5 Ways to Extend Social Media’s Reach

By Heidi Cohen, ClickZ, May 16, 2010

Read the full story at Click Z.com

Social media marketing is white hot. In response to this trend, many businesses feel that, at a minimum, they must have a Facebook Page to engage their prospects, customers, and fans. If you expect to improve your bottom-line results, you most likely need a broader, more integrated social media marketing effort.

5 Ways to Extend Social Media’s Reach

One approach is to take your social media marketing efforts offline. Five social media oriented tactics to accomplish this are:

• Hold live meetings. Just as social media provides a forum for individuals to interact and share information online, why not do so face to face. This is a great way to interact with customers by inviting them to test products, preview fashions, view demonstrations, or just give them a space to gather and interact. Online sites like Meetup.com and Yahoo Groups can help with the mechanics of arranging these events. This tactic works well for small businesses, hobby-related businesses, and not-for-profit organizations. Larger firms with a limited number of physical locations can use one or more local groups as incubators for new ideas or to partner with local distributors and organizations. Also, you can organize meetings that are inwardly focused to provide forums for your employees.
• Display customer photographs in frames or on an old-fashioned bulletin board. These can be displayed in your retail locations or at company offices. Think of it as a local version of your Flickr group. Alternatively, use a digital frame where images continually change. For example, Stew Leonard’s, which operates four supermarkets in Connecticut and New York, posts photographs of customers using their plastic shopping bags in fun and interesting locations. This tactic is useful for a wide range of businesses, large and small. Some ideas include scrapbook retailers showing photographs of customers’ projects, bridal shops presenting pictures of brides on their wedding day, travel tours sharing travelers’ photographs of places and each other, and dentists displaying close-ups of patients’ smiles.
• Gather customer stories about your services and products. Highlight these stories with appropriate photographs and display them in your physical locations or retail outlets to give consumers insights into your offering and company. This can be particularly useful for companies that create events like travel companies and not-for-profit organizations. It can also be used internally to recognize outstanding employees.
• Collect customer comments. Just as consumers review and rate a wide range of products and services online on sites like Yelp, why not collect their input at every touch point? To add personality, include the customer’s photograph. Then display selected comments in your stores and/or offices to support sales.
• Answer consumer questions about your products and services. Gather questions from consumers at every touch point including your retail outlet, website, or customer service center. These answers can be integrated into your collateral or highlighted in posters at your physical locations. One client of mine uses this format for a regular column in their local newspaper.

5 Ways to Increase Your Offline Social Media Efforts’ Effectiveness

In addition to enabling your organization to get physically closer to your prospects and customers, these social media tactics are a great addition to your marketing. Here are five ways to enhance your offline social media:

• Integrate your live social media marketing efforts into your overall marketing. This helps build your brand and reinforce your efforts across channels. This means that each of these social media tactics must support one or more of your marketing goals.
• Spread the word about your offline events through various online tools. This includes e-mail, social media such as Facebook and Twitter, and social media press releases.
• Leverage your marketing and corporate communications to promote these offline social media efforts. Use your website, current social media efforts (such as blogs), in-store signage and flyers, and packages to promote meetings, gather photographs, collect stories, receive comments, and get questions.
• Share content from offline social media efforts online. This can be done through public online social media platforms like Facebook, blogs, Flickr, and YouTube, as well as company digital platforms like your website and e-mailings. This is a great way to provide new content that engages and helps users.
• Remember to get permission to use customers’ photographs and other content they are sharing with you. Recognize that parents may be reticent to display photographs of their children so consider alternatives such as pictures of children’s drawings or projects.

