In Google Analytics and Social Interaction Part 1, we looked at methods of recording how often people on our sites share content from that site with their networks in social media.  But how do we measure incoming traffic from these social networks?

Measuring Incoming Traffic With Google Analytics

The Campaigns tracking tool in Google Analytics provides as excellent tool for tracking incoming links. In order to use this tool, you’ll have to build a link that contains tracking codes for helping Analytics parse and categorize the incoming traffic. The process in doing so is not difficult, but it involves a little more time than just copying and pasting a link from your browser and pasting into a status update.

Google Link Builder

Google provides an excellent free tool called URL Builder to construct a link with the tracking information needed by Analytics. Go ahead and book mark this – this is an invaluable tool you should be using often.

This tool requires you to fill out a web form that asks for the relevant information. Only Campaign Source, Medium, and Name are the only required fields.:

• Website URL: enter the web address that you re linking to
• Campaign Source: Enter the name of the social media account that the ink will be placed on (Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc.)
• Campaign Medium: Specify how the link will be displayed in its usage – (banner, email, link, etc.)
• Campaign Term: If you are building a link for a paid campaign, you can specify the keywords that were purchased as part of the campaign
• Campaign Content: You can use this field to assign a category for a link – for example, if you are going to have multiple links in your social media for a fundraising campaign, you could specify the link as belonging to fundraising or summer-fundraising to be able to measure that data separate from other links in that social media feed.
• Campaign Name: Name of the campaign to track – (For example, social media, Facebook, etc.)

After completing your form fields, click Generate URL to get the link address.

Shorten The Link

Google will now give you your custom link, and it will be ugly and long. It won’t look attractive in a status update, let alone fit in a Twitter message.

That’s were a URL shortening service comes in. A service like bit.ly or Hootsuite’s owl.ly  will collapse the link into a manageable length for posting. Link previews built into Facebook and Twitter allow the end user to preview content before going to the link, which is important for users who might mistrust a link that they cannot tell the destination of before clicking on it.

Use the Link – Collect Analytics

Use the shortened link within your comment, status update or message.

Changes to your website usually begin to show results in 24 hours in Analytics. To view your traffic, go to the Campaigns page under Traffic Sources. There you’ll be able to generate the same kind of reports you do with other incoming traffic data and page interactions, and start determining which social media traffic sources yield the best results for drawing traffic to your web sites.

As marketers and communicators, we go to where the audiences are online to deliver and receive messages. Today, that is Facebook. With over 500 million users and a daily usage that surpasses that of Google, using Facebook as a communications channel by any large business or institution is essential.

Branding a Facebook page is not as easy as setting up an account. By default, a fan page opens on the Facebook wall feed. From an engagement perspective, this is the best option as it presents no barrier to immediately communication between you and your fans. From a marketing or branding perspective, however, it presents a challenge, as their is no real estate for evergreen or promotional material that you might want to stay sticky at a top level for a few weeks or months. The only option would be to continually post about such an event or campaign, which would quickly be seen as spammy by your audiences and hurt your overall social reputation.

Custom Fan Landing Pages

Creating a custom fan Landing Page gives the page owner a flexible way of creating an attractive entrance page for their Facebook presence. The Coca-Cola page is a good example of what can be done with such a page:

Rather than opening on the Wall page, the Coca-Cola page opens on a Custom Facebook page called Home. This page has multiple calls to action:

• Like many Facebook custom pages, the top banner calls attention to the Like button and contains a Call to Action to click the button.
• A large Photo and associated text fro a primary point of focus that directs audiences to a current campaign. In this case, the article links to an associated Facebook application
• Links for following Coca-cola on related social media sites
• Links to fan-supplied photos and videos about the product
• Links to lists of products and a question and answer service
• A link to unique-Facebook content about the history of the Facebook page (which was originally created by a pair of fans of the soft drink that Coca-Cola eventually took control over, but incorporated the creators in their online marketing (a very smart move rather than coming down from above with draconian threats of suing and copyright infringement) 

The Pros

Custom Facebook landing pages:

• Can introduce campaigns and promotions from the rest of your online presence into Facebook
• Provide entry points to Facebook or website applications
• Allow a business or organization to put their best face forward in terms of branding and visuals to potential fans and consumers, thereby increasing the likelihood they are to like the page

The Cons

• Put  a barrier between engaging with other fans when coming to the page
• Require additional planning for content, updates, and strategies
• Require additional programming and design support

Creating a Custom Facebook Page

Originally, custom Facebook pages were created using a programming language called FBML, Facebook Markup Language. Pages were created by users and then hosted by Facebook. Images, Videos, and other materials were hosted on another website and called into the Facebook page.

