One of my new business-to-business clients was new to the world of Social Media marketing  and we selected LinkedIN, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr (for image marketing) to get them up and running. Although we have created connectivity with other social media sites, the above 4 will be the message drivers.  Once we created the accounts, we had no contacts which raised the question of ” How do I get contacts to begin networking via social media”. While the following addresses Twitter, facebook, LinkedIn and Flickr the techniques pretty much apply to all social media networking.  I offer the client the following which has proved to be very successful:

Step 1: Upload your contact database

The majority of the Social Media platforms import contacts from an online email accounts, so the very first step is to upload you contact database to either Google or Yahoo mail

Step 2: Invite contacts from your database to  become part of your social media network, as follows:

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/invitations/find_on_contacts

Import contacts from: Yahoo, Gmail and AOL

Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages#!/invite.php?ref=sb

Import contacts from: Yahoo, Gmail, AOL and Windows live Hotmail

LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/secure/importAndInvite?trk=hb_add_conn

Import contacts from: Yahoo, Gmail, AOL and Windows live Hotmail plus LinkedIn does permit you to upload direct from your desktop email program

Flickr

http://www.flickr.com/import/people/

Import contacts from: Yahoo, Gmail,  and Windows live Hotmail

Step 3: market your social media connections

1)     Complete your bios and make them appealing to your target audience

2)     Encourage your  followers and fans to retransmit your posts to their  social media  friends.

3)     Your staff  and personal friends can really help the cause  by occasionally posting something about your business on their  social media platforms

4)     Link to you social media connections every where: website, email (including the email signatures of your staff), forum signatures etc

5)     Include in all hard copy marketing collateral: business cards, flyers etc

Step 4: Addition Twitter specific actions

• Use hashtags  e.g. #UCONN  – read this blog to find out the benefits of hash tags
  • http://www.wildapricot.com/blogs/newsblog/archive/2008/03/11/an-introduction-to-twitter-hashtags.aspx

• Send Twitpics, photos of your products  but use hashtags to identify them,  in the hope that they will be retweeted  which will build brand.

Once these steps have been completed we can move into the world of a paid promotional marketing strategy but I will address that in a future article.

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Selecting the correct keywords to search engine optimize your web site  will make or break your  website’s search engine performance.  You simply have get this right if you want to out perform your competition and put eyeballs onto your brand.

The first step in any web development project should not be the development of the site it should be the development of a keyword strategy.

Why? Because your key word strategy will be used :

• To select a domain name.  A keyword rich domain is highly desired from a search marketing perspective
• To create web page URLs
• To name all images
• In  ALT /Titles
• Anchor links
• Navigation menu items
• In heading tags
• In web page content

And, of course, the keyword strategy will be the core of each web pages’  Title/Meta Description and Meta Keywords.

Given the above, why would you start a web site project without first formulation your key word strategy?

In working with my clients I find that almost all of them ‘drink their own Kool-Aid” in that each client speaks a language of their particular industry but that language often differs from the language of their customers. Web sites must speak the language of the target customers. While attorneys make use the term “estate planning” to describe this segment of their business, the search term “wills” is much more commonly used. I am not advocating that we ignore “estate planning” but that we build the term “wills’ into the keyword strategy

This is easy to validate thanks to Google’s Ad words tool. We can use this tool to find the most popular, relevant,  keyword/keyword phrases with respect to the term that you are investigate.

So, before you begin a web development project, understand the language of the target market with respect to the products and services on offer and then  validate with Google Keywords tool.

Be prepared to learn new information about the language of your customers, this can be quite revealing.

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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.

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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.

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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

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When web designers publish a web site it is often only  after many, many,  client project reviews and page edit after page edit with a focus, a sole focus,  on how the web site will appear in a browser. Few clients have any interest other than how the web site will appears in a web browser and they just assume that everything else is in place that will make the web site perform on search engines.

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However, in the months that follow publication the client  observes that the web site simply is not performing well on search engines!. What to do!

One of the first steps is to understand how a search engine reads you web site.

A great, efficient and simple  way to evaluate  your site is to look at the site in the same way that a search engine spider would… checking each page with a text browser using a Lynx Browser. This tool reads all the text on a web page including the ‘Alt’ text assigned to images.

If you’d like quickly to check a page on a site you could use the Lynx Viewer. but for maximum convenience and efficiency you can download Lnyx and run it locally.

