My Last Radio Home is Back in the News Business
If you’ll excuse a self-serving post about Richmond radio…
I used to work in radio and television news. My last job in journalism was as news director of All News 990, WVNZ, an AM 24-hour news station in Richmond, Virginia. Less than a year after I left in mid-1999, they switched the format over to talk radio, and then later to Adult Standards, and then later to Southern Gospel. I saw a bus billboard the other day that said the all news station is back on the air. They switched the call letters long ago to WLEE, which are letters with a long history here in Central Virginia. I actually worked at WLEE in the early 1990s when it was 1320am and a talk station.
The programming on the new All News 990 is .. get this .. the TV signal of CNN’s Headline News. Yup … it’s television without the pretty pictures. They sprinkle in some rip-and-read AP copy to say that they have local news breaks. I listened for a little while the other day and it’s bearable, but obviously local all news radio could be done much, much better.
The good news for the station is that they were finally able to increase the power of the signal. Back when I worked there it was 1,000 watts daytime and about the power of a cell phone at night. Now it’s 4,000 watts daytime and 2,000 watts at night.
I suspect the same people are behind the whole thing, based on a lot of the branding messages I heard in promos. The station group that owned them when I worked there sold out a couple of years back, but I heard the station manager/part owner ended up getting a job with the new owners.
I wish them luck with their new format, but I wish someone would dive in and really do all news here in Richmond. I did the best I could with very limited resources when I was news director. It seems like they’re not even bothering to do it halfway now.
Five First Steps for SEO and Social Media Beginners
I’m frequently asked to look at a website and evaluate it for usability, SEO, search engine optimization public relations (SEO PR), and social media optimization (SMO). At times, I’m asked, “What should I fix first?” So, I thought I’d put those first steps down in a blog post. I think these are the five most important things that can usually be done by novices to optimize a site for both the search engines and social media sites.
I invite you to add your own by leaving a comment!
1) Write good page titles: These titles, which are shown at the top of your browser, are the most important thing you easily control when optimizing a site. Even if you’re using an online “fill in the blank” template program, you can usually control the names of the pages. Just putting the name of your business or your site isn’t enough. You need to have the proper keywords in that title. For example, if you’re selling widgets with a company called “Widgettes”, and your customer base is mostly in the Albequerque, New Mexico area, instead of calling the front page “Widgettes, Inc.“, make the title, “Albequerque, New Mexico’s best Widgets, from Widgettes, Inc.” Also, make the title different for each page and reflective of what’s on the page.
2) Maintain your website: You’d be surprised how many people overlook this one. Some search engines will lower your ranking for things like broken links or images, and more importantly it looks bad for the people who do find your site. You should check your site every few days to make sure nothing is falling apart. You do that with your house or your office building. You should do it with your virtual storefront too!
3) Blog (the verb AND the noun): Blogs are painfully easy to build these days. If someone is building your site for you, ask them to set one up. If you’re doing your own site, check with your host. I use GoDaddy, which make it extremely easy to install WordPress, the software that makes this blog possible. The most important things about blogging are to do it frequently, and give people quality content. If you’re selling widgets, why not talk about a novel use for a widget or even how to select the right one? If you do that, they may link to your blog, and links are the ultimate goal. Additionally, if you see an interesting article that someone else wrote about widgets, post it on your blog and give the author credit. One last point — if you’re creating a blog for link building, don’t use free services like Blogger. If someone links to your blog on Blogger, it only helps Blogger’s search engine ranking. If the blog is on YOUR site, the link helps you.
4) Build links: I mentioned this above, but I’ll say it again: Link building should be your top goal. Search engines look at links as recommendations. If your site has enough recommendations from other relevant sites, then you’ll be rewarded with higher search engine rankings. There are a lot of ways to build links. Not many of them are easy, but not many of them require you to be an expert in search engines. Building a blog and keeping it populated with quality content is one way to build links. You might also contact a complimentary business and suggest the owner link to you from his or her blog in exchange for a link from yours. You might also suggest they run some of your blog content. Additionally, get involved in the blogging community for your business, if there is one. If people see your name on smart blog comments enough times, they may consider you an expert. Additionally, when you post on other blogs, use a signature that has your website address in it. In some cases, that will count as a link back to your site. At the very least it might get them to visit your site.
5) Submit articles and blog posts to social media sites: There are literally dozens of different social bookmarking sites. My favorites are Digg, Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, Reddit, and Stumbleupon. [Note: You can recommend or vote for this post by clicking on those links!] You can find a great list and explanation of each in this article on the site SEOmoz. Sites like these were created so people could list interesting content and share it with others. So, obviously, it’s a great place to gather links and credibility if you have interesting content. Don’t spam these sites with every little announcement about a new employee or whatever. Use it to spread your good content.
A new look for the Media Relations and SEO PR Blog
If you’ve been here before, you’ll notice the new digs. I redesigned the blog last night. I didn’t really want to, but something strange happened with the theme I was using. In the end, I like this style better. It’s based on the Mistylook-101 theme, but I made quite a few modifications to the color scheme. The dust is still settling, and I haven’t gotten my tag cloud to work right, but it’s getting there.
Enjoy!
A Review of the Top Social Media & Web 2.0 Sites
I happened upon a great article by Jane Copland from SEOMoz the other day and was thrilled. It was written earlier this month, but since I hadn’t seen it, it’s new to me! The article does a rundown of 30 of the top social media / social bookmarking / Web 2.0 (pick a description) sites.
There are dozens and dozens of sites that allow you to submit and share links now, and most have ridiculous names with periods where they don’t belong. It’s tough for the uninitiated to keep them straight, and frankly it’s tough sometimes for those of us who track this stuff for a living. To have details about this many in one place is invaluable. In fact, I’ve been using Digg, Technorati, Del.icio.us, and Ma.gnolia lately, but this article convinced me to look closer at Reddit and StumbleUpon.
Enjoy!
Are you … uh … Twittering?
Apparently there’s a new social media trend out there. I just heard about it (which probably puts me behind the times) and frankly I don’t fully understand it. Twitter allows users to create what I’d call a microblog, if your blog is the type that discusses what you had for breakfast. Twitterers, or members of the Twittersphere (I’m just making these up as I go along), use their cell phone text messaging, instant messenger program, or email to post one line “bloggettes” (I don’t like that one .. sounds too much like a pastry) about what they’re doing. That appears to be pretty much it for this site. It reads like a Larry King column. Despite that, it’s taking off like a jet plane bound for Guadalajara.
Since I don’t get it, I’ll post a few thoughts from people who apparently do:
Twitter is perhaps the best example of a new kind of blog that some are calling a “tumblelog.” The tumblelog is a bit like the old link lists: quick one or two-line entries – sometimes just a picture. Twitter in specific allows you to post, through a variety of means (IM, phone, web), short messages meant to describe what you are doing at any given moment. By establishing contacts on the site, you can also get a collected list of what all of your friends are posting.
Twitter is really increasing in popularity, and people are starting to add so many friends that their phone is a full-time vibrator.
Basically Twitter is social network micro-blogging, and best of all is its accessibility, you can keep in touch in different ways.
That’s a couple. I’m sure there are more. To me, Twitter just seems like the Web 2.0 version of a vanity license plate.
Edited to add on Dec. 13, 2008: Soooo … I‘ve been heavily into Twitter for a while and just realized I should probably do something about this post. I thought about deleting it but decided instead to add this note. I admit it … I was wrong about Twitter. It was a combination of not realizing Twitter’s usefulness and simply trying to be funny. It take a big man to admit his mistakes, and I’m 6’3” and about 220.
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