5 Ways to Measure Offline Social Media Efforts

As with any marketing program, assess the success of your effort in terms of how well they’ve achieved your goals. For these offline social media efforts, some metrics to consider include:

• Number of people involved. Depending on your initiative, this includes the number of people who register for an event, the number who actually attend, or the number of photographs, stories, comments, or questions submitted. Also, measure the reach of your initiative in terms of the number of people who heard about it via word-of-mouth.
• Track sales related to these offline social media efforts. Consider offering special promotions to participants to encourage purchasing.
• Monitor costs of offline social media efforts. While many companies consider social media to be virtually free, it has related marketing and human resource expenses.
• Determine the usefulness of input received. Do prospects and customers appreciate your products and services? Are they providing creative ideas that you can use to improve either your marketing or your product offering? Are there product or customer service issues being surfaced that need to be resolved?
• Assess the effectiveness of online content created by these efforts. Does it help engage prospects? Does it help consumers use your products? Do prospects and consumers like them and find them entertaining?

As social media marketing evolves, marketers must continue to test new ways to apply these techniques to different aspects of their businesses. More and more, this translates to integrating your online and offline efforts to better engage with your customers, prospects, and fans.

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View the video on ION Interactive’s website here

Great information on how to handle what pages you send your clients to via PPC or AD Campaign. Tough to control organic results but it allow you to really think about the content on the site and how it can drive the call to action.

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We thought we should post all the FREE SEO (search engine optimization) tools we use here at RgDesign for everyone to see and use. The sites listed below are free to use, some my ask you to register for the use of the reports but why not share with the world on how to make your site better with these tools.

Below are 11 FREE seo tools.

Digital Point Solutions
Has a collection of free tools to use, everything from Google AdSence Charts, Google AdSence Sandbox test environment, Keyword Ranking Monitor, Keyword Suggestion Tool and more. Here at RgDesign we use the Keyword Suggestion tool the most as we are building and developing a website.

Website Grader
Is exactly what the title says it is. Have you ever wanted a report card on your site? How does my description stand up to SEO standards? How many pages do I have indexed in Google? How many inbound links does my website have? So much useful information to have about your own site!

WOORANK
WooRank is another great tool to grade your site, just like Website Grader or vise verse Woo Rank gives you stats about your site. Use both tools and compare what you get and see the many different ways to help improve your over all rankings.

Majestic SEO
Majestic SEO Provides Competitive Link Intelligence about your site . How many many pages on your site are indexed. When was your site first seen by the search engines? How many Back links do you have going to your site. You do have to register for an account to take full advantage of the tools.

Open Site Explorer
Gives you a couple of different grades on a scale out of 100. What the site grades your website on are:

• Page Authority – Predicts this page’s ranking potential in the search engines based on an algorithmic combination of all link metrics. Page Authority scores are on a 100-point, logarithmic scale
• Domain Authority - Predicts this domain’s ranking potential in the search engines based on an algorithmic combination of all link metrics. Domain Authority scores are on a 100-point, logarithmic scale.
• Linking Root Domains – Number of unique root domains (e.g. *.example.com) containing at least one linking page to this URL/domain.
• Total Links – All links to this page including internal, external, followed and nofollowed

Open site explorer also gives you data on Linking Pages, Top Pages, Linking Domains, Anchor Text Distribution, Full List of Link Metrics.

Post Rank
Get your RSS feeds found, blogs, Twitter, product RSS feeds all of them. Sign up for an account and start submitting your feeds today.

SEO Chat
A HUGE list of tools in one place. Start searching what tools you can use today. Code to text ratio checker, Alexa rank comparison Tool, Domain Age checker, Meta Analyzer and more. What a great list to start from.

SEO Tools
An addon to IE or FireFox so you can see your rankings  over all the major search engines just by starting up your web browser.

SEO ENG
SEOENG® is the World’s First Search Engine Optimization Engine™.. Simply type the Webpage URL into the SEOENG Search Bar, and you will see its Webpage Scoresheet. If SEOENG® decides to, that Website data may be queued up for upgraded analysis. Don’t worry, you will be notified as soon as it is done, and you will then have fresh data.

SEO MOZ
Lists of FREE and register tools to help improve SEO provided by SEO MOZ.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth
A downloadable program that runs from your computer to track any broken links on your website. Once the report is complete you can see all of the urls or pages on your site and start t0 fix the broken ones.

