There’s a fascinating story in the Atlantic of one historian’s ongoing social experiment intended to reveal the nature of truth on the web. He teaches a U.S. History course at George Mason University called Lying About the Past. The curriculum has uncovered a fragile balance between truth and fiction within online communities as students craft a hoax to see how long it can pass as fact. Outside of academia, one prankster and entrepreneur duped Facebook into believing Abraham Lincoln patented a pre-cursor to social networking.

The lesson the Atlantic draws from the evidence is that the more trusting the community and the less centralized its communication, the more vulnerable it is to believing misinformation. Facebook is susceptible to propagating falsities with viral while Reddit collectively scrutinizes. It’s better to a safe skeptic than a sorry sucker.

What are people saying about your business online? Word of mouth has been amplified with social SERPs.

The findings are a cautionary tale for citizens of the web who avoid becoming victims. But the implications for businesses are equally pressing. A tarnished reputation can do serious damage to a business’s viability. If falsehoods or negative reviews of a business or people close to it crop up online, corrections or rebuttals can come too late to mitigate lasting damage. Active reputation management has always been a necessity of online business, but emerging search and social integrations magnify the issue.

Yesterday Bing launched its new socially enhanced search interface. Billed as another leap beyond blue links, the three column format dedicates the right-hand column to social activity in the searcher’s network. Reviews, both good and bad, become more visible when members of a searchers network have made comments about a business. Google has also made clear its intentions to continue to add social signals to rankings as well as SERP display, saying We think the web is better when it’s social.

Address your online vulnerabilities, be they from negative SEO sabotage or increasing prominence of social mentions. What’s being said about your business online? Isn’t it time to find out?

It’s the close of a Monday, so how about some light reading? OK, I lied. There’s nothing “light” about these powerhouse blog posts I’m about to share with you.

Here on the Bruce Clay, Inc. blog, our staff writes about a variety of Web marketing topics; we like to mix it up and include everything from “how-to” posts to in-depth analyses on hot issues facing the industry to opinion pieces and more. We’re also really lucky to have great guest authors from time to time.

It’s interesting to see the kinds of topics people get excited about here on our little blog. It gives us insight into what matters to our community and how we’re doing as far as providing value.

So I thought it’d be fun to share with you the top-performing posts on our blog for the first half of 2012, based on metrics like traffic, shares and comments.

• Biggest Facebook Marketing Mistakes of 2011: In this guest post by Brian Carter, author of “The Like Economy: How Businesses Make Money With Facebook,” he shares what not to do with your Facebook marketing, based on his many experiences in the world of social networking.
• Why Is Google Allowing Rich Snippet Spam? Unsuspecting consumers beware: those reviews may not be legit. In this post, our very own SEO analyst Bob Meinke shares what he uncovered in the way of Rich Snippet spam in the SERPs. Read on to see what he found.
• Twitter: The Single Greatest Relationship and Branding Tool: This guest post by Shannon Downey of Pivotal Production wasn’t even written this year, but it continues to grow in shares and traffic. In her post, she reflects on Twitter as a true relationship tool, and illustrates her point with a sweet infographic.
• 6 Online Marketing Problems Local Business Owners Face and How to Fix Them: Tackling search engine optimization as a local business is no small feat; that’s why BCI’s Virginia Nussey gives a jam-packed, in-depth blog post full of search marketing goodies for merchants to boost their business online. Check out this starter guide.
• Tips for SEO Web Design and Site Architecture: C’mon, do you really need to think about SEO in the beginning stages of designing a website? You bet your sweet patootie. In this post by yours truly, I dive into the fundamentals of architecting a site from the ground up with SEO in mind.
• How to Choose Social Media Share Buttons: The options for social sharing on the Web are dizzying. Any given blog post could have 20 social share buttons or more attached to it. In this post, I help you cut through the clutter and choose the social share buttons that matter most.
• 10 Image Optimization Tips for Local SEO: Content isn’t limited to text, so don’t forget to optimize other types of content for search, including images. In this guest post by Chris “Silver” Smith of Argent Media, he gives lots of handy tips on optimizing images for local search.
• Google Social Analytics: How the Pages Report Can Boost Content & Social Performance: Not too long ago, Google Analytics launched new social reporting integrated into its data that reveals much about top-performing content. Learn how one report in particular, the “Pages” report, can really boost your content strategy.
• Your Complete 2012 Guide for Tackling Important SEO Issues: Published in January, Bruce Clay Australia created the “SEO Factors and Trends Report” — a list of things you simply can’t ignore in your Web strategy and what to watch out for in the world of SEO in 2012 (unbeknownst to all of us how much Penguin would be flapping its wings and causing such a stir). This report has some great information about how to tackle some hot issues in SEO.
• And still going strong after all these years … drumroll please … How to Properly Implement a 301 Redirect:  This post comes from the land of 2007, and was written by Lisa Barone when she was still a blogger with us, prior to Outspoken Media. How’s that for nostalgia and staying power?

