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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Use Windows Live Mesh 2011 to Synch Computers

I just tried out this cool Live application last week and wanted to share it with you. It is called Windows Live Mesh 2011. You can get the free Windows application by visiting this Microsoft website. I am using Live Mesh to synch my laptop and my desktop computer as well as my administrative assistant’s computer.

Originally Chris, my assistant, and I were emailing each other files that he had to work on and when he was done he was emailing them back. The problem was when I got busy, I was not sure if I had picked up his updated file and where the most recent version was my computer or his – too complicated to keep track of in our busy office.

I tried synching full folders but found out that the data was just too big for the online storage area and worried about file security. Now I synch a file called “Chris Transfer” by dragging files I want him to work on for the day and then dragging them back to their home at the end of his work week. Although I wish I could synch the full folder to make it easy, this plan is working great for now.

If you need to keep information updated on your laptop for travel or travel with less than your full file load, Live Mesh may be a good answer for you too. Check it out, it’s free.

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How to Tag People in Facebook

nancy-2011If you want to tag a status update in Facebook how do you do it? First it is different than tagging photos. For photos, you simply put a square around the person’s face using the tag tool from the photo page sidebar and select your friend’s name from a drop down. With the wall, it is different. First it is important to know that tagging in this manner does not seem to work on the iPhone and for Macs. Firefox may have some trouble too, but using Facebook with the Internet Explorer browser does seem to work.

To tag someone in a wall update just put @ then a space and start typing a few characters of that person’s name. Leave proper spacing if you need to enter in the first and last name. Facebook will usually provide a drop down list as you type and you can select a name right from the menu. When you click the name the @ sign disappears and the person’s name appears hyperlinked to their Facebook profile. Cool huh? I am not seeing that this is working in comments to wall posts but does work for new wall posts that you create.

The is a great tool to point people to your business page or to another Facebook page or person that you like. As search engines are watching social media interactions and wall updates to point to your business page and try to drive traffic is an excellent idea and may generate more traffic for your page and get you more fans. Try it out today, just point to our Facebook page @ mccordweb or @ McCord Web Services – we have two.

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Facebook Reviews Are Now Being Picked Up by Google Places

info-puzzlesThis past week I saw something really wild and wanted to share it with you. I saw that in a Google Places site reviews had been picked up from Facebook of all places. Wow that is big news!

We are going to put the pieces of this puzzle together for you and need your help to do it!

Now, what I am not sure of is if you create a FBML page and add your website reviews there will the reviews be picked up or is Google only picking up reviews from people using the Facebook Business Page reviews app. If I had to guess I would say from the application.

As I do additional testing this week on how reviews from Facebook are picked up; meaning if I can ascertain whether you can simply add your own website reviews or if other Facebook users have to review you while they are logged in to their own accounts, I will make sure to let you know at Facebook. In the mean time, this is exactly what we are going to do to test and I sure would appreciate it if you can help us out on this one.

  1. I am going to create a tab in one of my Facebook Business Page accounts and load a sampling of my website reviews to the new FBML page I will create. I will even try to have the reviews coded using Google’s hReview tags. You can visit my page here. While you are there make sure to like this business page that I am testing on as I will only send out a note of success or failure through Facebook to fans. This is not my main Facebook page but one I have created to make sure I hold onto my business name.
  2. I am going to turn on the application for Facebook reviews in my main Facebook Business page account and solicit reviews from clients on that page. If you are not already a fan, make sure to like this page as I will also only be sending out the results to fans of this page. You need only fan one page to get the actual results.

So check out the two pages, look in the left nav bar for the reviews link, like the page, and if you want leave a friendly review. Then when I can see what is going on I will send the results out via Facebook to all of our fans at both pages.

Thanks for your help in advance, this could be a great mini whitepaper!

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Brace Yourself How You Get Organic Search Placement Has Changed

That’s right how you get organic search placement has changed, not a little bit but a huge amount. I consider the change in how to get organic placement so significant that traditional search engine optimization is a thing of the past.

Remember when if we wanted to book a vacation, or for that matter buy an airline ticket, we had to go to a travel agent? Now, we go online to Orbitz, Expedia, or directly to the airline site and serve ourselves. Travel agents, to stay afloat, have had to specialize their services; becoming trip advisors or travel counselors. The world of SEO (search engine optimization) is changing in many of the same ways, which will be impacting the viability of their ability to remain vital in the world of today.

I am not saying that we will be self serving SEO, but rather that what the search engines consider important has changed so dramatically in this last year alone, that code optimization, black hat or even gray hat link building strategies, and massive link building programs that try to approach site webmasters for reciprocal linking are no longer workable strategies to achieve organic improvement. SEO firms will need to change dramatically to find the niche markets that do work in this “brave new world”.

As an SEO code optimization firm, we have dramatically changed our services to respond to this huge market change. We no longer offer search engine optimization services as we have previously. We’ve even removed those pages from our website. Does that mean that we can’t help clients who need to improve their organic search positions – no, it just means we must go about it different ways.

For our firm this has meant the introduction and reallocation of assets into different and new service areas. When you visit our website you will see services for Google Places, Twitter services, Facebook Business page management, four levels of blog writing, and article writing. We have focused on services that will create a great reader experience and will build authoritative information rich website and blogsite content. After all my firm is just like our blog is named, we are The Web Authority.