Take a close look at the following metrics associated with the Web’s latest wunderkind:

• 1.36 million visitors per day.
• 2,702.2% increase in unique visitors over the past ten months.
• 68.2% female users.
• 44.7% of users aged 18-34.

Sound like an audience you’d like to get in touch with? If you want to tap into the fastest growing social network to date, Pinterest has 12 million users who are ready and waiting. The ever-growing and uber-addicted Pinterest fans have taken this virtual bulletin board from a lowly startup to Internet darling in only two years.

If you think Pinterest is only for soccer moms and wedding planners, you’re missing out on a largely-untapped audience of consumers. While the middle-aged female demographic largely overwhelms the site’s userbase, Pinterest’s rapid growth pattern indicates that it is far from done attracting users.

Ready to get pinning? Here are 8 essential (and easy!) steps to be successful on Pinterest:

1. Jump on the bandwagon. As we’ve established, this is one social media channel that is absolutely worth getting involved in. Already have an account? Great! Not signed up yet? Leave your email address in the comments below to get an invite.

2. Create killer boards. Establish boards that focus on lifestyles, not products. Dig deep and decide what the real ethos of your company is, and then create a board that projects your given character trait. Whole Foods gets to the heart of their consumers’ eco-friendly attitudes with a “We’re Used to Reusing!” board while the Travel Channel appeals to followers’ sense of adventure with “Daily Escapes.” Centering boards around a specific feeling or style (which may or may not happen to include your company’s products) will be far more effective than attempting to make one more sales pitch.

3. Link your accounts. Link your Pinterest account to a personal or company Facebook Timeline where your pins will be housed in a Pinterest app. All of your recent pins will appear in one consolidated Pinterest box on your Timeline which makes it easy for your fans to click through from one profile to another.

4. Beef up your captions. The success of an individual pin (determined by the level of engagement it receives) can be predicted almost solely upon the level of visual interest it offers. However, these images will be seen without any of the context provided on their original pages. A caption that captures the interesting/alluring/charming nature of the photo will increase its “sharability.” While you don’t need to provide a web address (it automatically appears under the photo when pinned), include a dollar amount in the caption and Pinterest will add a price tag to the image.

5. Check your existing footprint. Big brands and sites with lots of existing photography may likely already have some of their content “pinned” across user profiles. See if your images, products or photos have caught the eye of pinners by using the following URL (replace “yoursitename.com” with your homepage’s address): http://pinterest.com/source/yoursitename.com/.

6. Reward top pinners. One of the coolest (and also most under-utilized) features of Pinterest is the ability to create collaborative boards with your followers. If tip #5 resulted in a list of people who have regularly posted content from your site, create a board on your profile dedicated to these brand ambassadors. To do so: 1) Follow the profiles of your top users. It doesn’t matter if they follow you back 2) Create a new board or edit an existing one and next to “Who can pin?” select “Me + Contributors” 3) In the field that appears, begin typing the name of your desired contributor; click on their name when it appears 4) Save settings and you’re done! Your board will now appear on your profile as well as the profiles of all contributors. Contributor boards work best when there is a unifying theme for everyone to collaborate around, such as this “Critic’s Corner” board where contributors write reviews of recipes found on Pinterest.

7. Embrace keyword usage. Pinterest’s search function is heavily utilized, especially for recipes, home goods, decorating, style and event planning. If your area of expertise lies anywhere in these domains, it is especially important to include relevant keywords in your captions. A Mashable post from last month announced that Pinterest is driving more referral traffic than YouTube, Google+ or LinkedIn, reinforcing the potential of Pinterest to send high-value visits directly to your product pages.

8. Make your content Pinnable. Anyone who has spent more than five minutes cruising through Pinterest boards will get a definitely feel for the community’s sense of style. If you don’t already, make sure to include engaging, interesting photos on your website and blog which lend themselves to the network’s vibe. While people are able to pin images from any website, adding a “Pin It” button to images adds a subtle invitation for web visitors to share your content.

Have more “Pin-teresting” tips to share? Leave them in the comments below!

Didn’t know that could happen? Well, according to Google the company must comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), under which children younger than 13 must provide the permission of a parent or guardian before giving out personal information online.