The patient is crashing! Triage needed STAT! Is there a doctor in the house?

Yesterday the search engine optimization industry got fresh info from Matt Cutts on the Penguin situation. It’s been about two weeks since the bird first landed, enough time for SEOs to assess any damage and become familiar with the foul consequences of the update.

For those suffering under Penguin’s iron wing, a plan of action is needed to identify and remedy the causes of penalties and devaluations.

SEO experts have weighed in. Here are the steps for SEOs and webmasters to take to clean-up the link spam Penguin’s after.

Penguin Plan of Attack

1. Diagnosis

How do you know if you were hit by Penguin? Days after the update, Danny Sullivan explained a simple method for detecting Penguin‘s finprints on your site. Review your site’s search traffic immediately after April 24, the day Penguin went live. If your search traffic dropped, you probably got slapped by Penguin. On the flip side, your search traffic may have gone up, in which case you might have benefited at your competitors’ expense. Or perhaps you saw no change at all, in which case good on you.

2. Link Pruning

This is the area where the literature is currently lacking. Our SEO team began engaging in link pruning projects more than six months ago when a client came to us after being hit by the ugly consequences of having purchased 65,000 links. The site was nearly burned to death, but over the course of months of heads-down link pruning the site slowly but surely climbed in rankings. The link pruning process will be outlined in detail in next week’s SEO Newsletter (subscribe to our monthly SEO Newsletter), however this is a basic outline of the steps to take to prune rotten backlinks:

1. Identify: You need to gather a comprehensive backlink profile for the site in question. There are several tools available that would accomplish this, including Google Webmaster Tools Backlinks Report, Majestic SEO Site Explorer and SEOmoz Open Site Explorer.
2. Investigate: Go down the list of backlinks to find the rotten ones. It’s a time intensive step that requires you navigate to each link to evaluate its quality. After a while you may start to get a sense of what’s bad by the URL of the linking page alone. If you opt for using Majestic SEO, you have the benefit of their proprietary ACRank, a quality score that you can use to judge link value.
3. Send Requests: Create a template email requesting link removal that you’ll send to the webmasters in charge of the links identified as low quality. The template should candidly explain that you are an SEO or site owner trying to recover from a Google penalty and would he or she please remove the following links. List the URLs where the links can be found, the URL on your site they point to, the anchor text ─ all the info needed to easily find the link you’re requesting removed. To send the request, you may find contact info on the site, you may need to do a whois search, and you may need to do some sleuthing to get names and email addresses.
4. Follow Up and Repeat: Expect to receive four types of responses to your requests:

   ● Remove link and tell you.
   ● Remove link and not tell you.
   ● Not reply or do anything.
   ● Will remove the link if you pay them.

   In the case of the first, verify by going to the page where the link was and if the link was removed, check it off the list. If you haven’t gotten any response back from a contact in 2 weeks, check to see if the link has been removed. It may or may not. If it’s been removed, cross it off the list. If it hasn’t been removed, send a follow-up request.The process of link pruning requires multiple cycles. Each successive cycle will see more links removed. If you run across a webmaster requesting payment for link removal, let’s just say there’s a search engine who will be very interested to hear about this.

5. Communicate with Google: Throughout this process you must keep detailed records of your actions. A spreadsheet with columns for the linking URL, the contact name, the contact email, the date a request was sent, and responses or actions taken by the linking site. In the end you will not be able to extract all dubious links from the site but you will want to be able to show you’ve done everything in your power to extract manipulative links from your backlink profile.

In an interview with Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting, Bruce shares some stories of link pruning projects we’ve undertaken.

2 Alternative. Reporting False Positives

If you saw a downturn in rankings or traffic around the time Penguin launched and you believe you were inappropriately affected, there is a form for reporting false positives.

3. Waiting…

Once you’re confident you’ve cleaned up your link profile, all that’s left to do is wait. Penguin is an algorithm update so it doesn’t fall under the auspice of manual intervention and related reconsideration requests. See Matt’s explanation of the difference between handling spam based on manual action versus algorithm detection.

Today’s report from Danny held a frightening possibility:

“Again, recovery means cleaning up the spam. If you’ve cleaned and still don’t recover, ultimately, you might need to start all over with a fresh site, Cutts said.”

But before you worry if that’s the boat you’re in, swab the deck and wait until the next refresh of Penguin. Penguin, like Panda, is a filter that Google will tweak and push out again. Since the original launch, Google’s spam team has taken all the info they’ve received from webmasters, analyzed the damage from the first blast and made improvements to the Penguin spam filter which we’ll see next time it gets pushed. If your link pruning was effective, you’ll see it reflected in your search traffic and rankings.

