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Responsive Logo Design

May 15, 2020

You hear a lot in web design about responsive websites. A responsive website responds to the size of the screen viewing it. It may shift elements, change sizes of text or images, or drop elements completely from smaller phones.

What if you could do the same thing with a responsive logo?

Let’s take an example of Dijon Marketing. If I designed a letterhead or desktop graphic, I might be able to accommodate a very wide aspect ratio.

But as my screen gets smaller, if all I do is make the logo proportionally smaller, it can get harder and harder to distinguish. If you haven’t really considered web applications when originally designing your logo, it can be problematic.

In a responsive logo, much like a responsive website, elements of the logo can move, change size, or disappear altogether. Here’s a better way of displaying the logo on medium and small-width screens:

The brand is still recognizable, but the most identifiable elements stay front and center – and big enough to see!

It’s not too late to reconsider the implementation of your logo to add responsive elements to the display. A quickly recognizable brand means your users or followers will instantly recognize you from web to social platforms.

Best Practices

Don’t cross-post on social media platforms

April 27, 2020

If you are maintaining multiple social media profiles, it can be enticing to cross-post the exact same message on all at once. And certain social media management tools even explicitly allow/encourage this. But cross-posting can hurt the effectiveness of your social campaigns for a number of reasons.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t post the same message or content, it just needs to be tweaked to perform optimally on each network and avoid errors or follower confusion.

Things to make unique for each platform

Post times. The optimal time to post on each network varies based on the network and your audience. You can use some statistical averages, or use your own analytics and insights to determine the optimal time of day to reach your audience, but chances are it will vary by platform.
@ Mentions. Depending on which other profiles you are tagging or mentioning, the syntax may vary per network. That organization’s usernames may also vary. Or they may not participate in all the same social networks you do. Make sure to customize your @ mentions of other profiles for the network you’re on.
#Hashtags. Hashtag best practices vary by network as well. Whereas Twitter and Instagram rely on them heavily, Facebook was late to the game and they were not intrinsic to the platform. Overuse of hashtags can actually hurt your organic reach on Facebook.
Message length. Twitter is definitely the limiting factor on this one. You don’t necessarily want to cut your captions or messages to Twitter-length on all platforms, so customizing for the allowable length makes sense.
Photo/video aspect ratio. The best sizes and aspect ratios to get the optimal cropping on preview varies by platform. Understand the best size for images and you’ll get better engagement as users scroll past your content. In general, Instagram is the only 1×1 square content.

With minimal extra effort you can take a single message or post and tweak it slightly. That way you can take advantage of the features of each social media platform. And your content can perform optimally on each.

Best Practices

Choose the right #hashtag for your social media post

April 9, 2020

Hashtags in social media posts serve a few different purposes. They can be funny. They can categorize your content. Or they can extend your reach to a new, larger audience. Knowing your goals can help you select the right mix of hashtags for your social media posts.

Sorry to break it to you, but expert use of hashtags requires some research up front. I like to use a free tool called Ritetag. It will give you some stats on the frequency of use as well as some related tags to consider. Once you find some relevant tags with high volume, take the time to search them on your favorite social media platforms. The last thing you want to do is unwittingly contribute to something unsavory! You never know when a hashtag has a hidden meaning.

Four Categories of Hashtags

I generally divide hashtags into four categories with different objectives.

Branding – It’s great to use your brand name, product name, or something unique to your organization. You may not get a lot of new traffic from it, but it’s a nice addition to posts and can be a fun categorization to review for your users.
Example: #DijonMarketing
Engagement – Keywords that speak to your message, vision, or calls to action may not drive a LOT of traffic, but the traffic they do drive will be highly engaged and interested in your message.
Example: #ConnectGoodPeople
Reach – These are the keywords that have tons of posts. With the right message, imagery, and timing, you could gain yourself a much larger audience than without.
Example: #DigitalMarketing
Event – If you are attending an event, check first to see if they’ve proposed a hashtag for attendees to use. Similarly if you are the host, let your guests know there’s a hashtag to use.
Example: #MeetAndGreet2020

Choose a couple keywords from each category to get the best mix of eyeballs on your social post. Don’t go overboard though. Nobody likes to see a list of hashtags longer than the post content. Strategic alignment on hashtag strategy will elevate your social media presence to the next level.

Search Engines

COVID-19 impacts on Google My Business

March 22, 2020

If you use Google My Business for local SEO optimization of your business or charity, there are a couple of things to know about how COVID-19 is impacting the service.

Log in to your Google My Business account and you will see information about how to best update your information linked directly on your home screen, like below.

Things to do to your Google My Business during COVID-19

Update your hours. If closed due to social distancing or quarantine, indicate that temporarily or update the hours of operation.
Add new information about your COVID-19 response. If you’ve taken extra measures for safety, indicate that in your business information.
Create a post. Let your users know how long you may be closed or any alternatives like take away versus dine in.
Watch your My Business listing. User input may mark you as closed automatically. If that is not the case, you can remove erroneous information through your console.

