There’s so much social media going around that it’s hard to know which trends are worth spending your time on and which ones will fade away before you can say Google Wave. (I just got my good-bye to Google Wave letter this morning). Google+ is taking the world by storm, and this one looks like it will stay.

I love social media, but it’s just so hard to stay current and connected on all platforms. I told myself that I wasn’t going to invest too much time in it until Google+ started supporting business pages. Well they have, so I’ve been having a good time trying to figure it all out. Business pages are a lot like fan pages on facebook, but there are some important differences.

Only one person can be an administrator of a Google+ page. Facebook allows for multiple administrators. That means that unless you’re willing to give out your gmail password to the person that want to administer the page for you, you have to do all the posting to the page yourself. This can be a real bummer for larger companies that have multiple people running their social media campaigns. On the other hand, that means when people like Guy Kawasaki post something on Google+, it’s probably actually him.

There is no way to schedule posts on Google+. Facebook and twitter allow you to use tools like Hootsuite to schedule posts. Not so with Google+. Everything has to be done manually. To be successful with it and engaging, you need to log in to it at least a few times a day. On the other hand, that means when people like Guy Kawasaki posts something on Google+, you know that he’s actually online the same time that you are, and it’s easier to engage him.

There is no way to stylize your page so that it stands out in a crowd. With Twitter you get to play with the background of the page. With facebook, you can have a large logo and use welcome pages to let people know why they should “like” you. At least for now, every page on Google+ looks basically the same. You brand it with a square shaped logo, but that’s it.

There are fewer people on Google+ than on Facebook. That said, Google+ is growing in popularity (not like Google Wave) and has done a lot of things right to make it a very successful social media platform. They have taken what’s best in both Facebook and Twitter and have created a really fun platform that has been catching on like wildfire.

• It’s a live feed (twitter)
• You can add people to your circles (follow people) even if they don’t friend you (twitter)
• You can have posts that are longer then 140 characters (facebook)
• You can share pictures and videos without needing to open a new browser window (facebook)

Circles is another brilliant thing that Google+ has that facebook seems like it’s experimenting with now. By adding people to circles, you can share content that is relevant to them and not to others. In my personal Google+ account, I have circles for geeks and for anipals. I share my geekier posting with the geeks and the cute cat videos and animal welfare articles with my anipals. It’s great because I don’t feel like I’m spamming the wrong group with information that they could care less about.

I have a page for The Pet Wiki. On that, I share everything publicly. I figure that if you decide to add The Pet Wiki to your circles, you must be expecting to get pet stuff, otherwise you wouldn’t have added it to your circles in the first place. Another good reason to share things publicly is that the public posts get indexed by Google. Who couldn’t use some SEO help? I’ve seen some of my Google+ posts show up in search results. Not the pages that the posts point to, but the Google+ pages. That’s reason enough to be on Google+.

It seems like there’s a bit of mayhem going on with Google+ pages. As far as strategy goes for getting people to find your page, there’s a few ways to do it. Pages can’t put people into their circles, but they can put other pages into them. Find pages that fit your niche and add them. Share their stuff. Comment. Interact. People who have those pages in their circles will see you too. Write good comments, and you may get noticed by others and those others will add you to their circles as well.

Make sure to add people following you into your circles. If you don’t they won’t show up in your stream and you have no way to interact with them. No one wants to be in a one sided conversation. That’s not what social media is about.

Make sure to let other people know about your Google+ page. If you have a following on twitter and/or facebook, let them know that you now have a Google+ page too. Some may not have made the move to Google+, but others may have. It’s a good idea to share the information.

Another good way is to display a link to your Google+ page on your website. The +1 has been around for a while and a lot of people have started adding that to their sites. Now is the time to put a link to your Google+ page as well. I had fun adding it to the skin of The Pet Wiki. I’m very pleased with how it came out.

I would say that Google is Google and you know that it’s going to be big, but on the day that they announced the death of Google Wave, that just seems silly. This is different. With Google+ they didn’t try to create something new. The took existing platforms, copied them and made them better. I have totally joined the Google+ bandwagon. I hope to see you there!

Creating Valuable Original Web Content

There has been a lot of talk about content lately. Well it isn’t really lately, there is always a lot of talk about the importance of content. Heck, without it, the internet would be a very boring place.

Recently Demand Media and Answers.com have been on the hot seat for being content creation engines. Demand Media has the audacity of creating content that people want to read just so that they can sell ads. Well, duh. There may be some newspapers and TV shows that fit that description too. They are in the business to make money, just like most of us. If they want to help people, by giving people the information that they are looking for, who gets hurt?