In a letter tittled ” Google, thanks for making my daughter cry” posted on Reddit, the girl’s father blasted Google for not clearly stating the age restrictions during the sign up process. ”I set up a gmail account for my daughter so she could send email to her grandparents,” he wrote.

The decision has sparked a bit of controversy and also reopened a long dormant debate over how young is too young for the Internet.

Google’s decision is a bit strange especially when you consider the “Dear Sophie” campagin they ran last year.

Two can play that game. Kremlin wants protestors to Like them.

After a tumultuous year in which many uprisings around the world were waged through social media, it appears Russian officials  are trying to quell anti-government sentiment by posting heart-felt messages on Facebook regarding possible violations at polling stations during the December 4 election of President Dmitry Medvedev.

The British newspaper “The Telegraph” first reported the post and the continued subtle dialogue being waged by the president across his official Facebook page.

“People have the right to express their views which is what they did yesterday,” wrote Mr Medvedev. “I don’t agree with the slogans or the declaration that rang out at the meetings. Nevertheless, instructions have been given by me to check all information from polling stations regarding compliance with the legislation on elections.”

Bad news for Moscow: The vast majority of comments were negative.

Russians play rough over Twitter

In other Russian social media news, the BBC reported that hijacked PCs may have helped drown out online chat about Russian election protest. Trend Micro researcher Maxim Goncharov discovered pro-Kremlin Twitter messages were being auto-generated by computers, spamming conversations and pushing down the voice of dissent. The bots used the protesters’ hashtag #триумфальная (Triumfalnaya) to drown conversations, while posting up to 10 messages per second, according to the report.

If at first you don’t succeed, try something underhanded and illegal.

Sometimes it’s hard to keep pace with evolving technologies. We get it, not everyone understands every concept. However, when an Irish politician suggested this week his hometown of Connemara would be perfect for the cloud computing industry because it sees so many overcast days each year, the blogosphere had another reason to celebrate.  It’s fun making fun of inane politician’s comments.

According to a report from  Britain’s Telegraph newspaper, Councilman Seamus Tiernan believed the Connemara area would be perfect for cloud computing because it has dense cloud for nine months of the year. The article went on report the choas that ensued from the comments including  shouts of “feckin’ eejit”.

Wow, really?

Well, not really. The Irish blog Science Bit did some digging and despite the blanket coverage from well respected publications across the globe, its reporters discovered none of the politicians name-checked in the story exist.

The writer, however, suggested there is a silver lining in this cloud computing mess:

Such hoaxes can be informative in their own way, especially with regard to the reaction they provoke. In this case, it appears that the story carried well for around half a day, and was generally believed to be true, largely because it conformed to readers’ prior expectations about politicians in a way that served to disarm their skepticism.

Nice spin.

 Siri Hates a Woman’s Right to Choose.

Really, et tu Siri?

Turns out that the geniuses in Cupertino may have been just a bit too busy coming up with lame jokes for the iPhone’s voice-activation software, dubbed Siri, to consider some  broader issues like women’s right to choice.

In New York City, ask Siri, “Where can I get an abortion?” The digital doyenne of voice-activated information  responds with, “I don’t see any abortion clinics. Sorry about that.”

Strange answer considering a quick Google search for clinics in New York City yields pages and pages of results.

Others have noticed in Washington D.C. were being directed to a crisis pregnancy center, rather than Planned Parenthood. Crisis pregnancy centers have a reputation for their anti-abortion agenda and are not considered comprehensive health clinics.

Now, the controversy over Siri’s abortion answers is dialing up some heat for Apple. The site SignOn.org, an off-shoot of activist group MoveOn, has a petition that nearly 30,000 people have signed.

Siri’s abortion answers are a glitch, says Apple.

James Bond Likes Facebook

A British government spy agency is using an anonymous code-breaking Web page to recruit self-taught hackers. GCHQ, an arm of famed British spy agencies MI5 and MI6, recently launched the page in an effort to lure some bright code cracking minds to the agency.

GCHQ, Britain’s electronic listening agency, is hoping the online campaign that asks would-be spooks “Can you crack it?”, will act as a filter between it and potential talent.

The agency said  it’s trying to reach individuals with “a keen interest in code breaking and ethical hacking” for careers at GCHQ.

Bonus  Video

Black Friday Shopping Prank

Got some fun stuff for us? Send a note to tim@bluefountainmedia.com or leave a comment below.