Earlier this year, Facebook announced that FBML was being deprecated in favor of having developers build custom pages the Developer Application. This new method requires you to create a local HTML page that is then imported into Facebook using an iframe.

Creating a Custom Facebook Landing Page

You’ll need to create a web page using your standard web development tools. This page and any accompanying files would need to be then uploaded to your web server so it can be accessed by Facebook.

The iframe has a set width of 520 pixels and 800 pixels in height. Your content can be longer than this, but be aware this will create a scroll bar to the right and you’ll need to accommodate for that in your design (leave 20 pixels available for the scroll bar on the right).

Integrating Your Web Page into a Facebook App

1. Login into Facebook
2. Go to Facebook Developers and go to Apps in the top menu and add this app to your Facebook Profile
3. Cick on the button that says “Create a new App”. Will you need to give your application a name visible to the public (Name) and a name for the Open Graph measuring tool (App Namespace). You’ll have to complete a Captca as well to verify you are a human.Give your app a name and also add an icon since it will show up in your Facebook page.
4. Upload a custom icon to show next to your page. The icon will be rendered as 16 x 16 pixels, so think along the lines of a favicon.
5. At the bottom of this page, select the Page Tab option under Select how your app integrates with Facebook
6. Enter the Name of Page Tab (the name that will appear in the left hand menu on Facebook)
7. Use the URL of the web page on your server for each of the remaining fields. Be sure to use https: for the secure page tab url instead of http:

Adding the App to a Facebook Fan Page

To add the landing page to your site, you’ll need to do the following:

1. Open a  new browser window
2. Go to the following address, replacing YOUR_APP_ID with the app id number that has been created for your page tab (taken from the ) and YOUR_URL with the web address of your local page:
   http://www.facebook.com/dialog/pagetab?app_id=YOUR_APP_ID&next=YOUR_URL
3. This page will give a dialog box that will ask you to specify what page you are an administrator of that the tab should be added to.

What Does Web Services Have in the Works?

As you may have noted above, the dimensions of a custom Facebook landing page are smaller than those of the new UF&Shands WordPress theme, Apollo. In order to build a page properly, a unit would need to build a custom HTML solution for the space and host it external of their WordPress instance, which would require both programming and design support, as well as the help of IT staff to host and maintain.

After the launch of the UF&SHands website, Web Services will be looking at specialized WordPress templates for smaller goal-specific web sites. One of those in discussion is a Facebook optimized template for Landing Pages, basically a redesign of the current home page design to strip the navigation menus and other elements but retain the titles and branding.

This template would allow content authors to continue to use the tools they have learned for WordPress to maintain and update landing pages easily and with minimal IT support.

Stay tuned for more information on this template and other templates in the near future.  And if you have suggestions or ideas for this or other templates, please contact us – we’d love to hear from you!

The world wide web offers its audience a virtually unfiltered, unlimited supply of content. Each day, the internet grows massively, much larger than any person or group of persons could consume:

• 60,000 new web sites
• 2 million videos on  Youtube
• 1.6 million Blog Posts
• 1.5 Facebook status updates
• 10 Million Tumbler Posts
• 5 Million photos on Flickr
• 140 million tweets

- Contently, 2011

Before the digital revolution, content sent to mass audiences was filtered by gatekeepers – newspaper editors, television programming departments, radio executives, and book publishers. But the internet removed these gatekeepers, and it has only been recently that the internet audience has shown the fatigue of having too much data on hand.

Enter the Search Engines. In an effort to meet consumer expectations and to help combat content fatigue, Google and other search engines began a process of personalization – using viewing history, comments, and other digital material such as likes and follows – to try and tailor search results to match a consumer’s expectations. Tied closely to this is localization – using your IP address to givegreater relevance to results closer to your geographical location.

While a great tool for commerce – limiting search results to material that matches a user’s preference – the privatization of search results had an unseen effect, called the Filter Bubble. In a TED talk in May 2011, Eli Pariser discussed the concept and what unintended consequences it can bring about:

As you can see, this can become an issue quite quickly for businesses, especially start-ups and small business that have to break through the filter bubble to reach new customers. In health care, it could prove a challenge for public awareness and health campaigns trying to reach audiences with strongly held views or communities built around a behavior or practice that is trying to be changed or influenced.

