800 Muses Home About Us Categories eNewsletter Contact Us
Art and Design
Beauty
Career
Enrichment
Family
Fashion
Finance
Fitness
Food
Health
Home
Law
Marketing
Relationships
Technology
Travel

This Site is Sponsored by:

PDXWriter.com

Fresh ideas in
professional writing

 

 
Muse Yael K. Miller
Specialty:  Technology
Name: Yael K. Miller, Chief Technology Officer, Miller Mosaic, LLC
Bio: Yael K. Miller: Yael was raised in art museums and was taught from a young age to evaluate the marketing effectiveness of billboards. As a chief technology officer, Yael creates headers, edits copy, and nods when her boss speaks to her. Yael learns about design and code by hanging around Twitter.
  See all Technology Muses >>

Yael is a Muse who was an English major with a Medieval/Renaissance concentration and a minor in Classical Studies, which feeds into her own fiction writing.

The Most Important Reason You Should Be Involved in Social Media and Blogs

People will give you reasons why you should be involved in social media, such as to drum up business and to network, which might one day lead to business. These reasons are valid but they're not the most important reason. What is? Search engine ranking.

Enter your name in Google or Yahoo. Is that you on the first page? No? Or maybe: Yes, but it's something you did in high school that has no bearing on your professional life.

Nowadays, people use search engines to find out about you. Make sure they find you and they find what you want them to find.

"But, Yael, you say, my name is Jill Smith and there are millions of Jill Smiths out there."

Warning: Semi-technical explanation ahead. Google and Yahoo use "search algorithms" (an algorithm is a complex mathematical equations that produces results) to rank listings. But the heart of search engines is to help you find what you're looking for quickly.

So how do social networks like Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn help you besides the fact that "Google likes these." Google (and I assume Yahoo), like your old gym instructor, wants to see active participation. All your activity on these blogs and networks sends out signals to Google that say "Hey, I'm active" - good for you, thinks Google.

What about blogs? Blogs too show active participation but they show more than that. When people land on your blog and stick on it for a while to read your posts and leave comments, Google sees all this traffic and thinks: "Hey, this Jill Smith is important; people like her; let's push her up in page rank."

Disclaimer: Still, if you have a common name, it is much, much harder to get on the first page of Google. It could take years of hard work or, maybe, you'll be a one-in-a-million overnight Internet success that immediately rockets you to the first page of Google and Yahoo. Hey, it could happen.

Bottom line: Use social media and blogs (your own preferably) to rank higher for your name in Google and Yahoo.


Contact:

Yael K. Miller

Chief Technology Officer of Miller Mosaic, LLC
@MillerMosaicLLC

Copyright Protection and Reprint Rights: This article and accompanying sidebar are fully copyrighted by the author, but can be reprinted without permission provided the article links back to this page: http://www.800Muses.com/muse-profiles/muse-yael.htm

  Bookmark and Share

Yael's Top 10 Tools on the Web

Firefox: the best web browser. Why? First, security and, second, it displays web sites the way the web designers designed the site to look. Third, FireFox can be customized with Firefox addons or plugins -- these little programs allow you to add functionality to your browser.
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

Some addons I use:

WOT aka Web of Trust: You search for a keyword on Google and Google gives you all these sites. But how do you know they're legitimate? WOT tells you. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3456

Who is This Person? You're reading a post and a name is mentioned that you have no idea who the person is. Highlight the name, right click, and choose what directory you want to check for the name at.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1912

gTranslate: Highlight a phrase, right click, and you can translate the phrase into tons of languages.

Gmail: Free, easy to use, and a huge amount of space available. Gmail can store documents, filter mailing lists and much more. I use the chat to talk to my boss so we don't have to scream from several rooms away. I have Gmail set up so it warns me if I mention in an email that a file is attached and I've forgotten to attach anything.

Delicious: a bookmarking site. I read a post or article I like and want to keep; I save it to Delicious using the Delicious FireFox plugin https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3615 (Delicious is not dependent on FireFox and can be used independently) and give it tags on what the post is about and even write notes about it. The best part of Delicious is that your bookmarks (unless set to private) are their own URL and can be given out. So when I talk about my love of Twitter I share the URL to my Delicious bookmarks about Twitter

Twitter: I always say that there's a social network for everyone. And Twitter's not for everyone. But I can't survive without Twitter. I use Twitter to learn and communicate with other people in my fields. Plus I ask and get help for various technological problems I run into. I could wax poetic about Twitter forever.

Gravatar: a place to store your picture or avatar for sites to be able to use. For example, I leave a comment on a blog with my name and the email I set up Gravatar with. If the blog has Gravatar enabled, my picture will show up next to my comment.

Greasemonkey: Though a FireFox plugin itself, what it really does is runs scripts that can change the function of other websites.

For example, if I want to listen to a YouTube video over and over, I have to wait until the video is over and then press play again. With this script a little loop button is added to a YouTube video window that all you have to do is press and the video will automatically play over and over.

The script I love is Twitter Search Results on Google:, which when you search on Google, you get the last five tweets using that keyword plus all the Google results. Awesome.


URL shortener - Any service that shortens URLs to very little URLs. Some URLs can go on forever. Yes, the primary use is for Twitter. But really everyone likes a shortened URL. If you're sending an email to a friend of a post you like and the URL runs over a paragraph in length, it's cumbersome.

Three services that my boss and I use that track how many people click on the shortened URL:
http://www.tweetburner.com
http://budurl.com
http://cl.gs

If you don't care about tracking who clicked and don't want to sign into an account you set up, then http://tinyurl.com works great.

Fireshot: Yes it's a FireFox plugin but one I use all the time. It takes a picture of the screen you have up - a screenshot. Plus you can edit the picture right there without opening a whole new image-editing program.

Remember the Milk: I was initially turned off and didn't try this product because of its name. I thought, who cares about a grocery list? But then I desperately needed a to-do list program and tried it out. The program stands on its own website but I hardly ever use it that way. I use it with its Gmail plugin - meaning that in your Gmail sidebar your to-do list pops up. You can enter tasks you have to do off the top of you head or, more importantly for me, it connects to Gmail so when the boss or clients send me an email with something I have to do, I star the email and it pops up in my to-do list.

LiveTimer: I wanted a simple time-tracking software. Easy to find, right? Wrong. I tried at least seven different software programs and none were what I wanted. All I wanted was a simple free or low-cost program where I could track how long I spent on a project and how much I billed. I was the only one going to use the software. Then I cried out in desperation on Twitter and someone recommended LiveTimer. It's exactly what I wanted. Simple instructions before you try it so you don't go into it blind. A 30- days free trial and only $5 a month per user. Works so far like a charm. Many features already there and many features upcoming, including invoicing.

(Disclaimer: Currently a good review of LiveTimer that I tweeted appears on the site at http://www.livetimer.com/buzz. A representative approached me asking if my tweet could be posted on the site. I have no other connection to the company except as a user of the product.)