Posts tagged Corporate
Marking Up Corporate B2B Sites With Microdata
Nov 3rd
WordPress Single Post Microdata Markup from Straight North’s Blog
SEJ recently published a best practices article authored by me about e-commerce microdata, but what about non-ecommerce sites? Unless your agency specializes in e-commerce, most of your clients most likely will be B2B companies. Numerous elements can be marked up on B2B corporate sites to improve search engine visibility. Every corporate website will be different, but hopefully this article will provide insight into the microdata markup process for the most common layouts. Results are still immeasurable as Google, Bing, and Yahoo are still hashing out new schemas and benefits of microdata, although Bing admitted it helps them “better understand your content”. If your DOCTYPE is HTML5 compatible, you should not run into any compatibility issues.
Marking Up Headers:
Most headers on B2B sites include some form of logo, global navigation, company name and phone number. You will want to declare this entire section under the Corporation schema (http://schema.org/Corporation). Unless your global navigation incorporates keywords into the anchor text, mark up this section with “SiteNavigationElement”. Doing so declares that those links are for navigation, and it helps search engines better understand the page hierarchy. If keywords are being used in the navigation anchor text, you might want to consider marking it up as “significantLinks” inside a nav tag instead.
Place the company name inside an h1 tag, and mark it up with the “name” markup. Whether the phone number is static text or fed through a Marchex script, you will want to define it as a telephone number. This can be achieved by using the “telephone” markup. The logo can also be marked up using the “image” markup.
Marking Up Footers:
The most prevalent elements in footers of corporate websites generally include addresses, phone numbers, footer links, navigation and contact forms. Beginning with the address section, set the schema to (http://schema.org/PostalAddress). Mark up the company address with “streetAddress”, “addressLocality”, “addressRegion”, “postOfficeBoxNumber” and “postalCode”. If your client is located outside of the United States, you will also want to mark up “addressCountry”. Mark up the phone number as stated in the section about headers above.
Footer links can be marked up two different ways and can be interchangeable with the header’s navigation. It can be marked up as a navigation feature with “SiteNavigationElement”. You may also choose to mark it up as “significantLinks”. Between the header and footer links, determine which you would prefer search engines to consider the navigation and which ones are valuable links. If both are marked up as the same thing, it may potentially cause a confliction that will confuse search engines. If you have a contact form in your footer, mark it up with “ContactPage”.
Marking Up Static Pages:
Static pages vary by content and may or may not leave much opportunity for microdata. In most cases, the “WebPage” schema will suffice for most content types. No matter what content is on the static pages, each page should have a page title contained within an h1 tag. Mark the title up as “name”. If the page contains a main image, mark it up as “image”. Aside from those two elements, look through Schema.org’s full list of schemas to see if any other elements on the page can be marked up. Keep in mind that some schemas may seem relevant to an element on the page, but declaring the page as that schema may be irrelevant. If a page talks about custom plastic injection molding and buries an event mention somewhere on the page, you may not want to mark it up as “BusinessEvent” since only a section of the page talks about the event.
Marking Up About, Contact, and Employee Profile Pages:
Contact, about and employee profile pages are very similar, content-wise. Keeping that in mind, analyze the content on each of the pages to determine how you want search engines to interpret the content. If the page provides a company description only, mark it up with the AboutPage schema (http://schema.org/AboutPage). Contact pages are very similar. Set the schema for this page to ContactPage (http://schema.org/ContactPage). Although there are several individual schemas that can be used to mark up all the contact info, none fall under the ContactPage schema. Since ContactPage has the most relevance, it trumps all other schemas in value for contact pages.
CEOs and VPs may be big shots in the office with a nice page on the website, but search engines won’t care about them unless microdata interpret their relevance to the company website. Define the page as being about a person with the Person schema (http://schema.org/Person). Under the Person schema, you can interpret most pieces of personal information about employee pages. Start off by marking up their names and job titles with “name” and “jobTitle”. You can also mark up headshots and descriptions with “image” and “description”. You can also define several other fields including birthdate, awards, address, email, fax, phone, children, spouses, company, nationality, gender and many more. Most markup types for people will be overkill on corporate sites. Remember that everything you mark up will be clearly seen by search engines. That being said, avoid marking up anything you do not want to place emphasis on.
