Top 10 Ways to Effectively Use Social Media

There is no doubt that social media is a vital component in internet marketing, visibility, and branding. However, when done incorrectly, it can actually become detrimental to your company. Here are my top ten ways to use social media effectively.

1. Identify Your Purpose – Your social media strategy should be a stand-alone plan which requires nothing else to sustain it. Your plan should not aspire to improve your search engine rankings, as there aren’t usually many backlinks that come from it. Approach your social media strategy as if there were no such thing as search engines. Some things you may want to consider in identifying your purpose include:

• Branding – Start building a strong brand for your company!
• Exposure – Give your company and website some visibility!
• Networking – Get involved in the community and make connections!
• Relationship/Trust Building – Potential clients are more likely to become actual clients when they have a relationship with you and know they can trust you!
• Customer Relations – Use social media to build good, solid customer relations!

2. Fresh, Consistent, Relevant Content – Make sure there is a high level of consistency in the content you share on social media sites. Consistency is important regarding frequent updates (fresh content), as well as in keeping with the purpose of your social media strategy. Consistency in your message and your branding also establishes relevance for SEO purposes.

For instance, if you are a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Consultant, provide quality tips on SEM and internet marketing, as well as useful articles, resources, and links. Try to link to (connect/contact/friend/follow) other members in your industry or similar industries, like search engine optimization (SEO) or network marketing.

This can assist you in achieving your branding ambitions and enable you to engineer your own company’s brand recognition. This offers you some control over how you and your company are perceived. Your social media presence can help strengthen your company’s webutation (web reputation). Your online friends, business contacts, and “followers” should be able to give a brief description of what your company does. If they cannot, you may want to reevaluate #1 and reexamine the content you’re sharing.

3. Concentrate on Content, Not Marketing – All too often, people go about this the other way around. Allow your content to do the marketing for you by focusing on valuable, consistent, relevant content.

Digging, liking, bookmarking, etc. your own content can actually damage your credibility. It is better to write compelling content that your readers will give an unsolicited digg, like, or bookmark.  When people like what you’re saying, they will share it! When they do, search engines will notice, so write something noteworthy and let the rest happen organically!

4. Be a Valuable Asset – When you think of social media, place the emphasis on “social”. It is not called self-promotional media for a reason. Always keep that in mind when considering what to share on your social media sites.

Posting nothing but self-promotional links, information, and requests will inevitably make you a part of the social media noise, and you will eventually be filtered out. Worse yet, you could be regarded as a “spammer”, which is the fastest way for your webutation to take a downward turn. You may not lose friends, contacts, or “followers’ over it, however, they will begin to skim your posts without even realizing it, or they may ignore you altogether.

You can avoid this by becoming a valuable asset in your niche. One example of how to do this is by posting links to resources and domains that are not your own. This does not mean to post links to your social media profiles, your own squidoo lenses, etc. This means do not post any domains with which you are associated. You can; however, occasionally post links to your own site. Just be sure that you don’t do it so often that it becomes noise or spam.

Believe it or not, you should attempt to befriend your competitors and even promote them. I know this seems counter-intuitive, but interlinking and networking are very powerful tools!

5. The Client Always Comes First – Now that you’ve identified your purpose, contemplate what your client (or ideal visitor) is searching for. (Write for the audience you want.) Imagine your ideal, potential client distinctly in your mind, and consider what they may be perceiving through the information that you share. You want to make a good first impression on them, as they are the ones you want to attract to your site.

6. Get Involved and Build a Rapport – Participating in discussions, replying to forums and blogs, and asking for feedback (and responding to it) are all exceptional ways to get involved in the community and build a rapport with other members. This allows people to view you as a real person, instead of a robot that does nothing but post links repeatedly. (If you’re going to post links, ensure their relevance.) Other people will warm up to you and be more likely to become a friend or contact if you humanize yourself. Social media sites provide you the opportunity to show your personality, so use them in order to truly connect with your target market.

