Businesses are increasingly targeting social media as a means of generating buzz about their products and attracting new customers.  However, it can often be difficult to measure the effects of a social media campaign and how it affects the reach of a company, brand, or product.

Klout offers users the ability to measure their popularity online.

Klout, a start-up that uses algorithms to rank the online influence of each of its users on a scale of 0 to 100.  If you’re Klout Score is 100, it means that you are must likely an international celebrity with an established — and frequently updated — social media presence (think Justin Bieber / someone with tens of thousands of Twitter followers and Facebook likes).  If your Klout score is 0, you might as well not exist online.  Odds are that you’ve never even signed up for Facebook or tweeted.

In a recent Wired article, Seth Stevenson offers an excellent description of Klout:

Much as Google’s search engine attempts to rank the relevance of every web page, Klout—a three-year-old startup based in San Francisco—is on a mission to rank the influence of every person online. Its algorithms comb through social media data: If you have a public account with Twitter, which makes updates available for anyone to read, you have a Klout score, whether you know it or not (unless you actively opt out on Klout’s website). You can supplement that score by letting Klout link to harder-to-access accounts, like those on Google+, Facebook, or LinkedIn. The scores are calculated using variables that can include number of followers, frequency of updates, the Klout scores of your friends and followers, and the number of likes, retweets, and shares that your updates receive. High-scoring Klout users can qualify for Klout Perks, free goodies from companies hoping to garner some influential praise.  (via Wired)

Although it is geared towards individuals, Klout is also a very useful tool for companies that want to take their social media analytics beyond basic metrics such as likes or followers.  Indeed, the Aflac duck users Klout (and he does pretty well).  Klout allows is users to examine their reach (the number of people one influences), amplification (the degree to which one influences others), and network impact (the influence of one’s audience).   Klout also offers feedback on networks that users participate in as well as the various topics on which they are well-regarded.

If you have questions about integrating your social media presence with Klout or about social media in general, please feel free to contact us.

How do you stack up against other Klout users?

Photo: Wired

Initially referred to as the Webspam update, Google has officially dubbed it "Penguin." Isn't he cute?

The recent update to Google’s algorithm — referred to initially as the Webspam update, before Google officially dubbed it Penguin– has caused a good amount of debate within the SEO community.  Although the number of sites affected by it was relatively small, the Penguin update continues to be the topic of much discussion because of the information Google released along with it and its implications for the future of search engine optimization.

Some were concerned that this update spelled the end for SEO; however, their fears appear to be unfounded.  In his blog post introducing the Penguin update, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam Team, notes:

Google has said before that search engine optimization, or SEO, can be positive and constructive—and we’re not the only ones. Effective search engine optimization can make a site more crawlable and make individual pages more accessible and easier to find. Search engine optimization includes things as simple as keyword research to ensure that the right words are on the page, not just industry jargon that normal people will never type.

The Penguin update is another step by Google to reward well built sites that have been optimized using “white hat techniques” while punishing “webspam.”  The way these terms are defined in the Cutts’ post offer and Google’s desire to reward sites that offer a good user experience offer useful insights to conducting SEO in the post-Penguin landscape.

Cutts defines white hat search engine optimizers as those who “often improve the usability of a site, help create great content, or make sites faster, which is good for both users and search engines. Good search engine optimization can also mean good marketing: thinking about creative ways to make a site more compelling, which can help with search engines as well as social media. The net result of making a great site is often greater awareness of that site on the web, which can translate into more people linking to or visiting a site.”

Black hat webspam, on the other hand, makes use of techniques that offer no benefit to users exploit and loopholes or shortcuts to rank pages higher than they ought to be.  Examples of webspam techniques include keyword stuffing and link schemes.

In short, Google wants white hat optimizers to be able to focus on designing and maintaining quality sites without having to worry that sites optimized with black hat techniques might rank higher despite offering a poorer user experience.  ”We also want the ‘good guys’ making great sites for users, not just algorithms, to see their effort rewarded,” says Cutts.