Marking Up Blogs:
Individual posts and the blog home can both be marked up using microdata. However, some content management systems may not work well with microdata. Luckily, most blogs use WordPress, and WordPress is microdata compatible. WordLift is a plugin that works well for some themes but causes bugs with most. After installing the plugin, test it out fully to make sure it works with your theme. If not, you will have to manually edit the PhP template files to add in microdata.
Blog home pages generally consist of summaries, headlines, representative images, publish dates and author names. Declare the entire page as a blog with the Blog schema (http://schema.org/Blog). Set the schema for the article brief section as a BlogPosting (http://schema.org/BlogPosting), and each brief with the “blogPosts” markup. Each headline, publish date, author and single image can be marked up using “headline”, “dateCreated”, “author” and “image”.
On individual posts, you will want to declare the schema as BlogPosting (http://schema.org/BlogPosting). Do not mark up any images on individual posts. You can only declare one image within the content area of the post, and many posts may have multiple images. As with the blog home, you can mark up the headline, publish date and author. Comment sections can only be marked up if they are on a different page than the post.
Marking Up Video Pages:
Online video is one the newest forms of internet marking, and many corporate websites now feature videos on their website. Videos themselves and the surrounding content can all be marked up with microdata. Set the schema type to VideoObject (http://schema.org/VideoObject) for the page. Mark up the video itself with the “video” markup. The caption area can be marked with “caption”, “productionCompany”, “transcript” and “uploadDate” if applicable.
The body content of the video page may contain descriptive elements about the video. Schema.org has markup for the following elements: description, ratings, headlines, audio, awards, copyright, creator, publish date, creation date, genre, publisher, reviews, video quality, thumbnails and version. Defining as many elements as possible for videos will drive in more relevant traffic.
Starting with HTML5, you can also use meta tags in the page body to include additional microdata. The elements do not have to be present on the page to mark them up when using meta tags. This practice can be used for any of the CreativeWork schema’s on the video page.
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A New Way of Tracking Corporate Business News
Oct 19th
If you are trying to keep track of your competitors, you have a variety of tools that can make your search for business news easier. At the low end (meaning free) is Google Alerts and Google News, and you can build your own RSS feed collection and examine what comes through that pipeline. There are also paid gathering tools from Hoovers, Lexus and InsideView.com, just to name a couple of examples. GageIn is trying to enter this market with the release of its Content Platform and the integration with Salesforce and LinkedIn data repositories.
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The trick is in the filtering, to be sure: you don’t want to plow through irrelevant searches or receive too few alerts about the things that you want to track. “The quality of content I receive is unbeatable. I now spend less time searching for stories about prospects, competitors, and my industry and more time engaging my audience,” says Kelly Morgan, director of marketing at HealthRx and an early user of the GageIn service.
GageIn scans millions of local and regional news sources to aggregate hyper-targeted local news about both large and small companies alike. It tries to pull information about companies, people and actionable events such as personnel changes to a single place and doing so in real-time, too.
As mentioned, you can import contacts from Salesforce and LinkedIn and you can share your updates with LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, and Chatter and Yammer are in the works too.
You can use GageIn for free for following up to five companies and three search alert terms. Prices start at $5 per user per month for up to 25 companies and five alerts, and there are higher tiers including unlimited enterprise accounts that offer Active Directory single sign-ons and mangement tools. As a promotional offer, anyone who signs up for GageIn by November 2 is eligible for a free six-month unlimited access subscription.
