Ning Announces shut down of it’s free service, fires 40% of staff

Just announced today. If you have a free Ning network, you will now be forced to upgrade to a paid account or take your business elsewhere.

Read more about Ning’s shut down of free service.

How to Get Over 1 Million Visitors a Month Presentation

I had a great time speaking yesterday at PRSA’s Association and Non-Profit Day in Washington, DC about how to get over 1 Million visitors to your website using an integrated digital strategy using SEO, PPC, traditional press, social media and blogger outreach.

Here’s the How to Get 1 Million Visitors to your Website a Month presentation.

Adding Google analytics to your Facebook Fan Page

I thought this article would be useful for folks interested in tracking actions on their Facebook Fan pages using Google Analytics.

Facebook Fan Pages Now Showing in Google Search Results

SEO for Facebook Fan update pages is more important than ever now that Google announced that it will be displaying the results from 3 million fan pages in Google search results.

You can see their announcement via Twitter.

Google doesn’t have access to personal profile updates because of Facebook’s agreement with Bing, and for that I’m glad. I like using Facebook to quickly get in touch with all of my friends, but I’m sure items that my friends share with me (like updates on their pregnancy, clumsy moments, etc) are not ones that they want found via a Google search.

If you have personal profiles elsewhere you might want to be careful of what you post where, and adjust your privacy settings appropriately. In December 2009 Google announced that it would add data from Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Indenti.ca and Twitter to its search results (and now Google Buzz of course). From an organizational perspective, this is good news if your deploying good SEO practices to your updates on those sites. For a person, you just want to be a bit more careful about what you share with the world.

The recent news around PleaseRobMe is a perfect example of this. As a single woman, I’ve always been wary of revealing too much online about where I was physically in the world, and this site has been broadcasting when people update via their Twitter account from geographic locations that are not their house – announcing to the world that their house is up for grabs from a robber’s perspective.

When social media sites and search engines change their privacy policies so frequently, it’s certainly hard as an individual to keep up. Perhaps when everyone’s information is public we will stop caring?

YouTube now has auto captioning

Not only is this development amazing for those who are deaf (including my friend Christie) but there are also SEO implications. Here’s the announcement from the Google blog.

Here’s the summary:

You Tube now has autocaptioning using the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video. Machine generated captioning is not ideal, but with their auto-timing you can upload a simple text file with the transcript/script that you used to create the video and Google will figure out when the words are spoken and create captions for your video.

From an SEO perspective, this means that Google will have text that they can crawl to understand your videos, so when drafting your video script, keep your keyword strategy in mind. Having a text version of your video content will be great for optimizing your videos and reaching a larger audience.

SEO FAIL – Optimizing for “I Love Boobies”

Sometimes you stumble onto something that just makes your day. I discovered the organization and website http://www.keep-a-breast.org. They work on breast cancer issues from a cooler and hipper perspective, and my understanding is that they feel like they get quite a bit of traffic. I can’t help but wonder if it’s qualified traffic however, because when you search for them in Google, this is what their sitelinks look like:

Yes, that’s correct. They created a category on their blog called “I love boobies”. I wish I could get a peek at their analytics to see how much unqualified porn traffic they get per month with people looking for boob pictures…

Guides to Sharing Content via Social Networks

I’ve been working on putting together a training session for our in house bloggers on how to share their blog posts on various social networking sites as a way to create a process for regularly sharing our content.

Our blogs already have ShareThis embedded on each post, and in putting the training together, I found a bunch of well written guides to some of the major social sites that I wanted to share. Here they are:

• Guide to Marketing on Facebook
• Guide to Sharing Links on Digg
• Guide to Sharing Links on Reddit
• Using Delicious for Marketing
• Guide to using Stumbleupon

Enjoy!