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this LinkedIn for Business series, we talked about optimizing individual tabs within your company profile – the overview tab and the products and services tab. Now that you’ve got your “t”s crossed and your “i”s dotted, it’s time to look at how you are going to promote, grow and measure your LinkedIn business presence.

In this post, we’ll explore LinkedIn plugins that increase visibility, ideas for cross-promotion, tracking the success of your company page and its content, and growing your company’s network on LinkedIn.

Use Plugins to Make Your Profile More Visible

The LinkedIn Developers site has lots of goodies for driving promotion and engagement for LinkedIn. Grab plugins that create buttons you can embed in your site or other collateral so people can:

• Apply through LinkedIn for jobs your company offers.
• Share your Web content on LinkedIn.
• View individual LinkedIn profiles of you and your employees, right in your website.
• View common connections on LinkedIn related to your company’s employees, see new hire information and more.
• View your LinkedIn company profile at-a-glance along with the follow button.
• View full member profiles.
• Recommend your company’s products and services directly.
• See jobs users may be interested in, personalized to them. This can be either the jobs at your company or top jobs on LinkedIn.
• Follow your company directly from the plugin.
• Streamline their experience through a LinkedIn sign in button.

Think about the different ways you can reach people using these plugins:

• The share button has been reported to have slightly more traffic on average than a Facebook Like button. In a BusinessInsider post, reports showed LinkedIn drove an average of 1.5 clicks back to the publisher; better than the average across other social networks at 1.1 clicks.
• Do you have product and service pages on your site? Consider adding the recommend button on those pages. You can show how many people on LinkedIn have recommended them so far, and visitors can recommend on LinkedIn with a click of a mouse. Think about other places you might want to include this button, like additional communications channels.
• If you have a share button enabled on your primary content platform, such as your blog, consider adding the “follow company” plugin as a main staple on other pages throughout your site. This way, users can follow your company page directly from the button.

And don’t forget to cross-promote your company profile presence on all your other social media networks and content products.

Grow Your Engagement and Community on LinkedIn

If you’re already enabling the sharing of your content through plugins, that’s a great start. There are a couple other ways you can have that content spread deeper and also ways to increase engagement with your audience.

Monitoring and Engaging on LinkedIn

Always respond to comments and discussion. This may sound like a “duh” point. But some companies may not have built LinkedIn monitoring into their daily social activity. Just like any other social network, if people are engaging with your company status updates, always show them you appreciate it by engaging back.

And you can also do searches for your company in the search bar in LinkedIn to see who might be talking about your business, and then reach out to that person, add them to your network. For example, use the drop-down menu to select the “Updates” search, then type in your company name:

And voilà:

Expanding Content Reach on LinkedIn

LinkedIn Today is the social network’s content aggregator, and there are ways to go about optimizing for the service so that your business content is more visible across LinkedIn. Along with the many ways you can optimize for LinkedIn Today (<– check out that article by Greg Finn on Search Engine Land for goodies), don’t be shy about reaching out to LinkedIn to become a featured content source, so that your company is added to a list of publishers people can follow directly.

Creating a LinkedIn Group

LinkedIn groups are a great way to allow people to further engage with your brand and to grow your network. You can invite people to join your group through a personal connection on LinkedIn or if you have their email address. If you already have followers on your company page or a list of subscribers to your newsletter, you could start there, since you’ve already got a captive audience, so to speak.

But remember, the group started on behalf of your company is created by an individual member profile acting on behalf of your company, not your company page; whether it’s you or the person who handles your social media, ownership can be transferred and roles can be assigned at any time.

When considering what the focus of your group will be, think about whether it will be a broad reach of topics related to your industry or company, or more targeted by product or service  if they tend to draw a different crowd with different needs. You’ll need resources to manage multiple groups.

Don’t forget to optimize your group’s information with the keywords you want to be found for when someone does a search for groups in LinkedIn. Also, late last year, the LinkedIn blog featured an interesting post worth checking out which details how it ranks group discussions so that the most interesting are at the top.

LinkedIn gives additional tips for promoting groups here.

Measure Results to Drive Strategy

Use the data that’s available through LinkedIn’s company profile page stats to get a better understanding of page views on individual tabs in your company profile by month, unique visitors, visitor demographics by industry, function and company, and total conversions on your products and services page by clicks.

Although the page stats are fairly basic right now (you can’t drill down into things like page views per day or conversions by individual products), it does offer a good snapshot of the activity on your company profile. Here’s an example of the page views chart:

Just like Facebook, number of followers shouldn’t be the only thing you measure. That’s when this graph comes in handy. Do a quick analysis of follower count against page views. What’s your page views per month divided by your followers?

