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.
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Microsoft adCenter Customer Support Gets My Thumbs Up

Cathy H. at Microsoft adCenter gets a big thank you from me this last week for her help in resolving a problem. I want to say that in my experience adCenter has one of the most knowledgeable and tenacious when it comes to working with you to resolve a problem. I give them a big thumbs up!

Any client can call the adCenter 1-800 number to get help. Telephone support is not predicated on how much you spend as it is at Google AdWords. With Microsoft adCenter you can actually talk to a real person immediately. Not only will they work to help you then, but will call you back, allow you to speak to them personally on a second call (versus having to go into a phone tree and start all over with a new rep.), but they are smart and courteous on top of that.

Here is their contact information so if you have a need you can call too:

United States:
Telephone: (800) 518-5689 6:00am-18:00 pm PST seven days a week

If you are considering trying out adCenter for your pay per click advertising I recommend them to you. (I am not being paid for this blog post, just have had a great experience and wanted to share it with you.)

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Windows Live Writer a Great Blogging Tool

nancy-2011If you blog occasionally or even if you blog a lot, Windows Live Writer may replace creating your blog post in the control panel as your blog editor of choice. I am finding that it is sometimes easier and faster to blog in Microsoft’s free Live Writer application than it is to write in Word when I am on the go or for that matter faster than working directly in my WordPress control panel.

These are the things I like about Windows Live Writer:

  • Ability to work offline and so I can blog while sitting in a waiting room.
  • Ability to easily add images from my clip art gallery to my blog posts.
  • Ability to save my blog post to my computer automatically without thought or a second action if I am working live.
  • I like the spell checker and word count feature. Particularly the word count feature!
  • I like the ability to set up multiple blog accounts and switch between them at will.

I have Windows Live Writer set up on my laptop so I can blog anywhere I go – the soccer field, the waiting room at the dentist, and in the car (if I am not driving). I have found that I like it so much that I am using it more and more just for blogging while I am sitting at my own computer. I find it significantly easier to quickly add photos and style text than when I am working live on my WordPress blog online.

To have it work, you will need your blog admin or user login but that is about it. You don’t even need FTP access.

If you want to check it out, you can get the free download here. You may find out like me that it becomes your application of choice.

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Google is Picking Up Facebook Reviews

I wanted to give you an update from my blog post this past week on what is happening with Google indexing reviews on Facebook. Today, I found one of my test pages in the Google.com search results but not the other.

In just a few days I have found that Google has picked up the page with my hreview HTML tags hand coded and inserted into an FBML page, but not the page that has Facebook reader reviews. Although this may not be a definitive answer yet, as it is still pretty early in the test, the results are interesting.

I’ll keep you posted on my results as I do further testing. In the meantime if you want to read the full blog post and be a part of my test check out this blog.

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The Google Farmer Update Impact

adword-confusionTwo weeks ago and just then tweaked last week by Google, the Farmer algorithm update clobbered a number of website in regards to organic search placement. There was complaining in all the major webmaster forums. In fact the complaints were so loud that at the end of last week, Google announced that it would tweak the update to minimize that had been felt on many legitimate websites.

It is not unusual for Google to tweak an algorithm once it was launched. Several years ago an algorithm update was so serious that it started the naming of updates. It was called Florida. It has become famous in my sphere for screwing up placement on many, many websites. Google has gotten better about including web professionals in their updates. Although we’ve only received advanced notice on one algorithm update in recent history, it is not uncommon for Google to release an algorithm and then tweak it based on the blow-back from pros in the industry.

For our clients, we did not experience significant drops as this change was really created to drop the placement of scraper sites, those with duplicate content across the Web, and sites that are not actively catering to readers. If your website has dropped from this important update, now’s the time to very carefully address your content creation strategy and create a systematic way that you are building thoughtful and informative content for your readers.