For those who pay attention to the stance Google has been taking on SEO and webspam recently, the Penguin update should have come as no surprise.  For SEO firms that adhere to tested white hat techniques, it was in many ways a validation of those methods.  Keyword stuffing and link building schemes have been obvious things to avoid for some time now although have still tried to use them to game rankings.  Doubtless, there will be those who continue to do so, but the Penguin update should make such efforts much less effective, while rewarding white hat strategies like improving site usability, creating great content, or optimizing page load times.

It’s also worth noting that Google rolled out a Panda 3.5 refresh on 4/19/12 during the Webspam / Penguin update.  For more on the Panda 3.5 refresh and the biggest winners and losers in the rankings, check out Danny Sullivan’s  recent post on the topic.

If you have any questions about the Penguin or Panda 3.5 updates or would like to consult with us regarding its implications for your SEO initiatives, please feel free to contact us.  At Collaboration 133, we utilize proven and effective white hat SEO techniques to help our clients maximize their rankings without violating Google’s webspam policies.

Removing the "Add to Compare" link on product listings requires modifying some code.

Step 1
To remove the Add to Compare link, you just need to edit the .phtml file that inserts the link into the product view. By commenting out the block of code that inserts the link, you can easily remove it from the product listing. Download a copy of YOUR_PACKAGE/YOUR_TEMPLATE/catalog/product/view/addto.phtml via FTP. Open the file in a text editor and find the following code:

<?php if($_compareUrl=$this->helper('catalog/product_compare')->getAddUrl($_product) ): ?>
<a href="<?php echo $_compareUrl ?>"><?php echo $this->__('add to compare') ?></a>
<?php endif; ?>

Step 2
Comment out the code that adds the link (see lines 1 and 5 below):

<!-- <?php if($_compareUrl=$this->helper('catalog/product_compare')->getAddUrl($_product) ): ?>    <a href="<?php echo $_compareUrl ?>"><?php echo $this->__('add to compare') ?></a> <?php endif; ?> -->

And that’s it! Upload the modified addto.phtml file and check the product listing — the “Add to Compare” link will be gone. If it is not, flush Magento’s cache and refresh the page.

Note: this was tested on a Magento 1.4.2 install; however, it should work for Magento 1.3 through 1.6, although the code may be on a different line.

Back in December, we wrote about how it appeared that LinkedIn, despite posting healthy profits, had not figured out how to get RSS feeds to work on company pages.

Perhaps our post galvanized them to act.  We recently received a follow up response from LinkedIn support stating that the issue had been fixed:

We’re happy to report that our engineering team has fixed this issue with custom RSS feed data showing on Company Pages! Thanks again for bringing it to our attention.

If you are still experiencing this problem, please reply to this message with a screen shot image of your issue and we can proceed to investigate the issue further.

Upon checking our LinkedIn company page, we saw posts from our blog displayed:

Posts from the C133 Blog displaying on LinkedIn after an issue with LinkedIn's RSS functionality was fixed.

As we haven’t been posting that often over the past month, it remains to be seen how frequently the blog posts displayed on LinkedIn update.  Hopefully this one will be visible soon.  If so, thanks for taking care of this LinkedIn.

Thesis' versatile hooks system allows straightforward display of content on specific pages.

The hooks system in the Thesis Theme for WordPress makes it very easy to move content around on your website  and display it where you like.  What if you are are looking to display content only on certain pages though?  Say you have an “About Us” page on which you’d like to display some custom text, how could you display that?

Dynamic content can be implemented through the Thesis custom_functions.php file. We use it on our site to display different content on the sidebar for our blog than we do on the other pages on the Collaboration 133 site.

To display a custom text box that can accommodate HTML and CSS on your About Us page, simply paste the below code into custom_functions.php

// Custom text box on specific pages
function custom_text_box() {
if (is_page('about')) {
?>
<div style="width: 400px; font-family: arial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; color: #2361A1; padding: 12px; border: 3px solid #ccc; margin-bottom: 20px;">
Isn't this a nice custom function that only appears on the About page?
</div>
<?php
}
}
add_action('thesis_hook_before_headline','custom_text_box');

Notes:
1) The CSS code on line 4 can be modified to change the appearance of the custom text / html box or you can define an ID for the <div> and style the box in your stylesheet.

