First, What the Heck is WordCamp?
It’s an annual conference organized by our techie community in SF (though there are WordCamps all over the world), focusing on all things related to WordPress. There are great speakers, ranging from the original developers of WordPress to Google employees to eccentric social media advisers.

Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress (Thanks to Eva Blue for this photo!)

The State of the Word with Matt Mullenweg
Matt Mullenweg is the founding developer of WordPress, and I absolutely LOVE hearing him speak! His presentation was so creative, drawing similarities between WordPress’ open source environment to jazz, where everyone works together to create one beautiful piece, and even plugin developers are the jazz “soloists.” He uses four adjectives to compare WordPress to jazz:

• Improvised
• Independent
• Inclusive
• Inspired

His presentation was very inspiring and helped me understand how WordPress IS a collaborative community with its open-source nature, with folks helping each other out. There’s a reason why WordPress’ documentation and forums are so incredibly helpful!

The juicy news: What are a few new features in WordPress 3.0?

• WordPress Mu and WordPress will be merging! I believe there were a few features that weren’t available to WP Mu before, so this is pretty exciting! Many folks that use WP Mu are able to have separate blogs using one WP install—a lot of schools are beginning to do this with different blogs for each of their departments.
• Droplist subnav menus can be created/managed thru the WP Dashboard!
• There will be a new feature where you can upload an image as your “featured image” for your posts. This would be the main visual image used for your post.
• A new default theme! Kubrick has been WP’s default theme for many years now, and we’ll miss it, but it was great to see the new default theme, Twenty Ten. You can check it out here too! Definitely more modern, more visual with its large graphic header, and much more customizable to fit a vast audience with different site needs.


"Twenty Ten" — the new default theme for WordPress 3.0

Want to read up on more features that will be coming with 3.0? Check out BloggingPro’s recap with additional highlights.

WordPress, Audience, Engagement, and SEO with Vanessa Fox
Vanessa previously created Google’s Webmaster Central, which provides both tools and community to help website owners improve their sites to gain more customers from search. She gave us an update on current SEO trends and what we should (and shouldn’t) care about for our site searchability.

Things you should keep in mind when managing your site’s SEO:

• Search engines are now the primary method of navigating the web
• Consider the difference between “search” and “browse”:
  • Search — entails you have a goal and task to achieve
  • Browse — implies that you don’t have a set goal, but freely scrolling through. The new method of browsing now is via social networking. Example: checking your Facebook feeds and Twitter lists in the morning
• Titles: Be sure to title your pages/posts! This is the text that will appear in the search results. Ideally, make sure your title appears first before your site name. The reason why this works: when we scroll through search results page in a search engine, we scroll down the left side of the page to look for our key words. If those key words don’t appear on the left-most side of the search results, we usually skip and glaze right past results we think aren’t relevant.
• Google will be phasing out tags and keywords—these will not be the main determinant for your SEO in the future. My thoughts: This makes sense. Tagging and adding in keywords has become too arbitrary, where anyone can add any words to their posts, even when the tag doesn’t relate to the content of the post. e.g. spammers
• I’ve heard the same thing repeated at several tech conferences recently regarding SEO:
  • Write compelling content — it’s ALL in the content. This is the most important factor in getting people to come to your site.
  • Understand Your Audience — this means understanding the language of your visitors. For instance, if your site is about climate change, be sure to include related words like “global warming”. These are related words that people from your audience may use to search. You want to make sure you have these bases covered so they can find your post!
  • Community — link to resources and sites of fellow bloggers in your field while you blog and post. Everyone loves a linkback! It’s a great way to connect.

The Blog Doctor sums up Vanessa’s points in a handy list of 12 Quick, Easy Tips to Optimize Blogs / Websites for SEO if you’d like more info about Vanessa’s presentation.

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Up until now, users have been able to follow those brands that they like by clicking on the brand’s “Become a Fan” button.

