Ask Kalena

This week’s Search Industry Job of the Week is not really a job in the search industry. It’s actually more of a product marketing role with a little SEM mixed in, but the reason I’m featuring it on the blog is because the gig is for one of my favorite clients: Xtend-Life Natural Products in New Zealand.

Here are the deets:

Job Title: Online Product Manager
Job Reference #: 15219
Position Type: full time / remote
Name of employer: Xtend-Life Natural Products
Location: Christchurch, New Zealand / Telecommute from anywhere
Date Posted: October 2011

Position description:

This is a new role with one of NZ’s most successful online businesses. Work remotely from the location of your choice. Head office is based in Christchurch, New Zealand where you will be required to be from time to time. The purpose of the role is to drive profitable sales of skincare products through a broad range of e-commerce, web and social media communications, delivering on an integrated product and sales marketing strategy.

Responsibilities:

Using your strong product lifecycle planning experience you will develop a deeper relationship with existing customers, reach new customers, and enhance the company’s brand and values.

Required Skills:

• You will be degree qualified and have a number of years of experience in product management.
• You will be an expert in online marketing.
• You will be passionate about website design and development, email and social network marketing, search engine optimisation, web 2.0 and mobile media applications.
• You will be an attentive listener and forward thinker you will be a strong and capable manager able to lead and motivate people, develop effective relationships and operate across all levels from warehouse to board.
• You will have drive and energy and an unwavering customer focus.

Company Description:

Xtend Life Natural Products is a manufacturer and global distributor of natural dietary supplements and skin care products.

Each of the dietary supplements and skin care products in Xtend-Life’s exclusive range was developed to meet specific needs, using only natural ingredients from the best sources around the globe.

Since the first products were released in 2000, Xtend-Life has enjoyed a steady growth thanks to an ever increasing foundation of loyal customers who purchase products every month and refer their friends and family to Xtend-Life as well. This has enabled the company to develop additional products and continually refine those it has. The company’s manufacturing facilities are world class and because of the efficacy and quality of its products, it now supplies customers in more than 95 countries.

Salary range: Unknown
Closing date: Unknown
More info from: Paul Heath via paulh@powerhousepeople.co.nz or Jeannie Stirling on (+64) 4 931 9444
Contact: Send resumes via online form at: PowerHouse People

For more search industry job vacancies, or to post a vacancy, visit Search Engine College Jobs Board.

Not many people will recognize the name Art Clokey. But a lot more people will recognize the green clay animated character Gumby that he created.

Art Clokey was the pioneer of stop motion clay animation, bringing to life Gumby and his horse Pokey, who first appeared on the American kid’s show Howdy Doody. Art Clokey died last year, but to celebrate what would have been Clokey’s 90th birthday yesterday, Google’s home page featured the tribute doodle you see pictured.

The initial image shows a toy block and 5 balls of colored clay representing the letters in GOOGLE. Clicking on any one of the clay balls launches a delightful animation of the clay taking the shape of one of Clokey’s famous animated characters. A link above the doodle takes you to SERPs for Art Clokey and his life.

One of Google’s better doodles!

Did you catch the latest issue of our Search Engine College newsletter?

This issue includes an article about trademark usage on Google AdWords, as well as a series of Q and A’s from this blog.

Hi Everyone

From early days learning SEO, I went ahead and did all my meta descriptions with a bit of blurb about the page but my *Guru* has told me this is incorrect and I should include only the title of the page in the meta description, eg “Antique Dining Chairs” whereas I had put in “Antique Dining Chairs – over 500 chairs on display at the Glebe Antique Centre. Dining chairs to match your table, occasional chairs for that special place in your home”.

Any thoughts before I go and change everything yet again?

Christine

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Hi Christine

From where I’m sitting, your *guru* is wrong. Remember, your meta description tag is often used as the snippet on the search results pages to describe your site.

So apart from including keywords, it has to do the job of convincing people to click on it. A nonsensical list of keywords is not going to convince people to click so you have to balance it out with an appealing sentence, preferably including a call-to-action or reason to click.

Yes, it’s important to put your keywords at the start of the tag if you can, but you have up to 160 characters in that tag indexed by search engines, so you should use the space to your advantage. Having a short, unimaginative meta description or simply copying your title tag is not going to make any difference to your overall rankings and is more likely to turn your potential visitors off.

Google admitted that it no longer considers the meta description tag in their ranking algorithm anyway, so, other search engines aside, the main job of the tag in Google SERPs is to convince people to click on the link and visit your site.

Put it this way: if you were in the market for an antique chair and you saw the following two listings in Google, which one would you click on?

• Site1.com – “Antique Dining Chairs.”
  
• Site2.com – “Antique Dining Chairs – over 500 chairs on display at the Glebe Antique Centre. Dining chairs to match your table, occasional chairs for that special place in your home.“

I’m thinking Site2.com – am I right? And – oh look! The longer tag managed to include *dining chairs* twice and a whole bunch of other keyword phrases as well: *dining chairs Glebe*, *chairs Glebe*, *occasional chairs*, *Antique(s) Glebe*.

Case closed.

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Struggling to get better search rankings? Download our Free SEO Lesson. No catch!

We all heard the sad news yesterday that Steve Jobs, founder and visionary at Apple, had died at the age of 56 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

I heard it from a client who lives one mile from Apple headquarters and was awoken by helicopters over his house at 4.30am. But most people heard about it via social media. Within seconds of an official statement released by Apple, the first tweets started to appear.

“#ThankYouSteve for the magic you brought to people’s lives.”

“iSad. RIP Steve Jobs for leaving your mark on technology.”

“My iPhone made all the difference during earthquakes on 4 Sept, 22 Feb & 13 June – it found my kids & reassured my family #eqnz #ThankYouSteve”

“Life is the only thing Bill Gates has beaten Steve Jobs at. #ThankYouSteve”

“Steve Jobs changed the world. We have lost a true pioneer and American visionary #iSad #ThankYouSteve”

Twitter users started spreading the news of Jobs’s death, adopting #SteveJobs #iSad and #ThankYouSteve hashtags attached to their tweets. For the first few hours, the rate of Twitter activity about Job’s death looked like it was going to break the tweet per second record of 8,868 tweets per second, set after U.S. R&B artist Beyoncé announced her pregnancy at the MTV Video Music Awards in August.

Australian social media monitoring firm SR7 estimated that Twitter activity hit 10,000 tweets per second following the announcement:

“We’re awaiting the official Twitter data to be released, however, from the numbers that we’ve been monitoring through the day since the announcement it’s certainly been trending to break that record,” Peter Fraser, co-founder of SR7, told the news agency Agence-France Presse.

TwitSprout went even futher, claiming tweet activity reached 42,000 per second at one point.

But it was Twitter who finally revealed the truth. In a statement given to Forbes last night, a spokeswoman from Twitter said that their internal data showed a rate of 6,049 tweets per second. That’s faster than tweets following the death of Osama bin Laden (a little over 5,000 TPS), but below the 8,868 tweets per second that followed Beyonce’s pregnancy announcement.

But even though the death of the technology icon failed to break the all-time tweet record, Steve Job’s death *did* break Twitter temporarily. The site fell over for around 2 minutes under the weight of the heavy initial tweet load.

Apart from anything else, it’s an interesting insight into the growth of Twitter. Consider this: following Michael Jackson’s death in 2009 there were just 493 tweets per second being sent, yet this was still enough to crash the service.

As a final tribute to Steve Jobs and the impact he had, Twitter staff put together a fascinating infographic portrait, consisting of a visualization of public #thankyousteve Tweets, sent over about 4.5 hours yesterday.

RIP Steve Jobs.