Top Tips for Social Media Marketing

Social media is a powerful and cost-effective marketing tool for your business. It will not only put you directly in touch with existing and new clients, it will make you more personable, trustworthy and approachable. It will also improve links to your website, boost your SEO, help you to raise your own profile and establish new networks while attracting more business overall.

Of course, for most of you these tips will be completely obvious, however - I have had many people request some social media marketing advice, so to get you started, here are my top tips:

Twitter

Twitter is a hugely effective free marketing tool for your business. It’s a micro-blogging site and somewhere that allows you to talk directly to your customers quickly and easily. You basically follow people and people follow you.

You can tweet about yourself while keeping updated on the rest of the world. Sign up and create an account, reserving your business name and start ‘tweeting’. You can tweet about your company news, point people back to your website and any useful blogs you might have, or even respond to tweets about your sector.

If you’ve got an iPhone, you can use an application called TwitPic to instantly share your photos on Twitter. It’s a great way to add more personality to your business.

A useful ‘search’ function on Twitter will help you to find relevant people to follow or even target. For instance, as a PR person, I follow PR Week but also lots of design and marketing agencies around Staffordshire and Cheshire. I’ve found lots of new business by tweeting about my services and sharing my expertise. I’ve also searched for things like ‘PR services’ and ‘web developer required’ to target others and introduce myself.

To make the most out of your Twitter account you can use more advanced tools like Hootsuite or TweetDeck. These will make using Twitter a whole lot easier and come with lots of useful features. Take for instance, Hootsuite – you can schedule Tweets to be posted onto your profile while you’re away from your desk. Twitter has also recently introduced ‘Lists’ whereby you can organise all the people you are following, placing them into categories.

Bear in mind that you can't just self-broadcast. Social media is about sharing and talking to people. Get involved with things like #FF - or 'Follow Friday' where you recommend people to follow every Friday. Or 'RT', meaning 'Retweet', things that people are tweeting about to show your support.

And don't expect to win lots of business overnight with Twitter. Think of it more like a way of building relationships that might turn into customers. But never expect it, otherwise people will see through your insincerity.

Facebook

If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s third largest. As a business, you can start a Page where people can 'like' you, similar to Twitter, and become fans of your business. Like Twitter, this is a fantastic free marketing tool to help build your online presence and get more people talking about you and your products or services.

Again, you can point people back to your website, your blog posts or even seek customer feedback. For example, on Creative Boom’s Fanpage, I often talk directly to my fans, asking their opinion on how I can continue to improve the website. As a result, I recently launched this new Tips section – to other help and advice to freelancers, start-ups and small businesses.

Please note that Facebook is only really suitable for consumer type businesses. There's no point in starting a Page if you sell tiles, for example. Facebook is only suited to those companies who naturally have a community... Take for example, high street retailer ZARA. Their Facebook page has literally millions of 'Likes' and all because their product is so suitable for this social media environment.Therefore, if your firm is more business-to-business, consider just focusing on Twitter instead.

Linked In

Linked In is a business version of Facebook that is hugely popular and has over 60 million users worldwide. It has some very useful functions like ‘Recommendations’ where you can encourage clients or colleagues to add a testimonial to your Linked In profile.

It’s also another social media network that has Groups. On my own profile, I've followed relevant groups such as Staffordshire Business and regularly talk online through the forums. It’s also a great way of keeping informed of any relevant business networking events going on in your local area.

But I'll be honest, I don't really like LinkedIn. It's my least favourite of all the social media. But it's there and many people use it, so it's always best to be a part of it, rather than not at all.

Blogging

Writing a blog gives you credibility, helps you to showcase your expertise and target potential new customers online. What’s more, by integrating a blog into your current website, you’ll be providing fresh and relevant copy.

And search engines like Google love regularly updated copy, which will really help boost your SEO. If you’re stuck for things to write then consider the following: you could comment on something in the news; provide tips and advice; share your expertise; review a product or service relevant to your industry or even just talk about your recent client wins. Or read my Things to Blog about when you run out of Ideas article.

Don’t forget to give your blog posts titles with SEO in mind. Think of what people would search for in the search engines. For instance, this feature would be ‘Top tips for social media marketing’. It’s another great way of being found through the search engine results pages.

Forums, chat rooms and chatting online

Contribute to online conversation and check out other people’s blogs that are within your sector, adding intelligent comments/debate to their posts. It will give you further credibility and put you in touch with hundreds of potential new customers.

More importantly, it will sometimes build links back to your own website. Why is link building so important? It’s relevant for SEO and helps to drive more traffic to your website. The more traffic you have, the more potential customers you’re reaching. The more strong and relevant links you have, the more your rankings will improve. Remember, social media goes hand-in-hand with SEO.

Multimedia

Have you considered using multimedia to boost your online presence? Websites like Flickr, Vimeo and YouTube[http://www.youtube.com] are a great way to add more personality to your business.

If you’re a designer and you want to showcase your work, you can easily produce a video gallery of your work and post it onto YouTube. If you’re a photographer you can upload your work onto Flickr, a photo sharing site that also has groups, forums and online communities.

