Last year, we have witnessed how Facebook shifted to Timeline. We have heard and read several opinions about the change; some are bad and some are good. I was too amused by my Timeline that I stopped listening to the negative opinions and gave it a month try. And I ended up staying with it (I don’t have any choice anyway). By that time, I started to think what about the Pages?

Just today, I received an email from ShortStack. It is an announcement of their applications readiness to a possible shift of Facebook pages to Timeline. I for one, having several Facebook pages owned and maintained, felt quite a little worried as I use tabs and other applications for my social media campaigns. Last month, I remembered talking about this possibility to a friend and now I am seeing it rolling out slowly.

So what do we expect here?

1. Your old tabs will still work on the new Timeline though it might not look good as the Timeline will be using 810px of page size rather than the usual 520px. One of my pages displayed a tab on timeline but it was centered. ShortStack says their application now supports this.

2. That you can now put a Cover Photo for your page (company) which should be 815 x 315 px big. Not so fast though, I know what you are thinking with this but before you go and proceed with working with your cover photo consider this post.

Here are the sizes for your guide:

Cover image: 815x315px
Profile picture: 180x180px
Custom apps: 810px wide
Custom app icons: 111x74px

3. Unfortunately, you can no longer set default landing tabs with the new timeline for non-fans. Thus, you will no longer have the same options as before leading your fans to subscribe your page and then will be directed to a page where they can get coupon codes and other perks. However, ShortStack said fan-gating will still be an “option” as “visibility settings are still alive and kicking.” Their suggested reading on how to use the new design.

4. Other applications will also be added to pages with this new Timeline implementation. As of posting time, I saw that one of my pages already has an enabled “Messages Tab” but I still don’t know how I will be able to send to it. It currently has no messages yet.

5. Because Timeline is still on the mid stage of development, there are still several bugs that they still need to fix. One problem encountered is when you like a page on Timeline, it does not refresh. You can view your page on Timeline but it could be great if you don’t activate it yet. To give you more ideas on what they are working now refer to the developer’s page.

That’s it for now and I give you this video:

More information or questions follow me on twitter and twit in your insights.
Joseph Glenn Austero Jr.

And just before this week ends, I was yet greeted by an article by Distilled and Content Marketing Institute about last year’s announcement of Coca Cola of their move from creative ideas to content marketing. Tom Critchlow tackled bright and sound ideas about the “hotness” of content marketing right now and how we should harness and use it on our own campaigns. He cited there, how other sites and brands had already moved toward content marketing and its power. From that the post he shared 4 things that we can learn out of these things about content marketing. Read his article so to know about the four takeaways as I will not talk about them here.

Moving back to Coca Cola, their ideas shared in the videos below for me is unprecedented and purely out of the box knowing the reach they already had with their brand, the magnitude of their market and the age of the company. It made me think that, why Coca Cola, as a big and reputable company, would really invest in the thing us SEO’s are using with our very limited source of funding to keep creative people from beating off every limit and our skilled hires to get off their usual targets. I am even puzzled at the thought that Coke is trying to overpass its competitors in terms of SEO when in fact even without SEO they can surpassed even non-competitors when SEO is concerned.

So, are the ideas shared here worth using on SEO? Oh, yes it is. In fact many of the ideas present in the videos are the same ones we have been doing and using for years already. And storytelling, engagement, and interaction are the principles us SEO’s are cored upon. We made content in so many different ways and manners trying to get the attention of people and lead them to whatever it is we want them to be led to. However, as I mentioned last year in my previous post about Panda, “content is no longer king; great content is.” So the challenge here is for Coca cola is for them to create these stories in a way that passed the guidelines for their own measures of greatness. It has always been a challenge for us.
The problem with us most SEO’s is that we box ourselves and our ideas into a certain notion that we can only work and our efforts should only be confined into the normal changes and trends of the “Search Engine.” I believe though, that all things on the net are now conspiring and becoming interconnected. Look at how social media transformed social sharing. Look at how videos captured the limelight of the once on the realms of the boob tube. Things evolve and our reaction to this evolution as SEO’s is to adapt.

