The Internet and celebrities were almost made for each other. Whether you head out to TMZ to see who’s cheating on who, or head over to YouTube to watch the trailer for an upcoming movie you’re excited about, or if you’re heading over to CNN to see who Brad and Angelina adopted this week, at some point or another, the Internet has given you access to celebrities like you’ve never had before.
A recent public skirmish between Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines proves the inverse is also true: Celebrities now have more access to you than ever. Analyzing the situation, many businesses could learn a lesson on how to leverage social media to alter public perception.
Just to bring everyone up to speed on the situation quickly: On February 13th, Kevin Smith was removed from a flight on Southwest Airlines. The airline cites safety concerns and other issues. To the casual observer and to Smith himself, it basically came down to him being too heavy for the seat he was in.
When today’s sensationalized news shows get a hold on a story like that, it quickly becomes “Movie Director Too Fat to Fly!†and the feeding frenzy ensues.
Whatever the truth of the matter is, it’s made for an interesting skirmish held mostly via blogs, Twitter, and YouTube, and it is a fascinating case study. If you’d like to read more on the issue, Google is your friend. Southwest has issued statements and blog posts on the matter, and Smith has taken to his Twitter account, blogs, podcasts, and other avenues.
Smith has the luxury, being a celebrity, of having a built-in audience when something like this happens. His Twitter account alone boasts nearly 1.7 million followers, which is a staggering number. So when he speaks, there’s someone there to listen.
And speak he has, releasing tens of dozens of tweets, two audio podcasts, and a 21-part YouTube video series on the matter. Many folks are publicly claiming a boycott of the airline, and the airline itself has buckled with an apology.
Online news sources are reporting on Smith’s moves, and he’s coming off as the good guy in all of this. He’s effectively taken what was probably an incredibly embarrassing incident, controlled the spin to the best of his ability, and likely minimized the impact of it.
And at the heart of all of it, it seems to be a customer service issue. If Kevin Smith has provided a lesson for us as businesses, it’s that the disgruntled customers scream the loudest. Southwest may have had hundreds of people fly happily that day, but no one goes home and writes on their blog “I HAD A REALLY NICE FLIGHT ON SOUTHWEST AIRLINES!â€
And if not carefully addressed, the screams of the disgruntled become what the public sees as the truth when they research you.
While social media is no replacement for actual quality customer service, being out there among your audience monitoring and participating in the conversation can help reduce the damage that’s happening. For every Kevin Smith, there’s a hundred Joe Smiths who have opinions on your products and services, and aren’t afraid to share them. Go to YouTube and search for any large company. You’ll likely find many of the top results are from disgruntled customers complaining about that company. If you’re not actively involved in social media, this conversation is taking place without you.
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Exactly a week ago, Gmail users around the world noticed an interesting addition to their email accounts. Underneath their inbox was a new tab labeled “Buzz.†Although it may not have seemed immediately significant, this four-letter word has generated quite the impact. Buzz is Google’s boldest foray into social media yet – it allows users to instantly share thoughts, pictures, multimedia and social media feeds through their Gmail account. There has been some negative press regarding privacy issues with this new service, but all in all it seems as though Google has made a very smart move.
After only being widely available for a week, Google Buzz has experienced great success. Because it is wired directly into Gmail and users didn’t have to do anything to set it up, Buzz instantly gained over 38 million users in the United States alone. Look at that on a worldwide stage, and you’ve got some really impressive numbers.
So what exactly does Google Buzz allow you to do? First and foremost, you have access to its social media power the entire time you are signed into Gmail, which for many people is almost all day. In addition to this continuous and simple accessibility, some of the ways Buzz differentiates itself from other social media platforms is by allowing you to:
- Comment on Buzzes in real-time and easily access flagged posts that are popular among your friends
- Easily find people to follow through your contacts, as well as find new people to follow by checking out comments on your friends’ posts
- Receive instant email updates regarding new Buzzes, and respond to them immediately
- Sync with Google Reader, Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, Google Chat, and Twitter all at once, so that anything you post on those sites is automatically funneled into Buzz
- Quickly and easily embed, share and browse full-size photos
- Write longer posts that aren’t restricted by a character limit and share media more easily (YouTube links will automatically embed video into your Buzz)
- Use Buzz’s permalink functionality to easily email, link or share Buzzes with others
- Access Buzz from your mobile device
Because of these features, as well as several others, many users are quickly becoming fans of this newest wave of social media. According to an article published on Mashable entitled “Google Buzz Has Completely Changed the Game: Here’s Howâ€, users have embraced Buzz because it:
- Is easy to use, accessible and convenient
- Creates a closer social circle
- Moves in real-time
- Engages users
Google had a few privacy issues to deal with regarding Buzz’s auto-following feature, but it quickly made some privacy tweaks, and appears to have been met with generous enthusiasm and a high volume of usage. Of course there are people who are less than pleased at the prospect of having to deal with yet another social media platform, and there are many who believe Google is simply trying to monitor every piece of information available on the Web. However, we’ll let you decide – give Buzz a try and see if it adds to your social media experience. Check out the video below to get more detail on exactly how it works:
There’s talk that Buzz is going to provide some intense competition for other popular social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. It’s unlikely that Buzz will ever eliminate those two dominant forces, but judging from its initial success, it is likely to at least slow their growth. Buzz is an open platform, so it won’t be long before developers are coming up with all sorts of apps, analytics, and other traffic-driving forces to enhance it. Those involved in the world of the Web would be wise to monitor Buzz’s progress – it may be just another social media site, but with the power of Google behind it, it could become much more.