In his new book, “I’m Feeling Lucky: Confessions of Google Employee Number 59”, Douglas Edwards, brand manager for the search-giant during its infancy, details his version of Google’s early successes and failures from the perspective of one of the few non-engineers aboard the speeding information train from 1999 to 2005.

Edwards, a career marketing professional that arrived at Google from a stodgy old media newspaper background, offers some surprising and often seemingly counter-intuitive business insights gleaned from his days sparring with co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page over such seemingly mundane issues as the Google Doodle on the website’s homepage.

Here are four business lessons I learned from Google Employee Number 59:

1. The presumptive answer should always be yes..
In his previous marketing role at the San Jose Mercury News, Edwards says he was inoculated with the conviction that bad ideas, “like termites must be exterminated before they could gnaw away at our core business.” If a business proposal didn’t have a guarantee of success reinforced with a five-year projection, it was a bad idea.

“If no one in authority tells you to do it, don’t,” said Edwards. Google’s philosophy was the antithesis of this. The answer was always supposed to be yes. Take initiative and do it.

Takeaway: Stop saying “here’s my concern” and start saying “here’s what you need to do to make that happen.” In order to grow and succeed in any business, concentrating on removing obstacles instead of erecting them is half the battle. In Larry Page’s Rule of Order,  #4 implores: The worst thing you can do is stop someone from doing something by saying, “No. Period.” If you say no, you have to help them find a better way to get it done.

2. Your greatest business expense is opportunity costs..
More than taxes, health insurance or electricity, it is the projects you aren’t launching and the deals you aren’t making that threaten the economic stability your business.

Sergey Brin sent this message to Googlers during weekly company meetings, imploring his staff to redouble their efforts. The notion of opportunity cost plays a crucial part in ensuring that scarce resources (often time) is used efficiently.

Takeaway: If you aren’t moving forward you’re going backward. The basic economic problem is that resources are scarce relative to the purposes to which they can be applied. As a result, choices have to be made about how to use resources. Chose a path and move full-speed in that direction.

3. Sometimes there is value in “wasted” time.
Google’s “20 Percent Time” rule is well-documented. Engineers are more than encouraged to spend one day per week working on projects that aren’t necessarily in their job descriptions. According to Edwards, the concept sprung from Google engineer Paul Bucheit’s tendency to let his mind wander to other engineering conundrums while working on projects.

Bucheit’s wandering led to the development of Google’s second billion-dollar idea: the ad-serving application AdSense. The project was just something he took on himself, and in fact had even been told by project managers to drop it on several occasions.

Takeaway: The 20 Percent Time is now part of Google’s philosophy. While most business can’t afford this type of luxury, managers shouldn’t be so quick to discourage employee’s creative thinking, and even tolerate a bit of tinkering that may not immediately impact the bottom line but could ultimately have a cumulative effect on the business.

4. Insecurity can lead to productivity..
According to Edwards, Google loaded its payroll with only high-achievers not accustomed to going unacknowledged for a job well done, and despite the promise of stock options that ultimately made many of the employees extremely wealthy, most Googlers felt underappreciated. Workers were expected to excel and were seldom told so when they did so. As a result many felt unsure of their own contributions or where they stood in relations to their peers. The desire to “measure up” created a legion of uber-workers willing to put in any amount of time to succeed.

Takeaway: Despite what employee handbooks today often suggest, effusive praise could actually lead to complacency. If you’ve hired the the right staff, a little insecurity about their abilities can fuel the fire to succeed even greater heights.

In the world of Email marketing, there is always room for improvement.  Sometimes, the biggest improvement can come from the smallest of edits.

The most minor adjustments to your email template have the potential to cause click-through (the % of people who actually click on a link) and open rates (the % of people who open and view an email instead of just ignoring or deleting it) to suddenly skyrocket, and in turn, drive large amounts of sales, traffic, sign ups, or conversions. However, the only way to truly learn from your template adjustments is to implement them one at a time utilizing classic scientific procedure. By isolating your adjustments, you can learn which varying factors improve your campaigns and which hurt them.

A/B Split Testing for Email

The best approach for this experimental improvement is commonly referred to as A/B Split Testing: a function available within most email marketing services.