The page visitor demographics for “company” is a little confusing to me:

…  Haven’t had much success with finding out exactly what this piece of data represents. If you happen to know, would you drop me a line in the comments?

Now that you have a snapshot of your company page stats, pair this with the statistics LinkedIn offer for its status updates (see Part 1 of this series for info on status updates) and other analytics info, like Google’s Social Analytics, to form hypotheses on what’s driving traffic and engagement and what content is performing.

Check out an in-depth article I wrote on how you can use Google’s Social Analytics reporting to get a better understanding of how users of individual social networks engage with your content and your site.

For example, you can find out what a user’s behavior was on your site when he or she followed a link to your blog from LinkedIn. You can also find out how LinkedIn traffic fares against Twitter and Facebook, track conversion from LinkedIn, measure the performance of your LinkedIn share buttons and much more.

Use the data you uncover through the LinkedIn page statistics, the status update data and the Google social reports to get a big picture of how LinkedIn is performing as a social medium for your business.

You can also compare what you’ve found out about LinkedIn with analytics from your other social networks to better understand how it fits into your social media portfolio. You might find your engagement level is higher than your Facebook, even when you aren’t trying as hard.

That concludes our three-part series on LinkedIn for business. Got ideas for marketing on LinkedIn? Tell us what you think below!

There are a few experiences that stand out ━ not only because of the impact of the action in that moment in time, but also for the reverberations that persist long after.

One such event occurred at SMX East 2011. The Ask the Search Engines session was standing room only. Google’s rep was Tiffany Oberoi and she sat at the front of the room next to reps for Bing and Blekko. Tiffany had brought with her a bottle of Windex. You can just make out its small blue form on the table next to her in the picture.

Google aims to improve its transparency, as evidenced by @tiffanyoberoi‘s bottle of windex. #smx #33a yfrog.com/khrdqmcj

— Bruce Clay, Inc. (@BruceClayInc) September 15, 2011

Her visual aid supported a claim that Google was going to be more transparent with webmasters. High marks to Tiffany for a presentation that cut through the noise. Even more impressive, Google’s stuck to its word ━ whether or not for the better of the search engine optimization industry remains up for debate.

That event was a turning point in the way Google addresses the SEO industry.

We used to get confirmation that some 400+ obscured algorithm changes had occurred over a year and we were happy to get it. Now Google parades 50+ changes to search each month, spelled out in straightforward detail. Launch codenames, project codenames, and algo updates named after cute critters?

Google’s up to something. The search engine used to lock down its intel tighter than Fort Knox and now it’s spilling secrets faster than Niagra Falls. I suspect their intent is to bombard us with more information than we know what to do with. Google tried to keep SEO in check by withholding information. The less they told us, the more we poked and dug and snooped. Now they hurl every update at us in bloody detail, sending us into a tailspin of overanalysis.

Here’s a call to value SEO wisdom above knowledge. We can use that Windex alright, but to our advantage. Let’s clean up the discourse and clear up our thinking to embrace a long view of search engine marketing beyond algo chasing.

Taking full advantage of LinkedIn for business using the company profile feature is a great way for B2Bs to reach their target audience. Last time, we looked at how to optimize the “overview” tab on the LinkedIn company profile. Today, we’ll take a closer look into the “products and services” tab, offering some very cool functions for highlighting your goods and also for segmenting content by audience. There are lots of possibilities to market within this tab; let’s have a look.

Product and Services Tab

First, for editing purposes, always be on the tab you want to edit and select Admin tools > edit. Same goes for editing individual products and services, you must select one first, then edit.

Product and Services Overview

The product and services description is a great place to give an overview of your offerings. You can drill down into individual services and products later in the page. Here, you have 2,000 characters with spaces to introduce what your company has to offer. Note: the character cutoff before the “more” link is 291 with spaces.

Think of this “real estate” the same way you would any type of promotion within a limited space; you want to highlight and entice your users with the most important key terms and takeaways up front. So how will you best optimize the title of your products and services overview  as well as the body content?

For the title, think about using words related to what your business does, versus just a generic “welcome” message. Same goes for the body text – what company specialties did you add in the overview tab? Not a bad idea to include those in the copy here as well.

In the body text, you can do some light customization to layout, like bullets points and bold font – nothing fancy. But you may want to consider using bold on key terms that you want to stand out. People are used to seeing their keywords bold in the SERPs, so this could be a familiar way for people to scan and collect information quickly.

The body text condenses itself when you publish, so don’t bother trying to make separate paragraphs with hard returns. This is where you’ll want to put a little thought into how the information is presented so it’s not overwhelming, especially if you have a lot of text. Bullet points might be your best bet.

Product and Service Spotlight

Here, you can upload up to three custom banners that link out to any Web property you’d like, whether it be quote forms, marketing campaign landing pages, pages within your site or somewhere else you want to drive the LinkedIn community to.