Photo provided by siliconmonkey on Flickr.
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I’ve used several different content management systems over the years, and WordPress is by far my favorite. Not only does WordPress allow you to install pre-designed themes that can be hacked to your specifications, it also creates very SEO-friendly websites. While its use was initially dominated by bloggers, WordPress is quickly becoming the CMS of choice for many static industry and business websites, as well.
In spite of how optimized most WordPress themes are for search engines, there are still a few behind-the-scenes tweaks that webmasters can do to make their sites even more SEO-effective. I recently discovered one easy-to-implement WordPress hack that might come in handy for some Fathom SEO Blog readers.
About <h1> and <h2> Tags on WordPress Websites
Many of you already know the basics about <h1> and <h2> title tags: they let search engines know what the most important titles on a page are, with <h1> designating most significant title and <h2> designating secondary titles and headings. On any given website page, the title that you want the search engines to pay the most attention to should always be surrounded by <h1> tags. Less important titles and headings that separate a page into different sections should instead use the <h2> tag, which gives them less weight as a page descriptor.
When it comes to the homepage main index of most WordPress website themes, the <h1>/<h2> relationship is perfect. Your website title, which is the most important descriptor of the homepage, is automatically wrapped in <h1> tags, and the website description is wrapped in <h2> tags. In the content beneath the header, individual post titles are also wrapped in <h2> tags.
Here’s an example of what the <h1>/<h2> tag relationship looks like on a WordPress homepage:
<h1 class=”sitename”>Website Title</h1>
<h2 class=”sitedesc”>Website Description</h2>
. . .
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div>
<h2 class=”postTitle”><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
And as it is, this is great. The most important title on the page has an <h1> tag, and the less important titles have <h2> tags. When you take a look at internal pages and posts, however, there is one glaring problem.
Because WordPress themes pull html from the exact same header.php file for every single page on the entire website, that means that your website title ends up getting the only <h1> tags throughout the site. The page titles and post titles themselves are delegated to getting tagged with <h2>, which is exactly the opposite of what it should be. While the title of your website is important to internal pages, the much more vital keywords are usually found in the post or page title.
How to Switch H1/H2 Tags on WordPress Single Posts
Now let’s look at how to easily fix that problem throughout your WordPress website. A word of warning: always back up your original files before making any html changes to your WordPress theme!
First of all, go into the Edit Themes section of your WordPress admin panel (look in the sidebar and choose “Editor” under the “Appearance” header).   You’ll see all of the template files listed under a “Theme Files” header on the right. From this, use new tabs to open up the “header.php” file and the “single.php” file (the last one is your single post template).
Now that you have these two files open for editing in separate tabs, take a look at the “single.php” to see how WordPress pulls the same header html into every post on the entire website. The opening code <?php get_header(); ?> is what calls that common header html onto the “single.php” file.
Since the “header.php” file wraps the site title in <h1> tags, we no longer want to include that html in our “single.php” file. So the first thing we’re going to do is delete <?php get_header(); ?> from the top of the “single.php” file.
Once you’ve done this, do not hit “Update File” yet!
That “single.php” file now has no direction to pull header code from another location, so we need to put some header code in there for it. To do this, just click over to the tab where you opened the “header.php” file, highlight all of the text in that file, and copy it. Now go back to your “single.php” tab and paste all of that code right into the top of the file, where the <?php get_header(); ?> used to be.
Now you can hit “Update File.” And if you leave everything this way, you won’t notice a single change in your website yet, since all you did was paste the exact same code into the “single.php” file that it had been pulling from the “header.php” file to begin with.
