Sé Reed Media

Hello and welcome.

  • Flattery Will Get You Blacklisted

    Ah spam. You can still get a great email from the FBI about international funds that have been setup for you in a trust. And I actual enjoy some of the word-randomizer varietals, long form surrealist poetry that seems to make sense almost, sort of, not quite.

    But there is one strain of spam that is a particularly nefarious. I call it “Flattery Spam” and I bring it up anytime I’m helping someone set up a blog.

    Great

    Flattery Spam plays on it’s victims’ psychology. The Internet is full of bloggers casting their hearts and thoughts into cyberspace, hoping someone, anyone, will tell them they are doing a good job, to agree with them, to cheer them on. And Flattery Spam is happy to oblige.

    You made some decent points there. I looked on the web for additional information about the issue and found most people will go along with your views on this web site.

    Thanks, buddy, good to hear! ::approve::

    I do not even know how I ended up right here, but I thought this post was great. I don’t understand who you might be but certainly you’re going to a well-known blogger for those who are not already. Cheers!

    Who me? Oh, gosh. ::approve::

    Good day very cool site!! Guy .. Excellent .. Superb .. I’ll bookmark your blog and take the feeds also?I am happy to seek out a lot of helpful info here in the put up, we want develop more techniques on this regard, thank you for sharing. . . . . .

    You’re welcome, my pleasure! ::approve::

    Commercial insurance cover supplies company safety in addition to normally reduces less than several types: workers comp, the liability in addition to home insurance cover. Commercial automobile insurance defends a firm’s autos via burning, burglary, harm and also other financial obligations.

    Wait, what? Whojoo talkin bout Willis?

    The clue, of course, is in that last one. Commercial insurance, commercial automobile insurance, blah blah blah insurance. It’s oldskool keyword stuffing, keywords stuffed into my comments box by a comments bot, looking for a bit of backlink juice.

    The other ones are all spam too, but they’re the new spam. Flattery Spam. Despite their admonitions that your post matters, the truth is, they just want your backlink.

    Here’s why.

    Google knows that humans are better judges of good content than their algorithms are.

    Posts from bots named “what wholesale designer bags do for your appearance” and “cheap dre beats” and “Awesome Backlinker” (hey, at least he’s honest!) are banking on the fact that you’ll want their fawning comments on your site more than you’ll care about their janky URLs. If you even notice their janky URLs.

    Multiply that by the hubris of countless Internet psyches and these pages can rack up thousands of links pointing to their site from seemingly valid sources. Google* uses the amount of links pointing to a site, aka backlinks, aka inbound links, as one of its ranking factors: More links mean a higher ranking from Google.

    Of course, Google never stays in the dark for long.

    Pretty soon the Google bots figure out they’ve been had by the spam bots, the site gets de-ranked and the spammers live to spam another day. But Google doesn’t like to be wrong, and it’s not so good at separating the message from the messenger. And so it blames you, the innocent blogger, and despite your honorable intentions, flags your site as not-quite-as-valid-as-before. Spam backlinking is a slippery slope on the way to the dreaded Page 3+, the horror movie of SEO.

    A lot of people go in, but only a few ever make it back out.

    Thankfully, a good spam filter like the WordPress default Akismet, can stop, or at least substantially curtail, the obsequious onslaught before it even starts. But doing it the easy way … what fun would that be? Spam comments are easy to spot if you’re paying attention.

    Does “auction.jaka.biz” look like a valid URL?  Do you think “cheap nike nfl jerseys” is really delighted to have finally found your blog? Would you feel comfortable opening an email attachment from “wholesale-designers-4wf31@gmail.com”?

    The only problem with moderating your own comments, besides the tedious clicking, is that suddenly you suspect everybody. So when someone purporting to be my “old friend Ryan” suddenly comments on my blog

    Yay! You rock. 1 Million Views, unbelievable!!!

    with a backlink to his new “Easy SEO for Small Businesses” SEO company the SEO Scotsman, it makes me starts to wonder.

    I mean, he never mentioned he was Scottish.

     

    *By Google, I mean search engines. But Google is more fun to say.

