Wow! I can’t believe it’s been over a month since my last post. Actually, I can. I’ve been busy. Very busy. Been working on a pretty large web project that’s requiring a lot of hours during the day, and a lot of hours during the night to complete. It’s a challenge, but I have confidence that the end result will justify the means–even if the means means long hours in front of a computer without being able to publish my normal Level2wo blog posts. Sorry, sometimes priorities get in the way. That’s a joke.

I think for today’s post I just want to jot down some off the cuff notes about what’s been going on in the project that’s taking so much of my time. It’ll help me think, and maybe give you some insight into another project manager’s world, so you realize that you’re challenges and difficulties may just be normal. Or, maybe, make you feel that much better about your management skills.

The project I’m working on has many moving pieces, including a project team in four locations, English as a second language (for some team members), difficulties in communication (at varying levels among various resources), and lots and lots of digital assets spread across multiple business units. Managing the project is like lasso-ing a hurricane…but I must admit, the lasso does work.

As in previous lives, you come to understand that, while there is chaos all around, understanding that chaos and ensuring everyone on your team is comfortable with that chaos is key to project success. As a PM, I often strive to bring comfort and to ease my team members when they are stressed, over-worked, and when they simply need to step back, take a deep breath, relax, and get their second (and third and fourth) wind. As any project manager knows, there is pressure coming from all around to ensure client expectations are met, to ensure the little details fit into the larger project, to ensure that budgets are met, to ensure that everyone is communicating what they need to be communicating to each other for the health of the project, to ensure that all contingencies are in place, and on and on. It’s normal to get stressed out, both as a team member and as a project manager. Read it again: It’s Normal.

I’ve found that, given you’re doing everything you need to be doing, given that you’re prepared and understand that there will be very, very busy times and some not-so busy times, given that you understand the need and value in coaching and making people smile from time to time, you’ll do fine. That’s not to say you’ll not go through the ups and downs yourself, but you’ll do fine. It’s managing the inputs above that will provide you with the output–a completed project that is polished at the end, even though it may have started as a rough boulder in the beginning.

If you own a website, or are in the business of optimizing websites, you’re obviously reading plenty on what do to optimize the site for search engines by focusing on one-way links, keyword rich content, taking care of your meta tags, description tags, and so on. But there’s one area not to forget–your internal link structure.
Optimization is all about seeking an advantage, executing at the tactical level to satisfy all of the SEO strategy requirements that will improve your search engine rankings (although, truth be told, most people likely only have google come to mind). Part of that advantage is internal links–or links within your website that point to other pages within your same website. Besides having keyword links pointing to your site without you pointing back, internal links create the structure on your website that search engines follow like breadcrumbs in a forest.

What should you do from an Internal Links perspective?

1. Have text links to all important pages in the navigation and footer
   Search engines like google work like a train–they need a track to follow, and text links that point from one page to another within yoursite provide that track. Fancy images can’t be read by google or other search engines, at least not as well as they can read text links (I know, you’re thinking, “I just read google can read Flash”, etc., but it’s not that simple yet.) Make sure you have text links pointing to every page you want to optimize.
2. Use the rel=”nofollow” HTML tag
   Google and other search engines use algorithms to measure the importance of the various pages on your website. Part of those algorithms is that your internal pages may not rank the same, which makes sense based on a number of factors. One of those factors is the worth or value the page has based on its having a link from the Homepage, which will probably be a high ranking (if not the highest ranking) page on the site. If your pages are all relatively equal in terms of optimization factors, but you don’t want them to be, use the rel=”nofollow” HTML tag to ‘push’ all of the importance from one page away from itself and to other pages.
3. Be descriptive and alternate keywords in your quest
   The goal is to get the search engines to rank your pages highly on search engine results pages, or SERPs. Make sure you use anchor text that uses the same keywords on all of the different text links on all of the various pages where you have links pointing back to a particular page. If your anchor text is ’search engine optimization,’ for example, make sure to vary the words. So, for instance, you may have anchor text that becomes: “great search engine optimization,” or “search engine tactics,” etc., so you’re getting ranked for different terms that refer to the same or similar subjects.
4. Links within the content on the page
   This is probably the simplest seo tactic for internal link building. Blogs software such as the software that level2wo’s blog (this blog) use allow for quick and easy internal link building, which is great for people who don’t know how to write code and think HTML is some foreign language that only geeks speak. Basically, if you’re writing content for your website, and you’re including keywords for which you want to rank, turn those keywords into text links pointing to other pages rich in content on your site. It’s that simple.
5. There’s no place like Home
   If you’re a Wizard of Oz fan, I hope I just got a smile out of you. In SEO, your homepage is very important, as it is for your users. But text links that point back to your homepage, while they should be easily found, should not necessarily say ‘Home,’ unless that’s the word you’re trying to rank for on search engines. Be creative–but be user friendly, when creating that obvious link back to your homepage.