According to Facebook, their users click “Like” nearly twice as often as they click “Become a Fan,” so they are changing the “Become a Fan” button to “Like” in hopes that more users will feel inclined to show their affinity towards brands.

Facebook has said that the move of changing “Become a Fan” to “Like” will make users more comfortable with linking up with a brand, since the latter wording seems to carry less of a commitment than the former. (Their ulterior motive, of course if that with increased fans, the people behind Pages will be more inclined to maintain of increase inertia with Facebook Ads. Don’t forget, Facebook is a business.)

“The idea of liking a brand is a much more natural action than (becoming a fan) of a brand,” said Michael Lazerow, CEO of Buddy Media, which helps companies establish their brands and advertise on social networks such as Facebook. “In many ways it’s a lower threshold.”

All that is changing is the language. “The core functionality of Pages will remain unchanged. Pages will still have distribution into News Feed, and the administrators of those Pages will still be able to call the people connected to their Page, ‘fans’,” according to Facebook spokesperson. For both the brand and the customer, nothing is changing except the terminology.

No word yet on how this will affect the Fan Box Widget (right), which is Facebook Connect-enabled social widget that Page owners can add to their websites to allow users to fan and view the accompanying Facebook Page stream. (We’ve added it to at least a dozen of our sites.) With the Fan Box, brands can bring content from their Facebook Page into their website and help convert website visitors into Facebook fans. Users can view the most recent posts from the Page, see a list of other fans (including their friends), and, most importantly, become a fan without leaving the site. Additionally, if a user visits the site and isn’t logged in to Facebook, the user can log in and become a fan directly inline as well.

Our approach to Facebook Fan Pages is unchanged. But we are very interested in how the change in wording might affect the power of the Page.

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

But before last night I have never received an OMG ARE YOU KIDDING ME? email — from a lawyer, no less — about keywords. I mean, keywords. Seriously!? But I get ahead of myself…

With the rise of the Google State, meta data keywords fell in importance. Google made it clear that they were far more interested in contextual keywords. What Are You Actually Saying? vs What Do You Want To Be Associated With? — this was the new benchmark. Kelly and I even removed the tool from the book’s second edition (©2004) and the download from the book’s companion website. At Waxcreative, we stopped allocating resources to putting keywords into site code. It was hard enough to get “real” content from clients.

Lately keywords are back in discussion. With the world dominance of blogging platforms (all hail WordPress, amen!), “tagging” — really just a way of adding meta keyword data — has become vital in search functionality. In January one of our clients submitted her own keywords to us, so we popped them in her head code. Her position advanced on Google by pages within weeks. Once again, the keyword is important. What You Want To Be Associated With is back on par with What You Are Actually Saying. (Take note Wax clients: we will be contacting you shortly to update your meta data.)

What keywords you choose is up to you. You still shouldn’t spam — meaning if you sell feather bracelets, you shouldn’t list “feather bracelet” in your keywords sixteen times. That’s just poor manners and Google will snub you for it.

But here is something you should always do: include common misspellings of your name. My name is EMILY COTLER. I should have these keywords:

Emily Colter, Emily Kotler, Emily Cotter, Emil, Amy… You see where I am going. This helps for when people are looking for you but might not have it correct. Search engines are like playing horseshoes in this way; getting close still counts if your keywords are helpful.

Which brings me to the lawyer, the email, and the “Seriously?!” moment from last night.

One of our long-standing clients — let’s rename her Karin Jones for privacy purposes — has a site that we originally built well before tweeting had meaning outside of birds in springtime, and thus her home page Head code contains keywords. Last night Karin forwarded this email that she received:

Please ask your attorney to contact me regarding the apparent embedding of my client’s name (Karen Jones) in your web sites metadata.  I do not believe this is proper and I request that you cease and desist from this illegal practice, forthwith.

We are reserving all our rights.

And then signed with all the heft of legal letter.

Seriously? Does Karen Jones really think that she can control whether her incredibly common name is used as a keyword? There are over 6700 Karen Joneses on Facebook alone.