These are all free tools that we here at RgDesign rgrauphics.com have used over the years to help improve SEO rankings. If you have any questions about these tools please contact us and we are more then happy to answer your questions.

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Read Heidi Cohen’s article at ClickZ.com

What’s Wrong With Social Media Marketing?

By Heidi Cohen, ClickZ, Apr 19, 2010

Social media marketing is all the rage and every marketer feels that they must have a social media marketing campaign to be in tune with the times. But the reality is that most organizations are doing social media marketing wrong. It should not be a do-it-once, time-limited campaign, created by your marketing, communications, and/or PR department(s). It should be much more.

To take full advantage of social media marketing requires breaking down internal corporate silos and integrating social media strategies across your entire organization. It needs to permeate your entire organization. Social media marketing is the glue that truly enables integrated marketing across channels.

12 Tactics for Integrating Social Media Marketing Across Your Organization

To help expand how social media marketing is used within your company, here are 12 practical tactics:

• Create social media-friendly content on a regular basis:This content should be used across corporate communications. This information must not be leftover or recycled content. To work effectively, it must be high quality, useful information that consumers want and find useful. Examples include additional ways to use your product such as mixing and matching a variety of clothing pieces or photographs showing step-by-step how to install your product. Ask visitors what type of information they want. Useful metrics: Monitor views, shared content via social media and other channels, and customer comments.
• Cross-promote social media marketing in online and offline marketing: Mention social media marketing efforts in online advertising, Web site, e-mail, mobile, packaging, direct mail, television, print, out-of-home, and other advertising/marketing efforts. Useful metrics: When possible, track where social media references come from. Also, assess increases in social media activity that corresponds to initiation of other marketing campaigns.
• Integrate social media marketing into annual corporate budgeting and marketing planning processes: Social media marketing isn’t free and can’t be done when an employee has extra time. It requires dedicated resources and support. Useful metrics: Track social media-related budgets and resources including time dedicated to social media efforts.
• Extend customer service reach and responsiveness: This can be done by using social media to respond to customer questions, comments, and appropriate conversations. A relevant, personalized response is needed, not an automated answer. Useful metrics: Track the number of customer engagements and sentiment over time.
• Encourage employees to participate in social media as company representatives: This can be done by establishing guidelines for their participation. For example, tell employees how they should identify themselves as your representatives and support their efforts by calling attention to positive results. A good example of an employee who blogs is Dan Blank’s blog. Useful metrics:Count the number of employees involved in social media, monitor-related links into your Web site, and new prospects.
• Extend the reach of company events online: Extend by using a variety of social media tools such as Twitter, slide sharing, and video sharing. This includes live demonstrations that are videotaped or photographed and/or live blogging and/or tweeting of meetings, shows, and conferences. For example, a travel firm could use Flickr to enable travelers to share their photos and comments of their tours while a tool supplier could use YouTube to post “How To” demonstrations. Useful metrics: Monitor views of your company content across social media channels as well as customer comments, blog posts, and tweets.
• Extend PR efforts through social media use: This includes social media press releases, blogs, video, photographs, Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter, slide sharing, and other social media options to get the word out quickly and broadly. Also, engage outspoken consumers identified via social media tracking in appropriate channels. Useful metrics: Monitor press and other forms of media pickups as well as consumer conversations across social media environments.
• Provide faster, more effective crisis management for public issues through the use of social media tools: This means monitoring the sentiment of those conversations to understand what’s being said and how the public is reacting. This is a 24/7 process. To this end, have on-going social media monitoring, provide social media training to appropriately engage consumers, and install a process to raise potential issues through the company hierarchy. Then use social media to respond quickly and appropriately. Useful metrics: Monitor the number and size of potential issues and the effectiveness of social media response.
• Gather customer input and feedback for market research purposes: This is good for gaining useful insights about your products through forums, in-person meetups, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and reviews. Consumers may provide suggestions that wouldn’t have surfaced within the organization. Useful metrics: Assess market research improvements through the number of customer recommendations that get implemented and speedier time-to-market. Understand that market research resources may be used differently rather than reducing their budget or headcount.
• Expand human resources’ reach and effectiveness: Do this through social media use. New talent can be acquired more quickly and cost-effectively through social networking. Managers can preview job seekers’ work online, for example, a blog. Additionally, good work by existing employees can be showcased through a variety of social media formats and environments. For example, the employee of the month might be highlighted on a Facebook Fan Page. Useful metrics: Measure effectiveness through reduced employee turnover, shorter time to hire, and reduced hiring costs.
• Enhance investor relations through the use of social media: Such as video, slides, podcasts, and Webinars. Don’t limit your efforts to information required by regulators. Create and share content that gives investors a feel for your business such as new business performance and promoting your investor day. Useful metrics: Track relevant pieces of content, especially those required by regulators, number of views per piece of content and investor engagements, and the sentiment of those engagements.
• Facilitate cross-organizational relationships: This can be done through corporate networking presence such as LinkedIn or private social networks. Useful metrics: Assess improved employee relationships as well as improved cross-organization functioning.