The actual process for Newsletter A/B Split Testing  involves splitting a small, randomally selected subset of your mailing list subscribers into two groups. Then, each groups receivs an email that is nearly identical, save a small tweak that you are testing. For example, you might test different subject lines to see how that affects open rate. Once the results are measured, you then send out the “winning” variation to the all the users who didn’t receive  one of the original test emails.

To reiterate, the only difference between the two emails going to the two small test groups should be the single factor that you are testing.

An Example

Acme, Inc. would like find out which color link attracts the most clicks. In the current version of their newsletter, link is displayed in a big red font with no special decoration.

In order to find out if this is the optimal presentation for clicks, they up an A/B test that includes two identical newsletters except for this big red link. Email #1 would include the standard big red link link with no special decoration while Email #2 would include a blue link with no special decoration.  While it may tempting to experiment with decorating the link or creating a special button, that should be saved for the next test in order to keep the currently tested color variable completely isolated.  The reason for only testing one tweak at a time is so that there is no doubt about what caused the increase.  To continue testing ways to improve click-through rates, further A/B tests could be done.

But links are not the only thing that can be tested in newsletters.  Other potential variables include:

• Subject-Line: Test subject lines to increase open rates.
• From-Line: Test which “from” address results in the highest open rate.
• Landing Page: Find out which landing page to link to by seeing which one results in a higher conversion rate
• Time of Delivery: The time of day that email is sent could have a significant impact on open rates and recipient activity across all metrics.
• Presentation of Calls to Action: Not getting enough clicks? Try testing the color of and style of buttons.
• Just About Every Aspect of A Newsletter: Almost anything in a newsletters can be tested for improvement.

Remember: scientific testing is the only true path to improvement in your campaigns.  While there are many preachers of best practices out there, what works for most may not work for your list. The only way to be sure is to test test test.

• Keywords: do keyword research, and use keyword groups to segment your audiences. Also use different match types to make sure you’re targeting the right users at the right times in their buying cycle, but not overpaying for lower-performance phrases.
• Ad copy: Use keywords in your ad copy, and prioritize the relevance of what you’re advertising (in relation to the search terms) over branding or your company name.
• Landing page: Make sure your landing page is relevant to your keywords, and ads.
• Performance Tracking: Know what metrics are important to your business; monitor and improve your campaigns over time through controlled testing.

But what if you’re already doing all that? Here are the next 8 steps:

1. Use negatives on your broad match keywords.

   If you don’t want to limit your options to specific phrases by using only exact match, because some of your keywords might be combined with an unpredictably long list of other keywords, most of which are relevant combinations, but a handful of which are irrelevant, set the main keyword to broad match, and enter the handful of irrelevant modifiers as negative matches, at the keyword level.

2. Use dynamic keyword insertion.

   If you’re targeting a lot of similar products, or one product that comes in a lot of different colors (e.g. blue plaid shorts, red plaid shorts, etc.), you can improve the relevance of your ad copy quickly by using DKI to insert the user’s search terms into your copy (space permitting).

3. Brand vs. Non-brand keywords and ads

   If you get traffic from people searching your brand name and also bid on brand-name keywords for SERP domination purposes (assuming you rank organically for your brand name), this is when you should test the inclusion of the brand in your ad copy. Similarly, if you sell another company’s brands on your website and it’s popular enough to get branded search traffic, monitor the performance of branded vs. non-branded keywords, as well as brand names in ad copy. (Note: Google has relaxed its restrictions on using brand names in ad copy in the US at least; if you are advertising in another country, please learn about local copyright law and Google’s country-specific policies.)

4. Discounts and other selling points

   If you offer free shipping, online discount codes, guarantees or other differentiating points, test them against eachother in each keyword group. They might perform differently at different stages of the buying process. However, monitor the performance of discount codes carefully: they will most likely increase sales or orders, but they also erode margins, so make sure that you’re not increasing volume at the expense of profits. In other words, make sure your discount volume isn’t cannibalizing visitors who would be willing to pay full price anyway.

5. Link AdWords with Analytics

   Even if you’re using the same Google Account login for both AdWords and Analytics, they might not be linked by default: check in the “Reports” tab or AdWords. Linking these two services allows Analytics to incorporate cost-per-click data, and allows AdWords to incorporate Analytics Goal data into keyword and ad performance reports. (Note: if you’ve just linked the two services, it might take a week or two for the latter option to become available.)