Additionally, be aware that Google employees have been impacted the same as everyone else. They have pared down to essential staff and are only supporting reviews and responses from companies that directly impact public health, like doctors and clinics. They are working to prevent the spread of misinformation. You may wait a few weeks before new reviews of your business are posted.

For more information visit Google’s support pages about business impact to Google My Business and limited Google My Business functionality.

Best Practices

Dijon Marketing’s Registered Trademark

March 6, 2020

Dijon Marketing’s logo is now federally registered with the US Patent and Trademark Office. It is protected against anyone else using it. While this might seem like overkill for a small brand, it was an interesting challenge that I wanted to work through in case future clients had need of such protection.

The first step is to fill out the paperwork and pay the fees associated. You can register under multiple different uses for free, but each category of use will cost you an additional fee. Dijon Marketing is registered for graphic design, web design, web hosting, and digital marketing. That spanned two different categories and raised the price a bit.

Be aware that as soon as you file, that is public information. Your inbox and mailbox will soon be flooded with offers from law offices to help you navigate the registration process. Chances are you won’t need any help, but if you do, try to find someone who did not solicit your business from your public listing.

There’s a good chance your original request will be rejected. You will have to provide further clarification on your submission. I had to explicitly state that I was not attempting to trademark the word “Marketing” by itself, and also that the color of the logo was not part of the trademark.

Then all it really takes is time. Start to finish, I spent about 8 months total waiting for the certificate to come in the mail. It may not make sense, or be in any way necessary for your organization to trademark your logo, but if it ever does, having been through it once, I feel confident I could give some good advice to help you on your way.

Social Media

Open Graph Tags for Social Sharing

February 15, 2020

When sharing a link on Facebook, sometimes it will pop up with a nice, big, clear photo. It depicts the logo of the organization you’re linking to or something specific about the page you’re sharing. Some of this happens automatically, but chances are if it looks really great, that’s not by accident.

Web developers can control the appearance of shared links in social media platform using Open Graph Tags. They’re not quite as daunting as they may sound to set up or use.

How to View Open Graph Tags

Right-click and View Source on this page. You’ll find a number of open graph tags right in the header of the page. They are all denoted by an og: prefix. For now, we’ll just focus on the og:image tag and how that works.

<meta property="og:image" content="https://i2.wp.com/www.dijonmarketing.com/wp-content/uploads/dijon-marketing-logo-open-graph.jpg?fit=1000%2C500&#038;ssl=1"/>

It’s a metadata with a property of og:image and a content URL pointing to the photo I want to use. You can cut and paste the photo link into your browser to view it like any other image. This one happens to have “open-graph” in the name. That’s because it’s scaled properly to show on Facebook with no skewing or sections of the logo cut off. Here’s what it looks like if you share my website on Facebook (which … feel free to do).

Default Versus Featured Open Graph Images

In this case, the home page has no Featured Image set in the WordPress document. I’ve defined a default fall-back photo inside the Yoast SEO plugin. Just go to SEO > Social > Facebook and upload the photo of your choice. The aspect ratio should be 2×1 and preferably 1200×600 pixels large. Then Facebook can scale it as they wish.

If you have a featured image set, then Facebook will default to using that, like with this blog post:

Open Graph Tags using WordPress Featured Image

Sites Without Open Graph Tags

If you have no open graph tags, it doesn’t mean you won’t have shares with nice images. You’re just leaving it up to Facebook’s crawlers to scrape your page looking for some image to use. The results can be completely random, or even inappropriate. If you haven’t defined your og tags, take a moment to get at least a default photo set up. The click-through ratio of your social shares will thank you!

Email Marketing

Creating an Email Marketing Editorial Calendar

February 1, 2020

People frequently ask, “How often should I email my subscribers.” The simple answer would be somewhere between weekly and monthly. That depends on your audience and goals. The more involved answer would be to create an email marketing editorial calendar and then stick to it.

What is an Editorial Calendar?

An editorial calendar is a plan months in advance of when certain emails will go out and what topics they will cover. Instead of trying to come up with new topics on a monthly basis, the next 6-12 months should always be prepared and scheduled.

For any particular event, use the date as a base. Then count backwards and mark special milestones. You can send:

a first event notice 3 months prior
a reminder 3 weeks before
a follow up 3 days prior
and a follow up 3 days after.

Without planning ahead you might find yourself struggling to send out emails with enough advanced notice. Plan additional marketing, like a Facebook campaign, with enough lead time. It takes time for optimization to reach your audience.

It’s definitely an investment of time up front, but it will pay off dividends over the course of the year, and with recurring annual events, for years to come!

Search Engines

Long tail versus short tail

January 11, 2020

To sound like an SEO expert, just ask about “long tail keywords.” What exactly does that mean?