How can we be able to win this content marketing era then? I have set some suggestions here that we can do. Shoot a comment if you have other ideas to share.

1. Think out of the box. We need to think differently. I see content marketing as something unlike a bow and arrow where you can only set to a particular target. Content marketing for me is more of a Gatling gun that shoots bullets into different direction at a speed of who knows what. Content marketing is a big thing for me and I look at it in a bird’s eye view rather than in a perspective view. Looking at it this way allows me to venture to different opportunities that I can exploit to win my objective. When I linkbuild, I always think that what I give people are good choice of content that they can consume and can share. Yes, it’s good to have a better link profile and great number of links, but we are missing the point when we don’t give ourselves a shot at the thinking that in one way or another, our link building efforts can simply become void when we miss the real objective we have. It’s like saying that instead of following the trail of the search engine; why not make a way so search engines will follow your trail because of the amazing interaction and engagement that instead of just a link pointing to your site, they can sense real people talking about your product or visiting your website and all. The video below about enlightenment just speaks of the things about it.

2. Harness ideas, put them into action and be confident about it. When Steve Jobs regained controlled of his company Apple in the mid 90’s, he don’t have the most unique idea. He is not about to build a breakthrough gadget. He will reinvent most of the existing gadget available to man. But what he did was to still pursue with his idea, put it into action and confidently faced the people about his reinventions.

3. Be responsive, use disagreement and turn it into neutral playground. I always do this to gain the approval of my clients. By presenting people something can disagree about, you can share something of an idea that will look good to unite the disagreement eventually leading them to agree altogether. On many of my Facebook campaigns, I always tell my point persons to never delete or ignore negative comments as it can be used to draw answers and eventually turn it into a positive thing. For content marketing, it’s always good that what we do will always tackle the interest of the people we want to target and often, we use some forms of provocations in order to deal with their disagreements that often come out to be a better way to solicit conversations.

Content marketing has been around for quite a number of years already but its peak potential like other campaigns on SEO are still not yet reached. So, I agree with Tom that content marketing is now and if we don’t start do this now we’ll reap much failure in the future.

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Joseph Glenn Austero Jr.
JGlenn Austero

We strongly got back to the ranking on the 3rd week of February and have been slightly affected by the Panda Algorithm. However, many of the primary keywords of PulseUniform have showed significant increment as far as SERP is concerned.

Eventually, I have observed that every keywords of PulseUniform had not been submitted to the same avenues. I considered “medical scrubs” and found out that mostly of the off-pages where this keyphrase is on, are article submission sites. I wondered then why “medical uniforms” and “medical uniform” take a good place on SERP despite these keywords being used too on article submission sites. My guess was that, these two keywords have a good and diverse back link base and considerably high on-page optimization rating.

So, with these changes Google implemented, we were left with questions like where are we going, what should we do, and what do we expect to happen?

I have two expectations on the latest algo update:

1.    I expect that Google will not revert back the algorithm in order to favor those authority sites that have been affected, it will never tweak a portion of the algorithm so to automatically give exemptions on already affected websites, and it will be impossible for it to manually consider and put exemptions on every website that might attempt to apply for exemption.
2.    I expect that Google will surely upgrade and update their algorithm in the coming weeks; it will use other metrics and will consider other signals that will satisfy previous algorithmic changes, and it will surely affect our rankings.

With these two expectations what options are left for us?

It is good to first take a note on what some experts say about the update and here let’s take a look at Rand Fishkin’s (SEOMoz) observations.

