Social Media Optimization Becoming More Important Than Search Engine Optimization

The rapid growth of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, is bringing about a shift in focus for the online presence of businesses.  The new focus is being dubbed as social media optimization (SMO) by industry experts.  Some feel that SMO may become more important to businesses than SEO (search engine optimization).

A future where the number of hits on a website is less important than the size of the network an organization has built on sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn may not be that far off.

That is not to say that SEO strategies will not be important as well.  People are still going to go to Google and search for products and services they want or need.  However, there are some distinct advantages that SMO holds over SEO.

The use of social media gives organizations a chance to change interactions online from having mostly a transactional nature with no personal touch, to ones that build a relationship between a business and their clients or prospects.

People are more likely to buy from someone they know, like, and trust.

With so many people using sites like Facebook and Twitter, people are almost expecting that a company has a presence on these sites.  The advantage for a business owner is that those who do use social media sites tend to use them on a very frequent basis.

For example, statistics show that of the more than 140 million users of Facebook, over half of them use it on a daily basis.  With the creation of applications that allow people to log on to these sites right from their cell phone, users today have such easy and convenient access to these sites that it seems unlikely that those trends will decline anytime soon.

Video marketing sites like YouTube and Vimeo can give an organization a chance to put a face with a name.  Many business owners today are recording short messages about their products and services to share on these sites.  These videos give them all the benefits of a television commercial without the high cost.  In fact, some research is showing that many people trust a simple video shot with a handheld camera even more than a corporately produced, high priced advertisement.  There is something about simplicity that people like and trust.

The use of these social media sites can easily be intertwined.  A video shot on YouTube can then be embedded into a Facebook page.  A Twitter account can be used to broadcast a message to followers and let them know about the new video on the Facebook page.  All of the sites will have links pointing visitors to the organization’s main website.  In this way, organizations can stretch their reach farther than ever before.

Another advantage to business owners is the viral nature of social media.  A user of Twitter may “retweet” the broadcast of a business they are following.  Now instead of a business just reaching its followers, it is reaching the followers of their followers.  Some of them may pick up the message and decide to send it on to their followers.  A message on a Facebook page may attract comments from the “fans” of the page or they may choose to share the message with all of their friends.  The activity of those fans will be broadcast on the news feed of each of their connections.  It may attract interest from those connections.  They may choose to visit the organization’s fan page and become a fan as well.  Their activity might then peak the curiosity of their friends, and so on.

In this way, social media can give a business organization a super-charged version of word-of-mouth advertising.  There is no more powerful form of advertising than hearing an endorsement from someone you trust.  People may not talk to all of their friends and family on a weekly, monthly, or even yearly basis.  However, if they post something on a social media site that they are a member of, chances are all of their friends and family who are one of their connections on the site will see it within a day or two.

The business organizations who embrace this change and start to really invest in their social media presence will find themselves far ahead of their competitors who jump in much later.

Using Facebook For Your Business

Not too long ago it was commonly believed that Facebook was for kids.  I believed it.  You believed.  We all did.  Times have changed, and they have changed quickly.

Consider the following:

Between September 2008 and February 2009, the number of Facebook users between the ages of 35 and 44 increased by 51%.  Facebook users in the 45-54 age range grew by 47%.  More than half of the 140 million Facebook users are out of college, and it’s growing everyday.

In today’s troubling economic climate, business owners are looking for new, inexpensive methods of tapping into their market.  More and more businesses are turning to social media services like Facebook.

Facebook allows you to create a page profiling your business.  What is great about these pages is that they are free to setup.  Giving your business an identity on Facebook helps to strengthen your brand.

A page can grow exponentially.  Whenever someone becomes a “fan” of your page, all of their friends see on their status update that they became a fan.  Many will also become fans.  Then their friends will see the same thing.

You can think of your Facebook page as a living, growing advertisement.  It’s like having an ad in the YellowBook that you can change and update as often as you like.  Let your customers know about your latest products or services.  Keep them up to date on new promotions or sales.  You can even update them about staff changes in your office.

Your Facebook page will also allow you to post pictures and videos.  Use it to showoff pictures of your most recent satisfied customers.  Shoot a quick video to tell your customers about why they should choose you over your competitors and have it live on your page in minutes.  You can also post videos of testimonials from past customers right on your page.

The options are really endless, but here are a few ways we have seen local businesses utilizing Facebook.