  • 1,000,000 strong … and growing

    For the last five months, every Monday at 11am PST has found me in front of a computer, chatting about WordPress for a 30-minute, live-streamed roundtable discussion called WPwatercooler. The show is the brainchild of Jason Tucker, who conceived of the idea as a way to blend his love of podcasting and WordPress with the energy and creativity of the OC WordPress Meetup group. Mix in professional enabler Chris Lema and BOOM! WHAMMO! Show.

    The format is pretty simple: We use Google Hangouts to get up to 10 people in a group chat, and Jason streams it live on YouTube. He also archives it on the WPwatercooler YouTube channel, and sets it up as a podcast on iTunes and a few other channels.

    Photo by Nils Rinaldi | Some rights reserved by nilsrinaldi

    We start off with a general topic, but like with any watercooler conversation, it veers off in directions we weren’t expecting, like in Episode 17, where less than a minute before broadcast, Steve Zenghut decided we should all play a secret word game, and the entire show suddenly had a very, well, odd vocabulary (mega bonus points to anyone who can find all the words we slipped in).

    Today we filmed our 20th episode … and crossed the threshold of ONE MILLION views.

    That’s pretty awesome. It’s also a little unnerving.

    When Jason asked me to be on the show, I thought it sounded fun. I love my OCWP peeps and as a freelancer, the idea of some weekly camaraderie focused on WordPress sounded great. I had never done a group Hangout before, and in that first episode you can totally tell ::cringe::.

    Now, five months later, I’m still perfecting my Hangout etiquette, but I’ve been on 17 of the 20 episodes, even patching in from Northern California, Austin TX, and Phoneix, AZ. We also did three remote broadcasts from WordCamp Phoenix, four if you count the Friday episode where we botched the sound and I forgot I was on a laptop and leaned in at a less-than-chaste angle. (Thankfully Jason took that episode offline.) And we’re working on doing more remote broadcasts from WordCamp Miami.

    Did I say unnerving? How about unlikely?

    Six months ago if you had put “being on a YouTube show”on a list of 1,000 things and asked me to choose 500 I thought I might possibly be doing in six months, it wouldn’t have made the cut. It wasn’t anywhere near my radar.

    Of course, like a lot of unlikely occurrences, it actually makes perfect sense. In high school, I helped put together the daily news broadcast. In the late 90s’ tech bubble I worked at a start-up called CyberRadioTV, a far-before-its-time Internet television/radio station, where I produced three hour-long webcasts on sports and politics, as well as the live DJ shows on the weekends. And in the past few years I’ve collaborated with various folks to produce a few promotional videos and a music video or two for my sister’s band. Despite my penchant for print, it seems broadcast has always been hanging around.

    The difference now is that I’m in front of the camera instead of behind it. And my … well, let’s call it quirkiness, is now not only recorded for all posterity, but people are actually watching it. A lot of people. Given the innocuous way the show started, it didn’t even occur to me to consider the possibility that people would watch it, which is probably the reason I agreed to be on it in the first place.

    One million views is a pretty exciting milestone for any online endeavor.

    Jason and Chris have done an incredible job of taking a solid concept, executing it quickly, and following through. All feelings about said quirkiness notwithstanding, it’s been great fun, and more than a little inspiring, to watch it grow. I am delighted to be a part of WPwatercooler and I am excited to see where it goes!

    So cheers to you Jason, Chris, and my various WPwatercooler cohorts. Congratulations on a million views and here’s to a million more!

    Photo credit: Photo by Nils Rinaldi | Some rights reserved

  • Wherever You Hang Your Hat Is Your Home

    All websites have one thing in common. Their presence on the Internet is thanks to a server, somewhere, that is connected to the Internet and storing the site’s files to be served upon request. A website can exist on the Internet without a domain name, but no website gets on the Internet with a host.

    And yes, it matters where you host. Hosting outages are common talk among web developers, and they are always disruptive. Some hosts have lower processing limits than others. Some hosts are hacked more than others. And some have really crappy customer service.

    To that end, I am often asked for my hosting recommendations. I usually respond the way I respond to most “what’s the best _____?”-style questions:

    It depends.

    That’s not a cop-out answer. It really does depend. There are many factors that change the answer dramatically:

    • What is the site’s purpose?
    • What do you expect the traffic to be?
    • What do you want the traffic to be?
    • Is it primarily mobile?
    • Is it image-heavy?
    • Do you need on-site e-commerce?
    • Will you be using a CMS and if so, which one?
    • Are there any particular security requirements?
    • Will you be hosting email?
    • What can you afford?