While many companies think that they have an effective social media marketing strategy, they’ve only started to test the waters. They need to go further by assessing how they can apply social media marketing strategies across the various areas of their company. In addition to helping make firms more responsive to customer needs and issues, expanded use of social media marketing strategies will enhance overall performance.

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Real time search is on its way!

Back on March 29th, 2010 we posted an article about real time search and how to use it and what it was by our own search. Read about it here. Well we just read another article explaining it a bit more using the iPad as its real time search.

Remember real time search really only happens when the search term or trend has high enough activity within Twitter for the major search engines to pickup (Google, Bing, Yahoo). The creation of BUZZ is what will get the search engines to pick up on LIVE search from Twitter.

READ By Ron Jones, ClickZ, Apr 19, 2010 Article HERE or just scroll down to read his article we posted here.

Real-Time Search 101

Twitter has opened the door to the concept of real-time search. The ability to listen to an online conversation right now and hear what’s being said has brought a whole new dimension to search marketing. Let’s explore what real-time search is, how it’s being used in search engines, and how you can integrate real-time search into your marketing campaigns.

What Is Real-Time Search?

We’re all used to going to a search engine, typing in a keyword phrase, and getting a list of results. In the past, those results only showed what the search engines have collected and stored in their databases. That information can be a day or two old, or several years old.

What if you want to see what’s happened in the past five minutes? Maybe you’re interested in the latest news on the China earthquake or you’re waiting for your iPad to be delivered and need the latest news to fill the void.

Real-time search benefits those who read or write content within a short time span. Headline news, natural calamities and rescue efforts, and current events and shows are all examples where real-time search is used. Basically, your content goes hot for a small period of time before it goes cold.

For search engines, it means doing super fast indexing of sites like Twitter. This allows you to find information while it’s still relevant. To further help you understand real-time search, watch this videoproduced by Google.

Google Launches Real-Time Search

Back in December, Google launched the real-time search feature that now appears on its search results page. A search for the latest news on “iPad” tells me that the iPad will be useful for my two dogs. Also, there are links to articles and tweets ranging from five minutes to 50 minutes ago.

Since this launched in December, Google has gone beyond Twitter for real-time search results, adding content from Facebook, MySpace, and Google Buzz to bring you real-time news.

The other major search engines, Yahoo and Bing, also provide real-time search features.

Make no mistake; we’ll see more features and updates to search engines in the future.

Google Replay Feature

Google’s new tweet replay search feature for real-time search gives you the ability to go back in time and catch up on what people were tweeting about within a specific time range (e.g., if you want to go back and see what people were saying about the iPad before it started shipping). Google explained that there is a constant online conversation about breaking news, people, and places. With this new feature, you can zoom to any part of that conversation and see what people were tweeting about.

Other Tools for Real-Time Search

Several tools are available to help you take advantage of real-time search. Twitter Search has been around for a long time. Other tools that have emerged since and let you see what others are tweeting about are TweetGrid,Scoopler, Collecta, and CrowdEye, just to name a few.