I get it, people are worried that content is not going to be written by professionals. That only people who are considered experts in a subject have the right to express themselves and make money from it. By systematically creating content for consumers, the whole idea of expert goes out the window. Demand Media is using the global market of freelancers to get people for far less than the experts get. Is the content lower quality? I’m not sure.

Demand Media isn’t doing anything wrong. They actually have pretty high standards for their content. There’s nothing wrong with “farming” content, as long as you have checks and balances in place to assure what’s getting written is accurate. Demand Media does.

I think that the experts are grasping at straws, trying to figure out ways to protect their statuses. I totally get that. If there’s not much of a learning curve to become an expert, what does that leave them? Don’t worry guys, there will be people who will look for you too. And for those who don’t, there’s plenty of pie to go around.

Most content out there is not life and death content. If it is, as the content consumer, make sure that you check where your sources are coming from before you act on it. You wouldn’t accept medical advice from someone whom you just met on the street. Why would you accept it from someone that you haven’t met and that you can’t even see? Don’t rebuild your motorcycle engine with me. But though I haven’t tried it, an article I write about building motorcycle engines is unlikely to get through Demand Media’s quality assurance.

Some people say that in the world of search engine optimization there will be more low quality content. Sorry, I think it’s the opposite. There’s always been bad content. There have always been middle men who try to connect you to content, and whose interests aren’t totally aligned with yours. Google’s not perfect, but they’re probably the best company we’ve ever had at connecting people to quality content. If Demand Media is really low quality, their success on Google will be temporary.

Who am I to talk about content? I worked at Answers.com as the Director of Content. I am now running The Pet Wiki and having fun building quality content there.

Get Found

I’ve been working on SEO this past week. The Pet Wiki is a pretty new site, and needs a lot of work to increase the page rank so that it will show up higher in search engine results. One of the best ways to do that is to have others link to the site. Search engines figure, if other people trust you enough to give you a link, shouldn’t they? I spent a lot of last week submitting The Pet Wiki to online directories. It’s not the most fun job in the world, but it’s a necessary part of the process to get your site recognized. Here are some tips that I’ve learned along the way:

• Finding directories – There are so many directories out there, it’s hard to know where to start. Get a list and stick to it. A friend of mine showed me a tool that helped me keep things in order. The best list that I have found so far for submitting sites to free directories is SubmitHelper.com. They have a tool that you can use to go through all the directory sites and submit your link. If you don’t want to use the tool you can browse over to the list that they have compiled (with links) and go through them one at a time.
• DMOZ 1st – The best directory out there is DMOZ or The Open Directory Project. This is the place to be. Whatever directory list that you are using, if it doesn’t include DMOZ, something is wrong. DMOZ has everything you can imagine. I had a problem figuring out where to place The Pet Wiki becase you can’t submit sites to the Pets category. I opened an account and asked a question on the forum. They got back to me within an hour with the answer. ODP is a community of people that really care about what they are doing. They want to get it right and are happy to set you in the right direction.
• Describe your site – You are going to be asked this over and over again. Make sure that you have a description that fits your site. Try to make it to 200 characters. Some sites allow 350, 500 or unlimited number of characters, but most limit you to 200-250 characters. Keep it on your clipboard and paste it in as needed.
• Do a little digging – I have a pet site – how do YOU classify pets? I’ve found the pet category under science, entertainment, society, shopping, home and garden and recreation. I like it best when I find the Pets category under the Family category. It gives me a nice warm and fuzzy feeling to think of my kitties as part of the family. Each directory categorizes their topics differently. Search around for the one that suits your site the most.
• To Pay or Not to Pay – Most of the directory submission forms have multiple options, including pay, reciprocal list and free submissions. Why pay? Because directory owners will review your submission sooner and place your link higher up in the directory. By paying, you will get you site submitted from anywhere from 2 hours to 2 weeks. Don’t pay, and you could wait indefinitely to get your site reviewed. There are hundreds if not thousands of directories out there. If you pay for all of them all, you could go broke. Be selective. Choose the directories with the highest page rank and/or the highest Alexa ranking. Pay for those. Submit all others for free. As far as reciprocal links are concerned, I all the external links on my site are “nofollow” and useless to the directories, so I don’t do it, but feel free to try.
• Be patient – You spent all that time submitting links to directories. Now what? It takes time for the links to get posted and even more time for search engines to recognize them. It might take a couple of months to reap the rewards. Hang in there.

One last thing – I suggest putting on music you love while you do the submissions. It can get a bit mind numbing after a while. Music just makes you happier and makes the time go by faster. Turn it into something fun.

I’d love to hear your take on directory submissions. Have your experiences been the same / different?