    On top of all of those variables, the qualities and performance of the major hosting providers changes almost as frequently as WordPress updates. Which means that any recommendations I made here would probably be outdated in six months and embarrassing in a year. Luckily, the essential hosting features that all small businesses need are fairly consistent, whether it’s a one-man shop or an international manufacturing operation.

    Things you want in a web host

    1. 24-hour support, preferably phone support
      Nothing is worse than having your site go down, sending an email and … waiting. The Internet is open 24 hours a day. Your web hosting company should be too.
    2. Auto-backups
      Backing up is hard to do. You have to get everything configured and then … wait, strike that. Backing up isn’t hard to do. In fact, as far as preventing dire amounts of stress without a prescription, it’s one of most effective methods out there. In an ideal world, you’d backup your site locally, then on “the cloud”, and then backup your dual backups with an auto-backup from your web host. In the real world, using a host that does auto-backups will mean you might have a useable backup despite having never gotten around to setting up your other backup systems.A note of caution? Auto-backups are like boxes of chocolate: you never know what you’re gonna get. Before you actually need the backup, check to see if everything is actually being backed up.
    3. The latest versions of PHP and MySql
      WordPress uses these. And so do a lot of other programs. One would think this would no-brainer, but I am continually surprised by how long some hosts wait before updating their libraries. I know upgrading the mass server systems isn’t quite as simple as the WordPress one-click upgrades, but still. Ideally, the most current versions would be enabled by default, but you must at least have the options to upgrade.
    4. Third-party hosting
      I don’t believe in hosting one’s own web development clients for many reasons, but primarily because it puts the client in the precarious position of being tied to their web developer, for better or for worse. If something happens to the client-developer relationship, the site hosting becomes one more issue to be worked out, and more often than not it works out in the favor of the party who has all of the files. Whether it’s a small web dev shop or a web-o-matic website maker, the freedom to part ways without sacrificing the site is essential.

    Things you don’t want in a web host

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-3j4-4N3Ng

  • The Keys to the Castle.com

    Domain name registration is one of the first steps of the web development process, and like all first steps, it’s an important one. In an era when 50% of consumers say they research purchases online before buying, a functioning domain name is the lifeblood of any small business. If a potential customer calls up your website and it’s not there, it doesn’t matter what happened … you’re losing business.

    Despite its significance, registering a domain has become a casual, even incidental part of the process. In a burst of enthusiasm, new small business owners often just register their domains with whomever’s Super Bowl ad they thought was funnier.

    But there are worse things than mass-market web hosting companies with a penchant for race-car driver photo shoots.

    This past week, I met with a client who was operating his business’ website under a “.org”, rather than a “.com”, despite the “.com” being prominently displayed on all his marketing collateral. It seems that after having cancelled his registrar/hosting company’s add-on website-building service, his site was taken down and a rather unpleasant “Forbidden” 404 screen came up. The client didn’t really know what had happened and said he had tried to resolve the situation with the company, but to no avail.

    Despite the recent domain extension expansion, the “.com” is still the standard, especially in non-tech industries. I’m not one to leave a perfectly good top-level domain on the table, so I set out to track down the domain registrar account credentials.

    I first called the company with whom the client had originally registered the site. After a bit of fun hold music and a few monotone menu trees, the phone rep informed me that he had no records for the account because I had the wrong department. I had reached the “Do It Myself” department (yes, DIM), the client had used the “Do It For Me” department.

    They kindly transferred me.

    At the DIFM department, they told me that there had been an account, but it had been cancelled. After I explained that they still held the registration according to various whois registries, the second phone rep was able to determine that the registration had transferred to their sister company.

    They kindly transferred me again.

    Now at the sister company, I started over. This time when they got the records pulled up, I got a reference number. I also got transferred again, because, wouldn’t you know it, that wasn’t her department either. In fact her company didn’t have the registration, and she would transfer me back to the first company, but definitely to the right department this time.

    This went on for a while. Sometimes the reference number worked. Sometimes we had to start over.

    I was transferred a total of 8 times.