Real Estate Agents

Post your latest listings long before they’ll ever hit the newspaper.

Shoot a video walk thru of a house and put it on Facebook.

Schedule events on your Facebook page of open houses and invite all your followers to it.

Restaurants / Bars

Inform your fans about your weekend specials.

Introduce new entrée’s or drinks to your customers by posting them on Facebook.  Create some buzz to drive traffic into your establishment.

Post your live entertainment schedule on the page.

CPA’s

Keep your clients up to date on important changes in the tax laws.

Remind customers about upcoming important dates.

Auto Sales

Post pictures or even videos of the latest cars to hit your lot.

Update potential buyers on your latest sale or promotion.

Video testimonials of past customers.

Artists

Post pictures of your latest work.

Schedule Facebook events to invite followers to your next show.

These are just a few of the ways we have seen different businesses maximizing the potential of Facebook.  It can really be used by any type of business, big or small.  If you have questions about how you can best use Facebook for your business, please contact us.

All Flash And No Cash – Why Using Flash Might Be Hurting Your Website.

Flash Might Be Killing Your SEO

Many website developers have been using Macromedia / Adobe Flash when designing websites for clients. Flash gives them the ability to create some visually stunning designs. Although these sites may look appealing, and thus are probably easy to sell to business owners, there are some serious drawbacks to using Flash when designing websites.

Today, many internet users begin their session with Google or some other search engine. Many even do this if they know the URL of the site they want to visit. Search engines are the gateway to the internet. With so many different domain extensions today (.com, .net, .org, etc.) it is easier to trust Google to find what they are looking for. Because of this, it is absolutely a must that businesses make their websites easily visible to search engines.

Search engines work by scanning information on the internet, indexing it, and then returning the best match when a user enters a query. Search engines are programmed to read text. They can understand the context of hypertext markup language, or HTML for short. When a search engine comes across information embedded in graphic formats such as Flash, it has a difficult time extracting any details of what is contained within.

Websites constructed completely using Flash will often not rank well in the search engines. Even websites built with only a little bit of Flash will have a difficult time dominating the search engines.

Creating a website using Flash also creates great problems with tracking and reporting. A great tool for website marketers is using some kind of website analytics program to track detailed information about visitors to the website. What these tracking tools allow one to do is track where a visitor came from, what pages they viewed on the website, and from what point did they leave the website. Obviously, this allows for fine tuning and improving the site in question.

Without getting into all the nitty gritty details of how these programs perform their tasks, let me just say that Flash throws a big wrench into the whole process. The analytics program can track that the user did enter into the Flash object, but will be unable to give any data about what the user interacted within inside there, what they viewed or didn’t view, and where they exited. Now, if an entire site is programmed in Flash and not just a few little interactive additions to the site, you might as well forget extracting any information about what your visitors are doing when they come to your site.

Websites programmed entirely in graphic formats do not allow for any bookmarking or linking to specific pages of a website. This is often referred to as deeplinking by SEO marketers and is a vital part of search engine optimization.

Flash websites also take far longer to load. Ever visit a site and then have to wait ten seconds while some intro loads and plays for you? Flash is the culprit in this case. Not only is it not user-friendly, but recently Google announced that they will be incorporating website load times into their search engine rankings. If your site takes too long to load, you might find all your competitors ranked ahead of you in the search engines.

Flash does give website designers the tools to make some fantastic looking interactive sites. Those same designers usually don’t understand the harm they are doing to a business by using Flash. In only some cases does using it make sense for a website, such as creating a multimedia site to support an already established brand name. Otherwise, you may end up with a beautiful website that nobody will ever see.

The Power Of Anchor Text In Your SEO Strategy

Anchor text is one of the most overlooked elements in a solid SEO link building strategy. However, it might be the single most important element in achieving high rankings in the search engine result pages.

What is anchor text? It is simply the visible text of a hyperlink.

For example, if I was linking to a site such as the UFC’s homepage, I might use the name UFC for the link like this.

However, I could also give it a more descriptive link such as ’The World’s Premiere Mixed Martial Arts Organization .

Anchor text is a very powerful tool. There are tons of examples of this. A simple one is to go to Google and search for the term “click here”. Adobe Reader’s website is number one on the search engine result page out of over 1 BILLION LISTINGS!!!

