

Suggestions on social media
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Determine and measure goals
– efforts undertaken should be measured with the
same scrutiny as traditional marketing efforts.
– Same issue as traditional media

Offer value
– Don’t try to apply traditional messaging to an
environment that it doesn’t resonate in.
(shovelware)
– Take advantage of the ability to interact.
Suggestions on social media

Consider it a “conversation”
– Walmart failure of “Jim and Laura” traveling
across the country speaking with employees
who all love working for the retailer.
– ‘transparency’

Recognize the need to experiment
– Your social media project
– Ask for feedback and listen to what customers
are telling you.
Usability article last week:
Web page design &
Blog site design
Stick to the Rules
 Borrow
 You are Less Interesting Than you Think
 We will not go into detail about html, web
page authoring and such (420)
 We will address WordPress and similar

Usability article last week:
Breadcrumbs

Use Corresponding Labels
– Make sure your crumbs are called the same as
the corresponding location
 Aid Navigation, don’t replace it
 Don’t Link to Current Page
Usability article: Tabs
One of the only metaphors from the office
that work really well on screen.
 Best to only have one row of them.
 Short Labels
 Clearly indicate which tab is currently
active; color indication works best.
 Home Page Tab

Usability article: links

One of
SEO
 WordPress
blogs and web pages
Content
The only surefire way to great search
rankings is to create great, original content.
Search engines do not need, nor do they
reward, duplicate content.
 Be focused. Try to have a page dedicated to
each keyword or phrase that you’re trying to
rank well for. Use your keywords frequently
in the body tags of your pages.

Content

While you should include your keywords
frequently in the body tags, do not spam a
page by placing text in the same color as the
background or hiding keywords in places
that people can’t see. This is a way to get
banned from a search engine or be placed in
the supplemental index.
Page Titles
Page titles are extremely important for both
SEO and for CTR -- click through rate
 Page titles should contain no more than 5
words that are keyword-centric and directly
relate to what is on the corresponding page.
 Using more than five words in a page title
dilutes the strength of each word.
 Place important keywords early in the page
title. The first word receives the highest
reward.

Page Titles
Page titles are extremely important for both
SEO and for CTR -- click through rate
 Page titles should contain no more than 5
words that are keyword-centric and directly
relate to what is on the corresponding page.
 Using more than five words in a page title
dilutes the strength of each word.
 Place important keywords early in the page
title. The first word receives the highest
reward.

URLs
Search Engines take into account the names
of directories and files in each URL where
there is content. Keywords should appear in
the directory names and file names.
 Static URLs rank better than dynamic.
 If you’re going to use multiple words when
naming a file or directory use a hyphen, not
an underscore, between the two words.
Google ignores underscores, but views
hyphens as dividing two distinct words.

Two types of URLs
A dynamic URL is a page address that
results from the search of a database-driven
web site or the URL of a web site that runs
a script. Dynamic URLs are generated
from specific queries to a site's database.
 Static URLs - the contents of the web page
stay the same unless the changes are hardcoded into the HTML

Header Tags
Header tags should be used to let both the
reader and the search engine know what is
important.
 There should only be one of each tag per
page, with your most important keyword
appearing in the H1 tag and descending
from there in terms of importance.

Link Structure
How your pages link to one another is
important.
 Important pages on your site should link to
one another. If you have your site broken
into distinct sections, the main pages of
each section should link to one another.

Internal Links
Having internal links to pages to and from
one another is important. Even more
important is the anchor text used to describe
that link.
 The anchor text of each link should contain
keywords that relate to what is on the
following page.
 Having a link for a digital camera say
“Click Here” does less for SEO than a link
that says “digital camera”

Images
Search engines cannot “see” what is inside
an image. Therefore, most search engines
have a hard time properly indexing images.
 To have images help with search rankings,
use keywords in the filenames and
alternative text in the html to describe the
image.
 Also good to use captions near images.
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See more in reading
These are some of the issues you’ll see in
the reading about SEO
 Social Media in Plain English
 Personal Branding: What NOT to do
 What is Branding

Explain your online presence to us…