Or how about adding videos to your own website? You could demonstrate a new product? Or just talk to your customers direct by introducing ‘vlogs’ or video blogs.

Join everything up!

Finally, once you’ve got your own Twitter and Facebook accounts up and running and you’ve started a blog or introduced YouTube videos, why not connect them all up? You can use things like Twitterfeed to tap into your blog’s RSS feed and automatically post things onto Twitter and Facebook.

Just think of Twitter and Facebook as powerful tools that will drive traffic to your website. Don’t forget to add some social media icons to your website so that people can easily follow you on Twitter or become your fan on Facebook.And before you know it, you'll have built up your own online community and be in touch with a whole new range of interesting people.

10 secrets for search engine success

Just as doctors at parties often have guests request free medical advice, search engine whiz Luke Jamieson is regularly asked for gratuitous tips about how to grab Google’s attention.

“It happens all the time,” says Luke, director of Adelaide-based website specialist DBG Technologies. “The most common question is ‘how do I get to be number one on Google?’”

Although these questions are no show-stopper for Luke as he prepares for the Christmas party season, he has compiled a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) cheat sheet to help get websites Google-ready. DBG’s 10 SEO Tips for a Google-friendly website are:

1/    Create links that lead to your site

The best way to improve your website’s visibility for Google is with links from other sites, which deliver a double benefit of more ways for people to find your content plus improving your search rankings. Link sources include social bookmarking sites, industry forums, blog comments, local business directories, suppliers and news media websites.

2/    Create fresh relevant content – and keep refreshing it!

Ensure your site contains relevant material because search engines prioritise unique, informative content. Also, highlight key points and keep text snappy as users tend to skim read online.

3/    Make each page attractive to Google

Remember that Google ranks a web page rather than an entire website. By focussing each page around a particular keyword and theme, you have a greater chance of ranking well for that topic.

Write pages around keywords your market searches for rather than using “spammy” jargon.

4/    Promote your website through intelligent use of meta tags

Meta tags are the snippet of text you see displayed under headings in search results. Use enticing descriptive text to encourage searchers to click through to your website. Also, ensure each page on your site has a unique title and heading.

Google rewards integrity in meta tags rather than indexing them indiscriminately: Thus, it’s better to focus on one keyword per page, with meta tags aligned around a particular topic.

5/    Keep it simple for the KISS of success

Use technology to make your website work better, not just to keep up with the latest fad. Tools such as Flash! and JavaScript can make it hard for Google to find content: If you must, use it sparingly.

Even your web server location can impact your site’s Google appeal: Offshore servers can undermine the effectiveness of “local” searches.

6/    Use online tools to make sure your website is trim and terrific

Free online tools such as Google Webmaster or Yahoo SiteExplorer identify problems with your website, such as crawl errors and broken links, and let you submit an XML sitemap of your site, so search engines find all your pages.

7/    Get into the habit of regularly using website analytics

Google Analytics is a free way to track your website traffic. Stats Analysis tells you which sites refer you traffic and which keywords find your site.

As well as measuring if your SEO campaign is working, Google Analytics lets you know where to focus your efforts by monitoring user behaviour, time spent on site, the number of pages visited and which keywords resulted in inquiries.

8/    Social media participation can promote your website

Share content on news or bookmarking sites for others to read and recommend. Build a community on Twitter and Facebook, so you can instantly alert people to updates on your site with a hyperlink to content.

As well as submitting articles that use your knowledge to help people, you can also create content on your site, such as videos, that others can share socially / virally.

9/    Optimise your site’s images for SEO

Use keyword-rich captions and descriptive alternate text tags for all your images and place images near keyword-rich text.

10/    Remember – a website is more than set and forget!

Your website is not something to put online and forget: Think of it as a child that needs ongoing care. SEO is the same: Setting up your website correctly is a start toward getting good rankings but to stay ahead of your competition requires ongoing work.

9 Essential SEO Tips For Small Business In 2011

The end of a decade is upon us and as we ring in and welcome the new year, we do so by building upon what we have accomplished and hopes of achieving our new goals we have set forth. Social media has broken down the communication barriers and helped to pave the way for small businesses to emerge and thrive. While we continue to see growth amongst users within social media, we cannot overlook the power of search engine optimization and getting found.

Getting found online for small businesses is essential to remain competitive in today’s marketplace. The way consumers search has changed, the way they receive and consume the information has changed through sharing on the various social media platforms and also through the way that the search engines present the results for the search queries. In early 2010 the buzz was optimizing for local search, then, were re-introduced to Bing as they went full speed ahead to attract users and making optimizing for Bing worthwhile though creating more of a niche search. Google was hard at work creating instant search and Google Places and most recently confirming that yes, indeed, they are starting to pay attention to our online activity through the social signals. 2011 promises to be as action packed so enacting the essential SEO tips only keeps you ahead of your competitiors.

9 Essential SEO Tips for Small Business in 2011

1. Keyword Phrases. One word phrases are a thing of the past. Yes, it is important to have specific keywords targeted as they relate to your brand and overall industry however we have to keep an eye on what phrases people are querying to find us. Delving into your analytics and analyzing how people are finding you and comparing that to what you wish to be found for will help to secure your ranking.