Facebook also has a real-time search feature similar to Twitter’s. Facebook recently bought FriendFeed, which already has a good real-time search feature that searches content across many social sites.

What Does Real-Time Search Mean for Marketers?

While real-time search is growing, it’s still in its infancy. With the major search engines on board, it’s just a matter of time before it grows in adoption. Keep your eye on opportunities to leverage real-time search for use in your branding efforts.

In addition to advertisers, it’s also important to consumers. Marketers will need to adjust their approach to reaching out to consumers. With real-time search, you now have a tool to “listen” in to what consumers are saying about your brand or product. With real-time information, you can now react quicker and be more responsive.

Tips for Optimizing for Real-Time Search

Real-time search means you need to integrate new practices into your SEO (define) efforts and optimize accordingly. So, what can you do to enhance your optimization efforts to get the rankings you’re looking for with real-time search? Here are some tips that you should consider:

• Monitor hot topics: Stay on top of hot topics and be prepared to react to those topics. Create content that is frequently updated that speaks to these topics and trends.
• Add keyword support: Make sure you integrate your targeted keywords into your tweets and updates and utilize hashtags. This will help support your own SEO and PPC (define) campaigns and strengthen your relevancy for those keywords.
• Coordinate promotion activities: Planning is important so you can time when to update your Facebook Page or send out tweets. Try to do this shortly after relevant articles and blog posts are indexed in by search engines.
• Develop relevant content: Make sure you have content that supports real-time SEO. Coordinate all of your content for your Web pages, blogs, press releases, tweets, and fan pages to work together.

Real-time search presents a great opportunity for those who know about it and can find creative ways to integrate it into their marketing mix. This area will continue to grow, so look out for more features, methods, sites, and tools for leveraging real-time search. Please feel free to share any tips or beneficial tools you’ve found in the comments section.

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Social Media Blasphemy: Advertise!

By Gary Stein, ClickZ, Apr 16, 2010

Usually, we think about social media in the way that we are supposed to: as a remarkable new way for us, as marketers, to connect with our consumers, generate relationships, and, essentially, participate in the same community as the people who buy our products. I say that this is the way that we are supposed to think about this medium, because that relationship and give-and-take is what makes social media so unique and so powerful and so truly break-through. We should be thinking about bridging the gap between our brand and our consumers through social media because, for way too many marketers, we have acted as though our only job was to make something and plop it on a shelf.

But, that is not the only way we can think about social media. It is time for us to be OK and say to each other that, not only can we embrace the power of the medium and use it to be more authentic marketer…we can also use it to (deep breath)…advertise.

And, by advertise I don’t just mean buying ad space on Facebook (which, by the way, is a fantastic idea. You get lots of targeting, pay-on-performance, and excellent metrics). I am talking about actually using the medium itself to tell people about products, generate clicks, and sell your stuff!

Of course, you can’t just show up on day one and start advertising in social media. Some people will tell you that’s like walking into someone’s living room, shoving your way onto the couch, and talking about your new line of car wax. It’s nothing like that. You can’t even get in the front door, or know where the front door is. Or even if there is a front door. You can use social media to advertise, but only if you do a few critical steps first.

How to Advertise on Social Media Without Being a Jerk

A good many sites are beginning to discover something interesting in their analytics. Most likely, the number one source of traffic will be a search engine (usually Google). But, sliding up the chart are social networks (usually Facebook, occasionally Twitter). You can see this yourself, using a public analytics tool like Compete. Here’s the latest traffic for the wireless carrier T-Mobile (which was chosen totally at random). Facebook is driving nearly 6 percent of their total traffic. At 6.1 million visitors a month, that’s 366,000 people from Facebook.

The first step, therefore, in advertising in social media is to simply acknowledge (and get a sense of) the share of traffic coming to your site from social networks. If you are using an analytics package, you can pretty easily pull this data from most top-level reports. If you are not using an analytics package…what is wrong with you?! Start using one now!

