Are you still bound by the old ball and chain that is Microsoft Outlook? I have a love-hate relationship with it. As an email marketer the word “Outlook” makes me cringe because of the challenges it presents to HTML email rendering, yet I’ve been steeped in using it for business communication my entire professional career. When you become accustomed to something it’s hard to give up, which is why I wasn’t surprised to find out that I’m not alone!  I should point out that we switched our mail servers over to Google Apps for business months ago, but I’ve been using Google Apps Sync for Outlook.  Despite the strong encouragement of much smarter people, I most certainly do NOT want to give up Outlook. But with support and encouragement from fellow Data Dogger and Outlook junkie Zina Harrington – we’re going to give it a go!

Taking baby steps, all of next week Zina and I are ditching our beloved Outlook for our business correspondence to exclusively use the Gmail interface. There is a good video with some tips that will help ease the transition over on the TechRepublic blog like turning off conversation view and using labels and filters.  Are you still reading email from Google in Outlook?  Will you join Zina and I during our #OutlookInterventionWeek?

Tweet #OutlookInterventionWeek

Join us by tweeting about it using the hashtag above, or let us know what grinds your gears about the Outlook/Gmail transition in the comments section below!

Follow @MikeKissel

I would never label myself as a “coder” or “programmer,” I can get by with basic code to make my blogs work, but that’s where the story ends. It’s an area I’d like to improve upon so when I saw this GOOD article about Etsy providing scholarships for women who were accepted into the summer Hacker School program to learn or improve their programming skills, the story received a double fist pump from yours truly.

Programming is undoubtedly a male-dominated profession, but Marc Hedlund, Etsy’s VP of Engineering, acknowledges that men seem to use a site like Etsy in a different way than women. With such a female dominated user-ship (thousands of women sellers selling to thousands of women buyers), it only makes sense to want to add women to his programming team who might approach the user-experience differently.

As a handcrafter-blogger with a day job in digital marketing, the partnership of Etsy and Hacker School seems like a natural fit.

Etsy Seller :: LilikSha

So what’s the deal? Etsy will be handing out $5,000 scholarships to 10 women that get accepted to Hacker School in NYC. Why? While there are already efforts being made to reach girls at a younger age to generate interest in programming, Hedlund wants to see change sooner than that.

Sadly, the deadline is past for applications for the summer program. But you can sign up for notifications for the fall by going through this grants page.

Etsy is not the first to take notice, there’s also “Girl Develop It” which offers female-oriented coding classes as well as other small groups popping up worldwide. I look forward to seeing more programs develop (and hopefully join in soon!).

What do you think about the imbalance of Dave-to-Girl ratio? How would the internet be different if women designed it? Leave a comment.

I am one smitten kitten.

Data Dog Zina’s Blueberry Mojito

• 1 heaping handful of fresh (or frozen) blueberries
• 3 mint leaves
• 2 TB simple syrup
• 3 TB lime juice
• Club soda or Sprite
• Bacardi Rum

Directions: Smash the blueberries and mint together using the back of a spoon. I prefer frozen blueberries because the skins are softer. Add lime juice, simple syrup, desired amount of Bacardi (shot and a half or so), stir and top off with club soda or Sprite. YUM.

This recipe is “Mama’s Medicine” after a day of creative work during the dog days of summer. The catch? Fresh mint is quite pricey. Last year I decided I’d simply plant mint & enjoy leaves as needed. I was warned by multiple people to be cautious of where I plant because mint spreads like a weed.

My seeds never materialized. Does this feel like social marketing to you? You imagine your content going viral and spreading like a weed. Still, if you cannot get your seeds to grow you’re left with just dirt.

Stop back next Tuesday, I’ve got some tried and true social gardening tips to share with you.  Worried you’ll forget? Sign up for the R&D RSS feed and have the tips delivered to you!

PS: This post is dedicated to the lovely Kate Scmitt for introducing me to this heavenly drink.

Wednesday, May 2^nd marked a turning point for those seeking to better themselves through higher education.  Until now most of our educational institutions have been confined to the classroom, and elite schools have been out of reach for people with lower socioeconomic status. A new joint venture between Harvard University and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) aims to knock down barriers with the existing educational system with what they describe as “the single biggest change in education since the printing press”.

