The Maze of the Web 2.o. Learn how to navigate it!

Join me to discover, decipher and get hands-on training on how the Web 2.o tools can help your business grow.

Class: Web 2.0 Marketing Tools

Date: Dec., 12 and 17

Time: 6:30pm to 9:30pm

Place: Miami Dade College-Kendall Campus

Register: https://sisvsr.mdc.edu/ce/showclass.aspx?ref=542818

Professor: Marcos J. Menendez, President, Loop Consulting Group

Social Network Dissemination (SND™) is Loop’s program for selecting the right social media solutions needed for our clients to promote their causes and campaigns. Loop’s SND™ places the strategy, tactics, tools and training required to succeed in social network marketing. SND™ creates powerful communication tactics that will establish links, attention and traffic to the organizations website.

SND™ shows our clients that it is ultimately about building community around targeted a

udiences and spreading ideas that will drive results.

Cuil pronounced “cool” (use a heavy Irish accent) is the creation of ex-Google brain Anna Patterson who said to CNN that her new search engine offers “better ways to search”.

I’m always interested in better ways to find what I’m looking for, so I visited www.cuil.com to give it a test:

What I liked:

1. Simple home page, ala Google

2. Suggestive search box (based on what you type, it suggests words)

3. Folder style tabs recommending additional content sections (nice, requires less thinking, I think)

4. More visually appealing than Google

What I didn’t like:

1. Results seemed scattered on the page, but this probably because I’m used to scanning the page from top-to-bottom and Cuil presents results in a three column format.

2. Some results seemed a little confusing since they appeared with images along side and the image may not be relevant to the content.

Even though Cuil has $33M in venture funding and it’s just a couple of days old, I’m not sure if it’s unique enough to make a dent in Google’s armor. What I do like is that fact that people are trying to improve on the standards and even change them and this is how we all win.

But the ultimate judge of performance is you, www.cuil.com

Google engineer Matt Cutts, who’s quite popular with the techies, offered some simple yet great advice on how to make your website easier to find by your prospective customers.

Here’s a quick summary of what he says to USA Today in his interview:

1. Add “keywords” to your site’s content; keywords are the words you think people will use to find your site when they use a search engine. The more keywords you use in your content, the easier your site will be to find.

2. Title Tags and Description Tags are the information Google displays about your website in the results page.

3. The more people that link to your website the better. People will link to your content if it’s interesting and of value. (By the way, please link to me!)

4. Advertising on Google does not get you preferred treatment. You will not rank higher in the free results because you advertise.

5. Normally, Google refreshes its entire inventory once a month. This means that Google may visit your site to look for new content every 30 days. However, don’t wait a month for Google to visit your site; submit your site to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.

I’m not the best person to summarize interviews, but if you liked the tips above, I’d recommend taking time to watch the five-minute video interview and hear it straight from the horse’s mouth.