2) Line 3 defines the page on which the custom content will be shown and there are a number of different conditional tags that can be used. All of the conditional tags available are listed on this page in the WordPress Codex lists all the conditional tags available. Below are a few examples of common uses and constructions for your reference:

• is_front_page() This will apply the function to your site’s home page, whether it’s a page full of blog posts or a static page.
• is_home() This will apply the function to your site’s home page only if it’s a blog page—not if it’s a static page. If you are using a static home page, is_home() will apply to whatever page you selected to be your blog page.
• is_page(’23′) This will apply the function to a static page with an ID of 23. If you’ve set your permalinks so that the page ID doesn’t show up in the URL, you can determine what it is by going to the WordPress Pages screen and mousing over the page name. The URL will show up in the status bar at the bottom left of the screen with the post-ID number in it.

Note: You can identify pages in a conditional statement using either the ID number, the page title, or the page slug, which is the last part of the URL when you’re not using default permalinks. For example, if the URL is www.techforluddites.com/products, then “products” is the slug, and the tag would be is_page(‘products’).

• is_single(’5′) This will apply to the individual post page with the ID of 5. You can find the ID number by mousing over the post title in the Posts screen in WordPress.
• !is_page(’23′) The exclamation mark means “not” so this tag means the function would apply to any page (including pages with multiple posts on them) except for the one with the ID of 23.
• is_page(‘about’) || is_page(‘contact’) The double vertical bars mean “or” so this says to apply the function if it’s the About page or the Contact page (which means it will apply to both of them).
• is_single() && !in_category(‘business’) Here’s where you can see how you can build more complex conditional statements. The && represents “and”, so this is saying to apply the function to any page that is a single post page and that is NOT in the business category. In other words, every individual post page unless that post is in the Business category.

Note: There’s a difference between is_category(‘business’) and in_category(‘business’). The former applies only to the actual archive page for Business, which will list all the posts from that category. The latter applies to any post that you’ve assigned to the Business category.

If you visit the WordPress Codex page, you will see that there are many more combinations available, but this short list should allow you to do a lot of customization to your site. If you have any questions about or problems with implementing specific conditional statements, please feel free to contact us about them and we’ll be happy to help figure them out. Further information is also available here.

Unmatched transactions accumulate in QuickBooks for a variety of reasons that range from corrupted bank download files to incorrect matching practices.  Whatever the cause, the general consensus is that these unmatched transactions are unwanted and annoying; having to wade through them on a regular basis to find the transactions that need to be matched is a chore.  Unfortunately, a method to delete unmatched transactions is not readily apparent in on the Match Transactions section in QuickBooks.

There is some info available on the Intuit support forms; however, it’s pretty messy and takes awhile to dig through so we have pulled everything together into a concise set of steps that can be followed to remove unwanted, unmatched transactions:

1. Make sure you have matched all the transactions that you want to match and that only unwanted transactions remain unmatched.
2. From the top menu select Banking > Online Banking  > Online Banking Center (the menu options may be slightly different if you are using a version of QB other than QB 2011 Pro, but essentially all you need to do is get to the Online Banking Center).
3. In the lower box in the Online Banking Center titled Items Received From Financial Institution, highlight the institution for which you want to the delete unmatched transactions.
4. On the right side of the screen, click the Delete button.
5. All set!  You should not encounter any unmatched transactions.  However, as unmatched transactions do accumulate over time, you’ll probably want to follow these steps to clean them out periodically.

Note:  We use QuickBooks Pro 2011, but this method should work for all versions that allow the download of bank data.

Can the post-IPO LinkedIn successfully all the challenges facing it?

LinkedIn has already made many of the company’s top officials millionaires. LinkedIn’s May IPO saw the value of its stock almost triple from it’s initial offering of $45 per share to $122.70 per share, making millionaires of many top company officials. This week LinkedIn executives received further stock options as the company disclosed a batch of restricted stock grants to executives that is collectively valued at millions of dollars.

However, even as it touts itself as a booming tech company, LinkedIn still has some very basic problems to solve.  Last week as part of our revamped social media presence, we set up a company profile on LinkedIn.  After taking care of Collaboration 133′s basic company page configuration, we attempted to link the page to our RSS feed so that our blog posts would be pushed to our LinkedIn company page.