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Bad SEO Could Be Killing Your Corporate Blog Titles – Fast Company
Aug 30th
 Fast Company |
Bad SEO Could Be Killing Your Corporate Blog Titles
Fast Company I remember when SEO first "hit." I had been at an online publishing company for about a year, and while there was always some attention paid to on-page optimization, I'd hardly call what we were doing a strategy. It soon became clear, however, … Slingshot SEO Answers the Question: Where are Journalists Going? |
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The Changing Face of Corporate Facebook Landing Pages
Aug 5th
As businesses get more involved in using social media, they are starting to redo their landing pages, or places where you enter their ecosystems on Facebook, Twitter et al. We were reminded by this post by my colleague Paul Gillin that it could be a good time to brush up on your Facebook Markup Language and other techniques to not just pretty up the place, but provide solid information as well as calls to action for your visitors.
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What can you put on these pages? Lotsa stuff. Anything that you can code up in HTML can appear here, including forms (sign up for our weekly newsletter), lead generation, polls, playing the latest video news item, a link to all the other social media accounts of the company, clickable images, and links. Some of the pages can be very elaborate and a welcome change of pace from the blue and boring standard Facebook layout.
To get started, take a look at this post from Social Media B2B blog. The post lists several criteria on how to judge the effectiveness of these pages, including:
- Does it have a link to the Like button? This shows the critical mass and community interest. The SAS Publishing page has this directive right at the top of their page here:
- Does it have a call to action to some other place within Facebook? You can link to event calendars, newsletter subscriptions, and other product pages. BuddyMedia has its page offer up a subscription form, as you can see here to the left, for example.
- Does it have a call to action elsewhere that is trackable? For example, to download white papers or marketing collateral. EMC’s page will give you a free Mozy account (its online storage subsidiary) if you Like them.
- Does it contain links to other social media profiles? This would be a good place to put your directory of corporate Tweeters, for example.
- Does it have video or some other visually engaging item? Something to catch the eye and keep the visitor around for a few more seconds, such as this page from SAP that has two videos on it, including one introducing their community manager.
Feel free to share your favorite Facebook sites in our comments, and other page makeover suggestions.
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Corporate YouTube Lessons From A Racing Engine Builder
Jul 27th
Can you imagine a better way to promote your racing engine business than to take your Web site visitors, on a mind-bending video demo ride? For the last decade, Tom Nelson of Nelson Racing Engines (NRE), in Chatsworth California, has been building the nastiest, tire shredding, frame-twisting, internal combustion engines, on the planet. They had to get a bigger dynamometer because the old one only went up to 2000 horsepower!
How do I know it’s true? I’ve watched most of his absolutely awesome videos on YouTube.
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Although some of the company’s early videos were a tad bit grainy and decidedly homemade, they showed off the product line in grand style. Have a look at Nelson’s 2007 video of a customer’s 1963 Pontiac Tempest, with a twin-turbo, 522 cubic inch big-block Chevy. The color, contrast, and composition are pretty decent. Compare that to their recent trip to Bonneville showcasing a AAB Gas Coupe Dodge Barracuda. The ‘Cuda engine is one of NRE’s twin-turbo big-block Hemis. . The video is crisp, clear, and high-def. Even if you aren’t a car fanatic, watching these videos certainly gives you an appreciation of the quality of the car, engine, and people.
Nelson uses a video production group now and I think the level of quality and sophistication of the videos mirror that of his engine building. With some of Nelson’s race motors going for $50K to $60K, it’s easy to see why he puts a few bucks into posting premium on-line clips.
On the other hand, developing your own in-house videos, has never been easier. All it takes is a desire to learn the techniques and a modest amount of cash for some decent equipment.
DIY YouTube Business Video
I briefly ventured into do-it-yourself (DIY) business video last year when my brother wanted to promote his law practice. The results were reasonable, considering our lack of experience and approaching zero budget. Coupling a decent camera and softbox lights, with experience doing three or four more videos, would boost the quality of most new DIY videographers, tenfold.
Equipment can be pretty austere. We used a couple of umbrellas on stands with compact florescent (CFL) lights, an off-white background, and a tiny little Flip video recorder on a tripod, in a living room. All in all, we spent most of a morning setting everything up and then running through the takes.
The clip came out pretty well, although there a whole bunch of things I’d do differently next time. For one thing, we’d use a high-definition video camera, perhaps something from Sony or Canon. I noticed that some of the in-car NRE footage was shot with a compact, hand-held camcorder, that anybody can buy. Even then, they looked great. Don’t forget some digital SLR cameras and many high-end smartphones can now record good-quality video and sound.
