Tag: Web Content

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We Do Recommend Using Chat Apps on Your Website

What to Know About Chat Apps
What to Know About Chat Apps

Seems simple, just install code and you’ve got a chat app. But not so fast. I am finding out from personal experience that not all chat apps are alike.

I started out with Drift and still have that chat app on my website. What I found as I used the app was it slowed my website to a crawl for load time. I think much of this is the code is installed in the head tag as instructions state, but may be better installed before the ending body tag </body>.

What is happening on my site is the page is taking so long to load and the navigation does not operate until the chat app function appears – I consider this very bad. Drift must have made a code change to the asynchronous code recently as the page load time was not an issue before but started about two weeks ago.  As a result I have been actively looking for a website chat app replacement.

I have tried three Tawk.to, MyLiveChat, and now Pure Chat. I am using Pure Chat on my website right now and so far I do like the free version. What I consider important for a website chat app are the following:

  1. Easy to install
  2. Able to configure colors
  3. Has a rock solid mobile app
  4. Does not impact page load speed

So far Tawk.To and My Live Chat  were too complicated for my needs and cumbersome to use.  Pure Chat has easy set up and I do like the mobile app which is simple to use.

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Inbound Marketing – Where to Invest Your Time?

With link building right now being a big no-no while the Penguin 2.0 shakedown continues this week, the big question is where should you invest your time to improve your organic placement?

Where should you invest your time for the biggest payoff with search engines?
Where should you invest your time for the biggest payoff with search engines?

Here are my top tips and suggestions and where I invest my own time in regards to inbound marketing.

  1. I blog. I cannot underestimate the value of blogging. It has been a marked key to my own personal success online and one we highly recommend to clients. Not just drivel for your blog, but insightful information-rich content and a perspective that differentiates you from others.

  2. I write periodically for two large authority sites – SiteProNews and the Bing Ads global forum. I don’t waste time writting other places and will typically give these sites a 2 week exclusive on my content and then reuse the content for my newsletter. I don’t spin my articles or widely distribute them. Additionally I require that my Google+ author link be included in my bio so I personally get AuthorRank juice.
  3. I tweet. I have moved down in frequency from 5 per day to at least 3 and occasionally more.
  4. I Facebook but only once a day typically.
  5. I work my Google+ Community daily. I own AdWords Strategies and find the interaction of my peers interesting. I have used my ownership and moderation of this community to really boost my Google+ Circles.

These are the top areas that I invest my own personal time for my own business to get a pay off. You may have other areas you use, why don’t you leave a comment and let me and my readers know where you invest your time.

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Using HubSubHubBub to Tag Your Content for Google

Writters Need to Follow These Important Steps to Tag Their Content
Writers Need to Follow These Important Steps to Tag Their Content

On Monday I spoke a little about HubSubHubBub which Google recommends as a way to push out to the Web and tag your unique content to protect your AuthorRank for organic placement. In this post I want to dive a little deeper into this topic to help you understand how using these tools can help you with organic placement.First, I recommend that if you are a blogger that you set up your feed to be delivered by Feedburner which is a Google property. It is easy to set up and account and migrate your blog feed to Feedburner. You’ll end up with a feed that looks like this: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/TheWebAuthority instead of a WordPress generated feed that would look like http://www.mccordweb.com/weblogs/feed.xml. Make sure to select in the publicize tab to connect your feed to PingShot so you are pushing your content out.

Second, use the FD Feedburner Plugin for WordPress to override all settings in your blog platform to point to your new Feedburner RSS feed. It is simple to do once you have your Feedburner account set up.

Third, set up an account at FriendFeed. This is a fairly old application but one that I like and with the ability to push content to it now with Feedburner it operates as a hub for HubSubHubBub which will tag your content. At Feedburner make sure to link not your blog URL, but rather to link your Feedburner feed URL. This action completes the process to tie everything neatly together.

Here’s a great article I found that taught me how to take these steps for my own blog as part of my research for this post. I’d like to thank Jorge Escobar for his excellent article and tips. You can also watch this video about HubSubHubBub to understand why using these protocols are now best practices for any blog and writer.

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Google and Unique Content Authorship

This is a very interesting video from Matt Cutts about who gets credit for content when someone steals your content.

If you wrote content, someone steals and changes a date stamp to appear that they were the originator of the content what can you do. Matt addresses several scenarios in this excellent video.

First, Google will try to see who is the content owner by not only the actual content, but by co-citation on the web. I personally feel this is also why posting your blog out on Twitter and Facebook is important to link your content to your own web properties.

Second, taking time to let other sites know via a DCMA notice that they need to remove your copyrighted content although time consuming can be well worth the time. I have actually had web hosts take down full websites until the owner removed the infringing content. That is sure to get a thief’s notice when they will not respond to your take down notice!

If you can’t see the YouTube embedded video from Matt Cutts watch it online at YouTube.

Third, consider using PubSubHubBub protocols to push your content from your blog out to interested parties tagging your content early on the Web before scrapers can get it.