The Linklifter

Hey lovely Linklifters,

So we encouraged you to go be social and connect to your fellow bloggers a while back, but now we want to approach the subject of being social from a different angle.

How about being socially visible?

We believe that 2013 is really the year to begin being socially visible on the Internet.  If you aren’t doing it already, you should be, because it’s good for you and your blog, anchoring it to earth and granting it with the gift of “realness” (which actually is a real word… kinda).

It also helps improve your ranking and is something that BB Google and other crawlers will start to look for.

And how you become a socially visible blog? With Google Authorship of course.

You can tell a blog has undergone the “Google Authorship Treatment” (only available in select Spa’s), by searching for it in Google.  A small picture (normally of the blog or sites author) should appear next to the title of the blog, as well as the number of Google + circles the author’s part of.

We’ve roped in a willing assistant to give you a visual example. Enter Matt Cutts, Google employee.

Beautiful ay?

Authorship assigns each site (if only you are working on it) or each post (if several people are posting on one site) with paternity and identity.

This creates credibility for the readers and once people can see there is a person (with a face and personality) behind the writing, traffic should also increase to your site and posts. A personal connection has now been made and trust has been built. Excellent.

Another great aspect to this, is that it will help fight against content being copied without citing the source, or even completely duplicated (how very dare they), as the text is officially and clearly bound to one person.

You may say, “But I’m already on Facebook and Twitter, isn’t that enough?”

The answer in fact lies in the question little one.

Google always tend to favor it’s own products in it’s search engine (including Adwords), so aside from addressing the points mentioned, you would be aligning with their expectations of a good, nay awesome blog.

Let’s demonstrate this by typing “Google Authorship” into Google and looking at the first 4 results:

Two results that refer you back to a Google site, and another two that have already configured their authorship! You shouldn’t need more convincing than that

And how do you set this all up then?

The general approach is to configure it manually through your Google+ account (which you should also get if you don’t have one already!).  Enter the email address of your site (which must use same domain as your site, eg emailaddress@yourdomain.com), and then add your name (eg. Joe Bloggs) on the pages of the site.

You can follow this link for a more detailed explanation from BB Google itself, about how to link your Google+ profile and the content you’re creating.

Do be aware though, that if you use WordPress, it may be easier to link your account by clicking on the categories “Users” > “Profile” > “Google+”. Then just click save.

Ta-da! Easy as Pie, or was that cake?

And how do I know Google received my application and has made the changes?

Google will let you know that you’re successfully the proud father / mother/author of your content when you see the signs we mentioned above (ie. picture & name.) But if you want to check before the few days that it takes to implement this change, you can do so by using one of Google’s Webmaster tools. Just enter your website URL and it allows you to see what will appear after processing your authorship request.

So what are you waiting for? Scrub up, take that picture and show everyone who’s the boss!*

*author.

Dear Linklifters,
You guys are a clever bunch, so you’re most likely very familiar by now, with how your site benefits from social networking, and how search engines view being actively social as a sign of quality and authenticity (but in case you aren’t, you can read a bit about it in one of our previous posts: “Being Well Rounded and Connected“). Saying this, we’ve recently come to the decision to focus on having only one Facebook account for the whole company, which will include all our international postings and hopefully become a knowledge hub!

“But what’s the dealio? Which language will you post in?” I hear you cry. Fear not – we’ve got it sorted….

The Facebook FAQ is very thorough on this subject, but we thought we’d make our own little “How-to” guide anyway. So, imagine you were about to type a message or post on your Facebook wall. As soon as you click in the box to type, you’ll notice some extra buttons appear below.

Activating your account is easy!

Go to “edit page” and then “Manage Permissions” and check the “post privacy gating.”

Select the image of the Target and the “Add Targeting” drop down option will appear. This button allows you to actually choose who you want to receive or see a particular post.

Here at Linklift we’re an International bunch (speaking 5 languages fluently) so the option that interests us the most is “Language”.

At the moment we have numerous accounts across different social media sites, each written specifically in one language. But now, with this new option, we hope to be able to merge our Facebook accounts into one Grand, Official, Ultimate Linklift Page, whilst still targeting one language at a time, rather than send all posts, in every language, to everyone! This is great for all you blogs out there that do post bilingually.  Or maybe it could even be a way to put that 2^nd, 3^rd or 4^th language you’ve been meaning to learn, into practice?!
Another thing that’s handy, is that if we decide to organize an event in Berlin, then with this new tool, we can also geographically target our followers in the capital!
That’s the advantage of this option: You can be very precise when selecting your audience and should therefore achieve better results and feedback than you would if you sent it out to everyone at once. Who wants to have a post in Russian or Japanese come up on their feed, when they don’t speak it? Not a lot of people, that’s for sure!

So here’s where we wave “Au Revoir” to our French Facebook Page, and link up to that new ULTIMATE Facebook site of ours, where we shall be refocusing our efforts! If you speak English, French, German, Italian or Spanish, we hope you’ll join us there sometime soon to check out our whimsical musings and blogging tips, all in your language of choice!

Hi! I’m Philippa, I am the newest member of the LinkLift team.

I have found that the most important skill required for a new LinkLift intern (me!) is the ability to search effectively for great blogs and websites. One of the key issues I face is:  how do I find out where in the world this blog is situated? Many bloggers may also wish to find likeminded individuals online in their country of residence or interest, so read on if this sounds like you and searching for blogs in a particular country seems difficult.

Because we are the  UK department at LinkLift, UK domains always feature highly on our blog search lists for all campaigns. I have found a list of all the domains by country, and surprisingly, even that lonely continent, Antarctica, has a domain special to it  – .Aq. If I come across a .Aq domain I am sure to be very excited, but on an average day, I will be searching the online world for UK sites. Now, with a little nifty knowledge that I will impart here, searching for .co.uk sites is easy!

For example

We have a campaign running about home improvement and I would like to find some blogs on this topic but with a UK specific domain.

Step 1: Go to your favourite search engine.

Step 2: Input this string into your search engine of choice: “intext:home improvement inurl:.uk”

Step 3: Hit enter key.

Et voila! All the sites about home improvement with .co.uk in their URL will appear.

You could replace the “inurl:.uk” with the  operator “site:uk”. Same difference.

And just for fun, I have tried this with inurl:.Aq and, disappointingly, no penguins are currently blogging.

If anyone out there with a blog or website in English, with few existing adverts, lots of great content and an old domain (not necessarily .co.uk!)  you could save me a search or two by registering with us directly! We are looking in particular for blogs with topics covering these areas:

Home improvement

Interior design

Food and drink

Women’s lifestyle/fashion

Travel

Just to Note

This month Google has implemented a PageRank update. This change to the basic indicator of a site’s popularity means that many sites have been recently demoted or promoted in their overall ‘importance’ on the web.

Some online advertisers wish to promote products only on those websites with high PageRanks (4 and above). At LinkLift, however, we treat Google PageRank as a general indication of a website’s use and value, but more important to us are the content and links. We can usually tell what is a good site, whether or not this is reflected in the PageRank.