I was at a talk on SEO recently where I was told that you need to do sitemaps. Google will be able to index your site 4x’s faster if you put them up. Unfortunately I have not seen this yet on The Pet Wiki. I put up a site map a couple of weeks ago, but I’m not seeing a big improvement. According to Webmaster tools, 160 out of 390 pages have been index, but when I check site:www.thepetwiki.com on Google, I only get 65 links. What’s up with that?

According to this expert, it is very important to have people link to you. To do this, you need to have good content. OK, I get that. But if you aren’t on Google already, how are you supposed to get people to find you so that they’ll link to you. I feel a bit like I’m in a Catch-22. I’m sure that I’ll figure something out.

Meanwhile, my mom has finish writing about Horses. We are jut a few images and videos away from making that section complete. She said that she’s ready to start attacking new dog breeds. When she finishes that, she’ll be off to pet illnesses. She started on that a bit, but there is a bunch more to do.

The truth of the matter is that there is always more to do. That’s what makes it fun! I can’t wait until I have time to really start playing with the interface. I like the Cavendish skin. It’s nice, but it’s not all that appropriate for The Pet Wiki. I’m sure we’ll get there eventually.

I still haven’t been able to find anything about redirects since we got the Simple URLs up on The Pet Wiki. Most of the links to the site (that I know of) come from this blog. I’ve gone through my old blog posts and modified the urls. I hope that what I did didn’t kill the page rank. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. The most popular page on the site (not including the home page) is the one for the American Stratfordshire Terrier. I’ll keep my eyes on it and hope for the best.

A While back we created sitemaps for the site. I updated that too. I was expecting to see the new URLs in the search results, but I guess that it will take time until that happens. The old links still work, so at least people will get the page that they are actually looking for. I’ll cross my figures…

It took a bit of doing, but we finally got the site to use Simple URLs instead of that ugly title=[Page Name] on our MediaWiki (The Pet Wiki) based site. It wasn’t that difficult after we found the solution, but it took a ton of time to find it.

Since the site is on GoDaddy, we are unable to get to the root directory to make modifications. There is a page in the MediaWiki manual that says what to do (Manual:Short URL/wiki/Page title — GoDaddy Shared Linux Subdomain). We followed the instructions, but it still didn’t work. After looking all over the web in vane, the discussion page for the manual had the answer. You need to add

$wgUsePathInfo = “/”;

to LocalSettings.php as well.

The old URLs seem to still be working. The next question is how do you do 301 redirects for the old URLs out there? We keep looking for an answer, but haven’t found anything about it yet. On the one hand, the Simple URLs are better for SEO, but on the other hand, are we going to lose points for having multiple URLs to the same content. I’ll keep looking for a solution…

It’s a lot of fun to see how the site is progressing. For a while now, looking up “pet wiki” or “wiki pet” has done well and brings up The Pet Wiki homepage, but now we are showing up in the top ten on Google for American Stratfordshire Terrier. It is even going to the right page, and not the random page, as it was before. Things are moving along really nicely.

We are also starting to get traffic from Europe. We even got one look-up from Taiwan. I haven’t been able to figure out what look up comes from which country. I’m not sure how analyzing that would help, but it would be interesting to know.

My mom has really been at it. She has almost completed writing pages for all the dog breeds on the list and only has two left. Her latest loves are Beagles. She wrote the entry for Beagles a few days ago and has added a bunch since then. Considering that she hasn’t latched on to another breed, it must be love.

I’ve been playing around with redirects on her site. It won’t have any SEO affect, but it should make for a better user experience if a user does a direct search. If a user looks up Sheltie, they with now get to the Shetland Sheepdog page.

My daughter has gotten into the act as well. She has created a logo for the site. It’s not the final logo, but it’s a good start. It’s a bit ironic that the dogs are almost done, but it’s a picture of a cat. We recently got her a digitizer, and she’s doing amazing things with it.

The link that I put a few posts ago was short lived. Although Pekingese is no longer in the search results, the number of links went up from 7 to 11. Most of those links are pages for other links, but some of them have real content. That’s new. For pages on Chesapeake Bay Retriever I can search for a string of text inside, and it turn up in Google.

Another improvement: doing a search for “wiki pet” or “pet wiki” has The Pet Wiki showing up in the first 3 or 4 links. That’s also new. The progress is slow, but it’s definately there.

Just to give a quick update, the link that I put in my last post about the Pekingese has now been indexed by Google. I have no idea how long it will stay, and I also have no idea how to keep the rest of the animals in there. I think that we are going to try buying Google Adwords to increase traffic. As soon as my mom finishes all the dogs on the list, we’ll try it out.