One of the great failings that I see all too often in the use of Social Media as a marketing tool, is the lack of understanding of what it can do for the organic search performance of a businesses products and services. Why?  Because the Social Media user rarely looks beyond the communication services offered by the media. Take Twitter, and the world of micro-blogging as an example. The average user believes that the strength of Twitter is the ability to broadcast a marketing message or campaign to that users follows with the great desire that the campaign is so exciting that it goes viral through Retweets.

That is all well and good but Twitter, as a content-delivery media, can be hit or miss depending on how many of your followers see/read your tweets.

However, Twitter can produce high search engine rankings per this example below. I was searching for a recent photo shoot of the ‘RITCA Coaches meet’  and because I loaded these keywords into a Tweet, one of my search results came from Twitter. Great stuff!

Now that’s marketing, and it’s free! How does this work? It is simply an extension of your web site/ blog’s Internet keyword marketing strategy.   Carefully craft Tweets, which include the keywords that your prospective clients will search for while using Google, Bing etc.  While some of your followers may miss ‘that important Tweet’ we can use the search engines to make sure that they do not miss your marketing message.

The power of Twitter goes well beyond Tweets; it can push you up the organic search rankings.

google webmaster, search marketing, SEO, Twitter Hide

The importance of the Title tag is one of the most effective aspects of search engine marketing but the value of the Title tag is greatly overlook and is often abused. What is the Title tag? When you log into a web site the title tag for each web page appears at the top of the browser but is most commonly noticed when seen on a search engine return page, per below (for my Sports photography web site):

The Title tag is the top line in blue. The bolded words reflect the search term used “George Ross” and this means that the most important keywords for each web page must be included in the title tag for great search engine optimization performance. It is important to state the obvious that by simply having a great, keyword rich title tag alone does not guarantee great organic search engine performance but it is a very important component of a search engine optimization strategy.

The title tag should:

• not exceed 60 characters
• include the most important key words for that web page ( every page on a site should be unique)
• include a location, if you business is regional (state or town)

Most Title tags are badly written because the importance of them is under recognized. I adjust my clients thinking by asking them  to look at their own  title tags and the to consider the keywords that a prospective client would use to find their business. If they match great….but they seldom match.

The title tag should be uniquely crafted for each page, it is tedious and challenging but it is an extremely effective marketing action.

The use of the title tag is considered the 4th most important aspect of search engine marketing, see this blog entry  http://webdesign-ri.com/web_site_design_and_SEO_blog/2009/09/24/top-search-engine-ranking-factors/

If you ant to market your web site, embrace title tags.

SEO, WEB Marketing Hide

There are many tools available to all for SEO and internet marketing and my primary tool is a free plug-in for Firefox...the SeoQuake toolbar.. While I do use other products and techniques to evaluate the search engine optimization of client web sites, SeoQuake is my first stop as it provide a snapshot of the key search engine parameter. These parameters are detailed below:

* Google PR
Google PageRank of current page
* Google Index
Number of indexed pages. Google version.
* Google link
Number of links, pointing to the current page. Google version (Except links from concerned domain).
* Google cachedate
Date of current Google cache.
* Yahoo Index
Number of indexed pages. Yahoo version.
* Yahoo link
Number of links, pointing to the current page. Yahoo version (Except links from concerned domain).
* Yahoo Linkdomain (LD)
Number of links, pointing to the current domain. Linkdomain (LD) operator finds pages linking to domain, as opposed to link which finds references to a single page. Yahoo version.
* Yahoo Linkdomain2 (LD2)
Number of links, pointing to the current domain (2-level domain). Linkdomain2 (LD2) operator finds pages linking to an entire domain, as opposed to linkdomain (LD) which finds references to a current domain (subdomain for example). Yahoo version.
* Yahoo Directory
Domain presence in the Yahoo Directory.
* MSN Index
Number of indexed pages . MSN version.
* MSN link
Number of links, pointing to the current page. MSN version (Except links from concerned domain).
* MSN Linkdomain (LD)
Number of links, pointed to the current domain. Linkdomain (LD) operator finds pages linking to domain, as opposed to link which finds references to a single page. MSN version.
* MSN Linkdomain2 (LD2)
Number of links, pointing to the current domain (2-level domain). Linkdomain2 (LD2) operator finds pages linking to an entire domain, as opposed to linkdomain (LD) which finds references to a current domain (subdomain for example). MSN version.
* Yandex CY
Yandex Rank of current page.
* Yandex index (russian SE)
Number of indexed pages. Yandex version.
* Yandex link
Number of links, pointing to the current page. Yandex version.
* Yandex catalogue
Domain presence in the Yandex Directory.
* Rambler index (russian SE)
Number of indexed pages. Rambler version.
* Rambler top100
Domain presence in the Rambler top100 catalogue.
* DMOZ Directory
Domain presence in the Dmoz Directory.
* Alexa Rank
Traffic estimation index
* WebArchive age
First date in Archive.org
* Del.icio.us index
Link to del.icio.us history for current url.
* Technorati index
Link to Technorati history for current url.
* Digg index
Link to Digg history for current url.
* IP lookup
Current domain IP.
* Whois link
Link to the Whois record of current domain.
* View source
Link to the source code of current web page.
* Check robots.txt
Check if robots.txt file exists and if it does show link to it.
* Page links
Dispaly quantity of internal/external links with the link to the link list.
* Baidu index
Number of indexed pages. Baidu version.
* Baidu link
Number of links, pointing to the current page. Baidu version.
* Wikipedia (EN)
Number of search results found in Wikipedia (EN)
* Ask index
Number of indexed pages. Ask version.
* Bloglines
Number of search results found in Bloglines

I do not use all of these parameters as that would be overwhelming, so I have selected the parameters that are appropriate for my method of working. However, if none of the above parameters meet your needs SEoQuake provides a ‘custom parameters’ module. Great tool, thank you SeoQuake

keyword density, SEO, SeoQuake, WEB Marketing Hide