What’s awesome about this section is the ability to show different products and services to different audience segments – but we’ll get to that later.

The banner images can’t exceed 2MB and can be PNG, JPEG, or GIF. They will automatically be resized to 640 x 220 pixels, so you may want to size them accordingly before loading so they aren’t warped once resized.

LinkedIn states it creates a rotating banner for you out of those images, but the user actually has to manually press the arrow to be presented with the next one; you might want to consider placing your most important banner first, in case a user does not manually rotate them.

Don’t forget to add a URL to each banner to the page you want to drive traffic to.

Individual Products and Services

Scrolling down the page, you see there’s a products and services section where you can add up to five products or services, and highlight them individually on their own tab. LinkedIn gives a great step-by-step guide on how to get started with products and services section, so I’ll leave that to them. But here’s some tips and things to think about:

• Outside of individual products and services you offer, what other things can you promote? If you have a blog, newsletter, ebook or other type of content you’re promoting, you can do this here.
• LinkedIn has recommended in several instances to add as much content as you can surrounding your products and services, so try to use every field available to you in the editing mode. You can upload a logo, add a video and add key contacts for the service. Administrators for the company page need to be personally connected on LinkedIn to any person they want to add in as a point of contact for a service.
• You have up to 2,000 characters with spaces to talk about your individual products and services. Apply the same discretion and marketing savvy here as you did in the product and services overview. Use key terms to describe your service or product and make it compelling. Here, you’ll be able to do a little more formatting of the text by breaking it up in paragraphs. When you list your number, in many cases it converts it to a click-to-call format.
• In the “list of key features” area, you have 10 fields to add in text that will create a bulleted list about the products and services. LinkedIn tells us to use this space “to list the key benefits or use cases of your product or service,” rather than key terms you want to be found for. It certainly can’t hurt to use a mix of both, if it comes naturally, for each bullet point.
• Anywhere that you can use key terms related to your business, do it. Don’t keyword stuff, but make sure that your business is well represented with the words you use throughout the titles and descriptions in this section.

Solicit Recommendations

Unlike Yelp, LinkedIn supports and promotes going out there and asking people to endorse you, your products and your services. The recommendations feature allows you to gather and feature endorsements on individual products and services in this section of your company profile.

You need to be connected personally to these people, however,  in order to ask them for a recommendation. So start connecting with people using that database of names and companies you have on file. Make it a habit of connecting with new leads on LinkedIn, so the request for a recommendation comes more naturally and not right after you connect with them.

LinkedIn tells us the recommendations show up not only on the products and services section of your company page, but also on the profile of the person who recommended you. Though I had a hard time finding the recommendations myself on a person’s profile, they are easily viewable on the products themselves.

The stats LinkedIn provides shows you how many times the recommendation for that product has been viewed organically, and the impression per reviewer. Think about how those who have more optimized profiles and higher follower counts could affect the impressions of these recommendations. This is where quality over quantity could be more valuable.

Segment by Audience

How cool is this: You can serve up an entirely different product and service pages depending on the audience that’s visiting you. If you have several products and services that cater to different types of clients, this feature is for you.

The features that are customizable for this function is the product and service spotlight (the banners) and the individual products and services (up to five for each segment). Think of the possibilities. You can have varying promotions, content offerings and more that cater to each type of audience.

If a user doesn’t fall into the audience criteria you’ve defined, they are led to the default segment. So have something more broad for that particular audience that highlights your most important – or all – of your services.

Take a look at your followers list to get an idea of the type of audience that’s interested in your business already. Also check out your page statistics for more insight. Use that data plus what you know about the people who buy particular products or services you offer to help you define segments.

In part 3 of this LinkedIn for business series, we’ll look at promoting, growing and tracking your presence on LinkedIn.

You’ve heard it all before: If you’re a B2B and you’re not using LinkedIn for business, you’re missing out. With the LinkedIn community, B2Bs can present their companies to the decision makers most valuable to their services. If you haven’t taken full advantage of your LinkedIn company page and you’re not sure how to optimize it, this series on LinkedIn for business is for you.

Today, we’re going to start with the company profile “overview tab,” where you’re going to enter in crucial information about your company that will help it be found within the network, and also how to take advantage of features that can build an active and engaged LinkedIn community.

Before we dig into features, if you need to create a LinkedIn company profile, go do that. It’s a simple process to get started. And to access the editing function of the Overview page, select the Admin button > Edit while in the overview tab.

The LinkedIn Company Profile Overview Page

Use Status Updates to Create an Active, Engaging Profile

Just like Facebook, status updates are a way to keep your community engaged, expand your network and provide valuable information to your followers. LinkedIn states the best practices for updates are to make them “authentic, relevant and short,” and that posts that feel spammy will not be shared (wish they could say the same for company profiles in their search results, but we’ll get to that later).