Harvard and MIT have each contributed $30 million to a non-profit partnership called edX. The goal of the program is to make available the faculties and course work of each institution available online for free to 1 billion people around who have the desire and commitment the world to learn (and a computer with an internet connection). The platform will also serve as a test bed for research on teaching and learning in an online environment. While completing the online course work will take secondary status to on campus course work, the content is the same and is not to be considered “Harvard Lite or MIT Lite” according to L. Rafael Reif, Provost, MIT. There are more details on the project in the video below.

What do you think…will technology like this strengthen our educational system?  Is this the next big thing?  Let’s discuss in the comments.

Years ago when I was first learning to sell media airtime, a sales trainer taught me the axiom, “we get paid for the words we choose.” He explained that by choosing the right words – words that painted pictures in the mind of the listener – I could more easily connect with prospective customers and build value for my proposition.  So I learned to pepper my dialog with some of those powerful key words like “profitability” and “return” or “increased store traffic”  and, lo and behold, more people connected with my ideas and strategies. Revenue soon followed. This concept holds true in copywriting as well.

Choose the right words and people are more likely to read your content when it stimulates their imagination. More so, choose the right words in SEO, the keywords people are using to search, and customers will find you.  It all comes down to choosing the right words.

Do you have any favorite words that help you better connect with other people? What words in your vocabulary are most effective for you? Are there industry terms that build value for your conversations? Let me know and I’ll share all of them in a future post.

Twitter’s official Advanced Search tool is pretty nifty and allows you to drill down very specifically to include, exclude or match any word or phrase, choose languages, hunt for positive or negative comments, geo-target, look for tweets to and from specific people and more. If you’re more of a fan of hotkeys and shortcuts, you can also type a host of search operators into the regular Twitter search bar to get the same results. At the time of this post it appears Twitter’s search operator page is down, but I did find a handy image of them here. Feel free to copy and paste the operators below into your Twitter search bar and start digging!

P.S. The folks over at Mashable.com have put together a list of analytical spreadsheet scripts for Twitter (and more) that you can export search results to for further slicing and dicing.

Follow @MikeKissel

Over the past few weeks we’ve taken a look at search engine optimization from a beginner’s stand point.  We’ve covered how  search engines work, where to get started with analytics and keyword research, optimizing on page elements you control directly and how to get Google juice through directory submissions and link building. This post will summarize The SEO Essentials Guide for Beginners nicely, but if you’re not into the whole brevity thing and feel like you need a more detailed refresher I encourage you to jump back to older posts for a read. I’ve included a short list of some of my favorite tools and resources for SEO below, if you’ve got any to add please share them with readers in the comments below. Thanks for reading!

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Part 1 – How search engines work?

We eased into the subject by taking a deeper look at how search engines work and understanding the 4 key tasks they perform: crawling, indexing, determining importance, and presenting search results. Programs called robots crawl from page to page using links and measure hundreds of different signals on a page with sophisticated algorithms to determine its relevance and importance to the keyword or phrase.

Part 2 – Where do I start?

SEO can seem like a daunting task, especially for a green horn, so this post answered the question – Where do I start? The first step is getting acquainted with tools you’ll need. Start by installing or gaining access to the analytics package of your site. Google Analytics is a good one and it’s free. The next step is tedious but important to everything else you’re going to do, so make sure to do a thorough job on keyword research. Think of what words you want to be found for and ask real people (like your customers) what words they would use to search for you. Write all these terms down including all possible variations and common misspelling of those words and plug them into a keyword analysis tool.  Again, Google offers a great free keyword tool with AdWords that you can use to determine which keywords on your list get searched the most and how competitive those terms are.  Generally speaking, the more competitive the term the harder it will be to rank highly for it so pick your battles wisely.

Part 3 – Getting under the hood

It’s time to get hands on so I assume you can add/edit your website files and have a basic understanding of HTML. If you need a few lessons check out this HTML Fundamentals interactive tutorial from Codecademy. There are many HTML tags you can learn all about, but I focus on only 3 that should be fairly easy for a beginner to work with that tell search engines and (more importantly) people what’s important about your site. The HTML title tag is found at the top of every HTML document between the <title></title> tags and should describe what each page is about. The Meta Description tag allows you to suggest how you’d like your pages to be described in search listings. If you find that the title and meta description is the same on all your pages, change them and you may see results quickly. Header tags are used to identify and organize content in descending order of importance and should incorporate your keywords.