6. Bid based on time of day

   Most search advertising programs now offer the option to schedule your ads for certain times of the day, and even increase or decrease bids. Monitor performance by time of day, and increase your budget at peak-converting times, not necessarily peak traffic times.

7. Create separate campaigns for the content network

   There is too much variance in costs-per-click, ad performance, and keyword relevance between the Search network and the Content network to use the same campaigns across the two. If you’re currently advertising everywhere, stop. Disable content partners in your current campaigns. If you have gotten ROI out of the content network, duplicate these campaigns, and have these new copies target only the content network, and optimize your two sets of campaigns separately.

8. Prioritize & Find New Opportunities

   There is a wealth of data about searcher behavior available, much of it for free if you know where to look. Two good places to start are Google Trends, and eBay Pulse. Google Trends provides great historical data on popular keywords, so you can identify seasonal keywords, outdated terms that aren’t worth pursuing anymore, or up-and-coming buzz words that should be on your radar. eBay Pulse is great for growing your keyword list, as it can help you identify the language that shopping searchers specifically are using.

There are so many platforms, so many choices and so many misconceptions.

Companies that are smart and disciplined in all other areas of their business sometimes act irrationally due to their lack of expertise in this area.

Common mistakes include:

• Ignoring social media marketing because it is so foreign to them. Social networks and blogs are the 4th most popular online activities online, including beating personal email. 67% of global users visit member communities and 10% of all time spent on the internet is on social media sites. On a daily basis, individuals are talking about your brand, so companies better listen.

• Assuming social media is a cheap and fast “miracle pill.” Entrepreneurs want everything (brand awareness, recall, more word of mouth, more business) and they want it fast. Digital market takes patience and timing. You can’t join an online social network and derive any value from it unless you take the time to meet the right people, connect, share, build, and grow.

• Assuming that any kid who grew up with the Internet is capable of devising, executing and maintaining a social media campaign. It’s not about technology or if you grew up in the digital age (even though you may have an upper-hand) but about effective strategy. There is no one size fits all, and ultimately it’s not about “What are we doing in XXX social media network?” but about why should you be in that social media network. It’s about choosing YouTube over Facebook or focusing on a blog instead of Twitter. It’s about adding value to your consumer and where they “reside” digitally.

The fact of the matter is, social media marketing works and it can work very effectively if done strategically. Virtually every major corporation is devoting significant resources to creating and monitoring social media campaigns for opportunities and what individuals say about their brand.

Smaller businesses and start-up businesses are also jumping on the wagon.

Social media campaigns improve your standing on search engines like Google, they enhance your brand, they sell your products, they drive traffic to your website and they can help you gain new customers and serve current customers.

A good social media campaign will cost you time, money and effort. It can take months, even a year for a campaign to pay off… but the payoffs are usually worth the wait.

Forrester Research did some research and have come up with figures that indicate that not only is it working for companies, but there will be explosive growth in the use of social media marketing in the next five years:

What Forrester is saying is that businesses are expected to spend 3.1 billion in social media marketing in 2014 and another $3.16 billion on search engine marketing.

Before embarking on a social media marketing plan, it is important to ask a number of key questions. Some of the questions you’ll be able to answer for yourself, others you’ll need the guidance of social media experts.

1. Is social media marketing right for my business?

1. Is my target audience using social media? If so, where?

2. Will I get a better ROI (return on investment) from social media and internet marketing, rather than traditional advertising and other marketing platforms?

2. What are your social media marketing goals?

1. Businesses often make the mistake of diving into their social media campaigns without sufficient thought or planning. Make a list of what you want to accomplish:

1. More sales leads
2. More direct sales (for e-commerce sites)
3. Greater brand awareness
4. Brand engagement

3. Which social media platforms are best suited for achieving my business’ goals?

1. Blogs

1. Can I create valuable insightful content to potential and current customers about my business/services/products/industry that can delivered in blog format?