Another thing I’d do differently would be lighting. If you don’t have adequate lighting, your videos will come out dark, without much contrast. My brother’s video could have used a little more light. A lot of current Web videographers use green screens and then substitute a pure white or graphical background, behind the talent doing the talking.
Video editing software is also readily available for the average-Joe director and runs well on higher-end desktop and notebook computers. I used the Open-Source kdenlive video editing application on a fairly stout Asus Linux powered notebook for our video. Windows users should probably stick with commercial video editors, such as Adobe’s Premier series, Apple’s Final Cut, and Sony’s Vegas programs because large user communities have grown up around these packages. Although not cheap, Adobe’s Creative Suite 5.5 lists for around $1,700, you’ll get a complete, stable package that will produce exceptional results. A modest investment in training, software, and equipment can bring in a lot of business. If you use Linux, high-end Open Source video applications, such as OpenShot, kdenlive, kino, and the Open Movie editor are usually just a download away.
Plan For Your Video Future
Singapore based Adrian Lee, founder of VideoLane.com, thinks video production knowledge will be essential for executives, in tomorrow’s professional job market. His 2011 Forecast For Videography Trends In Business article offers a couple of interesting observations, First, camcorders are now as cheap as printers. Second, if a picture paints a thousand words, one second of video paints thirty thousand words. Why read pages of text when a short video clip says it all.‚Äù
Lee has been doing corporate videos for over 10 years. Of course, you’d certainly expect a video production company to use videos to promote their own business. Lee goes a step further and has ginned up some video how-to’s. Want to learn how to set up a green-screen? Here’s one of Lee’s tutorials. The clip was nicely done and full of useful information.
He also has a very informative clip titled Promote Your Business With YouTube – Five More Easy Ways you can see here:
That’s A Wrap
Web videos have improved considerably, over the last few years. They used to be poor to moderate-quality personal footage, shot on analog camcorders, by amateurs.
Not any more. Businesses are now getting into the video act…so to speak…in a big way.
High-quality, high-definition videos are all over the place. YouTube lets you post 15-minute videos for free. Serious business people should definitely consider the improved speed and no-advertisement advantages of a paid video hosting site. Take a look at the ReadWriteCloud article How To Choose The Right Host For Your Online Video.
Are creating videos to promote your business worth all the time, effort, and expense?
Feast your eyes on this one promoting the GoPro HD sports camera, then decide. The helmet cam version goes for about $300.
I just might need to go order one and find a few cool new video projects!
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Cisco Reboots Its Corporate News Portal
Jul 7th
Cisco long has had its own exemplary in-house news site called @News. Last month they upgraded and are now rebranding it as The Network here. So what can you find there? At first blush it looks like many other Web-news portals, with a set of top stories from major tech freelancers such as Steve Wildstrom (formerly of Business Week) who has written an interview with Internet luminary Vint Cerf and another story on big data; Elizabeth Corcoran, the former Valley Forbes bureau chief, and John Dodge, someone like myself that got their start in tech journalism back at PC Week in the 1980s.
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What you won’t find is much in the way of actual breaking news, unless you are looking for particular Cisco-specific products. Yes, there are links to third-party stories, and some interesting features, too. What is interesting is that all of the top shared posts are video clips. Clicking on the most viewed stories shows that some have gotten 20,000 views or more in the month since the site went live. That’s not bad for an in-house portal. Most of these are press releases, which isn’t surprising given Cisco’s reach and influence in the networking industry. Speaking of reach, Cisco’s Facebook page has over 180,000 followers and @ciscosystems Twitter account has more than 82,000 followers.
Like any good modern Web site, readers can easily share content on Twitter and Facebook and embed a widget into their own Web site, as you can see from the screenshot below showing the article layout.