If you have a static website that doesn’t change much, you may want to consider starting a blog to continually add fresh content to your site.  Google loves sites with lots of pages and blogging is a great way to fill that need while also letting you play around with internal linking and sprinkling keywords into your URL structure. Matt Cutts from Google discusses using keywords in your URL’s whenever possible in this short video. You’ll also want to make sure Google knows about all of your URL’s, so creating and submitting an XML Sitemap helps you make sure Google knows about the URLs on your site. This may be tricky if you are a beginner, but there are plenty of free XML Sitemap generators out there like this one. If creating a sitemap is a breeze, then you may also want to explore more advanced stuff like 404 Error pages, 301 Redirects and using the robots.txt file.

Part 4 – Building links & directory submissions

When other sites link to yours, it provides a signal to a search engine that your site is full of relevant content – sort of like someone casting a vote for your page. We call that Google Juice.  Building these links is one of the biggest challenges for SEO, but it’s also the most important. If you do nothing else, work to build back links to your site.  Things like well written headlines hook readers which can lead to more links. Comment on other blogs with a bread crumb link back to your site or offer to guest post on blogs with related content. One secret trick to link building is that getting .edu sites to link to yours gives you a good dose of link juice…if you can get them. Contact schools and universities and find a reason for them to link to your site.

Directories are a good place to start building your back links from, some are free while other are paid.  Web directories were originally created to organize content on the internet into logical categories, and this data powered many of the web’s largest search engines for some time. DMOZ has attracted a lot of criticism lately. Its human edited and takes a long time for a listing to get published, and even longer to change if you goof something up.  But it’s free so go ahead and submit a well written listing under a category that fits your business and move on with life. If you can afford $299/year, Yahoo! Directory is another one to have on your radar if you’re just getting started. If you want to focus on the local area, head over to Google Places to claim your free listing and use these tips from Google to optimize your Places listing to best show in local search engine results pages.

Other Helpful Stuff

As you continue learning about SEO you’ll discover that it’s a pretty big topic to wrap your brain around, and that the playing field is constantly changing. People devote entire careers to this specialized niche of digital marketing and it can be very expensive to hire an SEO because their results can be very lucrative for you. If you’re more of a do-it-yourselfer and follow the steps outlined above, you’ll be off to a good start and a few steps ahead of the game.  There’s tons of great free resources out there on the web to help you learn more. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Google Keyword Tool – free keyword analysis and recommendation tool
• Google Analytics – free analytics package for analyzing web traffic
• Open Site Explorer – a backlink analysis tool for competitive research
• Search Engine Land - news and information about SEO
• seomoz – useful blog about SEO, also offers paid tools
• seobook – useful blog about SEO, also offers paid tools and lists of free resources
• SEOquake – a browser plugin that fetches information about any page based on a large number of parameters
• SEOCentro – a host of free SEO tools like Meta Tag Analyzer, rank checker, keyword analyzer, etc.

PS: I’ll personally sponsor a $10 Amazon.com gift card for the first person to correctly guess the movie reference in this post in the comments below.  Ready…..go!

Below are 5 of my favorite resources for the creative marketer wearing many hats, some obvious and others not:

1. Mashable | Social Media News & Web Tips
   Website: Mashable.com
   Review: It is a wonderful way to keep up to date on what’s what. It is a pretty standard suggestion coming from the world of digital marketing. If you haven’t heard of it, take a moment to go and check it out. I learn something new and interesting everyday from Mashable.
2. Seth Godin| Riffs on marketing, respect
   and the ways ideas spread
   Website: Sethgodin.typepad.com
   Review: Wow, is Godin thought provoking. He never sends brand new earth shattering ideas, but he takes a simple concept and makes you look at it under a different light. He is a truly insightful man. If you follow Data Dog on Facebook or Twitter there is no point in hiding that I am smitten. I also love that Godin’s post are short so I can read them in under 3 minutes and continue on with cleaning my inbox.
3. Copyblogger | Tips and training for content marketers, copywriters and bloggers
   Website: Copyblogger.com
   Review: This week a new business owner asked for a great resource for 101 Digital Marketing Tips. I told him this was his one stop shop; it’s that good. I am constantly flagging these blog posts in my inbox. If I had one resource to recommend for people struggling to stay up to date on digital marketing this would be it! It is an everyday language, simple blog, but allows you to dig deep into topics if you so choose.
4. RadioLab | Podcast weaving stories and science into sound and music-rich documentaries
   Website: Radiolab.org
   Review: If you are daring to “make it” in the world of digital marketing it means you *love* to learn. The virtual world is constantly changing and you need to stay on your toes to be successful in this field. RadioLab doesn’t focus on marketing, but rather science. I am throwing it in for people who love to learn and think outside the box. It is AMAZING. If you enjoy soaking in new things like I do, you will like this wonderful podcast. You can thank me later.
5. The Art of Non-Conformity | Unconventional strategies for life, work and travel
   Website: ChrisGuillebeau.com
   Review: Last but not least, the talented Chris Guillebeau has inspired me personally and at the dog house. I have to warn you his posts are long, sometimes I skim and sometimes I just don’t have the time to get through one of his diatribes. However, when you find a post that speaks to you, it really clicks. Pop on over for one of his latest posts, 34 Things I’ve Learned About Life and Adventure. Which of these tips applies to your business or career?

