Author: Nancy McCord

Nancy McCord is the President and resident blogger for McCord Web Services LLC. She has been providing global web services since 2001. She is a web designer, search engine marketing professional, and search engine and blog expert. She lives in Maryland just south of the Washington DC metro area.
Posted on

HootSuite and Seesmic Reviewed

If you are involved in social media using Facebook or Twitter you will want to be using one of these applications for posting your updates. In this post I will be reviewing HootSuite and Seesmic.

HootSuite
I use this product and own two Pro accounts. I have been using the HootSuite product since it came out and like it. I have four team members using one account and write for over 10 client social networks using the application. This is what I personally like about the product:

  1. The Pro account allows me to add unlimited social networks and easily helps me to link Facebook personal pages, Facebook Business Pages, and Twitter accounts.
  2. It is very simple to add team members to my account. My team members only see in their personal control panel the accounts that I have given them access to and not all client accounts.
  3. When I have several team members working on one account, I can see in my master control panel who has done what, who has responded to a comment, and who has posted which update.
  4. I like that I can schedule updates for future dates. Some of our writers work several days ahead or at night and set up updates to publish the next day. When you work on the volume of clients that we do you need this flexibility for your staff.
  5. HootSuite Pro account have a bulk upload option. Although I don’t routinely use this option, it is there and allows for greater flexibility to feed out content over time.
  6. Reusable updates. This is one of my personal favorites. I like the feature that I can save an update and then reuse is and schedule it to be sent on days I select. Where we have something very important to get out for a client this feature is valuable.

If you want to check out HootSuite, you can for free. If you use my link, set up an account and upgrade to the Pro Account HootSuite will pay me a small commission.

Seesmic
I don’t use this product routinely, but am always on the look out for new applications that can make our work easier. Seesmic is great for a single user or for someone is just managing Twitter account. Seesmic does support Facebook, but only the Facebook personal profile, while HootSuite allows you to post to Facebook personal profiles AND Facebook Business Pages.

The Seesmic interface is easy to set up, but not as intuitive as that of HootSuite. You do not have the option to show columns for each account such as pending for one Twitter account, but you can see the pending updates for all accounts in one column. I set up my Seesmic account with three Twitter accounts and two Facebook accounts. I could not however set up or send to my Facebook Business Page.

Seesmic has a control panel for each account on the left side bar instead of tabs like HootSuite has at the top. This could be an issue if you were managing many Twitter accounts as you would have to scroll up and down to interact with accounts near the left bottom as your account list grows.

In Seesmic you can see, for Twitter only, retweets, mentions, sent, favorites, and searches but not pending. Remember pending appears as a column on your screen and is not sorted by account but rather by date. For Facebook you don’t have any options other than the home feed.

I feel that for professional users HootSuite is a much more usable product. For small accounts Seesmic certainly is an alternative to HootSuite. If you have more than five social networks you have to upgrade to the Pro Level in HootSuite but with Seesmic you are still at a free level. I think that as an alternative to HootSuite for do it yourselfers on a budget, Seesmic certainly is a nice choice, but not one that I would want to work with everyday, day in and day out as a power user.

That being said for clients that want to watch what we are doing and to respond to tweets, I think that a Seesmic account would be fine for them as this solves the problem of having to add them as a team member in HootSuite. They can’t see pending updates with this approach, but can see what has been posted after the fact. I will look forward to improvements as Seesmic grows and tries to establish its market share. In some ways it is similar to Sendible.

Seesmic has not paid me for this post and I do not make a commission on your use of the application or download.

Posted on

Google Should Look to the Microsoft Model

Remember when Microsoft owned the Web and for that matter computers as well as the Internet? Remember when there was only Internet Explorer and no Firefox? Remember when the only computing platform was Microsoft Office? Not so long ago was it, but now things are very different. Firefox has a distinct growing percentage of the browsing market, Macs are more common place, Open Office and Cloud computing are starting to become mainstream.

Now take a look at Google. Google used to, and for that matter is for right now, the dominant search engine and pay per click platform, but that will change. You have to look no farther than the model of Microsoft’s dominance and what is happening now in the news to know that Google is losing it’s grip on owning the world of search.

Some of Google’s thorns are Facebook, Bing, and the lack of true innovation within its own kingdom. When was the last time you saw one of Google’s new products hit the market make a big splash and be widely embraced? It’s been a while! Remember the flops: Friend Connect, Orkut, Google Wave, Google Buzz? Their last big hit was GMail and they drove traffic there by requiring everyone to set up a GMail account to use any Google products including AdWords when it first came out thereby pushing up initial membership.

Now let’s look at Microsoft. As this giant has aged, it has mellowed. It has grudgingly embraced, but embraced never the less, change. It has adapted and ended up creating better products with greater inclusion and transparency. Google is in a stat of flux, right now it is trying to grasp on to its glory days but may want to look at the Microsoft model to see how it may be able to stay vital yet play more as a partner and not as a desperate bully.

Posted on

Google Accuses Bing of Stealing Search Results

The search engine wars just started up again this past week as Google accused Bing of stealing its search results. So let’s dig into this and see if that was really the case.

First, I want to say that I feel that Google is running scared. There was the quick switch of Google CEOs recently and not just to any person but to one of the original Google founders. Then there was the bad news of Facebook overtaking Google in terms of popularity. Right on the coat tails of all of this news Google stated that they had inserted code into their search results and had found their bait in the Bing results.

Bing responded with a resounding “NO” and the conflict ramped up considerably between the two search engines with key engineers appearing on the Web in videos discussing the situation and the blogosphere dissecting both responses.

What happened in a nutshell is that Google inserted in their results a set of characters (that don’t even spell a word) and then found that same set of characters in Bing results. I don’t think this admits Bing is stealing Google’s results, as Bing states that their search results reflect a historical pattern of searchers use and click through rates as well a their own patented algorithm, but Google just does not see it this way.

With Google losing placement and retention of its stranglehold on popularity brace yourself for more paranoid statements and litigation as the two search engines start to reveal exactly what information they are collecting on us and how they integrate this information into their search results.

Posted on

Move Over Keyword Density – Readable Content is King

Being in the industry for 10 years this year has allowed me to see SEO strategies come and go. For many of you who have longevity in the industry, you will understand many of my references and have most likely will have used them at some time or another for your clients’ benefits.

Remember when to get organic search placement we did:

  1. Keyword stuffing – loading keywords into image alt tags?
  2. How about when we loaded keywords into HTML comment tags?
  3. Or used the meta keyword tag to drive search traffic?

Keyword density is another tactic that is becoming passé as well. I still believe that good keyword density on a home page is still, at this point in time, a way to get organic traffic, but making the content readable is becoming much more important both for visitors and for search engines.

I don’t believe that search engines drop sites with strong keyword density at this time, but that day is coming. Just look at my list above of the things we used to do that really got good organic placement. 7% keyword density on web pages will soon be added to that list.

What I feel is now more important is that the overall site have Web authority, be content and information-rich, and be updated regularly. The new world of SEO is less about tricks and more about content and inbound marketing strategies.