We’re thrilled to announce some great new firepower to our Client Services team!
Introducing Megan Bookless as our newest Account Manager:
Megan Bookless – Account Manager
Megan Bookless has joined our Client Services Team as an Account Manager. She has extensive experience in marketing and customer support. Megan brings with her a great strategic mind, attention to detail and a warm personality that will make clients feel comfortable. Previously, Megan was an Account Manager for a design and branding firm. She worked closely with well-known companies to help them incorporate their offline brand with digital and social media marketing. Megan will join our team along side one of her triplet sisters, Michelle Bookless, who is a Project Manager working with our Interactive Clients.
We’re pleased to announce that Dan Kompass has joined Union Street Media as our new Business Development Manager. Dan will be based in Massachusetts and will be an integral part of our team as we continue to expand our presence in Massachusetts. Dan has spent the last 20 years living on the Cape and working with many local real estate offices. He really knows his stuff!
Dan has worked in nearly every aspect of web development from project and account management, to search engine optimization, Internet marketing and application development. Dan started building websites in 1995, around the time that some of Union Street Media’s current interns were starting Kindergarten, and has overseen the development of real estate websites for agents and offices throughout New England. “We couldn’t be more excited for him to bring his industry expertise and customer service ethic to the Union Street Media team,” said Jon Adler, Director of Account Strategy at Union Street Media. “Being based in Massachusetts will be a great opportunity to schedule in-person consultations with current and prospective clients in that area.”
“My first few weeks at Union Street Media have been fantastic! Our team of dedicated and talented employees have taken real estate website development to a new level. I feel inspired Union Street Media’s commitment to our clients and impressed by the sites we have developed over the years. It’s great to be on board!”
“How often should I write a blog post for my website?” has been The Question to ask since blogging began. The answers to this question vary and should because it really depends upon your goals and the niche or audience that reads your blog. Most that ask the question just want a quick answer and there isn’t one. Ultimately the question is asked because the person wants their blog to be successful. There is a certain logic in thinking that if I produce X amount of good quality blog posts then my blog will be successful. There are many factors that make for a successful blog and, combined with the updates to search engines and online social landscape, the success of a blog becomes somewhat of a moving target. Although there is a core structure to effective blogging, some of what worked in 2006 for bloggers isn’t going to necessarily work today. The good news is there are guidelines below that will help get you on the right track with how often you blog. By using the points below as a guide and then adjusting to your specific audience, you can determine an effective answer for how often to blog.
The easiest answer to this question is if you can blog at least once a day, you should. Most don’t have that much time to dedicate to blogging and yet do want some success. To measure success, at a very basic level, a blog is effective when it brings in the right traffic. (A quick side-note: you shouldn’t expect that just because you write enough blog posts you will automatically get traffic, it will still need to be optimized and promoted). There is also a nice balance between enough content and other time commitments in your work week. To get and maintain a steady stream of readers, you will want to write at least once a week. If you write more, you will see additional benefits but if you write less, your blog won’t generally be a strong addition to your overall online efforts (whatever they may be).
Image via Wikipedia
The harder question to ask is, why are you blogging in the first place? What are your goals? To write just for the sake of writing won’t get you were you need to go. When you review those goals and the benchmarks for their success, you may find an entirely different answer than the one above. To get an idea of how much blogging some of the professional bloggers do (such as those behind Wired, ProBlogger, Gizmodo, Engadget, etc.) take a look at the book Blogging Heroes by Michael A. Banks. Banks does an interview with 30 of the world’s top bloggers and the answers are not only insightful but contain over-riding themes (such as how often they blog and how much online content they read). Consider the varying perspectives from Hubspot, SEOMoz, ProBlogger, and Gigaom that offer quick answers to the same question of how often to blog.
The website industry moves so fast, that keeping your website aesthetically and technologically fresh is a no-brainer. There are also personal and branding reasons that could force a re-design, but making good design choices with good SEO in mind can be a challenge.
Union Street Media Web Developer Evan Briggs comments:
“The web is constantly evolving, so it’s important that your website is evolving with it. When contemplating an redesign, consider the rewards: it establishes your web presence, keeps your brand fresh, and most importantly, your users engaged. “
Web users are savvier and search engines have helped drive up improvements, which is their M.O. For website owners, paying attention to how to keep visitors engaged on their site and finding a way to rank well is symbiotic.
After seeing the value of using Twitter, what about the content? Even if it is only 140 characters per tweet, coming up with content every day can become a chore. Here are some solutions for keeping tabs on news worthy items, compiling interesting ideas, and organizing the content for effective timing.