You’ll notice that every single link in this article points back to another page within the Level2wo blog, with the exception of the anchor text link pointing to Wikipedia’s definition. I did that on purpose here, obviously, to show how I built the internal links on my page–which you’re reading. So, hopefully, I’ve shown you as well as told you (which is also one of the main rules of fiction writing, in case you’re a fiction writer, as I am, and can’t help point such things out! ).

Enjoy.

I was thinking today about the industry I’m in, and while it’s not a shocking revelation, it did occur to me again how young the industry actually is. Many of the professionals in the industry (myself included), were not in this industry a decade ago. And why would they be, when the industry had really just begun–at least as we know it. But it gives light to the fact that it’s the skill sets that matter–not so much the industry, per se. Although yes, it does help if you come from a related industry. Marketing, advertising, programming, project management, copywriting–these are all areas within interactive media that are crucial to what we do–and if you’re in one of those areas in another industry, you’d probably be able to make the leap.

If you are, my suggestion is that you do a little messing around on your spare time. Figure out what you like to do, and practice it. Build a website. Run a PPC campaign. Write some copy on a blog somewhere, and see if you can use a little SEO magic to make it show up on the first page or second page of google. It’s not easy, but it’s not that difficult. In fact, I landed at the third spot on the first page of google a few weeks back for ‘Project Management Steps’ without even trying to. (No, it’s not there any more, but hey, I did it without trying). Good luck.

Without sounding too…something, I can’t stress the importance of teamwork. Not only in the sense of your coworkers helping you achieve the goals you need to achieve and vice versa, but in bringing together ideas and perspectives that, when combined (again, sorry to use this word, which I’m sure you’ve all heard plenty of times just in the past few weeks alone) create synergy. It’s what makes projects succesful, initiatives succesful, and, to go a little further, it’s what makes communities, country, and the world succesful.

But with teamwork comes personalities, egos, opinions, and every other factor you can imagine that has the potential to throw teamwork off track and away from the goals you’ve set for that team to begin with. Though not always the case, gathering groups of people, especially in business, means that you’ll often have to deal with adversity, often have to defer when you think your points may be valid, and, the true test of your understanding of situations and benefitting from teamwork–you’ll have to be able to open your eyes and be receptive to points other than yours, right or wrong.

It’s through that process that the best ideas will emerge–be it for a direct mail piece, a larger marketing strategy, creative, or even what type of venue to have for company outings. Let me stress that again: open your eyes and be receptive to points other than yours. You’re not going to be right all of the time, and I’m not going to be right all of the time. I learn from you, and you learn from me. It’s what makes the wheels turn, and what brings the good ideas to better ideas.

Rarely will you encounter that genius who’s ideas and insight and execution are perfection incarnate; rarely will you have anyone single-handedly, at least in a company of any size, be the end all be all for whatever product or service you’re hawking.

Knowing how to be a teamplayer doesn’t mean giving up your place in the food chain–it means securing it through smart decisions, an open mind, and the realization that we’re all consumers of good ideas and bad, and we’re all producers of them as well. It’s the end result we’re after by participating in a team of any size or structure–so don’t sabotage it, because you’re the beneficiary.