Filter Bubble and SEO

For web developers, this creates a real issue for tweaking SEO. Two individuals looking at the same search term in Google can get radically different search results, dependent on their Filter Bubble. When I look up issues related to Web Accessibility and Social Media tools, my results often pull up the blogs of friends and colleagues I have in higher education who have written on the subject.  But if someone else was to perform the same search, those blog posts would be much lower in rankings – sometimes on entirely different pages of search results.

As you can imagine, this can lead to a lot of confusion, especially when you, as the web content editor, are discussing the search engine placement of your site with an individual by email or phone. They might see a problem with the site’s ranking that you cannot; to you, your site is number one in search results, while in reality it might be a very different picture. It is essential to know this and understand the effect so you can communicate this to your clients and administrators of a department.

How do you Account for the Filter Bubble?

Google Verbatim

Last Month, Google introduced a new search tool called Verbatim. The Verbatim tool ignores the spelling auto-correcting tool, the synonyms tool, and, most importantly, your personalized filters to give you the unadulterated results of exactly what you typed. It’s the cleanest unskewed search result you can get from Google.

To use Verbatim, type in your search as you normally would using the Google home page. On the results page, select Show search tools at the bottom of the left hand column. Verbatim will be the last option on the Search tools list. Click it and the search results will be modified to remove Google’s influences on the results.

Correcting in Normal Search Results

There’s no sure-fire way to do this, but the following are practices to follow to help keep the filter bubble from skewing your results. Doing so will affect your web browsing preferences and experience, so use only those you are comfortable with.

• Clean out your cache
• Erase your web browsing history
• Clean out your cookies
• Set your Facebook privacy settings to maximum
• Don’t be signed into a Google account when making a search
• Hide your birth date on Facebook
• Opt out of targeted ads whenever possible
• Use the private browsing option available in newer browsers, or use an anonymizer for browsing the web

Eli Pariser talks about the steps of doing these methods with most modern browsers on his web site.

Accounting for Localization

You can account for localization bias in searching Google using one the country-specific Googles [i.e. use google.co.uk instead of google.com] or by changing location with the left sidebar tools to specify a different U.S. city or zip code.

Photo of Bubbles by Jeff Kubina, Flickr

Google Analytics now provides a set of reports for tracking social interaction with a website’s content. This new metric will measure how often users use social share buttons – for example, a Facebook Like, and Google +1, a LinkedIn share, or a tweet. This information can be used to analyze how your users share information and whether your sharing audiences use your website in different ways than those who do not.

Social Engagement Report

The Social Engagement Report shows site behavior changes for visits that include clicks on any social sharing actions. In the example below, we see that of 7,777 visits to this website in the last 30 days, only two visitors were socially engaged.

In the example above, we should also note that this site is only pulling in data from Google+, which is built in to the Google Analytics application. In order to measure engagement from other social media networks, it’s necessary to modify the scripts that control each of the social media engagement tools, which we’ll discuss in a moment.

Social Actions Report

The Social Actions report displays the number of social actions (+1 clicks, Tweets, Facebook Likes, etc) that have taken place on the site. This information can be important to determine which networks are more preferred by users, which can lead to making that button larger, changing its position on the screen, etc.

Social Pages

The Social Pages report shows the specific pages on your site that are driving social actions. This is very useful for content providers to determine what content on their site is of most interest to your audience, what they are most likely to share with their friends, and what has the greatest potential to become viral content.

The Tracking Code

In order to track the other social media tools, Google has created Social Interaction Tracking. This tracking has to be integrated into each social network button.

The syntax for this tracking is as follows:

_trackSocial(network, socialAction, opt_target, opt_pagePath)

Network

Name of the social network: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc.

SocialAction

Type of action: Like, Tweet, Send, Stumble, etc.

opt_target

This optional field allows the user to manually set the Subject of the action being taken. If it is not used, this defaults to the URL of the web page being shared. If used, it can be used to name a different web address, the name of a product or an article, or the content ID of the material, for example.

opt_pagePath

This optional field can be used to change the URL where the sharing took place (for example, for listing a virtual page name instead).

More Information

• For a more technical overview on how to implement this tag for Facebook and Twitter visit the code site article.
• To see a working example of how to integrate Analytics with Facebook and Twitter buttons check out the Social Analytics sample code.

Google Analytics and Social Interaction Part 2: In the next installment of this post, we’ll discuss methods for tracking incoming links from social networks and recording these in Google Analytics.

