Social Media is the culmination of the mediums people use to stay connected on the internet. It is the combination of personal, professional, and entertainment networks that we create as we navigate the internet. There is increasingly strong evidence that social media isn’t just a fad – it is the new way of sharing information.
With the creation of Myspace and Facebook, we saw a massive push towards creating personal internet space (hence Myspace). People could connect, share, communicate, and express themselves without having to be a website developer. Myspace’s popularity has dwindled while Facebook has taken social media to a new level. There are over 500,000,000 facebook users – and most are active on the site multiple times a day for increasing amounts of time.
Other social media channels such as Twitter and LinkedIn have also enjoyed massive amounts of users. The interesting thing about social media is that it is not something that is going away anytime soon, but it will continue to evolve. New services will come out to connect people and share information, but the idea that social media is not sustainable or isn’t here to stay just isn’t holding water.
There have been a few pioneers in the corporate world who have invested in social media because they understood the impact it would have. Pepsi traded their Superbowl commercials for a social media campaign. Ford has been launching new cars and revealing new designs to their fans and followers on social media networks. More and more companies are realizing the power of building brand and loyalty through social media.
After managing social media accounts for a while, we came up with the top 5 reasons social media is NOT a fad but is something that is here to stay.
1) Social Media channels have become integrated into our daily lives – email, news and events, and applications are all funnelled through social media.
2) Social Media allows a fast, friendly, and free way to connect with friends and share info such as images, videos, news and more.
3) Social Media continues to grow in users and volume. New users come on board every day, and the amount of time spent on social media is still increasing.
4) Businesses and individuals see the value of social media. Businesses can create loyalty, branding, and expand customer bases while individuals can connect with friends and businesses and share information.
5) (and possibly most compelling) There is a strong indication that social media will begin influencing search results in search engines such as Google and Bing (which also powers Yahoo! search). You can already see Twitter info and news in search results, but we expect the search engines to adapt and show results based on relevance AND what is trending in social media. This will be a huge shift in how people search for things, and could mark the maturity of a very young (but rapidly growing) way of using the internet.
Take a look at this video that shows the power of social media. Prepare to be amazed.
Most marketing campaigns are created to drive traffic to a website, get people to come to a location, or to make a phone call about a product or service. Media and advertising create the “call to action” that persuades a potential customer to make contact. Most established businesses have a location, a website, and a phone number. Other businesses only have a website and a phone number and in either case, how can a business owner or manager measure the effectiveness of traditional or media based advertising?
With visits to a location and phone calls, sales people can easily ask a customer how they heard about the business. You can also set up a specific phone number for a marketing campaign to easily tell how effective the advertising was at generating calls. Measuring the effectiveness of website visitors to an advertising campaign (like radio, TV, or print ads) can be a little tricker.
We advise our clients to integrate some sort of tracking and analytics software on their websites. We like Google Analytics because it is free, pulls an extraordinary amount of data, and has the ability to drill down to specific reporting on visitors, traffic sources, keywords, and user behavior. Using Google Analytics, we can set up some goals and dig up statistics to find out how effective advertising is.
If the advertisement has a printed (or stated) website address, we can look for clues such as increases or spikes in the amount of direct visitors to the site. We can make an inference that the increases are coming from individuals who saw an ad, related to the product or service, and went to the website for more information. We can also look for increases in the amount of traffic brought in from searches for the business name. This can be attributed to people hearing the business name but not remembering the website address. We can also look for keywords associated with the advertisement. If there is a specific product or service advertised, we can look at the statistics for 1) incoming visitors searching for those keywords in search engines and 2) increases in traffic for the pages containing the products and services you advertised.
With traditional media and advertising, we can’t know exactly the impact it has on website visitors, but we can make some very good inferences and understand the overall impact. Adding up the increases described above will paint a fairly clear picture on the impact of advertising on website visitors.