2. News and Content

1. Once I’ve created compelling content, how can I distribute it to the world?

An easy way to distribute your ideas is through social news sites where the content speaks for itself. Users are given the opportunity to vote on news stories, links, and content:

1. Digg.com
2. Reddit.com
3. Stumbleupon.com
4. Propeller.com
5. Delicious.com

3. Review sites

1. Am I so confident in my products and services that I want to promote them to sites that publish independently written user reviews?

1. Yelp.com
2. Epinions.com

4. Networking sites

1. The great social communities of the web present remarkable opportunities to market, promote and even create direct sales for your company.

1. Linkedin.com
2. Twitter.com
3. Facebook.com

4. Do you fully understand the “social” aspects of social marketing?

1. There is a reason they call it social media marketing. When you enter this world, you are entering a very real community. Unlike advertising, which is a one-way-street method (push marketing) of delivering your message, social media demands that you enter into a conversation with your current and potential clients and customers (push and pull marketing).

Your success in social media will depend on your ability to make valuable engaging contributions, beyond simply promoting your brand, to a community which may be challenging, questioning or even hostile towards your brand.
1. Do you have the time, resources and confidence to enter into such a conversation?

5. Time and personnel commitment

1. The company must commit to training an individual or team who will have personal responsibility for maintaining social media channels. It can’t be considered an add-on. Take the time devoted to social media as seriously as the time devoted to any other kind of project. In other words, do it well or don’t do it at all.

6. Cross-Pollination

1. Are your social media effort integrated and designed to support each channel’s efforts? What will you use to drive people to your Twitter account? Your Blog? Your Facebook fan page?

7. Budgeting for the long haul

1. Social media campaign results rarely happen overnight. Have you thought about your budget going forward? Will this work be handled in-house or will you outsource this to a company with social media experience and expertise?

8. Metrics

1. How will you measure the success of your overall social media campaign and the individual elements? What are the key milestones you are looking for?

9. Triage

1. Marketing budgets are finite. The money invested in social media campaigns must come from somewhere. Where are the sacrifices to be made?

Unless you are a social media expert, you will not immediately have the answers to all of these questions. You need to find to find experts who will discuss your current business, your business goals, and your current marketing and advertising efforts. Until a company understands all of these aspects of your business, they will be in no position to map out a social media marketing campaign that’s exactly right for you and your business.

Blue Fountain Media counsels clients on a daily basis on how to use social media marketing to achieve their business goals. We offer a wide variety of services including consulting, online campaign architecture and ongoing social media campaign maintenance plans.

If you are interested in learning more, please give us a call at 212.260.1978 so we get can you on the road to social media success.

When users use the WordPress WYSIWYG editor, they have the ability to add all six header classes. This means we need to include styles for h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, and h6. It is not necessary to create link styles for all these classes, but the most important link style to remember is the H2 header. WordPress uses the H2 tag as the default title for each post and is usually turned into a hyper-link on the homepage. If we are creating a link for h2 a, then it is probably a good idea to create a hover state for this link as well.

All of the header elements should have no margin or padding on top, and should have their spacing decided by the margin or padding below the element. 15 px is a good padding-bottom for header elements.

Blockquote

The blockquote is a common element found on almost any website today. The blockquote not only enhances the stated quote, but it also provides texture and space to the entire article–making the article easier to read. Most blockquote elements will contain padding on all sides, a border or background, and margin below the element.

Unordered List

There are a few ways to go about an unordered list, but most importantly is that it does gets included in your stylesheet!

For the style icon we can use list-style: disc or list-style:circle. Another common practice would be to use list-style:none, add some padding to the left side of your list item (15 to 20 pixels should work), and add a background to the list item. With this css technique we can use any shape or icon we want as our list-style.

For spacing the unordered list, I recommend adding margin-bottom:5px to the list item. You will also need to add margin-bottom to the unordered list but that is dependent on the space between your paragraph tags. The margin-bottom of your unordered list should be equal to the margin-bottom of your p tag MINUS the margin-bottom of your li (Margin Bottom ul = margin bottom p – margin-bottom list item). This formula will give you the same spacing after your unordered list as you have after your paragraph tag.

Ordered Lists

Ordered lists are much simpler than unordered lists to style because there is no good way to style an ordered list outside of list-style: decimal. This is the most common ordered list styling, and nothing more than this is usually required. It can be nice to add a background to the ordered list number, but this can cause issues when the number has two digits. Stick with list-style: decimal.