What this now allows us to do, though, is edit the header html code that we pasted into the “single.php” file without affecting the common “header.php” file that is used on the homepage.
After you’ve hit “refresh” on one of your website post pages to make sure that nothing has been screwed up (like I said, it should still look exactly the same as it did before), close the “header.php” tab (you won’t need it anymore). Go back to your freshly updated “single.php” file and scroll down until you find the code that assigns tags to the website title and description. It will look something like this:
<h1 class=”sitename” >Website Title</h1>
<h2 class=”sitedesc”>Website Description</h2>
Now change the two “h1″ references to “h2″ instead. Don’t hit “Update Page” yet.
The last thing to do is scroll down and find the code that assigns tags to the post title. It will look something like this:
<h2 class=”postTitle”><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
Change those “h2″ references to “h1″ instead, and now click “Update Page.” Our initial problem is now solved: the individual posts on your WordPress site now feature <h1> tags.
Cleaning Up the Title Tag Formatting
When you go to a post on your website and hit refresh, however, you are probably going to see that the sizes and formatting of your site title and post title are now all screwy. Don’t panic; that’s easily solved, too.
The title formatting is messed up because of the class=” . . .” attribute that remains unchanged in updated <h1>/<h2> tags on your “single.php” file. In other words, your WordPress Stylesheet is telling the web browser that anything with an <h1> tag is supposed to show up big and bold, and anything with an <h2> tag is supposed to show up more diminuitive.
Here’s the simple fix: go into your Stylesheet (style.css) and scroll down until you find the code that defines the formating of the <h1 class=”sitename”> appearance. It will look something like this:
#underheader h1.sitename {
padding: 0 0 0 0;
position: relative;
font-size: 23pt;
width: 600px;
color: #ffffff;
}
This is the exact formatting that we want for the new <h2> wrapped site title on our redesigned post pages, too. Just copy that snippet of code, paste another instance of it right below, and change the “h1″ to an “h2.” The end result will look like this:
#underheader h1.sitename {
padding: 0 0 0 0;
position: relative;
font-size: 23pt;
width: 600px;
color: #ffffff;
}
#underheader h2.sitename {
padding: 0 0 0 0;
position: relative;
font-size: 23pt;
width: 600px;
color: #ffffff;
}
After you update the file, the site title on your new post pages should look exactly as is does on the homepage. Now use this same method to create new #h1.postTitle formatting to fix the appearance of your <h1> wrapped post titles, as well.
An Important Reminder About Header File Updates
One important thing to remember after you’ve completed this process: any changes that you make to your “header.php” file will now only affect the homepage of your site, and you’ll have to make the same change to the header code that you pasted into the “single.php” file as well. If, for instance, you insert any tracking code or scripts in the homepage header, make sure you go and insert them on the single post file too.
So, what do you think: worth the trouble or not? The whole process of switching your H1/H2 tags on WordPress posts is much easier than this long tutorial might make it seem. And I’ve already started to see more organic traffic from implementing this WordPress SEO secret on my own blog.
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There has been some attention lately to Google’s use of synonyms and related searches. Google posted about it on their official blog. One change is they are bolding not just plurals in the results, but also terms that mean the same thing.
In short, it is wise to recognize that there are many ways to express the same concept. Google is attempting to be less literal and yet continue to deliver relevant results. While one searcher may use “sofa†and another uses “couchâ€, both might be interested in a shopping results from the same furniture store.
This may be good on a couple of levels. First, it could get closer to the searcher’s intent without regard to the size of their vocabulary.
Secondly, it frees up SEO copywriters to write like humans. That remark is, of course, hyperbole. Good writers long ago (in Internet years) abandoned the concept that if using a target phrase once is good, using it ten times on the same page must be better. However, anything that helps us resist that temptation is an excellent innovation.
While thinking about this, I did a few searches to see how far Google is going to make associations. While you can uncover hints from seeing the terms that are bolded on a SERP, I wanted to cast the net a little wider and looked at “related searchesâ€. There is a caveat here. Related searches are by nature broader conceptually than synonyms. but I’m still amused by what was returned when I searched for “uniformâ€.
I can understand the terms that modify (school, military, sports). I’m impressed that they recognize brands (Dickies, Cintas). But considering “unicorn†and “unicycle†as related is a stretch. And I’m disappointed that “unibrow†didn’t make the cut.
Interestingly, when searching for the plural “uniformsâ€, you see no unicycles. And I’m certain you’ll never see unicorns!
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