Perhaps this should best be described not as a news site, but as a community portal where customers and competitors can better keep track of what is going on in the markets that Cisco sells into: video conferencing, data center infrastructure, collaboration tools, and key networking technologies. MediaSurvey.com’s Sam Whitmore, who tracks these sorts of things, says “Cisco instead invests in its own content because it can own the analytics on it. That gives Cisco the power to iterate what works and dump what doesn’t — just like publishers do.” Whitmore is bullish on the new Cisco site: “Engagement is what leads to outcomes. That’s Cisco’s play.”
Here is the blog post that announced the site last month. I think companies that have fewer resources than Cisco might take a moment to look and learn from what they are doing here. Yes, an impressive freelance budget and lineup of industry luminaries is great, and they are off to a good start with the number of comments and views. But the whole place seems somewhat soulless and unexciting. While I am not as sanguine as Whitmore as to whether they will ultimately succeed, they do show what basic elements are needed for corporate sites to be engaging to their audience and is worth spending some time there.
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Windows XP Still Powers 60% of Corporate Desktops, Apple Makes Small Gains
Jun 17th
According to a new report from Forrester, Windows 7 is now in use on 20% of corporate desktops as of March 2011. Windows XP still holds on to 59.9% of the enterprise desktop world (down from 67.5% a year go). Apple now has an 11% share of the corporate desktop (up from 9.1%). Linux has only 1.4% (it was 1.3% a year before this study).
Meanwhile, Internet Explorer use is declining slightly while Chrome and Safari are on the rise.
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The pace of Windows 7 adoption is accelerating, according to the report. Windows 7 dominates new deployments, with XP and Vista finally starting to disappear. Forrester says Vista adoption peaked in November of 2009 at 14% and has declined ever since.
Internet Explorer declined slightly to a 58.7% share of corporate browser use from 61.9%. Firefox clocked in at 17.8%, down from 21.9% as it cedes share to Chrome (14.1%) and Safari (8.8%).
Forrester recommends that companies use virtualization to run legacy applications such as Internet Explorer 6 in isolated containers instead of clinging to outdated operating systems that slow down the adoption of other technologies.
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Google Deploys Largest Corporate Electric Vehicle Infrastructure
Jun 9th
It’s already well known that Google is a “green” company, having invested heavily in sustainable power projects such as solar and wind farms, not to mention the fact that their data centers run at 50% the total power consumption of the average data center in the industry. But Google also has some less visible green elements, including its Gfleet initiative. Gfleet is a lineup of earth-friendly vehicles that Googlers can access through a car share program. To support Gfleet, Google has also implemented the largest corporate EV (electric vehicle) infrastructure in history.
Google Fleet started back in 2007, and actually required that the most “green” vehicles of the time (notably the Prius) be retro-fitted with a plugin engine. Since that time electric cars have come along way, with energy efficiency increasing dramatically. The more recent introduction of the Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf – both of which are 100% electric vehicles that operate via pluginpower – allow for Google’s infrastructure to see greater use.
The Gfleet has already invested in 30 of these vehicles, and many Googlers have independently purchased electric vehicles of their own. Google campuses currently have more than 150 level one charging stations. However, Google’s 2011 infrastructure expansion for EVs will be adding over 70 level two charging systems and approximately 250 more charging stations (the type of which has yet to be determined). Emissions from Gfleet’s vehicles is 40% to 80% lower than standard emissions.
This effort combines with Google’s on-campus, biodiesel shuttles to reduce total emissions by an estaimted 5,400 Tonnes of CO2 each year – about the equivalent of getting 2,000 vehicles off the road entirely. For Google, the efforts were partially a way to give their employees a perk, but the efforts have become a way that Google and its charitable branch, Google.org, can help prove the viability and advance the development of the EV technology.
[via the Official Google Blog]
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Google Deploys Largest Corporate Electric Vehicle Infrastructure
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Corporate SEO consultancy Ayima appoints Aspectus PR – Prfire (press release)
Apr 20th
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Corporate SEO consultancy Ayima appoints Aspectus PR
Prfire (press release) Ayima Search Marketing, a leading search engine optimisation (SEO) consultancy to large corporates, has appointed Aspectus PR to manage its UK campaign. Aspectus will focus on raising awareness of Ayima amongst … |
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