Here’s a brief tutorial on how company status updates work and spread:

From LinkedIn:

• You can see impressions and engagement information on visible updates, but we don’t have the functionality for you to view old posts or the metrics related to those posts.
• Up to 20 updates will appear on the Overview tab and the most recent one will be at the top.
• Posts can be up to 500 characters (including spaces). Shared link titles and descriptions can be up to 250 characters each.

If you already have a LinkedIn share button enabled on your site, when your content is shared through that button, it’s entered into the LinkedIn ecosystem and shown to targeted users. But you can give that content an added boost by showing it to your followers through a status update.

Remember, people who follow your company are likely subscribing to your status updates and may even have a digest that is delivered to them into their email boxes.

But don’t stop with content from your site or blog. Experiment with different types of status updates — text only, images and videos — just like you might in your Facebook community. The cool thing about LinkedIn is, you can see detailed information about who your followers are. Select the follower count button and dig into the types of people who are following you.

Along with the engagement data LinkedIn provides on your live updates, you can use the type of audience you have to drive the message (note: you can access more info about this in your page stats in LinkedIn, too). Here’s an example of the engagement stats LinkedIn provides:

Take this data and compare it with other metrics, like the metrics you’re tracking in your Google Social Analytics reports for LinkedIn. This can give a bigger picture of how content that’s shared on LinkedIn is contributing to your goals.

Also keep in mind that users can control what types of notifications they receive about the companies they follow, including things like employees leaving or joining the company, new job opps and profile updates. So you want to make the posts meaningful and you’ll also want to experiment with the frequency of the posts, too.

People likely don’t want to be inundated with too much information in their updates about your company.

Optimize Your Company Description and Specialties

You have about 1,487 characters with spaces to create your company description. You can use this opportunity to provide important information about your company and optimize it with keywords.

As far as rankings go for results within LinkedIn, the company has made it clear that there is no single rank for LinkedIn search and that relevance is based on a variety of factors that changes from search to search, user to user.

LinkedIn gives little detail as to how it ranks company profile pages, but in a short video, it does allude to the fact that keywords and strength of network connections of the searcher to the company is a factor.

LinkedIn has also recommended you order the keywords that describe your company starting with the most important in the “specialties” list. The specialties list is offers 2at the bottom of the company description and gives 20 fields and up to 256 characters to input the keywords related to what your company does. Use the keywords here that you want to be found for in LinkedIn.

I did a quick analysis myself of the results returned to me in a company search using the keywords “SEO” and “search engine optimization”, and found that keyword usage and placement does seem to matter. I should note the results I examined were the default — all industries, all locations. Anyone can drill down to refine the results based on that criteria and more.

Of the top-ranked results for those key terms, the company size, location and followers varied, but they all had something in common: they had the keyword phrase in both the company description and down in the “specialties” area.

Here’s a snapshot of the term “search engine optimization” showing in both the company description and specialties area.

In every case, the keyword showed up before the cutoff “more” link that expands to give the full description about the company (about 300 characters in). Whether or not that has anything to do with the ranking algorithm, I don’t know. But it is a good practice to have all your important terms up front so when users scan the content, they can make quick assessments of your company and its services.

Also, in every case except one, the keyword was placed first among the list of specialties – just as LinkedIn had advised to do.

Back to LinkedIn’s statement about strength of network affecting the results. It’s notable that for the top 10 results for the keywords “SEO” and “search engine optimization”, three out of 20 of the company profiles returned were in my network, the rest were not. And the company profiles in my network had more natural company descriptions than the rest of the results.

All the other results in the top 10 that weren’t in my network were either blatant spam (see below) or had company descriptions with a higher keyword density: between 4 percent and 8 percent (excluding the keywords in the specialties area). Here’s an example of the spam that shows up in the company search results. This ranks No. 1 for the term “SEO”:

Crazy, right? Obviously, these profiles provide no value to the LinkedIn community, so it’s not as if they’re snatching up business from top-rated brands, but it’s still pretty lame they’re ranking.

General Information on LinkedIn

You can add up to five locations for a business. If you have more than five, choose the locations wisely. LinkedIn users can search for companies by location, and LinkedIn has stated its company directory is automatically generated by company pages that have the most activity per industry and location. So choose those locations that are the most crucial to your products or services if you have more than five to list.

When choosing your industry, if it’s a toss up between two or more, you might find you’ll need to do some research on what people search for when looking for your products or services. See what your competitors have listed as their industry as well.

Use this data backed by your own wisdom on how your clients would categorize your company to make the appropriate choice. If you’re not sure, try testing. See if it affects your search results in LinkedIn or try to track if one drives more users to your profile than the other using the page statistics.

