Diego Velasquez

In this day and age, it is becoming increasingly important to own your online presence. Your online presence can be described as the multiple online channels (portfolio/brochure websites, social networking sites, online directories and review sites, etc.) that lead to you or your business. Having only a website for your online presence is no longer sufficient for competing on the web and communicating with your potential clients. With multiple online channels, you or your company is afforded many more opportunities of being found.

Assuming you are going to develop your online presence from scratch, it is important to be consistent. Your domain name and every username you create thereafter should be the same. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon to come up with an idea for a business name or even try using your own name (i.e. johnsmith.com) and then hurry to purchase the domain or secure your Twitter username (i.e. twitter.com/johnsmith) only to find that the desired name is already taken. Do not be discouraged though. Often you can add a slight twist to your name or company name that is unique and available.

Your ultimate goal should be to own:

• uniquedomain.com
  • uniquedomain.net
  • uniquedomain.org
• uniquedomain@gmail.com
• twitter.com/uniquedomain
• facebook.com/uniquedomain
• linkedin.com/uniquedomain
• etc.

Even if you do not think Twitter, *Facebook, Gmail or the other various extensions of your URL (i.e. uniquedomain.com, uniquedomain.net, and uniquedomain.org) are important now, it is good to have the accounts as placeholders. Otherwise, if you develop a company and it eventually becomes quite successful, you might find yourself dealing with cybersquatters who have registered accounts under your brand name in hopes of being bought out.

When you create your Gmail account, you’re able to use that same account name to access all other Google products—Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Ad-Sense, Calendar, Docs. It is important to become familiar with Google products/services as they can provide valuable information and even opportunities to make money.

If you already have a website and multiple accounts yet they aren’t consistent, it is possible to create redirects from your website to the different sites. Here’s an example:

• domain.com
• domain.com/twitter  ► redirects to twitter.com/preexistingusername
• domain.com/facebook ► redirects to facebook.com/preexistingusername

Screenshot from my Twitter profile page

Redirects can be done either by using a .htaccess file or a HTML Redirect. The purpose of using the redirects is for simplicity and to try and alleviate confusion.

The internet has largely been “first come, first serve.” Once a domain name or a username has been taken, it can be next to impossible to ever get them back—unless you’re ready to drop a hefty amount of cash to buy it.  The point is, you need to act soon to secure your personal or your company presence online. And when you do, try your very best to be consistent.

*It is important to note that if you create a Fan Page on Facebook, you must have at least 1,000 fans before you can designate your URL name.

If anything can be learned from Twitter, it’s that shorter is better.  Okay, maybe “better” is not the right word; however, through the 140 character limit Twitter imposes, we are gearing our minds into packing the greatest punch with the least amount of room.  Because of the limited amount of content space, URL shortening tools have been emerging everywhere such as bit.ly, ow.ly, is.gd, etc. The act of “shortening” seems to be the current strong and worthwhile trend. So take it a step further with your website URL.

Do you even know why the prefix “www” is used? I didn’t until I was researching this topic. I kept seeing sites like “http://twitter.com,” “http://digg.com,” and “http://friendfeed.com” that were not using the “www” prefix. At first glance those sites appeared defective or just plain weird. However, after learning that the omission of the “www” was by design, I wondered why we even used the “www” to begin with. According to Boutell.com, “there is nothing in the HTTP specification that says a website must start with www. or any other prefix. It is simply a convention that began in the early days of the web and was used to distinguish a company’s web server from its FTP server, gopher server, mail server, et cetera. But no such distinction is necessary…”

This is great news! Apparently, there aren’t technical issues prohibiting a site owner from choosing to go strictly without the “www”. However, using additional web servers may warrant using prefixes such as www2 or www3 (i.e. http://www2.panasonic.com). It might take time to accept not using “www” but I think it’s important to at least highly consider it. If you do decide to implement the non-“www” URL version, there are a few points to remember.

First, consistency is very important. Any interlinking of your website or back-linking to your website must adhere to the non-“www” version of your site URL (i.e. only linking to http://SITE.com).  It is important to note that “http://www.SITE.com” is different from “http://SITE.com.” What that means from an analytics or a PageRank point-of-view is that your stats can be split rather than being counted as the same site—ultimately skewing stats and minimizing domain name strength. Hence, it is important to implement a .htaccess redirect rule on your site. A .htaccess redirect will automatically subtract (or can add) the prefix “www”.   For instance, if someone types in “http://www.SITE.com,” they would automatically be redirected to “http://SITE.com.” Here’s a quick tutorial in creating a .htaccess redirect file. Also, a newer element the major search engines adopted is termed “URL canonicalization.” URL canonicalization utlizes your meta data to indicate to the search engines which version of the URL is the best. Here’s Google’s tutorial on how to use the canonical element.