This traffic baseline is important, naturally, because you need something to compare your results to. You can decide that you want to simply increase the raw number of people visiting your Web site (volume of traffic) or increase the percentage coming from social media (source of traffic). Each one has its benefits. Increasing the volume just means that you are getting more people into the funnel, expanding (most likely) on doing the things you are already doing. Shifting the source and increasing the share of traffic from social media may be an efficiency question. You may be able to get more traffic from social media that you aren’t paying directly for.

Once you make this simple decision about the traffic, you can craft a strategy to begin achieving that goal. The point here is that you can use social media in a very specific and very instrumental way: drive traffic to a conversion point. There certainly are ways to use social media to build relationships that ultimately result in a conversion. But this is a way to use the channel in a way that is more direct.

Here are a few things that you need to do:

• Attract qualified followers with paid media: Writing something to a Twitter feed that no one is following is fairly pointless. You can do this fairly effectively on Facebook with paid ads (you can buy these on performance, so you are only paying for clicks). Make sure you don’t get stuck in this tactic though; you don’t want to pay for traffic that you then need to compel to click. You might as well just send the traffic direct to your site. Provide opportunities and reasons for everyone who “Fans” you to also tell their friends, so that you are not only buying traffic but also buying momentum. Get out of paying for traffic as quickly as you can.
• Make clicking-to-buy a normal part of the conversation: Companies that are most effective at using social media to drive traffic create an easy way to build offers into their flow of conversation. Some pick a certain tag that they always use to connote an offer or an incentive. Others always send out offers on a particular day. Whatever the case may be, you need to think about the content that you put onto social media in the same way that you think about an ad: you need to plan it, tag it, measure it, and optimize it.
• Make the content portable to search: Increasingly, we are finding that consumers are going from a search engine to a social media network to a brand site. That is because Facebook and Twitter have done such a good job crafting relationships with Google, Bing, and Yahoo, to make sure that relevant brand info appears in search results. This is only going to continue and you need to apply all of your SEO (define) rules to your social media actions. Whoever is in charge of your Twitter feed needs to get your target keyword list right now.

Ultimately, we need to have a complete view of social media if we are going to truly embrace it as marketers. It’s not a bad thing to recognize that we engage with consumers and have conversations to generate value for our brands. When we are comfortable with the medium, we can really start to get maximum value out of it.

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I was reading an email this morning I got from one of my favorite place, Larry Chase’s Web Digest for Marketers. The email was titled “How My Email Newsletter Makes Money” so I was naturally curious by what the email had in it. I think this is a perfect read for someone who is new to email marketing or just a refresher for an experienced email marketer.

The email goes into pretty good depth on how to break apart your email content. Great article to read. Click here to read the article at Larry Chase’s Web Digest for Marketers.

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Get Educated in SEO

By Mark Jackson, ClickZ, Apr 14, 2010

This week, I received an inquiry from a start-up company that wanted to engage in SEO (define). Like many before them, they had built a Web site and were wondering, “Why isn’t this thing showing up in the search engines for the keywords that are relevant to our business?”

After reviewing this Web site, it quickly became obvious why it wasn’t showing up for any keywords: there was neither a single mention of those keywords in the content of the Web site, nor in title tag of the Web site, and there were virtually no links to the Web site (it had only been live on the Web for about six months).

The first thing this company needed to do, before spending any money on any consultant or any time internally attempting to affect their rankings and/or traffic from natural search, was to read — to become educated.

Some might read this and say, “Why read? That’s why we hire consultants. Let them just do it.” However, it’s difficult to buy something you don’t understand, and it can also be dangerous to outsource to some company without understanding if they’re truly doing the necessary work to help you achieve results.

Being educated in this space will help you to be more successful, even if you’re outsourcing.

The more you understand about SEO, the more likely you are to approve (and push through) solid recommendations and to debate recommendations that you’ve learned may not be the path forward or deliver a solid ROI (define) in the time that it might take to implement.

