SEO & AI Search (GEO) Expert

Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience

Professionalism

by

Professionalism Wordpress SEO ExpertIn an email exchange with a client this morning I got to spell out my views on professionalism, and thought I’d share them with you to.

  1. There isn’t enough of it in the world
  2. I’m providing a service, and conduct myself as such
  3. I don’t get precious about things like a lot of developers and designers do. (Honestly, people need to get over themselves sometimes!)
  4. And this one’s really important; I both take pride in my work, and feed my family with it. Anything less than a five-star service means I’ll have less than a perfect reputation, which keeps food off my children’s table.

Point 3. is a particularly interested topic–I have known people who get so precious that they refuse to deliver what their client asks for!

Certainly, as a consultant and professional with 17 years experience, if I think a project or part thereof should be done differently to the brief, I’ll suggest it with a solid rationale. But I also accept that if someone really wants to stick with their idea, they should be able too.

In some cases it boils down to this, I know web development, design, and online community–but my clients know their own businesses better than I! That’s why I like to get to know my clients and their businesses, because I want to make sure they’re using the web as effectively as they can for their business model.

How to spot good after-sale customer care

by

This article is alternatively titled: Will you still love me, tomorrow?

I had considered something much more risqué to do with trying before you buy, but it seemed a bit crass in the context I intended it.

Whenever you buy something online, you have options. Product choices, price, and most of all, who to buy from. For every product there are several dozen people queuing up to sell it to you.

And the most successful online business are unsurprisingly excellent at selling.

But how can you tell who is going to offer you good after sale care? And the the case of products you buy to interact with online (i.e., online systems that you’ll log into to manage) how can you spot the people who care about you after you’ve parted with your cash, from those who just want to keep on selling?

I’ll start by putting this out there–for all sorts of reason, GoDaddy are not a company I recommend. In fact I do my best to warn people off them.

And this is a prime example of why. Below you’ll see a screenshot of the GoDaddy homepage. I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting in red, any area of the screen which is wholly, and unquestionably (I went easy on them frankly) devoted to selling.

Now to be fair their is a prominent support line number which is likely useful to both new customers, and exisiting ones.

But the only section devoted to existing customers is that small, plain looking “Log In to My Account” button on the top left. Now for sure a lot of business run this way, they are predominantly sales on the first page, and then the bulk of their information (and interactive systems) for clients is behind a password.

But I’d expect to see an obvious login box, with some graphic element drawing out attention to it. Not something so small my daughter’s Sea Monkeys could probably ride it like a tiny train.

GoDaddy’s after-sale support is well known to be, frankly, appalling. Unless you’re buying more products from them in which case they’d love to help you, yes sir, of course ma’am, have a nice day!

And you know what? I can see that right there, from their homepage. They haven’t given screen real estate to existing customers except in the most perfunctory, absolutely necessary way.

It’s just an example, albeit a solid one. Before you sign up for an online service (knowing you can very rarely try before you buy), have a look at how much they value their customers, by looking for screen space they’ve devoted to them.

 

You probably don’t need Microsoft Office

by

There’s a reason people abbreviate Microsoft to M$—it’s incredibly expensive.

But it gets bought out of habit, because it’s something most computer users have been using for over a decade, and surely the most popular product must be the best, right?

Something that has long annoyed me about the computer industry is the way the stack the deck when it comes to needing the newest thing.

Case in point: the latest version of Office comes out. You head down to the store to buy it, because they have this new fancy “x” on the end of the file extensions and you want to make sure your files will play nicely with most other people.

Whoops, your old operating system won’t work with it. And your computer is too old to run the newest version of Windows, so why not just buy a new computer?

It’s got more processing power than the average simian brain, produces more colours than were previously known to science, and runs faster than a cheetah on heat*.

Or just put this process in reverse—a new computer, with a new OS, needs a new version of Office.

And why can your old computer NOT run something as simple as a word processing program? Simple: they bloat it.

They stick in fancier looking buttons, more help files, extra layers of stuff you’ll never even know about, and the only reason for doing so is to sell you a newer version of their product.

But if they didn’t, the old system would probably last you for years doing just what you need; Internet access, word processing, and email.

Enter OpenOffice (and it’s fork, LibreOffice). It’s an Office suite with everything you need; word processing, spreadsheets, presentations—and it’s free. It’s maintained by a community of skilled volunteers who are dedicated to seeing computing be an open experience, not one based on finance and money making for a few huge companies.

Best of all, it’s files are compatible with Office anyway. And it will open Office files, so you don’t need to recreate anything you already have. It doesn’t need massive amounts of processing power because it’s built to perform a function, rather than sell units.

Increasingly my client’s of mine are sending me files that have been made using OpenOffice, so the uptake is good.

But if you’ve not tried it out already, I highly recommend you do. It’s an example of what online communities can achieve. It’s also very, very awesome.

OpenOffice.org

* I have no idea if Cheetah’s run faster when on heat. Or indeed, if they do experience “heat” like domestic cats. Feel free to let me know!

I can make you an awesome, SEO’d personal online brand

by

It’s true.