Looking Under the Hood

Here we see the Google+ page for the University of Florida. As you can see, there are a number of features that are very similar to a Facebook page – you have a wall feed, a photo gallery, a video gallery, and an about page. There are, however, a few unique features to the application that departments and centers would want to take advantage of.

Circles

Google+ uses a concept called Circles for categorizing the followers for your page. As you post to Google+, you can choose to send a global message to all your circles or to specific circles only if the message you are sending is only applicable to a few audiences.

The new Google+ business pages create a few standard Circles for your use: Team Members, VIPs, Customers and Following. Departments and units might choose to create circles for audiences such as:

• Prospective Students
• Residents
• Parents
• Faculty
• Alumni

Google Hangouts

Google+ has a built in video conversation feature. Hangouts can be by invite only or open and can involve up to ten participants. This allows for your audience and your department or program to interact with people in a face-to-face interaction – all they will need is a video camera and microphone to participate. The video chat offers many possibilities for communication:

• Admission officers and prospective students, including international applicants
• Orientation sessions for incoming students
• Advisors and current students
• Professors with students and the public
• Q and A sessions about public health initiatives, services, and events with the general public

Direct Connect

The Direct Connect feature allows people to find your business Google+ page by adding a + to the front of their Google search. In order to take advantage of the Direct Connect feature you have to connect your website to your Google+ page. 

Issues to Keep in Mind

Multiple Adminstrators

Currently Google+ business pages do not allow for multiple administrators.  Google had acknowledges the need for this feature and it is scheduled to be deployed sometime in December.

UF’s Social Media Policy

A Google+ page falls under the UF Social Media policy.  Before creating a page, a UF department must get authorization for an official university activity must come from the vice president with jurisdiction over one’s unit as well as the vice president for University Relations or his/her designee. Here’s the form for registering your account.

And, as always be aware of FERPA and HIPAA regulations and post accordingly. 

Examples in Higher Education

Mashable has a terrific photo gallery of 16 universities that jumped onto the Google + Page quickly. While some of the sites have been built primarily as an admissions and recruiting tool, other have been built primarily as a school spirit tool more in line with bringing content to current students and alumni. As pages progress, expect to see specific targeted admissions pages and individual pages for colleges, departments, centers.

About the Author

Photo

Bon Unreall, Flickr, with modifications 

Anyone that has attempted covering an event live via a social network like Twitter knows this can be a difficult job.

The tweeter has to act as both a reporter, covering the relevant information of what is occurring and what is being said at the event, and a community manager, responding to the reactions and impressions of people following the event and sometimes selecting tweet questions to share, personally or through the moderators. If the twitter back channel for an event becomes robust, then an already difficult job becomes moreso.

One complication is that there are potentially several related conversations about the event taking place at once within Twitter. Using a Twitter hashtag (a # sign followed by a key word) is one way to manage and organize the discussion within Twitter, but the stream can be very rapid if there are are a dozen or more people involved, especially if those tweeters tend to RT messages sent by others in the stream. Some conversation might branch off from the main conversation as well, dropping the hash tag as they continue.

Another complication is that the very nature of tweeting diverts some attention from the event in order to compose a well-crafted summation of the proceedings. Live tweeters often miss key points and messages from speakers, especially in large round table discussions or events with multiple points of focus. Multiple contributors using a common hashtag for the event can make up for this gap, but for some users, the level of noise in the tweet stream, from multiple authors, retweets, and off-topic comments – can eliminate any type of narrative to the story.

Enter Storify.

Advantages to Using Storify

The screen capture from Story.com shows how simple the interface is to use. A user uses the search box to search for a topic, and the icons to the far left to select a social media service. Results are presented in the left hand column, and can moved into the story window using click and drag motion with the mouse. Items can be moved and up and down in the time line using the same method. Authors can add text blocks in between social media excerpts as needed.

Examples of Storify in News Coverage

Examples of Storify in News and Communications for Higher Education

• University of Florida – Kindergators
• Meeting Chrissy Teigen for @UFlorida
• Field Notes from the Digital Prairie: How To Do Social Media Right (and Wrong)
• Belmont University – Maya Angelou visit
• University of Flint-Michigan 2011 Welcome Back Picnic
• Tufts University’s stories

Photo

mpclmens, Flickr, with modifications 

Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?