Internet based advertising is much easier to track because we will know everything about an incoming visitor – where they came from (search engine or referring website), what they searched for (keywords) or what they clicked on (links). we will know exactly what the impact of online advertising is based on segmenting the data into these areas. This is also a great way to measure the impact of social media campaigns – you can see exactly how many visitors come from social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more.
You can go a step further and use this for an email marketing campaign. You can parse your analytics data into referring sites, allowing you to see the incoming traffic from email accounts. You can add these together and get a great look at the traffic generated from an email newsletter, promotion emails, or even from having your website address in your email signatures.
There is a deep well of data that is available for business owners and managers to make informed decisions about where to expend energy in marketing. You can understand the impacts of traditional advertising, email campaigns, internet advertising, and printed ads. For more information on this, contact us at (800) 314-4736. Let SEOTERIC help you increase leads and help you make your marketing as effective as it can be!
Link building is always a hot topic because it is really what makes an SEO campaign work. Content is important, page and link structure are important, and the url is important, but for competitive search terms, great on-site optimization will only get you so far.
Much like in the world of content, quality is better than quantity when it comes to obtaining links. After years of combining strategies and tactics, I have come up with a list of best practices for obtaining incoming links to your website.
It is well worth the time to write great content as opposed to lots of decent content. Some of the articles I wrote was one that attracted the most links and landed on good websites, and one or two were even highlighted in a breaking news story that brought a LOT of referral traffic while it was on the site’s homepage.
Write content for your own site first. As other top marketing professionals point out, you will get the links pointing back at your site for having the original content.
Here is one of my favorites – syndicate your RSS feed, not your article content. This is a philosophical change to the approach many people have in article marketing. Instead of publishing your duplicate content everywhere, keep the content on your site and ping services like technorati, twitter, facebook, and anywhere you can publish your site’s feed. Get visitors on your site and then give them an opportunity to bookmark or share your content via social media.
Quality directories are still valid. I have still seen good success from getting listed in the top human-edited directories, especially local and regional ones. Avoid the free-for-all sites and focus on the ones that add value to users.
Guest Blogging is a new hot-topic which is also worth trying. Finding relevant websites to post content to is a good way to get quality inbound links and brand awareness. In many cases, you can get content for your site as well if you establish a good partnership with a complementary website or blog.
Patience is a virtue. It is hard to not check Google rankings every day, but there are a lot of other things to do with your valuable time than checking rankings. I schedule a time once a week to check up on how things are progressing. This keeps me from wasting time each day, and gives me a reason to measure results and dive into analytics at the end of the week. We know SEO is a long-term strategy and results often take months to mature.
Reciprocal links are not all bad. It is natural for complementary websites to link to one another, so the emphasis is on relevance. I will exchange links with relevant and complementary websites, but not with just any site. You want to make sure you are linking to reputable websites too. Using your “off-line” networks to create on-line link partners is a great way to build links from people and businesses you know.
Don’t Spam. Search engines (like Google) mostly update their algorithms to do one of two things: to increase the relevance of the search results and to battle spam in their index. If you keep things relevant and avoid spam tactics, your rankings should continue to increase as long as their isn’t a fundamental shift in how websites and pages are ranked.
Find ways to add value to your industry. If you are an expert on a topic, utilize Yahoo! Answers, DIY, or forums to give advice and answer questions – each time leaving a link to your website for more information. This not only builds credibility, but makes you an authority figure within your industry. You can set up Google Alerts for some phrases and questions you can answer, and get updates about new questions posted. You can also write a blog post to answer questions you find online to attract visitors looking for the same thing.
Give links to get links. Especially in your blog or content, write about newsworthy information and list a few sources. Giving out links to reputable websites tends to encourage other websites to link to you. Think about developing some lists of resources and industry best lists. People love getting mentioned online, and they will point their audience to it.
Hopefully this best practices list will help you understand the importance of link building. I originally posted this article at SEOmoz.org (here is the original post). The best practices have been updated and added to from the great discussion we had in the comments. SEOmoz is one of the top SEO blogs in the industry, and you can find a lot more information about link building there.