7. Warning! Do Not Over Optimize – Of course you desire top search engine rankings for your specific keywords, but tread lightly here. It is possible to over optimize. If you use the same anchor text on every site you link to, your site will leave what is referred to as a “digital footprint”, which can be a sign that you may be trying to exploit or manipulate search engine results.

In order to refrain from this, use natural alterations in your anchor text for the links which point to your original site. A certain amount of “click here” (or similar links) are necessary to balance your optimization strategy.

8. Start Linking to Your “Deep Links” – Everyone wants to link their public profiles to their (main) homepage, but deep links (or links that point to internal pages on your site or blog) provide depth and authority. Let’s assume that there are two identical websites. The one that has accumulated more deep links will always outrank the other. This method will also gain more exposure for your site in search engine results because your internal pages will begin to rank for relevant keywords and key-phrases.

Deep Links Tip: You may not want to share the link to your homepage with someone you meet on a business network or social media site. Think about linking to your “About Me” page (if applicable) in order to give a more personal introduction to your site, or try linking to your “Company” or “Services” page (if applicable) to give your visitor an overview of what your company does.

9. Link Deliberately with No Apologies – When someone “friends” you, follows you, or subscribes to your blog and/or updates on social sites, it is because they are interested in your most recent information, news, tips, resources, etc. If they should discover that they are not interested, they will simply stop following you, which is not a big deal. This is not a “popularity” contest (regardless of what some people may think), as the “quality” of your “followers” is what matters, not the quantity of them! This is a way to syndicate and socialize with like-minded individuals in a professional and personable setting.

As with anything else, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about hyperlinking to content and resources on social media websites. Here is the wrong way: “Read my blog!” or “Check out my site!” The correct way is achieved by sharing a helpful link (it can be your own, or something else of interest to your audience) and encourage a discussion about it. For example, if you are a SEO specialist, you could share a link to a Google article about their latest SEO standards and ask for your readers’ opinions on it. Since most of them will be in your field or a related field, the article should be of interest to them which should inspire some discussion.

10. Utilize Social Networking – In order to genuinely accomplish a successful social media strategy, you should engage in social networking, as well. Replace the word “competitor” with “colleague” in your social media vocabulary. Other webmasters, companies, consultants, and individuals in your niche are your allies in the brave new world of social media!

Make it a goal to locate as many of your competitors (who are on your level or within an acceptable range) and develop a cadre or key group of professionals, friends, and/or business contacts. These are people you can share with, exchange links with, and even embark on joint ventures with. Don’t view them as your competition anymore. Start exploring ways to leverage one another’s positions in the marketplace!

Source:Danielle Dandridge

Site Navigation & Information Architecture Fundamentals For SEOs

One of the most confusing skills to teach someone who practices organic search engine optimization is called “information architecture” (aka “IA”). I’ve given several talks on the topic in an effort to chip away at some popular misconceptions. Each time the audience has people who refer to themselves as an SEO, IA or usability professional. Typically we’re allotted anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes to discuss “successful information architecture.” Since IA is not the same for SEO and Usability (closely related however), conveying the nuances of how, why, when, where and what information architecture is to each profession feels like a disaster.

Adding to the frustration of communicating what IA is and what it’s for are terms like “mental model,” “taxonomy,” “ontology,” “wayfinder” and many more. If I were to list all the pieces of the information architecture puzzle here, it would take up too much space.

It’s easy to think that IA is all about navigation or even is navigation. It’s not navigation if you think of navigation as offering directions to get from one place to another place. Rather, it’s offering directions in a manner that depends on who or what is asking for them.

For this article, I’m going to focus on information architecture as it is used by someone who optimizes web site pages for search engines. You’ll see the connections to the usability side but the methodology I want to cover now is for the SEO.

Navigation

The screen shot below is of a real web site. What you see is the navigation scheme for the entire website. There are no drop down categories if you click on a sphere.