We recommend that Karen Jones include “Karin Jones” in her meta data. It’s good strategy. And we are happy to share.

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

You have spent a lot of effort (read: time, money, thought) to establish your brand and to make your url known. You include it on everything. But then you go and use TinyUrl.com or BudUrl.com — and you get this sort of url to use to spread the word about your site’s information:

http://budurl.com/ta49

A few of our clients use these shortened URLs. One, Elizabeth Yarnell, is very marketing-savvy (she even has a blog devoted to online publicity) and she loves this. It lets her post more descriptive text in her Twitter and Facebook status postings. “There is a character count to consider,” Elizabeth points out, “and besides, it’s free. But most valuable is the tracking mechanism that BudURL.com offers. I can see which links are drawing a response.”

So, she knows where to devote her next burst of marketing energy. Good info.

And the Twitterization of the internet does command a method for shorter URLs.

HOWEVER, use of shortened URLs removes the opportunity to imprint your own URL in in your viewer’s minds. A basic tenet of advertising and branding includes not just the click-thru and conversion goal, but just the sight and reading. That has value. See it enough and the brand –or in this case, the URL– seeps into memory. Your viewer might not click over this time. They might not next time or the time after. They might never click over. But after seeing your URL over and over, they might eventually find their way there on their own, simply riding on the familiarity of it.

And regardless of how your audience makes their way to your site, if they have seen your URL over and over, when they do finally arrive, their comfort level will foster a more favorable response than if they are seeing it for the first time — which they are if you have been posting shortened URLs instead of your actual domain name.

Furthermore, there is a bucketload of ominous-looking code attached to BudURL. Look at this:

UntrustedLink
<h3 class=”UIIntentionalStory_Message”><a onmousedown=”UntrustedLink.bootstrap($(this), &quot;25236cabe3dcbeafa769854b6345be56&quot;, event)” rel=”nofollow” href=”http://budurl.com/ta49″ target=”_blank”>http://budurl.com/ta49</a></h3>

That just looks scary. (Note, we stripped all this out of the link at the start of this post.) Plus, according to this boingboing article, shortened URLs have all sorts of additional liability attached, including assisting spammers, undermining googlejuice, and exposing users to security vulnerabilities.

At Wax we always (try to) post pithy or numerically coded permalinks, such as:

http://waxcreative.com/blog/2009/03/home-sweet-home

or http://waxcreative.com/blog/2009/01/smart-woman

Longer, yes, and lacking the tracking mechanism of BudUrl, but putting our company name out there. Again, the people who see this may decide against clicking over and over. But sooner or later, the familiarity will have seeped in.

Also, consider this related aside: if you are using gmail (or yahoo.com, etc) for business, such as yourname@gmail.com (or yahoo.com, etc), then you are also missing an opportunity to display your domain. Why aren’t you using yourname@yourdomain.com? I asked this to several people, and the responses were almost all essentially the same: “I know, I know, I will get to it,” and “I don’t know how to get that email into Outlook,” and my favorite, if only for its bald honesty: “I am too lazy to change.”

I don’t think that I am going to stop this URL shortening trend, but the point is pointy, and worthy of discussion.

And no, the irony of a long blog post about shortening things is not lost, thankyouverymuch.

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Set-up:
Susan had been writing sweet, Americana historical romances for well over a decade. Two RITAs, twelve novels, one novella, and a gazillion fans after her Golden Heart in the early nineties. Then she suddenly shifted focus, and was excited about her new directions. But her site fit her backlist, not her new books – not even a little bit.

Challenge:
Present the new Susan Kay Law and her new books – contemporary set women’s fiction with sophisticated themes – in a manner consistent with her new brand, but a big challenge would be to do it without alienating her existing audience or compromising the still-available previous product.

Strategy:
We conceptualized a subsite for the historicals that would preserve the bright visuals (cheery colors and quilt-like textures) from the outgoing site that represented Susan’s backlist so well. The problem would be making the user path into the world of Susan’s historicals seamless.