I’ve been in SEO for several years and have managed hundreds of initiatives. Sometimes I take for granted that after all of these years, people understand the basics of SEO. Judging by the large number of people attending the Dallas-Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association’s last event, it’s important to continue pushing the basics.

Domain

Good SEO (and good business on the Web) starts with a great domain. Ideally, you’ve acquired a domain that’s been live on the Web for a good amount of time (as a general rule, two years or longer), which includes the most competitive keywords you would want to target.

If that’s not an option, just know that it will take some time to gain authority for the domain, through slow and steady acquisition of links on other Web sites pointing to yours and the build out of quality content on the Web site. Don’t be that company that launches a new domain and then purchases 1,000 links to your Web site. Remember, the link building process must appear natural.

Keyword Research

The keyword the start-up company was interested in had a total of 100 searches performed each month for it, according to Google’s Keyword Tool. This is why keyword research is so critical.

Imagine spending any amount of time or money on SEO and finally earning that coveted top spot for the keyword that you believe is the ticket to success, only to find out later that the top ranking has resulted in a total of 50 new visitors to your Web site (that you probably could buy via AdWords at $0.25 per click). So, what could have cost you $12.50 per month is costing you how much, in terms of time and/or money?

Even better keyword research can be had through purchasing ads on the search engines for the keywords and then developing a history of which keywords not only result in clicks, but also have shown a propensity to convert! SEO isn’t about ranking for a particular keyword; it’s about driving a good amount of quality visitors to your Web site that you hope to turn into leads or sales.

Competitive Analysis

It’s not enough to finally determine the keywords, which have any amount of search volume and have also shown the ability to convert. Gaining a presence for these keywords via paid search is one thing…gaining a presence for these same keywords, organically is another.

To quickly determine what it will take to compete, search for one of your more searched for/competitive keywords on Google. Create a list of the top 10 domains. Then, do a “site:www.nameofdomain.com” (without the quotes) search on Yahoo and you will see the number of pages and number of backlinks each of these Web sites has. While this isn’t all that it takes to rank, it’s a good indicator of what work may be involved in bridging the gap.

The start-up company had six pages of content indexed in Yahoo and three backlinks, while the top competitor (for the keyword that isn’t searched often) had 374 pages of content and 2,000 backlinks.

Content is King

Without quality content, you’re going to have trouble getting links and traffic. Develop quality pages of content on your Web site. Use the important keywords for your business you’ve found through research.

Each page is unique. So, too, should the title tags of your pages be unique and relevant to each page of copy.

Every page of the start-up company’s site had the same title tag. And, yep…you guessed it…the title tag was the name of the company.

If you must include the name of your company in your title tag, put it at the end. Opinions will vary on the best practices for a title tag, but if you want your most important keywords listed first, keep the title tag around 66 characters long, including spaces.

Links

Slow and steady wins the race. If you’re starting a new Web site (or just starting to put any amount of attention to SEO), start with the basics to generate some links to your site. You can get a Yahoo Directory, BOTW.org, or Business.com listing easy enough. And you can submit an application to DMOZ (though it may take a good amount of time to actually get listed). You can also submit press releases.

Again, don’t rush into buying a boatload of links, as this can be a red flag to the search engines that you’re trying to manipulate their results. SEOs don’t manipulate search engines results; we help businesses position themselves in a more positive light to the search engines. Think of us as public relations experts for the SERPs (define).

Analytics

The true measure of successful SEO efforts isn’t what you may or may not see in a search engine ranking report — at least, not directly. If you don’t already have analytics in place, do this now. Google Analytics is free and delivers some pretty solid reporting. Yahoo Analytics is also great (and free, if you’re an advertiser).

If you’re trying to measure SEO efforts, you might want to get a good baseline of traffic in your analytics, then implement your recommendations and track how your changes impact your organic search traffic. Your implementation should include conversion tracking, so that you’re not merely analyzing traffic, but also monitoring for keyword conversion rates.