The internet is rife with websites with sitewide navigation using the words “about,” “services,” “solutions” and “contact.” Sadly, many of them have an SEO assigned to work on them and despite all their keyword and linking work, they ignore the words used to navigate the site. For this site, each sphere links to one page, with no categories. To learn what “solutions” are, one page explains it if you click to read it. (Just love the incentive to go do that!)

The easiest step for an SEO to correct this is to add a keyword to each link label. The most obvious choices would be the brand, specific types of services (consulting, accounting, job finding) and identifying “solutions” (or finding a more definitive word). An SEO skilled in information architecture will take it deeper. This person will want to know what the “mental model” is before picking out any keywords.

Mental model

“Mental models” represent people. And people have brains. Because they have brains, they have information and behaviors stored in their heads. We know humans are creatures of habit and many dislike change. They use commonly known words to describe different things. They’re young or old. Some are deaf. Some wear reading glasses. Maybe they can’t spell. Maybe they only get online when they’re drunk or when they can get to a public library.

Without an idea of who the people are that are expected to use a website, plain vanilla link labels like “about” and “services” are the uninspired standard. But with some mental model data, an SEO can add more zest to their keyword research. I understand that an SEO is often one of the last people to have input on page content during development. This is not a wise practice. For an SEO to create more powerful information architecture for a site, they need to know:

• Who is intended to use the site?
• How they conduct tasks?
• What do they need?
• Variables? Environment, disabilities, age, time, computer experience
• How do they think? Behave?
• User personas
• Card sorting
• User testing during prototype stage
• Analytics
• Market research
• Brain research (neurosciences)
• Human behavior

Why?

Let’s take a moment to consider first-time parents and grandparents searching for baby items. They may want to browse online inside a famous department store. When they land on the homepage, they find confusing navigation. It’s frustrating them because the navigation was laid out without regard to research into the habits and needs of customers. If you were an English speaking person taking a visitor from Japan on a tour of your home, wouldn’t it help to know their language and customs first?

In the example below, there is left sidebar navigation and another drop down menu that appears with the search function. The drop down menu offers redundant or similar link labels as the left side navigation. Which “baby” link do we choose? If you’re looking for a baby gift, do you look under “baby” or “gifts?” For clothes, would you think to try “apparel” or still stick with “baby?” What’s the purpose of the “entire site” drop down menu? Isn’t it adding confusion to the overall user experience?

An SEO might want to add expertise here. Perhaps “clothing” is more commonly used by the site’s customers than “apparel.” Are “baby gifts” something that could be put together rather than in separate categories? What if keyword research strongly suggests those two words are often searched on together?

Mechanics, IA & SEO

Information architecture for an SEO also requires getting into the mechanics of a web site. Consider a site that uses AJAX technology. The URL doesn’t change on AJAX pages. How does this effect IA?

Today, most people understand they can tell the hierarchy (directory structure) of a site by looking at a page’s URL (domain.com/directory/page.html). If that URL never changes, they’re denied this information. And of course, if they bookmark it, they’ll never know what page they bookmarked because it has no accurate identifier.

Text links still rule search engine crawlability. Therefore, an SEO must work out issues with JavaScript and image-based navigation. Link consistency is another area of focus. If a link within content points to a link in global navigation, they should be using the same terms. Navigation, from an SEO perspective, is not simply a matter of creating keyword rich categories or classes for products. What’s happening in the background ties in too, such as sitemap creation, robots exclusions, types of navigation (footer, global, side bar, breadcrumb, etc.), error page handling, internal linking and more.

The key to understanding where the mechanics fit in is to understand and rely on your mental model (who is using the site). An SEO is working on the search engine side, but search engines are dependent on user behavior.

Taxonomies & ontologies

Alan Bleiweiss did a great job working out navigation layouts with categories and sub-categories in Information Architecture – Rocket Science Simplified. He created graphics of example navigation schemes so that readers could visualize relationships, categories and classifications of terms.