Which sites, blogs or podcasts do you favor everyday? Let’s chat in the comments.

PS: Don’t miss future posts and projects! Be sure to sign up for our RSS feed or connect online:

{Photo Credit :: Thanks to Thaliapap for the wonderful creative commons photo!}

Created by: MBAOnline.com

Questions? Comments? Let us know below or on our Facebook page.

If you’ve been following along with this series you should be ready to start building back links and directory listings, or what’s more commonly known in the SEO world as off page optimization. While on page optimization reflects what you think is important about your site, what really matters to search engines is how important other people feel your content is. This is best demonstrated by the number of other sites that link to yours.

Link Building

As I mention in Part 1, links are like highways that make up the interconnected structure of the web.  They also serve another critical role by providing a strong external signal.  When someone links to your site, it’s like casting a vote for pages they feel have relevant content. The more links that point to your site, especially with keywords as the anchor text, the more relevant a search engine deems your page. Quality vs. quantity is a good rule of thumb to follow when building links. Generally speaking, one back link from a reputable and authoritative site is better than 10 back links from commenting on a blog.

Building links is one of the biggest but most important challenges for SEO. If you do nothing else to improve your SEO, work to build links and search engines will notice. Use social networks to build relationships and distribute your content for other people to link to. Well written headlines hook readers which can lead to more links. If you blog, comment on other blogs and leave a bread crumb link back to your site or offer to guest post on blogs with related content. One secret trick to link building is that getting .edu sites to link to yours gives you a good dose of link juice…if you can get them. Contact schools and universities and find a reason for them to link to your site.

Directories

Web directories were originally created to organize content on the internet into logical categories, and this data powered many of the web’s largest search engines for some time. There are literally thousands of free and paid directories that range from very general to highly specific subject areas, but you really only need to concern yourself with just a few.

Lately, there seems to be a lot of controversy about the value of a DMOZ listing. DMOZ, also known as the Open Directory Project, is human edited directory that search engines would harvest information from to display in their search results.  Because of that, getting listed in DMOZ was a huge plus in getting listed higher in Search Engine Results Pages, but it came with baggage. Being a human edited directory it can sometimes take months before your listing is published, and getting something changed is almost impossible. Since it’s free, go ahead and submit a well written listing under a category that fits your business and move on with life.

Yahoo! Directory is another one to have on your radar.  This is a paid directory that costs $299/year for most sites. Yahoo! bills this directory as “the world’s most visited internet destination”.  I don’t know about all that, but many SEO’s still consider this a good link to have in your arsenal, especially if you’re just getting started and need all the help you can get. If you can afford $299/year, consider getting listed in Yahoo! Directory.

That same Google Account you set up to access Analytics, AdWords and Webmaster tools I covered in Part 2 also allows you to claim a free listing with Google Places. Google Places for business is also free so be sure to claim it and use these tips from Google to optimize your Places listing to best show in local search engine results pages.

This brings our SEO Essentials Guide for Beginners to a wrap.  We’ve covered how search engines work, tools and methods for conducting keyword research, on page optimization and today’s look at off page optimization.  Next week I’ll summarize these posts and provide some final thoughts.  In the mean time, if you’ve got an SEO question drop us a note in the comments section, on Facebook or Twitter.  Thanks for reading!

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

The SEO Essentials Guide for Beginners Round Up:
Part 1 – How search engines work?
Part 2 – Where do I start?
Part 3 – Getting under the hood
Part 4 – Building links & directory submissions