One of the great things about software is that it opens up a world of ease to those who learn and use it to achieve, more often than not, completion of tasks that would otherwise take a much longer time to complete. That said, sorry if I am not making complete sense–I’ve been reading software manuals all day. Yes, this is where you laugh. Or chuckle. Or, at worse, give a silent nod of acknowledgement.

Actually, it’s not so bad. But it got me thinking. While we do use a variety of software programs to get done the things we need to get done, such as everything Microsoft ever puts out (excel, word, powerpoint, project, access, etc.) (no, I’m not going to mention Vista), we also ocassionally end up using new software that we’ve either never heard of, heard of and had no contact with, or heard of and tried to avoid. It’s times like these that I don’t look to the future to solve but the past. It’s sort of like financial planning–we know we need it but no one ever really teaches us it as we grow up (I know, I can hear you yelling either a) When we were growing up certain software didn’t exist, or b) Many of the software programs extant today ARE being taught to kids in school. Well, good. Good for those kids, I suppose. But in the land of Me, I want more of a quick fix than anything else. Maybe a quick IT doctor visit where I’m injected with the knowledge to not have to read printouts and dictionary-length software manuals that are standard issue in the brains of kids today. But I’m probably asking for too much. Well, at least I can blog about it. That’s something my folks probably think is a space creature from some far away Sci-Fi flic.

Today is the 4th of July, and I thought it would be appropriate to show some patriotism. We’ll be up and publishing again on Monday. Have a great holiday weekend.

Millions of us have them. You probably have one, or at least know of them. Maybe your kids have them. Actually, I’ll bet your kids have them. I’m talking about accounts/profiles on social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, and networking sites like them–LinkedIn anyone? I have to admit, I have accounts on all of these, but I don’t use them as often as I should. Truth is I am a little social networked (read overloaded). The only time I even go on them is when I receive an email from one of them informing me that one of my friends or connections has invited me to take some test (which I’m not going to do), or (and i’ve had this one a few times), someone has thrown something at me (I can’t remember if it was a ham, or an animal of some sort, but definitely not worth the few seconds it took me to sign in and see that I was virtually assaulted).

Like any popular and cool new fad, social networking sites have exploded and made tons of money. Advertising on them has been successful, to a point. Actually, I think they’ve returned a good deal in terms of revenue, but things seem to be slowing down. I’m not implying that they are not a Must Have on marketers list of To Dos, only that like any new medium, you eventually start heading towards the maturity phase, and with that things start to slow down.

Traffic in social networking sites may be a bit better than typical websites, such as ecommerce websites, news websites, dating websites, etc.–partially because they’re more like hangouts than information portals where you go in, get what you need, and get out. From a branding perspective, I’d bet it’s a pretty important tool to continue using. Really, it’s hard to try to ignore such sites, because the buzz is still in the air. As a grown up (and unfortunately I’ve been one for a while now, even though I still ‘feel’ young), I don’t enjoy social networking sites. But I can see the appeal, and I can see their worth. And, apparently, so do the marketers out there targeting these websites. How long these sites will last, who knows. But right now, if you’re a marketer, it probably pays to play the game.

Wikipedia’s definition of Social Media: “Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning, as people share their stories, and understandings.”

If you’re reading this blog entry, guess what? You’re involved in social media. My ability to write, and hopefully influence my readers, is all part of the phenomenon that is social media. While traditional media may be a one-way street, i.e., I write an article for, say, the New York Times, and you, the good newspaper reader, consume what I’ve written, including my point of view (hopefully not included in real journalism), and you read it alongside my advertisements (hopefully I’m not selling anything immoral or unethical or that hurts small animals). Social media, however, turns the corporate world on its head, because now the consumers of products and services are able to influence other consumers of products and services–which, my friends, may not be exactly what corporate entities want happening. Why, you ask? Well, because now the control has been wrestled from the giants of industry and they no longer are the Goliath, because David is wielding far more influential weapons.

So what sites fall under social media (note, some of the below sites are for communication (MySpace, Facebook, etc.), and some are for collaboration or multimedia, or entertainment, etc)?