“Taxonomy” refers to classification such as categories. “Ontology” means the relationships between classifications or terms. For example, a fruit basket is the classification. Apples, oranges, peaches and mangoes would be related to this classification. If a stakeholder requests that you put “car” into a fruit basket category, it’s unrelated and they need their head examined.

Another example for a taxonomy setup would be:

• Category – Music
• Subcategory – Rock
• Related terms – soft rock, hard rock, etc.

Web sites with enormous inventories face situations where relationships can overlap. Unless the information architecture is worked out beforehand, they end up with orphan pages or hubs (sections with levels) that are completely disconnected from related categories or sub-categories. Before navigation can offer a sense of place, it has to be soundly researched for link relationships, user connections based on user behavior (i.e. baby gifts, baby or gifts), mapped out and coded in the back-end. It’s not difficult to see how important sense of place might be for site visitors, but it’s just as important for search engines. A well designed IA allows search engines to link directly to top level pages that it learns are popular with searchers.

Context, organization and findability

An SEO works with content, whether writing it, creating link labels or linking between pages. While many stop at keyword research, the more skilled will evaluate context issues such whether the site is local or global, what language(s) are used and what terminology choices are the best. An information architect will determine the overall interlinking structure with the goal of creating confidence for both search engines and site visitors by establishing hierarchy and orientation via navigation. Organized page content creation consists of where it goes, how much, order of importance, what goes in and why.

“Findability,” which is another fancy word you may see tossed about, is simply how to make pages easy to search for. Short tail and long tail keyword usage factor into findability. Keep in mind that much of the clues to a fortified site IA are found in mental model research. And best of all, if something isn’t converting as desired it can be examined and changed because user and searcher mental model information is available.

95% of all search engine referrals come from page one of search results pages (SERPS). Organic marketing has been viewed as the “easy” way to market web pages. Some will insist that paying for ads and placement in SERPS is the only way to go. It’s costly and to me, not that challenging. Information architecture is more of a voyage into the art of information communication. Before one syllable of text can be found by either an intended search engine bot or a human person via navigation, we study what they want to know and how they want to find it.

Source: SearchEngineLand

The five charts essential to have all reference SEO

In the process of SEO There are many different activities related to marketing, content and technical aspects a site that always come very handy reference documents not only learn, but in the day to validate the performance of these tasks (or send the customer to require sources! ).

Below are five graphs and flow charts SEO to be a useful reference in the optimization process :

1. The Pyramid of the SEO Basics

Excellent chart published by SEOmoz which shows the fundamental aspects that are part of SEO process : Access and Quality Content, Survey and focus Keywords, Creating Links and “Social“.

Download the chart here and I invite you to see the interesting video posted on SEOmoz beside him .

2. The most common SEO Questions – A Guide

A series of computer graphics showing different phases, activities and reference information from a SEO process : Study Keywords, Optimization of a page, Creating Links, SEO Tactics, linkbaiting and Social Marketing , and even a graph of vs. SEO . PPC created and published in Datadial.

Check out this series of graphs and download it here.

3. Help leaf SEO Web Developer

This is an indispensable aid sheet as a reference since it includes the more technical aspects related to the code of the Web , such as, optimization title tags and header, imagery, links, Funnels, canonicalization, Etc.

You can see in more detail the various aspects that are included in the leaf and aid download it from here.

4. Flow Diagram for a great SEO SEO

Although the language “somewhat “strong flow chart created by Create Market Profit takes us through the various activities of analysis and optimization to be done in a SEO Process.

You can access it from here.

5. How to manage a penalty from Google

This flowchart published by SEOmoz is a reference to always take into account, and guide you should you suffer a penalty by Google , because even if you do things right , following the activities in the SEO process raised in the previous graphs there is a risk :

Read more about Google penalties and Download the chart here.

Bonus : 5 Ways to improve the tracking , indexing and positioning

In this graph, Which is part of an interesting article from SEOmoz about optimizing site architecture with a view to improving its indexing and positioning are five ways to do it .Download the graphic from this article.

