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Thursday, July 28, 2011

How SEO and Social Media Add Up to Online Marketing Success

Social search, as defined by Wikipedia, is “a type of web search method that determines the relevance of search results by considering the interactions or contributions of users.” Some marketers have claimed that social search is doing away with traditional search methods and that SEO is dead in the water because of it.


But social media and social search are not the magic bullet to online marketing needs. They are just one more piece in the growing arsenal of Internet marketing tools available to SEO professionals. SEO and social media should not exist in separate silos, vying for online dominance. In fact, SEO and social media marketing can be intertwined to create more online brand presence for companies than they could ever do alone.


Here are 3 examples of how social media and SEO work together-


Social promotion of content generates natural links: According to Twitter, around 25% of all Tweets contain a URL. In March 2011, Twitter was seeing an average of 140 million Tweets per day. That’s 35 million Tweets every day with a link in them! Twitter has become a go-to source for breaking news and is a favorite social network among consumers for learning the latest about their favorite brands and companies. By publishing your content and promoting it on Twitter, you are encouraging your network to not only check out your content, but also pass the link along to their network in the form of a reTweet. The more times your content is shared, the better it looks in the eyes of the search engines.


When it comes to Facebook, many marketers will say that the more Likes your company page has, the better. While Likes are important, they are starting to be overshadowed by the number of Shares a piece of content has. Someone could like your Facebook page in order to get a promotional deal. Plenty of them will unlike your page just as fast and never bother to return. So what is a Like really worth? When someone Shares your content by posting it to their Facebook wall, they are broadcasting to their network (and the search engines) that this content is valuable in some way, whether it be informative or just interesting. The recent Facebook-Bing integration pulls this information into the search results when a user conducts a search and affects the SERP based on what that user’s social network has to say.


Social networks drive traffic: If you want to drive traffic to your company blog, posting snippets of each new post to your Facebook wall and to the LinkedIn groups you are a part of is a great way to do just that. But posting the first paragraph and not the whole thing, visitors have to leave your Facebook page for your blog in order to finish reading the post. You have a much better chance at converting a visitor once they are on your blog or main site than when they are just sitting on your social profile. A well-optimized social profile should encourage visitors to check out the main site for more information. Think of your social profiles as the gateway into your site. Someone who is checking out your social profile has already pre-qualified themselves as a well-targeted consumer. Driving them to your site is the next logical step in getting them to convert.


One of the main goals of SEO is to drive targeted traffic. Social networking is about connecting with your audience. When the two work together you’ll see a steady stream of well-targeted and engaged visitors coming to your site.

It has to be mentioned that social profiles should drive traffic back to the main site, not the other way around! Why would you want a potential customer to leave your site to like you on Facebook? Promoting your social profiles shouldn’t be a main goal of your site. Keep the “Connect with Us” buttons out of prime webpage real estate.


Social networking increases online brand presence: Search for your favorite company by name. Hopefully their company website ranks number one in the SERP, with popular internal pages filling out the first page. But chances are (if they are active in social media) their Facebook page and LinkedIn profile, along with other niche social networking sites, will also pepper the results. Just like any other business profile, social networking profiles can rank in the search engines, increasing your company’s online brand presence. Many searches will also show links that have been shared by that company’s Twitter profile or posted to their Facebook wall. The new Google +1 also shows who in your Google network recommends links.


Social media and SEO professionals shouldn’t be squabbling over whose authority and practice is more important. The two disciplines are more closely related than you might think. When you combine your SEO and social media marketing, you’ll create a much more powerful and comprehensive online marketing strategy.

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Best of Pay Per Click Optimization and Search Engine Optimization

Pay Per Click is beneficial for driving immediate and relevant traffic to your website. A Pay Per click service would sustain traffic on an ongoing basis, or boost traffic during seasons relevant to your business. PPC is an Internet marketing strategy in which clients only pay for traffic they receive. Search Engine Optimization is a marketing strategy process of Improving the Traffic to a website from search engines by way of search result. Pay Per Click is basically an internet advertising tool used on search engines, advertising networks and content websites where advertisers only pay when a user clicks on an advertisement to visit the advertiser’s website.

PPC Optimization ensures that a Pay Per Click campaign is feasible and efficient and a PPC optimization company will review all aspects of the campaign. These aspects include campaign structure, Keywords and ad text, biding strategy and landing pages. With PPC Optimization, you are able to control and manage PPC and ensure that it is set-up properly.

Search Marketing or Pay per click (PPC) allows businesses to bid on targeted keywords on major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing in order to drive relevant traffic to their websites via click-through.

Search Engine Optimization, one is able to optimize your website for a number one search term but this is not of much use if traffic brought by a keyword is unable to convert. PPC allows you to find out which keywords convert before considering an SEO campaign. In addition, PPC optimization also makes finding which keywords work and which do not possible.

Another great advantage of combining PPC optimization and SEO is it offers greater speed. The combination also results in ones brand standing out on every search page and not just as the highest ranked increasing the exposure of a website. Effective pay per click campaigns begins with the account build, followed by landing page selection/creation and then the ongoing campaign optimization stage.