    The last time went like this:

    Agent: I’m sorry ma’am, it looks like that record was transferred to our sister company.

    Me: Yes, I’ve talked to them already.

    Agent: No, our other sister company.

    Me: Well, fine, put me through to them. Is it the same account number?

    Agent: Yes, ma’am, the same reference number, but they’re not open now.

    Me, noting the time: Okay, it’s 4:30, when should I call back?

    Agent: They open at midnight.

    Me: … midnight? On a Friday?

    Agent: Yes.

    Me: It is just me or does midnight on a Friday seem like an odd time for a domain registration company to open?

    Agent: They’re a 24-hour company, ma’am.

    Me: 24 hours. Except they are not open now. At 4:30. On a business day.

    FAIL.

    Over the course of two phone calls, I was on hold for more than 2 hours and 15 minutes. At one point, an agent told me it looked like his company was actually the registered owner of the domain, not my client. Given the run-around I got, I wouldn’t be surprised.

    Incidentally, I had my client call back that evening. He sent me a follow-up email:

    “Senior tech told me he cannot access my info, I need to talk to [the original company] on Monday.”

    The moral of this story? If you’re gonna build a castle, make sure you’re the one with the keys.

  • Put Up Or Shut Up

    My friend–author, speaker, and general instigator Chris Lema–quoted me in his blog yesterday:

    My friend Sé Reed, of WPwatercooler fame, works with small businesses and helps them get online. She’s seen hundreds (if not thousands) of clients at the Small Business Development Center and she reminds them of the same thing I’m going to tell you here.

    Folks that blog more than 20 times in a month see 500% of the traffic that those who blog 4 times or less in a month do.

    It’s true. I do remind them of that. In fact, I tell it to rooms full of small business owners every month.

    “Look, guys,” I say. “It’s not about what your cat ate for dinner. It’s about showing what your business is about. It’s about sharing your knowledge. It’s about creating content.”

    That’s true, too. Google eats content for breakfast. And content is also pretty popular with humans.

    In fact, content is the only reason people visit websites.

    At least, that’s what they’re hoping to find. And the content they find, or don’t find, dictates what they do, or don’t do, next. If you’re a shop without directions to your location, that customer probably isn’t going to stop by. If you’re a restaurant and you don’t have a menu, that customer probably isn’t going to come try your food.

    “Think about how you use the internet,” I tell them. “When you go to a website, you’re looking for some sort of information, right? And if you don’t find it, you leave.”

    They always agree. Because it’s true.

    And yet. And yet the link to my site in a post about blogging, quoting back to me a stat about the benefits of blogging I’ve been preaching for the last year … that link was, for all intents and purposes, a link to an empty blog.

    Oh, the irony.

    I’m never been scared of writing. I have a Bachelor’s degree in journalism. I love words. I love websites. And I don’t have a shortage of ideas. But I don’t have a shortage of excuses, either. “I have to finish those designs for that client.” “I have to update to 3.5.1 first.” “I have to walk the dogs … ”

    It’s all the same excuses I hear from my clients. The same excuses I encourage them to get past, the ones I push them through, telling them it won’t just help their SEO, but their business development. They will inspire themselves, I tell them. They will connect to their business. And it’s true. They will. And they do.

    And yet I don’t.

    So, having been brought so blatantly face-to-face with my apparent do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do behavior, I cannot simply push it back onto the back burner. It is time, as the saying goes, to put up or shut up.

  • Mashable Says Social Media is a Designer Drug

    This seems accurate to me. But it also seems obvious. Most humans seek to self-actualize (whether or not they are successful is another topic), and social media gives us a place to explore ourselves and others. And, much like the structure of a haiku makes it easier to write poetry, being given the structure of Twitter’s 140 characters or a writing prompt a la Facebook’s “What’s on your mind?” makes it easier that ever to express ourselves, however stiltedly. Combined with the ever-present suggestion to share and the relative safety of remote expression, where you can control any adverse reactions to what you’ve put out there,  social media is a gilded invitation to express yourself.

    Now, if only we could do that in person.

    Social Media: The Newest Designer Drug

     

  • The ASBDC conference in New Orleans!