“Long tail” merely refers to the length of the phrase. The term “keyword” gets thrown around a lot. A more apt description for the concept would be “key phrase.” SEO optimization targets specific key phrases that are relevant to your organization, have sufficiently high search volumes, and that you have a chance at ranking on Page 1 for.

When Long Tail is Preferred

That last requirement is where long tail keywords can come in handy. Let’s say you run a small handmade candy shop. Sure, you’d love it if you were #1 on Google for anyone searching candy. The odds of that happening are basically nil. And that’s not a bad thing either. Someone searching on Google for “candy” could be looking for stock photos of candy, a Wikipedia article, or a recipe. There’s nothing indicating intent of their search suggesting that you want them to land on your site and buy candy. So since you won’t, can’t, and don’t want to rank #1 for candy, we start to investigate long tail variations. Use your imagination or a tool like Google Ads Keyword Planner (or both).

candy store near me
old fashioned candy
peanut butter kisses candy
handmade cotton candy

An Engaged Audience is a Valuable Audience

As you narrow your focus, you can capture much more traffic. That traffic is much more engaged, or more likely to convert and make a purchase on your site. The downside is, the more focused your keyword is, the lower the search volume will be. Congrats on ranking #1 for a term with 0 average searches per month. The ease of ranking is inversely proportional to the value of the keyword. More valuable keywords are more competitive.

That’s the heart of what SEO practitioners refer to as a “keyword strategy.” Knowing what you want to rank for can sometimes be as hard as actually ranking for it. With a little research, creativity, and maybe a bit of help, you can get a rock solid plan with real return on investment.

Search Engines

Request indexation through Google Search Console

December 23, 2019

Every now and then, you will find a page on your website that doesn’t seem to be getting any organic traffic. If you refer to our blog on The Most Basic SEO Test, you may discover it’s because Google isn’t serving it up as a result, no matter how specific you are with your queries (even using site: syntax). If Google hasn’t discovered your content, how can you get organic traffic? The answer is to submit a crawl request through Google Search Console.

The first step is to inspect the URL using the dialog that is now present at the top of every page in GSC. Pop in the URL in question and see what the results say.

Google Search Console: Inspect any URL on the domain

The image above shows one possible result. “URL is not on Google. This page is not in the index, but not because of an error. See the details below to learn why it wasn’t indexed. Learn more”

Google either hasn’t had time to discover the content, or there aren’t any internal links that it could follow. Link to it from other pages and the sitemap.xml to rectify. Either way, Google will probably discover it eventually, but we’d rather control that indexation.

There is a button at the lower right corner of the dialog that says “REQUEST INDEXING.” Hit that button and your content should be discovered, crawled, and available from Google searches within just a few minutes. As with everything, you cannot tell Google what to do, so this is merely an invitation. Don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t work immediately. It will eventually result in your content being discovered and traffic flowing in to your new content.

Best Practices

9 reasons you should be using a password manager

December 7, 2019

Password managers like LastPass or 1Password can help you keep your online life organized, updated, and most of all secure. Here are 9 reasons to start using a password manager today.

Keep all of your website logins in one convenient list. When you store all of your passwords in a single location, you also get a list of all the websites where you have an account. Need to update your address? With a categorized list of all sites, you can quickly run through and ensure you’ve updated your info everywhere.
Have a unique password for every website. We all know we shouldn’t reuse passwords. A lot of us aspire to maintain a set of low, medium, and high security passwords. But when you start to catalog every site from personal and work life, that list easily reaches several hundred. Even if you could think up a unique password for each, good luck remembering that many.
Auto-generated passwords take the stress out of new registrations. No longer do you have to agonize, or even think really, about what your next password should be. Just generate it. It’ll be way more secure than anything you came up with, and you don’t ever need to remember it.
No more forgotten passwords. Even if you haven’t logged into some obscure site for a few years, you’ll never hit “Forgot password” ever again. Avoid any embarrassment contacting IT for the fourth time this week because you don’t remember some login at work.
Sync everything between desktop and mobile. Even on the go, you have all the data at your fingertips. These password managers also work with most apps. No more typing in passwords on a mobile keyboard.
Auto-save passwords. When you do create a new account, you either generate or come up with your own new password. The integrated browser plugin or mobile app will automatically prompt you to save your new password.
Share passwords. If you have a shared bank account or Netflix login, no longer sacrifice security for convenience. Shared passwords can be just as long and complex as any other. Because password managers allow for shared data, everyone stays up to date and synchronized.
Run security audits on your passwords. You can get a security score letting you know of any old, weak, reused, or compromised passwords. You can even run the usernames/emails through a known list of hacked accounts. That alerts if your accounts could have been included in any of the latest public hacking scandals.
Store more than just website passwords. Your friends WiFi network. Your personal credit card number. The gym locker combination. When you get in the habit of storing passwords, you can also start to store secure notes for yourself. That can be a life saver in the real world.