Did Adobe optimize their site for the term “click here” in the search engines? Absolutely not. Nowhere on the page will you find the phrase “click here”. It is not listed in the meta keywords or the domain name. How is this possible? The answer is simply anchor text. There are thousands of links from all over the internet pointing back to this page with the phrase “click here” in their anchor text. In this case, it is anchor text alone that is resulting in Adobe claiming the top spot in search engines.

How can your SEO strategy benefit from using anchor text? All good SEO strategies should begin with keyword research. Lots of it. This research will help you to identify the best keywords or keyword phrases to try to increase your rank for. Your links should include these keywords and phrases in their text. When many links are pointing back to your site with a particular word or phrase in their anchor text, Google feels this shows authority on the topic.

There are many different methods to use for link building. You might exchange links with other webmasters, use article marketing, submit your site to social bookmarking sites and online directories, or even buy links. Whatever methods you are using, it is vitally important that you are getting the full benefit of each of your links by utilizing the best anchor text.

When implementing your SEO plan, be mindful that using the same exact text for each and every one of your links is probably not the best method. This may be looked upon by Google and other search engines as suspicious or unnatural. Try targeting multiple keywords with your links. You will want to use both singular and plural of terms that potential visitors might be searching for. Try to use closely related variations of words, such as “coach” and “coaching”.

A well planned out linking strategy for search engine optimization begins and ends with keyword research. From there you use the power of anchor text to achieve high rankings in the SERP’s.

5 Solid Reasons Why Article Marketing Is the Most Powerful Method For Driving Traffic To Your Website

As you undoubtedly are aware of, having traffic is very important for your website if you want to be able to earn an income online. You can drive traffic to your website using a wide range of tools.

Among all the different ways of generating traffic to your website, writing and submitting articles remains the most powerful tool for boosting your web site traffic and skyrocketing your sales and online profits.

So why is creating and submitting articles so useful in creating traffic to your website?

1. Articles enable you to become an guru in your niche. By writing high quality and desired articles in your niche, you become an expert. Trust and confidence from your prospects is also built. As an expert, clients will feel confident to buy from you, and this will explode your sales and online business profits.

2. Articles are a cheap way of increasing traffic to your website. You can create your own articles or you can hire a ghostwriter to write some articles for you, and this does not cost much at all. You can then submit your articles to many directories. There are many products that you can enlist the help of to automatically submit your articles to many directories, and this boosts the quantity of links pointing back to your website.

3. Articles are viral and powerful in generating traffic to your website. At the bottom of all your articles, you will find a resource box containing your website URL. Your articles will be published by a great number of directories, websites and e-zines containing your website URL. Just by creating articles and submitting articles, you have created a powerful viral tool with many websites having your website URL on their sites.

4. Articles will result in life long results and will continue to drive traffic to your site for a long time. Unlike other tools of marketing that bring on momentary results, articles will continue to bring traffic to your website for a long time. All your articles are archived in article directories, and that means anyone can still stumble upon them and visit your website. Your articles can generate thousands of permanent one-way links to your website.

5. Articles make search engines index your website and send traffic to your website. Writing and submitting a great number of articles to article directories is very powerful in making your website visible on search engines. By including your keywords in your articles, when people are trying to find information about your niche and type those keywords, your articles and website appear on search engines, therefore making it easy for you to get a lot of traffic on your website.

Even though there are many tools for driving traffic to a website, article marketing remains the most effective tool that brings long term results.

The Importance Of Being On Page One Of Google

We see it all the time.  Business owners setup a website and think that is all they have to do. Now the internet traffic will just magically find their website and the sales will start to roll in.

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but it takes a LOT more work than that to generate a large amount of web traffic to your site.  You need to have a well thought out strategy to get your site to the first page of Google, and you need to start implementing it right away.

Right now 49% of Google’s search engine traffic clicks on the very first listing in the search results.  That’s right.  49%.  What could that mean for your business?  If you are in a line of business whose keywords are searched 15,000 times a month, that means nearly 7500 unique visitors each month just from search engine traffic.  What if it is a highly popular field that is searched for 50,000 times a month?  100,000 searches?  500,000 searches?

Here’s another fact for you.  A whopping 92% of Google’s users never look past page three of the search results.  Guess what that means?  If you are not on the first three pages of Google, chances are 92% of the traffic on Google has no idea that you or your business exists.

As of 2008, 39% of internet users believed that businesses who were found on page one of the search results were industry leaders.

What are you doing today to get your business to Page One?