“Based on these, we have some guesses about what signals Google may have used in this update:
•    User/usage data – signals like click-through-rate, time-on-site, “success” of the search visit (based on other usage data)
•    Quality raters – a machine-learning type algorithm could be applied to sites quality raters liked vs. didn’t to build features/factors that would boost the “liked” sites and lower the “disliked” sites. This can be a dangerous way to build algorithms, though, because no human can really say why a site is ranking higher vs. lower or what the factors are – they might be derivatives of very weird datapoints rather than explainable mechanisms.
•    Content analysis – topic modeling algorithms, those that calculate/score readability, uniqueness/robustness analysis and perhaps even visual “attractiveness” of content presentation could be used (or other signals that conform well to these).”

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-farmer-update-analysis-of-winners-vs-losers

Here are the things that I think we should be considering now after the algo update:

1.    Content alone is no longer KING

With the current trends and changes, content is no longer king. What is king then? Good and original content submitted to “good” sites. Good sites would mean any website that is currently having good SE traffic as far as SE is concerned and are basically algorithmically considered sound. For now, we cannot acknowledge www.ezinearticles.com to be a good site because of the current changes but later on, things might simply change. The problem with EzineArticles is that, it accepts reproduction of articles as long as submitted by the same author. Bad thing is that, Google’s new algo may no longer count multiple submissions under originality signal. But we cannot get relevancy without content farms or article submission sites. So with these, what are we going to do? My take is this: We will still consider article submission sites to be important sites but multiple submissions to different must be avoided. This would mean that, submitting one original article to different sites should be minimized. We must also avoid those article submission sites that are known to be the source of many “article syndicates” or the so called “scraper sites.”

Here is my interpretation on the Farmer Update as far as content farms are concerned:

a.    Algorithms to be effective, it must answer logical questions that can be measured automatically without so much of human intervention. Remember that there are only two answers that can be answered by algorithms, TRUE or FALSE. If you are technical enough to understand, these two words are represented by the numbers 1 and 0 respectively. There are factors that I consider to be important in this new algorithm:

1. Content originality and relevancy – content originality may be measured by the number of content reproduced (as far as G SE algo is concerned). Please refer to number 3 and 4 for some explanation and observation about originality and relevancy.

2. Time and date of submission – considering the new capability and speed of Google Instant (the new spider of G that carries with it the algorithm) time of the submission and the date it was submitted can now be taken in a short time. Thus, time and date is a viable signal that can be measured that allowed me to consider it as one of the important factors regarded by the Panda Algorithm.

3. Number of times the content has been submitted to different sites – this is where originality comes into picture. If in a span of 24 hours (this is just an estimate) one has submitted 1 article to say 30 article submission sites, the version of the copy that has been published first I believe will be considered by G as the original. All the other articles that will be published within that 24 hour frame or whatever time frame it might be, may be considered by the algo as mere copies. These copies may no longer be indexed and links to the source may no longer be credited.

4. Number of times content has been reproduced over a certain period – this is where relevancy I believe comes into picture. If a particular article will be reproduced by another website or an article submission site, it will be counted as relevance though this can only happen after a certain period of days or weeks. While this guess is not that plausible, relevance or importance of the article can be measured up not just by the number of reproduction but also by the number of backlinks(tweets, facebook share, SB’s, etc.) an article post has. So your judgment is important on this signal.

5. Site ad architecture – I got this theory on Fishkin’s comparison between EzineArticles and eHow pages. On the part of EzineArticles, it hosted several boxes of advertisement in almost all of the corners of the article page. eHow on the other hand has lesser ads on pages. Matt Cutts, during the debate between Harry Shum of Bing and Richard Skentra of Blekko last Feb 2, 2011, said that they are not considering ads as factor in their algorithms and that includes ads Google serves. So is the new algo now discrediting sites with ads on its pages? My answer would be no. Ads are great and they are not being considered by Google as spam (they too have ads being served). However, taking the example on EzineArticle pages, it seems to me that, having 4 boxes of ads that speaks and tells you about the same products is simply not a good idea. One box of G Ads is just fair as far as G SE is concerned.