SEO is generally a free service, they require more time, effort and experience than a Pay Per Click campaign. Generating more traffic is the common goal of both campaigns and used together, a website can built a solid foundation on Search Engine Optimization and then incorporate pay per click advertising to target traffic towards it. The PPC optimization further enables successful conversion of traffic.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Five Free Social Media Automation Tools

Social media is probably already a key part of your marketing strategy. But as many of you will attest, doing social media marketing effectively is a rather time consuming process. And when time’s a commodity that many small business owners lack, it helps to have tools to streamline the process.


Here is a short list of social media automation tools that will help you use your time better. My favorite free social media automation tools:


Social Oomph: This is a service that has a free version and a paid version that helps automate and schedule your social media. You can schedule your tweets; create a bigger Twitter profile and more. You’ll need the professional version to be able to schedule and post to your pages and profiles of Facebook.


Hoot suite: This is a fabulous tool to use for Twitter. You can pre-schedule your tweets, monitor keywords, and assign admins and more with this app. It integrates with other apps like Ping.fm too so it is a very useful tool.


Twitter feed: Twitter feed is not just a feed for twitter as the name might suggest. It’s a great way for you to syndicate content (that’s available in a feed) to your other social media profiles…e.g. your latest blog post shared on twitter, Facebook etc.


Gist: I’m only new to Gist, but it’s already proving very useful. Gist combines the information you provide into consolidated Gist profiles. The great thing about Gist is that you can program it to keep track of certain important contacts so that you can monitor them across their social networks and never miss making an important connection. It works online and in your Gmail and Outlook mail.


RSS: Combined with Google Reader RSS, which stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, is a very powerful time management tool so that you can read what you want, all on one page. It keeps you from having to move from site to site to read what is important to you. In addition, you can set it up with keywords combined with Google Alerts to monitor what people are saying about you.



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Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Benefits for your Social Media Marketing SEO Campaign

Social media marketing is also widely used in concert with search engine optimization. Most of the internet marketing professionals make the serious mistake of excluding social media marketing from their SEO activities. Some online marketing guys also interpret social media marketing and social media optimization as the same, but the fact is that both are entirely different.

High Rankings can help you achieve them through an on-going SEO strategy performed in conjunction with a well-crafted social media marketing campaign. Some of the major advantages for SEO with an effective social media marketing program are listed below.

Branding: Social Media is one of the best platforms available to enhance your reputation and branding on the internet, provided it is carried out in the right and legitimate way. Remember, branding cannot be achieved overnight, but needs continuous effort and patience.

Get More Backlinks: Links to your site can do a lot for your search engine marketing efforts. They provide a stream of traffic both from people and from search engines. If your content is promoted well on the various social media channels, other webmaster might naturally link back to your content, which is considered as the indirect but the best way of getting backlinks through social media marketing. A linking strategy is vital for being found online and there are many ways to get plenty of links pointing to your site.

Traffic Generation: Traffic generation is another major benefit of social media marketing that is liked by most of the web marketers who are into social media marketing. A site that is marketed well in the social media platforms would be bringing you a large amount of instant and targeted traffic to your website.

Better Search Engine Performance: Social Media marketing is an amazing marketing strategy that helps in achieving a much better search engine performance for your website and it has been proved many times. Better search engine placement is important to the success of your website especially in top 10 search engine placement on engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Get More Targeted Traffic: There are many methods that people use to get free traffic, it is quite clear that one would be getting more targeted traffic on to his website. This aspect would certainly help and enhance the SEO campaign which is aimed at getting traffic from a targeted niche group.


Saturday, July 2, 2011

Eight advanced Search Engine Optimization Tips

Advanced SEO tips that are very useful to all the blogers will help you in giving some advanced SEO blogging tips. If you are aiming to raise your blog’s visibility, consider these following tips:-

Use SEO friendly blogging software: If you want to advance your blog site, you should use SEO friendly blogging software. There are many blogging software’s available in the market.

Be consistent: Update your blog site frequently. This will help the search engines in ranking your blog site. The minimum frequency of staying your blog site updated is three to four times a week. But, if you can update you blog site more often the better will be your rankings.

Make it interesting: Make sure that you are working on some interesting topics. Maintain the interesting attitude of your blog. This will keep the people in reading your blog to the last content.

Advanced planning: Plan your post in advanced. Think on the topic that you are going to write. Make some effective strategy and give importance to the keywords. Be reminded that the keywords must be important to the topic or your blog’s content.

Make use of headers and sub-headers: Use headers and sub-headers in organizing your content. But, the application of headers and sub-headers will vary to the theme of your blog.

Blog post and site categories: Write a series of blog posts to boost your page rank. Do not forget to make a landing page that will link your topic to all your blog post.

Inbound links: Inbound links or commonly known as “backlinks” are the links pointing to your site and search engines like Google like it when you have thousands of links pointing to your site but sometimes Google penalizes you for it too if you have poor quality and irrelevant backlinks pointing to your site.

Outbound links: This is very helpful for your blog, since by placing an outbound link you will recommend the reader to visit the other blog site which has more related information on the content or the article published at your blog.