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Twitter to Start Pushing Advertising to Users

By Mikael Ricknäs, IDG News Service

Read the story here at PCWorld.com

Twitter on Tuesday introduced a new service called Promoted Tweets, which will let companies send ads in the form of ordinary messages, according to a blog posted by co-founder Biz Stone.

The introduction is an important step for the company, since it represents the first step towards turning the microblooging service into a money-making venture.

Users will start seeing paid messages, which will be labeled “promoted,” at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages, according to Stone. Initially, up to 10 percent of users will see the promoted messages. Twitter will work with Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America, to roll out the first ads, he said.

Twitter roll out the Promoted Tweets in several phases, with Tuesday’s announcement marking the first. Before Twitter develops the service further, the company wants to get a better understanding of the “resonance” of Promoted Tweets, the user experience and advertiser value, Stone said.

Future changes to the ad service could include showing the messages in users’ message timelines, he said.

The ads will have to fight to get user attention. Twitter will attempt to measure whether the advertising messages interest users and stop showing those that don’t, according to Stone. They will have all the functionality of a regular message, including the ability to reply, retweet and favorite.

On Tuesday, Twitter’s COO Dick Costolo will be talking about the offering in detail at the AdAge Digital conference, according to Stone. Costolo and CEO Evan Williams will further discuss Promoted Tweets and what it means for Twitter developers at Chirp, Twitter’s developer conference, on Wednesday, he said.

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Microsoft and Google Attempting to Follow Twitter`s Lead
By: wubayou at SEOChat

The extreme success and popularity obtained by the social networking site known as Twitter has caused other companies to take notice. Among those companies are technology giants Microsoft and Google, who have both seen Twitter become highly successful and plan to follow suit…but not, perhaps, in the way you might be thinking.
The way in which they will follow suit has a twist to it. Rather than looking to social networking as a fun medium, Microsoft and Google are looking to create programs that incorporate social networking to help companies increase efficiency and productivity.

Microsoft is testing social networking in the workplace via its OfficeTalk application. OfficeTalk is not available to the public, as it is more of a research project. With OfficeTalk, employees can post ideas, updates, and the like in an effort to share information with others within the organization through microblogging, just as Twitter does, but in more of a social form.

Microsoft is testing the effectiveness of such a product on itself first by making OfficeTalk available to its own employees. The company is hoping to find out how employees will use the program and what features would be helpful. After using themselves as a guinea pig, Microsoft will then shift the focus of the program to other organizations to get a better sample size and more ideas on how to improve OfficeTalk. This is essential; many businesses differ, and what might work for a company like Microsoft might not work for another type of company.

Not to be outdone, Google is also testing a similar social networking in the workplace concept with its Google Buzz program. Google Buzz (what is Google Buzz YouTube Video) is a program that works in conjunction with Gmail to give users a comprehensive view of their friends’ information. For instance, they can view friends’ statuses, photos, videos, and links all in one place. If this sounds familiar, then it is, as Facebook basically uses this model. Google hopes that Buzz will be more useful for organizations and employees, however.

Buzz also integrates several existing social networking sites into its platform, such as Flickr, YouTube, Picasa, and more. Unlike Microsoft’s OfficeTalk, Google Buzz was actually made public on February 9, 2010. While the idea sounds good, the program has already received criticism for its perceived lack of privacy in sharing too much personal information with other users.

One has to wonder, why doesn’t Twitter come up with a workplace-based program? They could be developing one, and at the moment they do offer private accounts to keep information safe and enclosed. Whether or not a full-fledged corporate program gets released in the future is something to be determined.

Besides the already-diagnosed problems with privacy as seen with the Google Buzz program, other questions and concerns could arise concerning the development and use of such a social networking program within a business. Primarily, will it cause too much of a distraction? With many people’s lives seemingly consumed by text messaging, Facebook, Twitter, and the like, will the implementation of such a system at work actually decrease efficiency? The possibility seems to be very high. If developers can provide a solution that does increase workplace efficiency without causing a distraction, however, it will be worth its weight in gold.