Have an Active Community of Company Employees

A guest post late last year on Search Engine Land talked about the potential power of inbound links from LinkedIn, and how certain factors could affect the power of those links.

In his post, author George Aspland gives tips on how to boost the authority of a LinkedIn company profile; this includes the number of employees associated with the company page, the activity of those employees on LinkedIn, the optimization of their profiles and more.

So, it’s not a bad idea to make sure all your company employees on LinkedIn are affiliated with your company profile, are active and are building strong profiles and networks of their own.

Enable Your Blog RSS Feed

In the edit function, scroll down to the “company blog RSS feed” field and simply copy and paste the URL for your feed. We use Feedburner but recently noticed it doesn’t keep our feed current. So make sure you’re monitoring your feed to ensure your content isn’t stale on your LinkedIn page.

Having this stream of posts doesn’t mean you should completely ignore sharing the most important content you have in your status updates; it’s not guaranteed people will be following the feed list just because it’s there.

And as an FYI, the company activity shown towards the bottom of the overview tab is automatically generated, and is a combination of activity surrounding company employees, status updates from the company page and more.

In the next post in this series of optimizing your LinkedIn company profile, we’ll take a look at the Product and Services tab.

Once upon a time, the average person didn’t read or write, relying on scholars and the church to pass down rules and law. In modern times, mobile phones were once a luxury of the business elite and now they’re a rite of passage for seven-year-olds. Remember when a college degree gave you a leg up in the professional pool? Now it’s practically a required credential.

As technology advances and we upgrade our collective cache of abilities, some skills once reserved for specialists become commonplace.

Well, there’s another skill that soon will be on the list of mandatory know-how: programming. We consume code all day; not knowing how to code is in many ways like knowing how to read but not write. We’re doing ourselves a great disservice by relegating ourselves to mere consumers not equal to a separate class of creators.

Opportunities open when you know the code.

How can we as Internet marketers implement campaigns to their full effect if we don’t understand the language in which we are working?

An evolving hybrid of coder-marketer, or Growth Hacker, may be taking over the traditional role of VP of Marketing. Programming will be a required skill for any decent paying job in the not-distant future. It’s currently such a coveted skill it almost guarantees you employment.

One company instituted a program to teach all employees how to write code. It’s seen improved efficiencies in collaboration and communication across departments from client communication to administration due to deeper understanding of the company, its technology and products.

So, how can a busy professional learn to how to code?

That’s a question I asked myself recently. If you’re interested, we could try together! My starting point is familiarity with HTML and CSS. If anyone out there has suggested reading and advice, I’m all ears. Otherwise, this is how I plan to start learning code.

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

This introduction into the inner workings of smart machines gives context to understanding PCs and the Internet. This book uses familiar language systems like Morse code to lift the veil from the workings of code all around us. It’s simple enough to understand that you may want to read this one with your teenager at home. That way you get the added benefit from the position of student as teacher.

Google Code University

After poking around a little, I’m discovering this could prove a bit of rabbit hole. In the second paragraph of the Tutorials and Introductions section, there are three links out that I’ll want to investigate before reading further down the page. The material is straight-forward, with courses divided by topics like programming languages (C++, Java, JavaScript, Python and Go), Web Programming, Algorithms, Android, APIs and Tools. Much of the free course content is contributed from institutions like Cal Poly, Stanford and Princeton.

Codeacademy

From the outset, this design looks the most encouraging to me as a beginner. I can select a track, either applications or websites, to start my learning, and a progress bar shows me how far along I am in the course so I can judge my accomplishments which encourages me onward. It’s interactive and integrates with Facebook so I can share with friends, introducing a social layer that affords me bragging rights. May as well take advantage of it while programming is still a special skill.

Alright, your turn. Your help is welcomed on two fronts.

1. What tips do you have for making time for something you want to do but don’t necessarily have to? Like, how did you make time for learning a new language? Or picking up a new instrument?

2. When you learned programming, was there a resource that made it click for you? Where would you start if you were teaching your kid?

In other words, how can I make this really happen?

No one would ever want to be in George Zimmerman’s position: a controversial target in the volatile debate of American race relations. Of all the lessons society can take from the case of Trayvon Martin, disaster response and reputation management sit at the bottom of the list. Still, for marketers Zimmerman’s defense team’s efforts to control the online conversation are worth a closer look.

This morning we learned that the defense team had set up a website, Facebook page and Twitter account. Zimmerman’s attorney Mark O’Mara explains his decision to establish an official social media presence:

“We feel it would be irresponsible to ignore the robust online conversation, and we feel equally as strong about establishing a professional, responsible, and ethical approach to new media.”

An explanation by George Zimmerman's legal team on why a social media presence is necessary for a sound defense.