It is quite common that web sites that look spectacular have little-to-no content and this occurs because of a dependence on images and flash files and very little use of text. Spiders read text.

If your web site must be image intensive then please read this blog entry for advice on image optimization for search engines…http://webdesign-ri.com/web_site_design_and_SEO_blog/2009/09/18/how-to-search-engine-optimize-images/

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When WEB Design RI performs SEO web site check the most common web site ommision especially a site that was designed several years ago (Sitemaps in this format were fiorst used by Google in 2005),  is the  sitemap.xml file. The sitemap specifications are detailed at http://www.sitemaps.org

If you want your web site to be indexed  by the major search engines and you would like the search engines to be  to be notified of changes to your site then you must include a site map XML file in your web site. These files permit the search engines to  crawl web sites in an intelligent fashion.

Sitemaps are what is known as a URL inclusion protocol where we notify the search engines of all of the URLs that we would like to be included when they crawl our sites and this compliments the Robots.txt files which is a URL exclusion protocol. See my Robots.txt blog entry.

Sitemaps are extremely useful on web sites which are not browser friendly and that use rich Flash or AJAX content.

Sitemaps are used by the largest search engines:  Google, MSN, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.

The process is relatively simple:

1)    Create  an XML site map file  – http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ is a free sitemap generator tool  – there are many free products like this

2)    Save your sitemap.xml file to your web site root directory

3)    Upload your sitemap.xml file to your web server.

4)    Create a webmaster account with Google Webmaster, Bing Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer and upload the sitemap file.

5)    This step is important and is often ignored: When you make changes, especially the addition of pages, to your website – create an updated sitemap.xml file  and upload the new file  to your web server and the next time your site is crawled the spiders will look for the new pages.

Sitemaps do have limits 50,000 URLs and 10 megabytes , so keep your web site to under 50,000 pages!

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In many regards,  search engine optimization is a black art because there is not a set of definitive rules to follow, therefore,  much is left to both interpretation and emotion. Emotive decision factors are never a good thing!  Google publish a set of best practice guidelines but there are many nuances above and beyond the guidelines that define them as that guidelines not rules.. However, SEOMOZ.org publishes a list of the top SEO factors as assessed by a panel of experts and below is the top five from their overiew, for search marketers this is an invaluable report. Read the full report here What is interesting about this survey is that even that panel of experts cannot agree and where consensus is not achieved a contentious factor is assigned. This is good reading for the search marketer.

1. Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links

   73% very high importance

2. External Link Popularity (quantity/quality of external links)

   71% very high importance

3. Diversity of Link Sources (links from many unique root domains)

   67% very high importance

4. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag

   66% very high importance

5. Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains (e.g. TrustRank, Domain mozTrust, etc.)

   66% very high importance

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A commonly missed opportunity when building web sites is the failure to search engine optimize images. In a competitive world, any edge that you can gain over your competition  should and must be taken. If you fully optimize your images it is more than likely that your competitor has not, because seldom do, and you will gain an edge and this edge may push you higher in organic search rankings. We need focus our attention on two attributes: the file name and the HTML ALT tag.

FILE NAME: Most images on web sites have generic names either the nomenclature which is assigned by the camera (IMG_1234, DSC_7897 etc) or are assigned the generic name of a web template e,.g photo1, photo2, image1, image2 etc. While these are extremely convenient that are useless from an SEO perspective. How many people with search for IMG_1234? It is important to rename all of your photos which include the primary search keyword. For instance, I am sports photographer and as such it is important that I include the name of the event in each photo. So, if my camera outputs file#   IMG_1756, I will rename that to CVS_Downtown_5K_09202009_IMG1756.jpg now we have a file name that makes sense to a search engine by carrying the event name and I retain the file name for my library purposes (which is very important, trust me!) If you can be more specific with your file name, you should be, but as I may shoot 1,000 to 4,000 images at an event, I have to take a more general approach.

ALT tag: this allows you to assign description to an image in the example above – CVS_Downtown_5K_09202009_IMG1756.jpg – I would add a more specific description e.g ” Shalane Flanagan winning the 2009 CVS Downtown 5K in Providence, Rhode Island”

Now, we have both our image name and image ALT tag with descriptions which include search terms.

Also, make sure that you turn on the search images attribute in Google.

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