Geosocial applications are designed for users to share their physical locations with their groups of online contacts. Most geosocial applications run via mobile devices – the user enters information or selects a location from a map, and their check-in is recorded and shared with the audience the user selects, be it a small approved group of friends or to the entire internet.

In addition to check ins, users can share tips, reviews, and other details about the locations and businesses that they check into.  In turn, businesses can claim venues that have been created by users, in order to manage factual details like addresses, phone numbers, web site urls, and hours of business.

A Self-Imposed Big Brother?

Understandably, geosocial applications make many people nervous from a privacy standpoint – many people simply don’t want to share that level of information with people. Geosocial has been equated to the equivalent of a Big-Brother style society – except in this case, the public self-chose to be in a monitored existence instead of the state making that decision. Apocryphal stories abound of thieves targeting homes based on following geolocation services to determine when there will not be anyone home. This reluctance to share this data might be reflected in the slow growth of Facebook Places. Growth and usage of geosocial services is much larger in self-contained applications like Gowalla and Foursquare, wherein the users broadcast check-ins to a smaller, more controlled group.

Geosocial also raises some red flags in the arena of health care and its relationship to HIPAA. Currently, the general consensus is the field is that geosocial applications are not a HIPAA violation, as patients themselves choose to check in to a location. Groups that manage a venue, however, should take HIPAA into account and not communicate directly back to patients in a public way in this forum as it could lead to a violation.

For a excellent run down on the pros and cons of using a geosocial application for Health Care, I’d recommend reading Jenn Riggle’s post on the subject on BuzzBin. (http://www.livingstonbuzz.com/2010/05/27/foursquare-in-healthcare/)

Why it Matters

This screen capture from Checkin Mania highlights how conflicting data and multiple listings can lead to confusion in a geosocial application. Here, we can see the numerous check-in locations in Foursquare for Shands and the Health Science Center.

Despite these misgivings, geosocial is being explored by many of the large internet concerns as a potential for getting valuable, real-time data on audiences, consumers, and their behavior patterns. Knowing purchasing patterns and customer visits can fuel customer loyalty programs, discounts, and other incentives.  It helps businesses identify potential consumer and brand advocates and allows them to receive feedback from the customer in an unobtrusive way.  It also provides customer service programs another outlet for identifying potential problems and areas of complaint that should be addressed.

Even more important, it is imperative for businesses and organizations to be involved in order to ensure that those key details of the business and its operation are correct and accurate. As listings in these services are created by users and not employees of an organization, information is often inaccurate – the name of the business is wrong, the address is slightly off or lists the wrong suite number, phone numbers or emails are missing. As users often enter new check-in via a multitude of mobile devices and interfaces, it is likely that people will create a new venue for an existing location, leading to even more confusion. The industry has discussed the possibility of consolidating all location databases into a single source file that all could use to eliminate these concerns, but such an agreement is unlikely given the competitive nature of the groups involved.

The problem is compounded as other applications and services begin to use these databases to fuel their own applications or searches.  The most important case of this is Google, which serves Google Place results very high in retrieved search results, often right after a Google Map listing; in fact, it often appears as the first search result.  As you can see, claiming and controlling the venue in the application becomes important to maintain a connection with the customer or consumer.

UF&Shands and Geosocial

External Web Services, Shands Marketing, and Health Science Center’s News and Communications are working on a plan to centralize and manage place location data and provide easy resources for management to individuals in colleges, units, and departments. If you have a venue or location that you’d like to be included in this centralized list, please let Web Services know.

Geosocial Applications to Watch

Google Places

Google still remains king of the web. With 89 million unique users per day, it dominates search. If you pass on trying to maintain or organize any of the other geosocial services listed below, this one is the absolute must. And, as Google’s search engine increasingly gives more weight to Google Place and Map listings, delivering them over other search results, it becomes paramount to make sure this is up to date. Google gives businesses the option to combine their Google Map and Place information together to simplify the managing of both.

Facebook Places

Facebook’s Places has not had as widespread an adoption as was planned – primarily due to privacy concerns. Nevertheless, place data is served up in Facebook’s internal search feature – and, given that Facebook has 500 million users worldwide and currently has traffic equal to or greater than Google, needs nurturing and cultivation as well. Facebook gives businesses the option to merge their Facebook Places and Community pages with their primary pages – we’ll talk more about this in an upcoming post.