Now you can wallpaper your desktop What other diagrams or graphics will serve as a reference in your daily activities such as SEO?

The five charts essential to have all reference SEO

Geo-Marketing As A New Business Marketing Tool

Geo-Marketing (or Geographic Marketing) is a new method of marketing a business and its website through web searches, mobile searches and social media. As you can see, the geo-marketing tools being used are digital and through the Internet or Mobile devices.

While geo-marketing’s definition is the association of data and maps in the traditional sense, the added convergence of local business listings, mobile marketing, and social media makes this method of marketing more powerful than ever before. This marketing tool is no longer just a large business marketing tool, but is available to small and medium size businesses too.

We should define what we mean by local business. A local business is any sized business dependent on the local consumer for its revenue. This means you could be a national company like Home Depot, U-Haul, or Best Buy or you could be a local florist or independent store only known to your local geography.

From a technical standpoint an Internet user’s IP address is tied to GPS data, like longitudes and latitudes, which are mapped with technology to geographies around the world down to the city and street level. While all this data may seem overwhelming, the good news is that most businesses do not need to concern themselves with this part of geo-marketing. Many of the tools already have all of this information built into their software or hardware technology so we can stay focused on how we will use geo-marketing tools.

The difficulty with any new marketing tool is a business’s inability to adopt the methodology early. When it comes to technologies and the Internet, in the past, by the time most businesses are ready to adopt a marketing tool, the industry has already moved on to something new. Being an early or at least an earlier adopter of marketing methods on the Internet and through digital devices can only benefit the business.

We have seen many signs over the past two years regarding the evolution of geographic marketing. When companies like Google, Apple, and the investment community of Wall Street start to put $100+ million and more behind a technology it will become part of our daily lives whether a business wants it or not. Consumers have and will be using more of these geo-marketing tools to find businesses, services or products near them.

Let’s take a look at the three main tools that consumers are using to find businesses, products or services close to their geography.

1. Web searches are the first and most obvious, however, these are web searches in which a map displays with targets the businesses that match the search criteria. Unlike the traditional yellow pages, these geo-listings (a.k.a. Local Business Listings) can be claimed and updated with your business marketing information in order to meet these search criteria.

While this may sound relatively easy, geo-listings also include: consumer reviews that need to be managed; the clean-up of duplicate listings; coupons; offers; discounts; videos; photos; citations; QR bar codes; and, hyper local websites. Understanding what to start with and how to strategically use these components can be done by a professional marketing firm that specializes in this area. You can read more about these components in one of our previous articles here.

2. Mobile Marketing is the next most significant geo-marketing tool in which SMS Texting, Mobile Applications, Mobile version of your website, and Mobile advertising are your key components. The starting point in this process will be with SMS Texting to get your alerts out to customers that subscribe to your short bursts of information. The reason why this is your starting point is that it will take time to build your list of subscribers.

3. Social Media Marketing continues to evolve and is, also, geographic in its targeting ability. Consumers are using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Wiki sites, Four Square, Instant Messaging and other social community tools on their mobile devices. While they use it mostly to find businesses, products and services, in the social communities they are seeking recommendations from their friends (near and far). They are, also, using these social communities to post their experiences with a business, product or service. For this reason you have to monitor the social communities in order to embrace any potential problem situations and work with them.

These three geo-marketing components are important to any business size – large or small – and each have their own sub-components that need to be well understood in order to succeed. Understanding the strategy amongst them; the acceptance and embracing them early; and, finally planning on a 3-year return will put you on the right path of geo-marketing.

Certainly your time resources are limited and Geo-Marketing Services are provided bySmartFinds Internet Marketing. You will find this to be of great benefit to your time resources and the low cost service may eliminate your yellow page ad costs. Let the experts of over 16 years Internet marketing experience help you use this local business marketing tool properly and prevent brand security issues from occurring.