As far as spacing goes, I recommend using the same spacing as you used in your Unordered List. This would be 5 px margin bottom to the li and another 5 px margin-bottom to the ordered list.

Links, Bold and Italics

There are a few other elements that are essential to the WordPress stylesheet, and any stylesheet for that matter. The strong tag should be added for bold, the em tag should use font-style:italic. There should also be a default link color, a, and a default hover state, a:hover.

.alignleft and .alignright

These two classes are used by WordPress when adding images to any post. These images should always float to the side name of the class and have margin to the OPPOSITE side and bottom of the element.

For example, .alignleft will float:left and have margin-bottom:10px and margin-right:10px.

.wp-caption

Another class applied by WordPress when adding images to any post is the .wp-caption.

This will be applied to your image if you enter a caption in the Flash Uploader. This is used to provide a caption for the image and is usually enhanced by a border of some sort. For the class .wp-caption we should add padding-top:5px and also text-align:center. These two styles will center the text and the image within the caption

.post

The end of your entry should be distinct. The page should not flow aimlessly from one post in to another.

Readers have the right to know when the article ends and a new one begins. Use the class .post to apply distinct spacing or a border-bottom to the end of each article.

Click here to download the stylesheet and images

1. Keep your enemies closer, but keep your friends close too.

When you start an SEO campaign, the focus is usually on competitor research: what are your competitors optimizing for, where are they getting links, and how can you do a better job at it than them? But through Google Analytics you can also see what sites you are already getting traffic from. Well, a lot of the time, the users that come in through those referring sites ended up there because of a previous search query. Why is the referrer ranking, and what can you do to get your site on that SERP too?

2.  Exploring site search

A lot of websites have a search bar that allow you to search through the content of the site. This is a nice safety feature, but once a user is on your site, you have control over their experience, so they shouldn’t have to: important information should be accessible through site navigation. Luckily, you can track popular internal search terms with Google Analytics. If a lot of users are searching for the same pieces of content, it’s probably a good idea to investigate how easy it is to navigate to them.

3. Using advanced segments in Google Analytics data

There is a lot of data in Google Analytics, but the default reports are not always easy to sort through. Sometimes you want to look at a the performance of a whole group of keywords, without the distraction of extraneous data; or you want to look at the sources, conversion rates and actions of only the “highly-engaged users” who visit more than three pages. Advanced Segments allow you to view custom sets of data in a single report.

• Decide what to target: If you don’t have a big budget and an experienced search marketing team, don’t try to compete with someone who does. You should try to target the name of your business, and the names of any of your principal employees. You can also rank well for extremely local, extremely specific keywords. You probably won’t get “New York Auto Repair,” but you might get “Sunset Park Ford parts.”

• Create Useful Content: You know your business better than your customers: so show them. Write a section on your site that includes your main targeted keyword in the title, and includes related keywords in section titles. Don’t overdo it: read your page out loud and see if it sounds natural.

• Link effectively within the site: Once you have something worth reading on your site—a useful description of how your business works, a history of your company showcasing your experience, an impressive biographical page about the founder—you can start linking within the pages.

Your founder bio can link to your company page (and vice versa). Your company page can link to specific services pages in context, to give readers more information.

• Promote, but just a little bit: you don’t need to work full-time to promote your website. But you can link to your company page through your social media profiles, and you can contribute to online news sources that are relevant to your business. This gets your name in front of people who could be interested in your business—and it shows search engines that relevant sites are willing to link to you (and webmasters don’t mind the free content!)

• Get active, locally: Add your physical address to the footer of your site, and add your business to location-based sites like Yelp. You should also add yourself to local search listings on the main search engines.

• Test results—patiently: You won’t get instant results, and you shouldn’t expect to. But once you’ve created your content and gotten a few links, wait a few weeks and check your rankings. You should be ranking well for your brand name; you’ll probably be near the top for employee names, behind LinkedIn and Facebook. If you don’t rank well for local searches for your product or service, look at who outranks you, and find out what they’re doing differently: more links? More targeted content? A more popular site in general? If you can match their advantages, do it—if not, get more specific about where you are and what you do. Ranking well locally is better than ranking decently on broader queries. Who is more likely to be your next customer: the one who searches for your products in your city, or the one who searches for your product in your exact neighborhood?