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

Google HotPot a Great Idea With a Silly Name

Google released HotPot about two weeks ago and so far I have used it several times and like it. I have to say if you have not checked it out you definitely should. If you are a local selling and serving business, you for sure need to come up to speed with HotPot as it will be incredibly more important to your business in the months to come.

First check it out here: http://hotpot.google.com. I think it has a stupid name and should have been named something more indicative of the service, but if you think about it, reviews stir the pot of attention so maybe HotPot works. Not sure who was at what bar with what drinks under their belt at Google when they dreamed the HotPot name up.

Never the less, once you start to use HotPot you will understand the this is one powerful tool that you will definitely want to encourage others to use to help your own business. First HotPot is very similar to Four Square. In fact so much so you may say – hey did they steal this idea. Well most likely they did as Google is not incredibly creative on its own, its MO is to see something they like and then knock it off.

If you have a Google account, you have a HotPot account. The great thing about HotPot is that it is a web interface and not solely a mobile interface like Four Square. Additionally, HotPot ties in directly with Google Places. Have you wondered how reviews appear now on your Google Places account? Well they are now going to come in via HotPot.

I personally just reviewed two restaurants that I ate at in the last two weeks. Both got 5 stars from me. Not only can you star rate a local business or place, but you can leave a comment and rate service, ambiance,  and value. When your review is done, you get another review registered on your HotPot account. You can add friends automatically with which you will share reviews. I think that Google is pulling your GMail address book contacts for this, but I am not positive.

The important take away on this is that HotPot feeds reviews to Google Places. For local businesses, HotPot activity will be key to getting reviews and plenty of them. No longer will Google need to rely on City Search, Yelp, or Google Maps, they now have their own “Four Square” like tool to garner reviews and build up activity on Google Places so they can further monetize local search.

Posted on

Doing an e-Newsletter Do Double Duty with an Online Archive

e-Newsletters are far from dead at this point. We have many clients for whom we provide writing and HTML services for their monthly or quarterly e-newsletters. I still find it surprising that when a new client comes to us that they have not been archiving their previous HTML newsletters on their website.

If you are going to create an e-newsletter in HTML format make sure to archive a copy in a newly created online e-newsletter archive section of your website. This way not only are you sending out a e-newsletter to prospects and clients, but you are also creating new website content for search engines.

If you are blogging, you can even use your best blog posts as e-newsletter content; saving time and money, as the people who will typically read your e-newsletter are usually a different demographic than the ones who will regularly read your blog.

The only time you would not want to archive e-newsletters on your website would be if you had a special price offering or coupon code for use for a certain list segment.

To get an idea of how you can create your own archive here is our own  e-newsletter archive to review for ideas.

Posted on

When Does Blogging Work For You?

This is my candid opinion, blogging works best when WordPress is installed on your website server under your website domain in a folder called blog with a URL that looks like this: http://www.MyDomain.com/blog.

Any other variation does not give you the links or SEO juice that you want and need. So what do I mean by SEO juice.?Well here’s just one example in regard to inbound link generation. We’ve been blogging for a client for about one year three days a week. I was just in on the Google Webmaster control panel and Google is showing that 500 sites are linking in to his blog.

Linking in is one of the really big perks that blogging consistently delivers for a website. Here are some other success stories: for another site there are 1,400 sites linking to the blog, for another 537, and for my own website I have 2,413 sites linking to my blog.

Blogging is just incredibly useful when it comes to getting links back to your website the best part is that if you have good blog content the links all happens on their own without your involvement. But, you only get the benefit of the links by having your blog properly configured as in the first paragraph.

Links are just one of the factors that help with organic search engine placement. Blogging is very effective when it comes to improving organic search placement by increasing the number of website pages, keyword density, and inbound links. If you want to find out more about our blogging services, and we do a really nice job with blogging for clients, check out our blog writing services page for pricing, levels, samples, and in-depth details.

Posted on

The Birthday Party Cupcakes

I am feeling sentimental today and so I want to share with you one of my memories. It was not so fond of a memory the day it happened but over the years it has morphed into a hilarious episode that makes the entire family laugh.

My husband and I have triplets, they are thirteen now, but I remember their first birthday. I proudly had a special decorated cupcake for each kid. All chocolate cupcakes as we are the chocolate lovers family.

I had this dream of this wonderful Kodak moment of our triplets picking up the cupcake so cutely by our son and so daintily by the girls and then snapping some great photos to remember forever.

What I go instead was this. I set each cupcake on each high chair tray. My husband I turned around for a millisecond (and I mean less than a heartbeat) to grab our cameras and when we turned around it was as if a cupcake bomb had gone off on each child. I’m telling you it was shocking. There was cupcake all over each kid top to bottom hair included. We had turned around for a second. There was cake smeared and rubbed in hair and all over the faces. They somehow it was all over their clothes too! Unbelievable!

In fact, the mess was so bad that I had to get a bucket of water and stand up each kid and wipe them down. I used a whole roll of paper towels. I still can’t believe the speed and cupcake devastation. We do have pictures to prove it!

The next year we did not do cupcakes but rather one cake placed far away from the kids with us fork feeding them.