The Internet has proven time and again a powerful platform for influencing public opinion, which the defense team is wisely engaging. Previously, $200,000 had been raised for Zimmerman’s legal defense through online donations. Three websites were responsible for garnering those donations, and the one administered by Zimmerman himself was shuttered by the legal team in favor of the attorney-controlled gzlegalcase.com.

While court cases set precedent for interpretation of the law, Zimmerman’s defense is setting a precedent for communicating in the new-media world. In the top right-corner of the site, a link to a page the lays out the legal group’s reasoning for a social media presence. The major points on why an Internet presence is prudent for Zimmerman’s defense:

• Eliminating fraudulent websites and social profiles
• Disputing misinformation
• Discouraging speculation
• Acknowledging the larger significance of the case
• Providing a forum for communication with the law firm
• Fundraising

In other words, all the textbook social media advantages we preach to clients. Have a major input on the conversation, and bring the conversation to your own channels so you can moderate the discussion. You can’t curtail the discussion happening elsewhere on the web, but you must at least create a platform for addressing criticism and be proactive in stamping out imposters with malintent.

The O’Mara Law Group has designed a simple and efficient social media strategy accounting for the popular use and strength of each channel to establish a unified message and presence. The individual parts can be described as follows:

Website and blog: The primary hub for the group’s Internet presence, the website contains a blog through which the team can address the public. The site points to press releases the team has published, the official Facebook page and lists recent Twitter updates with a displayed feed.

Press releases: Controversy has arisen not only from the circumstances of the case but also from the aftermath. Press releases accomplish the one-sided message delivery to traditional media outlets, effective for both proactive and reactive communications.

Facebook and Twitter: For communication that embraces the participatory nature of new media, Facebook and Twitter are the most popular networks where people are already talking. Not having an official presence where you’re being talked about would be negligent. On the Facebook page, the team addresses their policy on comment moderation, shares links to conversation starters on the GZ legal case blog, and prompts discussions with questions that tie into the larger dialogue with links to third-party sources like Routers. With Twitter’s microblogging format, the team is linking to news coverage of the hearing and addressing Twitter users’ questions. As a result of this kind of promotion, the team comes across as having a balanced interest in full disclosure.

Tweets by @GZlegalcase addressing questions and sharing news.

The stakes are high for Zimmerman in this case. They’re also high for a brand seeking to nurture positive public perception. Internet presence must be taken seriously with a well-designed social media strategy. The O’Mara Law Group’s final investment in social media reads by the book:

Monitor the conversation. Participate in the conversation. Protect the brand/message.

Got a few minutes to be inspired by technology today? Can’t stomach another how-to post or dramatic Google-focused news story — or is that just me? Monday started off feeling a bit more “Mondayish” than I would have liked, and I’m sure many of you are feeling the same way (quiet down, eternal optimists). If you’re anything like me, it’s easy to become caught up in the details of this tactic or that strategy to the point of losing sight of the bigger picture. That’s why I love TED Talks and it’s also why I love technology — because it’s part of something bigger … even if I have to be reminded ever so often. Today, I found the inspiration I needed in some very moving, tech-focused stories via TED Talks, and I wanted to share those with you. 

The following three videos each talk about a different type of medium in tech — texting, blogging and apps — but they have a common thread: connecting people, sentiment and action in new, life-changing ways.

So take a few moments throughout your day today to watch these short videos, be inspired and remember how your role in tech is contributing to the bigger picture. If you’re feeling really moved, share with us in the comments section below how your company or career contributes to something bigger through tech. We’d love to hear your story.

Texting That Saves Lives

In this Ted Talk, CEO of DoSomething.org, Nancy Lublin, talks about how texting as a medium to reach people – actually *reach* them to make a difference in their lives – was something that was discovered accidentally during texting campaigns her organization was performing for unrelated events. In this short talk, Nancy discusses the power of texting not only in terms of helping people directly, but also as a means to prevent undesirable and unspeakable things from happening in our society through meaningful data.

Half a Million Secrets

Do you have a secret? You’re not alone. PostSecret.com, the most visited ad-free blog in the world, has been collecting anonymous secrets since 2004. In this talk, the man behind the confessions, Frank Warren, discusses how the freedom of sharing secrets anonymously has allowed people to identify with one another, to bring them closer together, to leverage ideas, to promote random acts of kindness and much more. This one, you have to watch until the very end.

Coding a Better Government

Think for a minute about the power of an offline community that’s able to connect and help one another in ways that were not possible before through the use of government-supported technology like apps. This is the talk led by Jennifer Pahlka of Code for America, where she discusses how apps created and used by local governments have moved people to be an active part in maintaining their community, to help a neighbor who maybe wouldn’t have reached out for help, and to make the government run more like the Internet – open, permissionless, generative. Find out how the government is creating community through simple apps, giving some people a renewed sense of hope and perspective on how the government can work for the people, and how the people can work for each other.