    The ASBDC
    (America’s Small Business Development Center Network) conference in New Orleans was really great! I put together a curriculum about basic web development called “I Need A Website,” answering specific questions that I know SBDC consultants get and addressing specific SBDC concerns, such as liability and meeting limitations.The entire second half of the presentation was a primer in how to get a WordPress site up and running in a short amount of time.

    I presented for about three hours to about 40 folks and felt really great about it, especially since a lot of the audience came up to me after the session to tell me how much they had gotten out of it. Nevertheless, I was thoroughly delighted to get the results of the session evaluations emailed to me a few hours later!

    UmUhEvals

    I sometimes miss the finality (validation?) of a getting a grade, so to me this was like getting an A+. Side note: I do talk fast, but this was an especially info-packed session! Perhaps next year I can do a full day.

    Aside from the conference, I really enjoyed exploring New Orleans … it’s full of awesome small businesses!

    I also had a really interesting conversation with a representative from the SBA about Walmart, in which I made a case for small business vis-a-vis Walmart that I was rather surprised I needed to make. But that’s a whole different post.

    Recently I received an email from an SBDC consultant who had not attended my workshop, but heard about it from a colleague who did. He is working with a small business in a rural area that doesn’t have a website and is slowly losing business. He wrote to ask if he could check out my slides in the hope that it would help his client create a website. I don’t feel my presentation slides are especially helpful without my narration. But I really want to help this small business! So I’m going to do a few write-ups in order to hopefully help my fellow consultant to help this small business. And in the hopes that it will help some other small businesses, I will post the writeups here, along with the worksheets I created. Stay tuned!

  • Ooh LA L.A. … I’m speaking in New Orleans and at WordCampLA!

    I’m extremely excited about September!

    First, I get to go to New Orleans, LA, to speak at my very first National Conference! I’m conducting a three-hour presentation on web site development for small businesses at the ASBDC Annual Conference!

    Incidentally, I had thought ASBDC stood for Association of Small Business Development Centers … however it is apparently an acronym that culled from part of the phrase “Representing America’s Small Business Development Centers.” Or something. I’m still not quite clear.

    Wherever its name comes from, the ASBDC serves as the national conference for all of the Small Business Development Centers in the United States. I’m stoked to be going, let alone presenting!

    Then, I’m flying straight from New Orleans back to L.A. to give another presentation at WordCampLA!

    This will be my third WordCamp ever and my second speaking at one. (My first was WordCamp Phoenix, then I spoke at WordCampOC back in June. Both were awesome!) I am completely hooked on WordCamp. I think it is a reflection of my affection for WordPress itself. Truthfully, it’s nice being in a roomful of people who also think WordPress is fun and powerful and useful as … well, just really useful.

    The best part about both of these conferences? Not only do I get to present, but I get to learn! A LOT!* Oh la la indeed!

    *I realize that sounds uber-cheesy. But I don’t care. It’s true!

  • WOot! I’m speaking at WordCamp OC 2012!

    I just got news that I’ll be presenting at WordCamp OC! I’m so excited!

    I’ll be presenting an Introduction to WordPress … and making more WordPress converts! Yeehaw!

    WordCamp OC is sold out already … but sometimes they release more tickets closer to the event, so follow them on Facebook or Twitter to hear any extra ticket announcements!

     

  • Common Search Engine Optimization Terms

    • SEO: Search Engine Optimization
    • SEM: Search Engine Marketing
    • On-site SEO: Search engine optimization techniques applied on your website (also called “on-page”)
    • Off-site SEO: Search engine optimization techniques cultivated on external website (also called “off-page”)
    • Domain: The “nice name” of the root URL of a IP address, i.e. sereedmedia.com
    • Website: All of the files (including pages, images and scripts) housed under a single domain
    • URL: A single page (including content and scripts), i.e. sereedmedia.com/blog
    • Links / hyperlinks: a reference to data that the reader can directly follow, or that is followed automatically, points to a whole webpage or to a specific element within a webpage.
    • Content:  Visible text, photos, videos
    • Meta-data/Meta-content: Text embedded in page source code, not visible to the user
    • Spiders: Automated computer programs that follow links from webpage to webpage (“crawling”) in order to record webpage content in the search engine’s index
    • Index: A search engine’s database storing the date from every web page that its spider visits.
    • Indexed site: A site that has been added to a search engines’ index