About the Author: SEOTERIC is an Atlanta web design and SEO company specializing in building business websites and generating sales and leads through natural search results.
I was browsing Google this morning and realized an usual occurrence – the page navigation at the bottom of the search results was missing. I refreshed the page and it came back. I did a few more queries and the same thing happened. What is going on over at Google?
It is the holiday weekend, so maybe all the guys are out on their boats or taking a well deserved day off – but I couldn’t hep but find this odd.
Here is a screen shot of this…
It makes it virtually impossible to go past the first page of results. If you can’t get to any more than 10 results, maybe the click-through of their sponsored listings will increase but who knows, right? I am just wondering if this is a fluke, or if anyone else had noticed this.
Happy searching – I hope the Google results are relevant enough for you to find what you are looking for in the first few listings!
Seoteric’s approach to search engine marketing has been a breath of fresh air for the business owners and managers we have worked with. From our experience, SEO companies tend to be secretive in their practices and not give out much information on exactly what services they are providing. Some mask this as selling results and not services, but we feel very differently about it.
I recently read an article on SEOMOZ about this same issue. In their article about “what they would change about the seo industy” they pointed to the lack of professionalism. I agree that professionalism is a big problem, but I also think it is an issue of not having enough transparency in the services provided.
We are currently working with a client who has been frustrated with the seo services they are receiving from another company. They presented me a whole package of complaints from poor communication, not understanding the business goals, not enough reporting, and not understanding exactly what the company is doing and what they are paying for.
From what I have gathered, SEO companies (not all but some) tend to feel that if they give away to much information then they will in some way give away their business. This could be from fear that companies will do it themselves, or potential clients will see what the seo company really does and not want to hire them.
The solution seems quite simple when you think about it. If companies really wanted to handle SEO themselves, they could easily find the information on the internet to do it. There is so much published information that you can put together your own SEO campaign if you really wanted to. It will take more time, but it is possible. I tend to think that if a company is going to go that route, they will do that before contacting a company to do it for them. If a company contacts an SEO firm to handle the SEO for their business, then they are already in one sense saying “we don’t have the time to devote to this, but we see the value in it.”
You also have to look at the different types of business owners out there. Some will be ok with not knowing the process as long as they gets the results they want. Others will want to be involved in the whole process and know exactly what their money is paying for. Before a proposal is put together, you have to understand what type of business owner or manager you are dealing with.
For the sake of transparency, I tend to give as much information on our strategy as possible, from what text or information we need to change on the website all the way down to where the incoming links will come from. I also do a lot of keyword research and match keywords to their business goals, and prove on paper the search volume and value of the keywords we chose.
If you are afraid of giving up too much information when proposing an SEO strategy, don’t be. Think of SEO as any other service industry with results. If you hire a consultant to come into your business and look for ways to increase profits, are they going to not tell you what they did, and just show you how much they saved you or how much they increased profits? No, they are going to show you everything they did and how to manage the changes they made. SEO is not much different than that. Yes, they do receive long-term benefits from seo, but so do companies who hire other types of business consultants. The goal is to empower your clients. That is the main reason our number 1 motto is “Your Success is Our Success.”
The next big move for search engine optimizers has come according to Google. In recent months, Google has increased the weight of related keywords to a search query. In the old days, when a search for a specific keyword is done in Google, only the specific instances of that keyword would count towards a website’s ranking in the search results. This brought along ideals such as keyword density percentages, where on the page the keywords appear, and what type of page elements they appeared in. It seems the way marketers approach search engine optimization is changing.
The weight on keyword density is the first obvious element that looses value when you talk about latent semantic indexing. If you stick to just one keyword and aim for a specific keyword density like you used to do in the old days, then chances are you won’t get the same results you used to. This is because the weight of related keywords on a page has increased, and this affects the ranking for all the related keywords on the page. It may seem confusing at first, but it is a heroic effort to clean up the search results and return more relevant pages for the search query.
