In a recent analysis of social media use by large and small corporations across several sectors we found that less than twenty percent have buttons showing where else they have content.And many of them don’t carry a consistent branding and message through their blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.

If you are not yet vigorously active on Facebook, take another look at what they are up to: depending on whose stats you believe Facebook is either right behind Google nipping at its heels or has already surpassed them in terms of traffic.

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Today the buzzwords in the social media space are community. Everyone is interested in creating community and for good reason. Community is at the heart of human social interaction whether it is online or in the place you live. People do not thrive alone in most cases. There is a need to be connected to someone or something that is more basic than most of us ever admit. It’s an emotional thing which also makes it an elusive thing.

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This is another subject I have been meaning to discuss that I haven’t seen debated a huge amount openly even though everyone in the industry is aware of it.

Simply checking the UK agencies ranking for ‘SEO’ (as an example) it’s very easy to spot that some of them are using their own clients as a link network to rank for that very term. I am not going to call anyone out or make examples of anyone, they know who they are.

Presumably by doing it they think its fine, so perhaps I can give examples.

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If you rely on local customers to come to your store or service facility, then it is most important that these customers can find you on Google.

If they do their checking before they leave home using their desktop PC, then they may well use Google Local Search. It may be a problem for you to rank well in such a search as a recent Cre8asite Forums discussion points out. As the topic author pointed out, there are Completely And Utterly Farcical Google Local Verification Procedures. The problem is that Google does not support this local search facility with a customer service function. They rely on computer algorithms to identify the location of particular businesses. If that algorithm handles your website incorrectly, then it may be very difficult for you to get that corrected.

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This morning, and I mean really early morning, I went about my weekly perusal of about 50 or so SEO and SEM blogs.

For the most part this is a very informative and satisfying experience. However, there are a few barriers to blog reader experience that I feel especially obligated to point out. These observations are relevant for any business blog:

* Don’t make readers register or login to make a comment. What, you’re too lazy to manage all the comment spam? Or install a better spam filter? You’re lucky to get people to your blog in the first place. Why make it inconvenient to interact?

* Please don’t publish content in PDF of MS Word format that would be just as fine as a web page. I hear you saying, what? Yes, there are a few blogs out there that post using a blog content management system, but publish longer articles, white papers, etc in other formats. At least warn readers before they click on the link.

* Why oh why must so many blogs make it difficult to subscribe? Get an RSS button up above the fold. Add your RSS url to an auto discovery tag in the head template. If you really want to capture extra readers, add an RSS to email option like the one offered at Feedblitz.

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Blogs are an evolution, and keeping it up is a big commitment.

Usually you end up focusing on just creating new content on some sort of consistent interval, but the biggest problem with keeping a blog up to date is revising all those elements you once thought you would use, but now realize are not useful at all. This is my 400th blog post on this blog, and I recently rebranded the blog slightly to make the name simpler. Now I am thinking about to carry through the theme of simplicity to improve the user experience on the blog even further. Here’s my list of ways that I plan to rethink the interface of my blog or have elements I have already replaced:

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