Foursquare

One of the original two breakouts in the geosocial field, Foursquare saw 3400% percent growth in 2010, although this still only accounts for about ten million users as of the last count. Like its primary competitor, Gowalla, Foursquare employs game theory to encourage people to check-in.  Having the most check-ins in a certain period of time to a location awards you a ‘Mayorship’, and checking into specific venues or events can earn you virtual badges that are displayed in your profile. Some businesses leverage the Mayorship to encourage repeat business by offering the mayor discounts on their goods and services. This use to build customer loyalty has had limited success but has to catch on as a major marketing tool.

Gowalla

Foursquare’s primary competitor, Gowalla, was originally seen to be the breakout in the field, but its growth has steeply declined, numbering around one million users. It’s efforts with customer loyalty programs has also suffered from a lack of ‘stickiness’: businesses and merchants have not been quick to adopt the service. Nevertheless, current users have great loyalty to the brand and still actively contribute to its database.

Yelp

Although Yelp does allow for check-in, it’s primary purpose was more as a 2.0 community web site than a geosocial application. It was designed for individuals to leave customer reviews for the businesses that were listed. Alexa.com ranks it as the 36^th most visited site in the United States, with over 500,000 visits per day. Yelp provides an important window into what consumers and the public think about your goods and services.

About the Author

It’s no wonder that an industry has built around the core of search engines.  Numerous businesses tout techniques for increasing your site’s relevance to search engines. Some use industry-approved techniques to boost your rankings – methods called ‘white-hat’ techniques.  Others employ more shady, ‘black-hat’ techniques that might prove profitable in the short-term, but that can result in severe penalties if they are discovered (Google will delist web sites they find employing such techniques, a situation which almost assures economic ruin for the business that finds itself removed from their listings).

A Natural Diving Technique

The most successful long term strategy for developing a high ranking is search engines is through an organic approach.  In the organic model, quality, relevant content to your audience takes precedence over other SEO techniques. The business or organizations concentrates on writing strong content that has value to the end user.  The end users, in response, link to and recommend the site to others, both through their web sites, blogs, reviews, and social media.  This, in turn, increases your relevancy scores to the search engines and leads to a higher search result.

Organic  SEO is the most sustainable method for increase search engine relevancy. It does not require the cumulative and expensive costs associated with paid search engine placement or hiring external SEO firms, and stays solidly in the ‘white-hat’ side of the process by building on within the parameters that were intended for the search engine algorithms that determine placement. However, it does require a long term institutional commitment to revising, editing, and providing content that changes and is responsive to meet the needs of your audience. As it builds on organic growth, it also takes a longer time to show measurable results, but its results are often much longer lasting that the paid placement techniques.

Testing the Waters

SEO Blogs

Like many things involving the internet, there are changes within search engine optimization occurring every day. Any change made by a search engine can have immediate implications in your rankings if not identified and addressed. Here are a few SEO industry blogs that I would recommend reviewing if you are taking an active role in the SEO of your unit’s web site. You don’t need to follow them all, but they are some of the most widely used and you might find a few that appeal to your reading preferences and you might want to bookmark them for future reference.

Content Strategy Blogs

In addition to the blogs above, I’d recommend also looking at informational resources about content theory and content strategy, the lynchpins of the organic growth model. These three are quite good and I readily recommend them:

• Meet Content
• Leen Jones – Winning Content
• Content-Ment

Keeping Our Heads Above Water

Raising the search engine results of our web sites is a communal effort.  The new WordPress template leverages the strenght of all of our units through the use of a global navigation system that ties the Shands hospital system, the colleges of the Health Science Center, and the veterinary hospital system together. Ranking improvements in any site in our system will have the potential to raise the ranking results of many others within the system.

External Web Services is ready to assist you in your SEO efforts.  We’ll consult with you, recommend best practices, and help conduct audits on your site’s current content. In turn, we’re working with our University of Florida colleagues to share resources and knowledge to allow us to build off of the University’s brand. We invite all of our content providers to share their experiences and knowledge via this blog as well – contact me if you have some suggestions.

About the Author

Jeff Stevens
Web Content Optimizer

Jeff studied history and advertising account management before deciding that the creative side was more where his heart belonged and he became a graphic and web designer, working freelance and in a variety of small jobs. Eventually this led back to higher ed and webmaster positions with Student Financial Affairs and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, where he worked in communications, marketing, design, and web development, not to mention honing his skills as a meddlesome do-gooder.

As Web content optimizer, Jeff is the Web Services go-to person for questions on analytics, SEO, social media, information architecture, usability, Star Trek, and the latest internet memes.

Photo

Hani Amir, Flickr