We built “historicals” right into the main navigation of the new site so that established fans could see right away that they were in the right place, and we created the new book titles their own navigation buttons to make them stand out. And then before jumping into the subsite, we created a gateway page, complete with a note from Susan and a screenshot of what the page would look like upon entering.

Once inside the subsite we made sure that the masthead was clear – you were not at the Susan Kay Law site, per se, you were at the Susan Kay Law Historicals site. To continue the connection between the subsite and the main site, we included a link on each of the historicals pages to the home page in the redesigned site’s visual style.

Post-launch, in her own words:
“The big challenge was going to be drawing in the new audience,” Susan says. “I knew that. But I was adamant not to lose my established historical romance audience base. Loyalty works both ways. And how to tackle that challenge was less clear.

“Since the new site was launched in Spring 2007 I have received a lot of emails from fans of my historical work praising my new work. I have received virtually no confused emails – no, ‘Are you the same Susan…?’ and this is testament to how well the site is working in easing the existing audience into this new writing phase.

“If I have one gift,” Susan says, “it’s knowing when to call in the experts. This shift in my writing was too much for my old site to encompass. And I’m not visual, nor could I conceptualize the thought-progress of the site visitor; I am too close for that. I’m not creative about anything but writing, but luckily my web team is.”

Susan Kay Law is the author of fourteen novels and one novella, including The Paper Marriage (modern fiction in trade paper) and A Wanted Man (the more recent RITA winner for historical romance, in mass market). Please visit her at SusanKayLaw.com where you can catch excerpts (follow title links to read right now), a regularly updating reader-based contest, and blog posts from over the years.

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Hello, I’ve been following the advice in your web redesign 2.0 book for several years now and absolutely love your stuff. But I need an opinion for a client and I don’t know who to turn to. I was hoping you could help me. She has asked me about using a company at ——–. Are these companies worth spending the money for to optimize her site? They seem very expensive. Any advice would be much appreciated. I consider you the ‘Goddess’ of web designs. Thanks in advance, Jo

Hi Jo,

Well, I am flattered and tickled. I spent the day with a sick kid. Being a goddess of anything other than pink eye is smile-worthy, but of web design? That makes it so much worth while.

As for your question, the person truly to ask would be Stephan Spencer. He is the god of search engine stuff in my book. But on the whole I can offer the following advice:

It depends.

I wish I could come out like gangbusters in the affirmative and say YES, GO FOR IT, but the truth is that you will spend a lot of time regardless chasing Google. So it really depends upon a lot of things — your budget, competition, and product. Doesn’t that kind of wrinkle everything?

I have a client who spent thousands on a SEO firm last year only to get absolutely zero advice on how to tap into web 2.0. She got a lot of old school lexicon and tagging advice though — very valid, but not the whole picture, and not very timely. So, worth the money? I don’t know. She is still chasing Google just as much. Her ranking has improved for some searches but not for others. She gets frustrated.

I always feel that a strategy is definitely better than stabbing in the dark. And without an expert (often in the form of one of those expensive SEO firms) validating a plan, or at the very least an expert consultant, then we would certainly be stabbing. And money is too tight these days to stab, for anyone.

Nevertheless, when you need to do something right, I always recommend recognizing when one is out of one’s area of expertise and bringing in a heavy hitter. For instance, I would never dream of doing my own taxes, or caulking my own tub. Clients who hire Waxcreative have for the most part acknowledged that they are experts in what they do, but not in web design. They ask us to sweat out the structure and details. So with SEO, I recommend expert advice. We have an expert we look to on a very regular basis. She “lives” in my iChat buddy list, no less. She has us experimenting with web 2.0 strategies along in the flickr, facebook and hubpages routes, but how successful we will be only time will tell. The plans seem to fit well with our clientele.

I just can’t tell you if the big expensive firm is the right one for your client, because… Well… It depends.

Best regards,
Emily

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.