If you are not comfortable using article submission sites just yet, submitting to other websites that stores articles into other formats is a better alternative. For example, we can use www.scribd.com to publish e-books in PDF formats. We can upload powerpoint presentations to www.slideshare.com without the worry on being syndicated (embedding the .swf from SlideShare can be considered syndicated in other terms but not with the SE’s). Other options would be submitting to “winning” websites like www.ehow.com.

2.    Social Media sites are now considered a good market place

By the end of 2008, the power of social media had been discovered. The successes of www.facebook.com, www.twitter.com and www.myspace.com paved way for more opportunities in business. www.youtube.com on the other hand had become the authority on sharing video after it has been purchased by Google. There are also other video hosting sites like www.vimeo.com that are comparably successful as YouTube. So what do these things tell us? While most of the social networking and media sites follow piously Google’s rule on using the rel=nofollow attribute on links, it does not necessarily mean that sites like these are no longer effective in marketing. Remember, links may not always come directly from these sites to your site; most often, they come from the people that has been impacted by the media and networking sites.

So how will we be able to use social networking and media sites in our campaigns? I thought of one thing. What about allowing all our employees create their own accounts on these sites and let them make friends with as many as they can. Demographics at this stage are not yet important. So how will they be able to utilize media and networking sites? We will make resource contents in the form of white papers, DIY articles, video tutorials, slides, podcasts, and issue/opinion responses and we will let our employees share all these materials to their friends on facebook, myspace, and twitter. The resource contents may not necessarily be uploaded to our banner website in order for it to be effective. For one, we can make use of other data hosting site to upload our resource contents and then we’ll just get the embed code or the page link of the content.

The technique I enumerated above is the other form of linkbuilding. This is what I considered an indirect linkbuilding campaign wherein we as marketers will create a brand – the PulseUniform  for example– in order for people to link to it naturally.

3.    Social Bookmarks, Blog Comments, Forum Posts, and Directory Lists are still useful tools

I do not want to start a debate here about good or bad practices in SEO. Many will surely dispute that using these types of campaigns will definitely mirrors low quality campaign but no; I still am positive that these types of campaigns when used properly will yield positive effects both for your marketing and link building efforts.

Unlike those usual flooding and spamming on blog comments and social bookmarking sites, our approach should now be more inclined with marketing than purely linkbuilding in its corrupted sense. Creating a network of friends by commenting or by targeting specific audience in SB sites should be a primary concern when doing this campaign. However, I greatly advise to still use keywords for anchor texts but only on a very sound judgment thereby preserving network and not jeopardizing the marketing campaign.

4.    Mentions are becoming effective too

The term “mentions” is basically what we call the word of mouth. As we think more of branding, then mentions are an effective tool. These do not actually get the juice or the credit to your site but they do get attention from the search engines. This works best using networking sites and other sites that has a healthy community interaction.

5.    Do not shift to other approaches that fast yet

We know about it already that any abrupt change in whether positive or negative is considered by Google as something not cool. So, while we move towards some refinement on our campaigns, slowly doing it and still maintaining the momentum of the old ways should be highly considered.

Nobody would dream about a messy and spam saturated net. No one would ever wish to land at an auto parts site after searching for cheap computers. I totally agree with how Google initiates cleaning up the web as the market leader and I equally laud Blekko and Bing for becoming that vigilant. So while we have made some submissions to content farms in past, we do not regret having used them to share our ideas and our services to people who might need them. One thing that I am so proud about our campaigns done using the content submission was that, all articles we submitted to these sites are all original and well written.

This is another challenge from Google that we have taken into serious consideration and we are dedicated to be on track to comply not just with Google, or Bing, or Blekko but to our clients and clients-to-be in terms of transparency and good practices.