2. Content. The content that you are creating is not only built around keywords, it is built from what people are going to find useful, has a high propensity to be shared and also to be created from what people would want to link to. The content when we think in the different ways it will be viewed enhances how it is created.

3. Mobile Friendly. A site that is not mobile friendly is losing visitors. We have become a mobile dependent society and adapting your site to mobile devices is not only increasing your chances of searchers having the ability to view your site, it is also securing the trust with them as ultimately when we are searching, we want results. The results via a mobile device need to be more immediate and valuable.

4. Local Search. Local search is still a hot topic. Google Places becoming the default for many industry specific searches has changed the way that people are accepting the search results. This is where the biggest change has taken place. Users have had to embrace this search result change. They want results that they feel that they trust. Appearing in the results, starts the trust.

5. Link Building. A link building strategy that encompasses internal and external linking through directories, reciprocal links as well as engaging in social media through commenting on blogs, creating content that is linked to as well as web pages that are a resource to be linked to is going to point to your site through the search engines as a point of reference and increase your rankings.

6. Canonical Pathway. Creating a clear and precise canonical pathway domain sets to avoid multiple page variations and duplications. The search engine spiders crawl and are unable to determine which is the preferred pathway for your site. Establish one pathway.

7. Crawl Frequency. How often are your pages being crawled? Blogs are crawled and ranked very quickly. Internal web pages that are not linked to or updated and have high visit volume are not crawled as frequently. Monitor through your cache how often your pages are being crawled to determine which pages need to be crawled more frequently and this also can give some insight as to when a new page or blog (for those that are not blogging every day) should be posted to ensure that the page is being crawled and indexed when the crawlers are crawling.

8. Photo Alt Tags. Alt tagging photos seems sometimes to be forgotten. The spiders cannot see the photo, but they can see the text that is associated with the photo. Creating alt tags that contain keywords are not only preventing the stop gap for the spiders, it is allowing an extra source for keyword density.

9. Site Speed. The speed in which your site downloads matters. Visitors will click off a site is taking too long to load.The faster the site loads the more time is spent on the site. This not only is attractive to the user, but the speed of a site matters to the search engines. Of course, the content will outweigh the speed but if you have great content that is slow and people will not wait for it, the search engines will not rank it.

These tips are essential to be ready for 2011. Search is only increasing as we see users engaging online for longer periods and having an ability to do so on the run. Mobile usage, desktop/laptop usage while at work and at home will continue to increase. People are online and trust the search engines to give them results. Can the search engines trust you to give them what they need to rank you?

SEO Tips For Beginner Bloggers

SEO is an important part of blogging. You don't just want to be writing content after content and no one there to read it, no one wants that to happen. So, there are some important white hat SEO tips that a beginner blogger must know and follow as well.

If you are completely new to the concept of blogging then you must read this first to open up your mind about blogging concept "What is Blogging? and how can I benefit from Blogging" and also check out "Top 10 important tips for beginner bloggers".

Now you should be ready to go through with SEO tips for blogging:

·         Blogging platform: When you start blogging on platforms like Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad or anyother platform for blogging, your 80-85% of SEO work is already done by these blogs. Blogs themself are search engine friendly and all the search engines love to crawl blogs. So what you have to do is that try to fill that 20% SEO gap as much as possible.

·         Quality content is the key: Provide good quality content in your blog, if the content is good then only your visitors are going to stick to your blog posts to read it, else they will just skip your blog and your bounce rate will go up.

·         Unique content: In order to get a good content make sure you don't copy it from some other website or blog. Copying content will benefit you in no way at all instead it can lead your blog to be penalized by the search engines and the SERP (search engine result page) will go down.

·         Quality keywords and phrases: Add good quality key phrases to optimize your page for SEO, don't just focus on single keyword, describe your page well in about 160 words and choose your keywords wisely. Don't stuff unnecessery key words.

·         Use targeted keywords in Headlines: Use your targeted key phrases as headline tag(H1, H2 etc). This provides more value to your targeted keywords than that of other words.

Off page SEO (search engine optimization)

·         Blog submission: Submit your blog URL to search engines and top directories on web.

·         Get good backlinks: Ask other bloggers to backlink to your blog. Get links from blogs and websites related to your niche. Make sure you are reputed bloggers and websites to link to your blog. If your blog is referred by good and reputed websites then that will help your blog's creadibility in search engines and your content will also gain prefrence.

·         RSS submission: Submit your RSS to RSS directories on web and blogs that take RSS submissions.

·         Keep your blog updated: Don't make your site look static by keeping the content and not updating it. Also it's always good to provide your visitors with updated and new content. By adding new content you are allowing search engines to index more and more pages from your blog.

These are some of the most important SEO tips which you must follow and you should see results in 20-30 days if you do everything correctly and follow the process.

Never use black hat SEO methods to get top rankings in search engines as it can get your domain banned from search engines.

Hope you will like this post about SEO. Subscribe my blog to get latest updates. Show your appreciation by leaving a comment.