In  the end, it’s all preference. Whether or not you use the “www” prefix, it is important to be consistent.

As consumers become smarter web searchers and search engines become more advanced, the use of zip codes in local searches will be more common practice. Right now, if you’re looking for a grocery store in Denver, CO,  it’s very normal to type “grocery stores Denver” into the search engine–which can bring you a vast array of grocery stores scattered throughout the major city. Although the search result is accurate, in that you found grocery stores in Denver, the search result is not precise to your location. The term “Denver” is too general and needs to be broken down into smaller districts.

Instead of using a city in your local search, why not use a zip code–a much narrower, more precise indication of your location within a city.  Now, instead of gathering the top ten grocery stores throughout Denver, you can get a top ten list of grocery stores closest to your neighborhood.

What would this mean for optimizing your website? Well, you definitely want your actual zip code to be listed multiple places throughout your website-so your site will rank well for your zip code. Or how about inserting the 5 closest zip codes to your location in the footer of your website? This will increase your funnel size and your chances of being found by those around you.

Twitter is a like a virus—small and minimal yet robust and scalable. Many adaptations are found daily for the status-update tool. Doing a search on “additional uses for twitter” will demonstrate the vastness of its uses. Today though, I wanted to demonstrate one way I have been using the Twitter HTML Widget.

At my full-time job, among many duties, I work as an online marketer and reputation manager-trying to ensure my company has a respectable and positive imagine online. A positive imagine can abound when potential clients see testimonials/feedback from previous clients. Generally, a company’s website will have a set page for documented testimonials and success stories. My company’s website has a testimonial/ feedback/ references page, however, I wanted to create a better way to show what our clients are saying, and for the comments to be displayed on all pages throughout the website.  There’s no guarantee that anyone who visits your site will see your testimonial page, but there’s a good chance they will at least read one testimonial if it’s displayed at least somewhere on every page of your site.  So what’s the solution? Creating an additional account on Twitter (assuming you already have a company Twitter account) solely for your documented testimonials and doing some coding and tweaking to your site.

Let me demonstrate on my company’s website how I added a Testimonial-Twitter Feed in addition to my company’s main Twitter Feed. You’ll notice that in the header, I embedded the coding for our Testimonial-Twitter Feed. Underneath the header, you’ll see where I’ve embedded my company’s main Twitter Feed. Both Twitter feeds can be found on just about every page on the site. I also linked the “Testimonial Updates” image to the actual testimonial/ feedback/ references page on our site.

If you have integrated your company Twitter account (once again, assuming you already have a company Twitter account) on to your website, then you’ll discover you’ll need additional coding to embed more than one Twitter account on a page. I found this tutorial quite helpful for implementing two Twitter feeds on one page.

Whenever our company is given a new testimonial for our services, the Testimonial-Twitter Feed is updated—showing dynamicity and recency on all pages of our website. Of course the testimonial is only allotted 140 characters, so pack the greatest-positive-punch possible.

Let me know if you need help implementing your own Testimonial-Twitter Feed on to your site. Here’s my personal Twitter account: @DiegoMVelasquez

I’m currently trying to design my new personal site, here at diegovelasquez.com. It’ll serve as my online portfolio and main point of contact. Everyone needs/will have an online presence and most people do through social networks these days. However, this site is serve as an integration of all my online residencies and a place to allow me to write in a robust manner (thank you WordPress).

I really desire to start writing and offering as much helpful online marketing tips/tricks (that I know thus far) as I can. I subscribe to over 30 bloggers, sift through over 200 blog posts a day, and actually read about 40 of the blog posts a day. Also, I love watching YouTube and Lynda.com tutorials and online webcasts/seminars. Basically, I learn a lot and then I always experiment to see what works well.

At this point in my life, my interests evolve around developing online presences for small/medium businesses. There’s a lot of inexpensive methods for owners/anybody to use to rank higher and be made more known to their (potential) clientèle. I’ll blog a lot about that stuff later.

I also want this blog to show what’s going on in my life. I like to travel, go to concerts and be with friends (no duh! everyone does) and I would like to share that with anyone who ever visits my site.

sidenote: I currently compete against the famous dead Spanish painter, Diego Velazquez, which will make my new site fun and challenging. My goal is to rank 1st in Google for “Diego Velasquez”. How much time do you think it’ll take me?