I spent much of last year involved in making personal brands for people to improve their search engine rankings, industry positioning, and overall getting them in more clients and more revenue.

On the back of my 17 years web development/design experience, my decade long history of helping people with their social networking, and months of testing and improving my system, I’ve created a personal branding product that will do wonders for you, your reputation, and of course your income.

Currently it’s only being offered through People Per Hour (PPH), but watch this space–when I’ve got a few more of these under my belt you can expect this package to cost over £700.

Right now it’s just £167!

“i thought you bought 30000 followers on twitter what happen to it”

by

It’s true. A couple of months ago I bought 30,000 Twitter followers off ebay, just to see if it was a strategy that was as bad as I expected it to be.

With my sample of one (after all, I’m the only person I know of who’s done this) I had, unsurprisingly, mixed results.

On the positive, I did notice I had a much steadier stream of new, legit followers flow in after I did it. I suspect I was right in my thinking that people who looked at my Twitter profile would see I had a lot of followers, and therefore be more inclined to follow me themselves—trusting me as a known opinion leader.

To the negative, I felt dirty. Plain old like I’d been rolling around in pig filth. Friends and clients would notice and speak to me about how popular I was, and even though I was up-front about what I was doing, I always felt pretty sheepish about it.

Nonetheless, I was still pretty peeved to receive this tweet from “Kaz The Masturbator”:

Sure enough, they were gone. About six weeks after I bought them. Of course I can’t complain, it was sketchy to begin with.

Kaz the oneist was clearly a front, the dodgy seller’s way of telling me they’d taken back my purchase.

As an experiment, it was worth undertaking. And I’ll sum it up like this: I got what I paid for—a lesson. And while I may not be playing alone like Kaz, I’m certainly 30,000 followers more alone, and happier for it.

Warren Ellis on social media, my thoughts

by

Warren Ellis, English author and social commentator, wrote a wonderful post shortly before Christmas in which he discussed the end of the first wave of social media.

Twitter alters its terms of access to its information, thereby harming the services that built themselves on that information. Which was stupid, because Twitter gets fewer and fewer material benefits from allowing people to use its water. And why would you build a service that relies on a private company’s assets anyway? Facebook changes its terms of access regularly. It’s broken its own Pages system and steadily grows more invasive and desperate. Instagram, now owned by Facebook, just went through its first major change in terms of service. Which went as badly as anyone who’s interacted with Facebook would expect. As Twitter disconnected itself from sharing services like IFTTT, so Instagram disconnected itself from Twitter. Flickr’s experiencing what will probably be a brief renaissance due to having finally built a decent iOS app, but its owners, Yahoo!, are expert in stealing defeat from the jaws of victory. Tumblr seems to me to be spiking in popularity, which coincides neatly with their hiring an advertising sales director away from Groupon, a company described by Techcrunch last year as basically loansharking by any other name.

This may be the end of the cycle that began with Friendster and Livejournal. Not the end of social media, by any means, obviously. But it feels like this is the point at where the current systems seize up for a bit. Perhaps not even in ways that most people will notice. But social media seems now to be clearly calcifying into Big Media, with Big Media problems like cable-style carriage disputes. Frame the Twitter-Instagram spat in terms of Virginmedia not being able to carry Sky Atlantic in the UK, say (I know there are many more US examples).

This first wave, or cycle as he calls it, can best be described as one of ecstatic enthusiasm bordering on insanity.

His closing statement wonders if anyone regrets giving up their own websites in favour of just using social platforms yet. I bet the answer is yes, and I’ve been warning people against that for a long time. More on that another day though.

To focus on the core message of the piece—yes, he’s right. People have been so far up social media’s behind that they forgot to try to turn the lights on to check where they were.

And just where are they? At the mercy of a bunch or other companies who have very right (although very little market-mandate) to change their terms of service and take what you thought was yours.

Issues of content ownership and the like aside though, I’ve been waiting for this bubble to burst for a long while—because it’s time to simply accept social media, rather than jumping up and down on the sofa about it.

Is social media exciting? Of course. New technology, ways to reach your audience and methods of interaction always are. But they aren’t the be-all and end-all. Television still has exciting content. Radio programs can still blow my mind.

Once all the hype settles down, content becomes the clarifying point, sorting the overly excited from the thoughtful.

When approaching social media for any business purpose, look at it in the context of all your online work, sites, portfolios, information, etc. If you just think outside the box a little bit, you can have a very large and well rounded arsenal of online communications at your disposal. Which can all work together to improve your bottom line.

I’ve been waiting for a long time for people to realise that as exciting and useful as social media is, it’s one tool you have at your disposal, and you have many. Make them all work together, for you.

Think of it like this, there will always be new waves. And just watching them from the beach is no good, you need to ride them. But stay on top of them where you can see what’s happening around you, rather than falling in and finding you’ve crashed up on a beach with no David Hasselhoff in sight.

via Warren Ellis » The Social Web: End Of The First Cycle.

Prices are quoted exclusive of VAT unless expressly stated.

RSS

Peter Mahoney, WordPress SEO expert blog