Setup seemed pretty easy:  on company pages, under Admin Tools > Edit, is a field for “Company Blog RSS Feed.”  We entered our RSS feed and went to try a test post.  Upon publishing the test post, we went to check our LinkedIn profile.  Nothing, so we contacted LinkedIn support:

Hi,

I would like to update the Collaboration 133, LLC company page with blog posts from our WordPress blog. I have entered our RSS feed in the Company Admin Edit section; however, I do not see posts appearing on the company page as they are posted on our blog.  What am I doing wrong?

Thanks.

Their response 3 days later:

I’m sorry it’s taken so long to get back to you.

Yes, in fact, you’ve encountered a known issue. I’m very sorry for the inconvenience. Our engineering team is working on it but there’s no estimate as to how long that might take. We’ll do our best to keep you posted.

In the meantime, I’ll gladly help if you have any other questions.If you have further questions, please feel free to reply to this message.

So there you have it.  Even as LinkedIn’s revenue grows by leaps and bounds, they still have yet to master something as simple as publishing posts from an RSS feed on company pages.  This makes LinkedIn a lot less useful to us.  Here’s hoping that they get things fixed soon?  You get that LinkedIn?  Probably not — this post won’t make it to our company page.

Our post about how to Show Blog Posts on Static Homepage with WordPress Thesis Theme has garnered a lot of  responses, even some from folks who don’t use Thesis, but want to display recent posts on the homepages for their other themes.  Since not all themes are as easily customized as Thesis, implementing this functionality can be a little more involved.  However, it’s still pretty straightforward.

This post will detail how to customize your Toom Morel Pro theme to display content in one of the Feature Content areas on the homepage:

1.  Edit front-page.php by logging into WordPress admin and going to Appearance > Editor.  Then select front-page.php from the list on the right.

2.  The code for the Feature Content boxes starts at line 218 in front-page.php.  Locate the Feature Content box (1, 2, 3, or 4) that you want to show the recent posts in by looking for the following code after line 218:

<div class="circle">NUMBER_OF_FEATURE_BOX_YOU_WANT_TO_EDIT</code></div>

3. Three lines below the above code, you will see an else statement that looks something like:

else { ?>Our Clients <?php } ?></h3>

Replace “Our Clients” with whatever you want the title of your Feature Content box to be e.g. Recent Posts.

4. Two lines below the else statement, you will see something along the lines of:

<p><?php if ( get_option('inkthemes_feature3') !='' ) { echo stripslashes(get_option('inkthemes_feature3')); }
			else { ?>Anonymous Hacks NATO, Hackers Deface Anonymous Site Tablet Sales Show Hope for Microsoft Google Announces AdWords Business Credit Card for Public.<?php } ?></p>

5. Delete everything between the <p></p> tags.

6. Insert the following code between the <p></p> tags:

<div id="my-static-front-posts">
<?php
$custom_loop = new WP_Query('showposts=1&amp;amp;amp;orderby=date');
if ( $custom_loop->have_posts() ) :
while ( $custom_loop->have_posts() ) : $custom_loop->the_post();
echo '<div class="post type-post hentry post_box top">';
echo '<div class="headline_area"><b><a href="' . get_permalink() . '">' . get_the_title() . '</a></b>';
echo '<p class="headline_meta"><abbr title="" class="published">' . get_the_date() . '</abbr></p></div>';
echo '<div class="format_text entry-content"><p>' . get_the_excerpt() . '</p></div>';
echo '<a href="' . get_permalink() . '">' . '<span class="more-button">Read More</span></a>';
echo '</div>';
endwhile;
wp_reset_query();
endif;
?></div>

7. Save front-page.php and check out your site. You should see the most recent post being displayed in the appropriate Feature Content area. The above code can be modified to customize how feature posts are displayed.

Much like the cobbler whose children are perennially wearing worn out shoes, we have neglected our social media presence even as we have helped numerous clients optimize their social media campaigns on all platforms, including blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Stumble Upon,  and Google+.  However, we are happy to say that the situation has been remedied.  As of today, you can follow Collaboration 133 on three of the top social networks.  Click the icons below to check out our profiles:

Twitter

Facebook

LinkedIn

We launched our updated social media presence for the same reasons that we advise our clients to use social media:  it can be an effective way to engage users who would not find your business through typical channels, it provides a means to gauge the sentiment of your customers and collect feedback, and is a great way to network not only with individuals, but other businesses as well.  If you are interested in learning more about a social media campaign, please contact us.