Facebook
Friendster
MySpace
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flickr
Zooomr
imeem
World of Warcraft
Miniclip

And the list goes on and on. Advertisers and marketers have been able to buy placements within the sites, as banner ads, content, and in games, even as virtual billboards advertising their wares in a less intrusive manner (if you play certain games and drive by a realistic 7-UP sign or Coke sign, it’s likely not just for the realism.

Because social media sites involve the user, and because the user is creating much of the content, social media sites are win-win for all involved; the user feels that they are part of the media process, and the site owners have built-in content generators for them, which obviously helps in many different ways.

Social media is not going away any time soon, and will likely just get more and more complex. What social media sites are you on? Let me know–please comment the sites you’re on, and where you see social media going in the next few years. Happy social media-ing!

The sun is out today in Seattle, and we’re going to reach the abnormally hot 80s and 90s. What does that mean for you and Level2wo’s blog entries? It means it’s list time. Today I thought I would provide you, dear consumers of everything marketing and web, with some resources on Interactive Marketing, in particular Interactive Marketing Blogs that I read (though, perhaps, not as often as I should). In either case, that shouldn’t stop you from checking them out, and brushing up on your Interactive Marketing skills.

Again, I try to incorporate a variety of blogs, perhaps not the big ones out there but rather ones that I either find interesting or that you might not find on your own.

• Rohit Bhargava’s Influential Marketing Blog
• Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (http://blog.mima.org/)
• AdverBlog
• Mobile Marketing Blog (Punchkick Interactive)
• Diva Marketing Blog
• Interactive Marketing Trends
• Interactive Marketing Blog

Hope you have some sunshine in your neck of the woods like we’re having here. Happy blogging!

I thought today I’d just touch on a few small business questions and answers that have crossed my mind–and likely yours–when thinking about small business.

1. How Would You Spend A $1000 Marketing Budget?
   Answer
2. Is Your Small Business Marketing Strategy Killing Your Profits?
   Answer
3. Is Your Marketing Message or Elevator Pitch Holding You Back?
   Answer
4. What is the Fastest Way to Increase Traffic to a Website?
   Answer
5. I have Search Marketing Questions, Not Just One. Can You Answer Them?
   Here’s Some

To see a few more answers and blog entries, visit Level2wo’s Marketing and Small Business blog.

Hyperlinks are good. You know that, I know that, everyone knows that. But what’s a hyperlink?

A hyperlink, in Wikipedia’s words, is ‘a reference or navigation element in a document to another section of the same document or to another document that may be on or part of a (different) domain. This is a hyperlink to Level2wo.

For Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes, hyperlinks are good because they are valuable to website visitors looking for content on a particular subject, and hyperlinks allow the user to navigate to other resources where they can continue researching whatever it is they are researching.

Hyperlinks are one of the most important elements of google algorithms out there, competing with the whole ‘content is king’ aspect of seo. Hyperlinks should have the keywords you want to promote within them, but the basic concept is that the search engines will pick up on the fact that this link (whatever hyperlink we’re talking about here) redirects the user to this page (whatever this page is), and that the content on that final page is relevant to the content (or word) that is hyperlinked.

So, for example, if you’re trying to promote your site for the words ’search engine marketing’ (SEM) or, say, the phrase ‘content creation,’ then you would make either of those a hyperlink in content on a site, and that hyperlink would point to your page, where you would have more content on the term ‘marketing’ or ‘content creation.’ The search engine magic, given everything is fine outside of the tactic of using a hyperlink, will work it’s way over time and the more hyperlinks pointing to your site the better in terms of results for your page on search engine results pages, or SERPs.

For the novice, even creating a hyperlink is a difficult proposition. But once you know how to do it, it becomes second nature.

Blogging is a great way to learn the basics of hyperlinking to other locations within your blog–try joining a blog or creating your own with the various free software out there and you’ll understand how easy it actually is. Blog software such as wordpress makes hyperlinking as easy as a click. If it didn’t, you’d probably not be reading my blog right now.