To better understand what is happening here, lets say you are looking for shoes. You go to Google and type in the word “running shoes” and start clicking on results. In the old days, you could get more articles and pages that focus on the words “running” and “shoes” but you wouldn’t see many results for jogging shoes, tennis shoes, basketball shoes, or training shoes. The search results would heavily weigh the actual words “jogging” and “shoes” producing very limited results. When you consider related words to “jogging shoes” you open the door for pages to show up in the search results that have ” jogging shoes” in the content, as well as a lot of other types of shoes. The end result tends to be more end-user friendly since the results produce higher quality pages and better options for the query.
If you look at this from a marketing perspective, it make your job a little more difficult if you have been simply cramming keywords into pages to get rankings. Now the proverbial tables have turned, and the search engines are forcing websites to not only include the keyword they are trying to rank for, but to include content around related keywords as well. You can’t just use a thesaurus either and try to manipulate the results, because one of the factors of latent semantic indexing is how closely related the keywords are in the context of the search query.
So what does all this mean? It means that quality content is king. Not just content anymore. If you want to have a successful marketing campaign for your website, you have to throw out the old keyword density tool and start looking at the related keywords. You can find latently related keywords in Google by putting the “~” symbol in front of your desired keyword. Google will highlight the latently related keywords so you can know which ones to use. But be careful and don’t fall into a numbers game again. Write good content and the search engines will reward your efforts.
Search engine optimization has changed, but those of us who have been focused on quality content from the start should actually see an increase in search results rankings. It is always best to stay ahead of the curve when you are talking about search engine marketing. Remember, a few things will always be true when it comes to the search engines: quality content written around multiple keywords is best, varying anchor text for incoming links is best, links form authority sites are best, and the more you contribute to the web, the more you will get back. It really is better to give than to receive.
Article Marketing is a hot SEO button right now. It is without a doubt one of the most effective search engine marketing strategies, but there seems to be some disagreements on what the most effective techniques are. Some argue that because of duplicate content filters, you have to create lots of variations of your articles. Some argue that publishing the same article across lots of websites still generates the links you need even if the pages don’t rank well in search results.
First, let’s look at the technique of using different versions. This can be a very time consuming process to create multiple versions of an article, especially if you intend to keep the quality intact. According to this approach, each article submitted would need to be at least 70% unique from the other articles submitted, which means you need to change 70% of the content or wording. This 70% threshold brought the rise of new technology called “article spinners.” These programs take an article and “spin” it up to several hundred times, and submit the article to hundred of different sites as “original” content. The problem with this approach is the poor quality of the “unique” articles. The software changes the articles by using synonyms for about 70% of the words. You can imagine how strange some of the articles will sound. Using synonyms is a way to “circumvent the duplicate content filter” but it will inevitable lower the quality of the content on the web because the automatically generated content will 1) never be edited by an individual and 2) will not read correctly for end users. Hopefully, for higher quality websites where articles are human edited, the “spun” articles will not get approved. This alone will lower the effect of using an article spinner.
It is another completely different thing to update your existing articles with new content or to do a few articles covering different aspects of the same topic. This is more time consuming, but end users can appreciate a second or third edition of an article if it provides new insight and information. Even a related article is beneficial, especially if related articles are linked together to form a series or an e-book.
The second technique is to submit one quality article to many different websites. Using this approach seems like the better of the two options. In a case study, a single article was submitted to several hundred sites including social media sites, bookmarks, article directories and online magazines. When you search for the title of the article, over 700 results showed up, almost all of which were on websites we submitted it to, and some where added from third parties who liked the content. The content was a higher quality article providing insight on a subject matter, and was distributed to a lot of sources.
Of the two techniques, there will still be ongoing debate. It is however important to remember a few things regardless of how you market your articles and content. First, write content that people will want to read and not for the search engines. Second, publish the article on your own website and get credit as the original source. Third, use the web to promote your insight. The end result will be a far more effective marketing campaign.
Seoteric is a Website Design and SEO Company company specializing in search engine optimization, content generation, and website development.
but who knows, right? I am just wondering if this is a fluke, or if anyone else had noticed this.