Keeping tabs on news worthy items to feed your followers or respond to can be time consuming. Here are three tools that make it easier to find news worthy content:
Google Alerts: Google Alerts makes it easy to get updates on particular keyword phrases. If you are new to Google Alerts the easiest way to start is by brainstorming search phrases, checking the results until you are happy, and adding the alert.
Twitter Search
Twitter provides such an easy way to share information. Tweets are quick to create, quick to read, and easy to share. The only downside is that it is hard not to have your tweets go out randomly and all at once. This is because most of us don’t have time to send tweets out all day long. Yet to be effective, to hit the target times when people are most likely to read, and not bury important tweets with another, tweets need to be spaced out. Luckily there is a nice free tool to make tweeting not only that much easier but have your efforts perform better.
There is some science behind using Twitter. Hubspot has done some studies on the best time to tweet. Their data shows some of the best times of the week and times of the day that work best for sending out tweets. For example, the best time to post if you want to get re-tweeted is generally between 2-5 pm and later in the week. If you want data more specific to your particular experience, you can try using Hubspot’s TweetWhen. Keep in mind though that if you don’t have enough retweets within your account, the tool won’t have enough data to provide any suggestions. In this case it is better to use the general guides from their study and then tweak after checking your own data.
If you want to take advantage of tweeting at the best time then use Buffer. Buffer is a free online application that makes it easy to amass tweets that go out at predetermined times. There are other tools that allow you to pre-publish your posts however Buffer takes this one step further. Buffer allows you to throw tweets into the application and it will automatically send the tweets at the correct times. You only have to set up your calendar once instead of each time you have a post. This makes it so much easier than trying to remember the best times to tweet each time you post. Set up Buffer with all the times you want and then throw in good posts as you think or find them. 
There is no real science behind just sending out tweets as you think of them. One tweet follows another at random times often burying a previously important item. At the very least you should use Buffer to space out when one tweet follows another. If you do use Buffer though did you know it can actually increase your followers? The data actually comes from Buffer so it is bias but why not give it a try in case it does work?
In the last few weeks, we’ve had the privilege at Union Street Media of launching several new websites. The Lynn Jackson Group, a Century 21 Jack office, located in Vergennes, VT, was looking for a new website provider that would be able to help them expand their market. Union Street Media had the right tools to do the job. The system allowed them to update listings and syndicate with Social Media sites with the added ability to create additional content pages on their website; a task that had previously taken up a lot of their time. The new website also allowed them to segment their MLS data, providing site visitors with recommended searches and more SEO authority.
Doing a search online you want quality results, not webpages full of duplicate content and advertisements. Google wants quality results also and takes action to improve them via updates. In fact, the recent Panda Update continues to try to improve search results by getting rid of low quality, thin content. It is important to find pages that contain thin content to prevent damaging the health of your website overall.
From a human perspective, thin content is a webpage that doesn’t effectively answer a question or get someone to take action. From a search engine perspective, thin content is duplicate content, where a high percentage of content is the same as other content on the site (read more on this from the SEO Moz blog) or other websites out on the internet.
Image via Wikipedia, Have Solid Content to Be Found
Thin content gives consistent signals to search engines that the content on the website is poor quality. Some usual indicators for this include low time on a webpage combined with a high bounce rate. There are some pages where this combination is ok. This includes pages similar to the contact page where visitors come for a specific purpose, get what they need (such as a phone number or address) and then leave. Most other pages are not like the contact page so a low time on a page and high bounce rate are indicators that a visitor didn’t find what they wanted.
In this post I wanted to turn my attention to an oft-misunderstood basic SEO practice—and one that I get a lot of questions about: the title tag.
The title tag is one of if not THE most important piece of text information that search engines look at as a signal of relevance on a web page. These innocuous words and phrases appear at the top of your browser. They also appear in search results and sometimes as link anchor text, from external links.
Title tag at top of browser
By HTML and XHTML law, a title tag is required on every web page document. Title tags are located in the source code within the Head section. For anyone not familiar with code, you don’t necessarily need to know that but it helps if you want to ask the right questions. It looks something like this:
Every now and again, we always need to be proactive with our skill set and check we are up to speed with best practices. From a 30,000 feet level, we try to make sure everyone is on the same page without reinventing the wheel. At the end of the day, if we can think outside of the box, throw a few things at the wall and see what sticks, it’s a win-win.
Well, it was all cliche. But did any of it make sense?
Google's Cliche Whiteboard
Cliches are fascinating, since there very existence is born out of an axiom or self-evident truth. In SEO, I find myself repeating the same terms, often out of habit, but also because from an understanding perspective they do provide structure.
Search Engine Optimization