Joseph Glenn Austero Jr.
JGlenn Austero

But a study conducted has unleashed a rather ironic results of Twitter. The survey has been initiated by a Toronto based social media analytics company Sysomos. The study focused on the posts made from August to September 2009. Researchers found out that 71% of the posts were left not replied and not retweeted making it comparable to a waste posts. A post from Sysomos reveals some figures that will leave you thinking whether Twitter is still that useful in your marketing or it is now the right time to go back to the old schemes. Here is the video that will show the relationship of a Twitter post to the retweets and replies with small dots being the tweets.

watch?v=xuxxzndapIk&feature=player_embedded

Joseph Glenn Austero Jr.
JGlenn Austero

I visited a local bank website through a Samsung phone and I was surprised that I was actually using a mobile version of the site. To add to my amazement the website was as secure as the normal one. It allowed me to access my e-account using my found and I have transferred funds from my account to my Paypal.

Facebook, twitter, and many other social networking sites are now becoming as accessible by making mobile versions of their websites. Why is there need for you to create a mobile website then?

The answer is simple. You need to have a mobile version of your site so users can access your site through a mobile phone without them thinking about the resolution or the download time they needed before they can fully see your site. Mobile versions contains lesser scripts and nodes that makes it more faster to load than a normal website. Mobile versions can also be redesigned in a way that the resolution or the template design is just exactly as big as most screen of current smart phones.

So in your projects, consider creating a mobile version of your site so your site can still be browsed even by using smart phones or similar gadgets.

Joseph Glenn Austero Jr.
JGlenn Austero

By 2009, there had been spreading rumors that within a year, there will be a catastrophe that will again affect the world computing system. This time, it has something to do with the internet. The talks were about the increasing usage of IP addresses. Many reports states that the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses will come short by the end of 2011 depending on the number of people using it. Many people are panicking about the issue as there might be a real catastrophe when IP addresses are no longer available.

Not too quick though, tech people and other engineers have been so patient enough in explaining the range and the possible effects of this online phenomenon. To begin with, they started by explaining what is IP and how it works. IP addresses are unique combination of numbers in binary form. This serves are the individual number assigned to every unit or computer in comparison with the phone number. This also serves as a unique access point to the hardware that uses internet. The current version of IP addresses we use these days (in fact since the 80’s) is known as IPv4. The IPv4 can handle exactly 4,294,967,296 of unique IP addresses annotated in dot-decimal notation in four octet form. Reports said that almost all of that 4 billion plus IP addresses had been already in use. When all IP addresses provided through IPv4 has been used there can no longer be any movement as it has reached the limit. But late 90’s, this problem has already been foresaw thus the conceptualization and eventually creation of the IPv6 paved way. Contrary to IPv4, IPv6 is in dotted hexadecimal notation also in four octets. Because it is annotated in hexa, IPv6 can handle 4 times more addresses than IPv4 or 2¹²⁸ as the former is represented in 128-bit while the latter is 32-bit. The problem however is that the IPv6, according to many articles including this, is still in the infancy period and is not yet totally implemented in all systems and hardware units. IBM is one of the big companies famous to have retained its IPv4 notation for their units. But big companies such as Google and Apple are already implementing IPv6 in their system. When IPv4 addresses become used up, the problem is that many will no longer be able to use the internet when IPv6 is in full utility already.

There are things ISPs are doing right now; like serving dynamic IP addresses so they can save up with the static ones. Many companies are doing a sharing scheme wherein an IP address is shared in two or more units – that is when one unit is not in use for the internet then the other one can.

In conclusion, there is nothing so destructive with IPv4 depleting as there are already present solutions laid. It would just take for some adjustments that we hope would be available soon.

Joseph Glenn Austero Jr.
JGlenn Austero

We are the same people with the same objectives. We do your projects faster than a second; sleeker than silk.  And we come out again in public with new perspectives and new approaches, thus the birth of the new SleekDesign we have.

We are hoping that you still come with us with our next journey. Thanks and let us keep you as our inspiration to move forward and explore the whole wide web.