Paid links many seem like an easy way to boost your website's rankings, but you should be aware of their risks.

Many methods of online promotion are currently available for businesses or individuals wanting to increase the traffic to and reach of their websites. Four of the most popular methods are Paid Links (backlinks to a site that posted in return for compensation from the site owners), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay-Per-Click Ads on search engines, such as Google or Bing (referred to as PPC, paid search, or SEM for Search Engine Marketing), and Social Media, which has exploded on to the scene so rapidly that many advertisers are playing catch up as they deal with the challengers presented by this new marketing tool.

The purpose of this post is discuss paid links versus SEO and provide information regarding the pros and cons of both approaches so we will set PPC and social media aside for the time being.

Paid links often seem link a great way to quickly acquire a great number with backlinks. You simply pay a fee and the rest is taken care of. Sometimes this fee is paid directly to the owner of a website who may offer various packages with different amounts and positions of links or banners, sometimes it is paid to a third party that claims to specialize in backlink building (“10,000 links for only $75. High PR Sites!”), or sometimes it is paid to a blogger to do a sponsored post.

Of the above scenarios, buying bulk backlinks from a third party is certainly the least preferable option. Often site owners have no way of verifying the page rank of the sites that post backlinks or for that matter even whether the backlinks are posted. Having a bunch of spammy-looking sites linking back to your site is no good and will be more likely to hurt your rankings than improve them in the long run.

Th other two options — packages bought directly from websites related to one’s own site or sponsored blog posts — can offer some benefits. You know who is posting backlinks to your site and can verify that they are there. However, using paid backlinks to boost a site’s search ranking difficult because of Google’s policies on backlinks and spam: any paid links are supposed to be marked with the rel=”nofollow” tag, which instructs some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index (more on rel=”nofollow” from Wikipedia).

Links can be bought for valid reasons, i.e. banners or sponsored blog post to rise brand visibility and awareness, and as long as they have the re=”nofollow” tag they will not run afoul of Google. And so the site owner trying to promote their site is faced with the question of whether to play by the rules and forgo any positive ranking influence from backlinks or try buy backlinks without the re=”nofollow” tag, which will benefit their site’s ranking, but may risk the wrath of Google (In February, J.C. Penney all but disappeared from Google search results after it was discovered that they had been engaged in buying links against Google’s policies).

Getting your site to rank well on the major search engines is crucial to increasing traffic and visibility.

Compared to paid links, search engine optimization requires much more focus, organization, and time. However, while the upfront effort required is indubitably greater, the payoff is that — when done correctly — SEO techniques do not run the risk of getting a site demoted in Google rankings due to policy violations. Areas that search optimization focuses on, such as the creation of original content about a company, product, or person, the proper use of keywords, and backlink building campaigns that rely on reaching out to similar sites and stimulating interest rather than just paying a fee, are proven methods for increasing a sites visibility in organic search. In fact, SEO has become such a standard within the greater industry of online marketing that it is essentially required for any site that wants to succeed on a large scale. You may have a beautifully designed, state-of-the-art website; however, not many people are going to see it if they can’t find it through organic search.

In short, paid links are often quicker and easier than a well-implemented SEO campaign, but they run the risk of getting a site demoted if any of the links violate Google’s policies. This does not mean all paid links are automatically black-hat; accepted uses for paid links include banners and sponsored blog posts for raising brand awareness, provided that the rel=”nofollow” tag is used. Search engine optimization is more labor intensive and has a lot more angles of which to keep track. When done correctly though SEO doesn’t run the risk of getting your site demoted and delivers proven increases in search engine ranking position (SERP). If you’d like to read more about Google’s policies regarding paid backlinks and spam, this post by Matt Cutts (although older) is a good starting point.

At Collaboration 133, we use a combination of tried and true SEO techniques and new, innovative approaches to ensure that our clients achieve their maximum return on their investment in search engine optimization. All our techniques comply with Google’s policies, which allows our clients to rest easy knowing that their online reputation is in good hands.

If you have questions or would like to inquire about Search Engine Optimization for your site, please contact us.