The Social Media Marketing Wheel

Social media is impacting search engine results! Our wheel explains how:

Word Press Blog/Website
the center of your wheel

Blog/SEO article marketing is important for many reasons. Generating new content keeps people coming back and makes you look like an expert. Blog writing allows your site to be noticed by search engines. By constantly providing new content with specific keywords, it is more likely to move up the results list on Google.

YouTube
YouTube is the second most popular search engine on the planet. More than 100,000,000 different videos are viewed each day on YouTube. Engage your customers so they choose you over your competitors. You will need a customized YouTube Channel, your videos optimized for your key phrases.

Squidoo
Lesser hailed Squidoo provides a place where people can be experts in whatever interests them, and can integrate existing social media accounts and outside links to build up credibility. Pages, referred to as “lenses,” are comprised of different widgets allowing each user, or “lensmaster,” to add different functions and pages to his or her original topic, while increasing the amount of exposure of his or her expertise in more places online.

A great way for certain businesses to boost link popularity and relevancy. Combined with other social media, this is a powerful tool in boosting traffic to your main site.

Facebook
There is no easier way to connect with your future customers than Facebook. Facebook allows you to shop for your own customers by adding them as friends and inviting them to be yours.

Fan pages are a valuable asset because they are indexed by search engines, therefore having the ability to increase your search ranking and draw more people back to your home page.

The possibilities of Facebook increasing your bottom line are endless. Create a promotion to encourage more users to become a fan of your business. Receive feedback on your business through conversations generated through groups and discussions.

Twitter
Twitter has evolved from a small micro-blog website used to update friends and family on your life to an Internet marketing phenomenon. It is a great resource to post links back to your main site, or your site’s blog articles. By spreading your link across various social networks, your arms are constantly outstretched to draw your customers to you.

One of the clearest integrations between social media and the search engines is the Twitter Search Engine on Bing. This tool enables you to search tweets in real-time from within the Bing search engine. Tweets are now in the Bing News feed, as well as a preferred treatment for content “liked” by your Facebook and Twitter contacts.

LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a search engine and has a ton of authority on Google and other popular search engines. Likely if you Google your name and you have a LinkedIn profile, it will show up on the first page of Google. This demonstrates the ranking authority of LinkedIn on Google.

Import your WordPress blog feed to your profile, use Groups to connect with people, create an event and send invitations to your LinkedIn network, get recommendations to attract more clients.

Flickr
Flickr can also be used to generate traffic, build links and increase your visibility in the search results. Add descriptive hyperlinks that encourage people to click from the image to the blog post. Flickr images tend to rank well in the search results for a certain period of time.

Create a descriptive title for the image. This is one of the best places to post your primary keyword. Write a keyword rich description for each photo and use tags.

Yelp
Reputation Management
Yelp is experiencing phenomenal growth! Much like Google has the market on Google for reviews, Yelp now has the iPhone market thanks to Siri, the new Apple personal assistant.

If you own a restaurant or other type of business location, another important task to do after claiming your locations on Google Local Business is to claim them on Yelp. Yelp is important because it is emerging as the leading consumer review site for many types of businesses and it currently receives high priority from the Google Search Engine results.

Business owners greatly benefit when their location is claimed on Yelp. Claiming a location allows the business to personalize their Yelp page in a number of ways.

Google Plus
Add +1 to your pages to help your site stand out. Let visitors recommend your content on Google Search and share it on Google+

You can now set up your own Business Page on Google+. There are lots of ways to promote your site and your Google+ page, from promoting it yourself with Google+ Direct Connect and the Google+ badge, to helping others recommend you with the +1 button. Google’s measurement tools helps understand Google+ activity: what people are saying about your business, how many +1’s your business receives and how these affect your traffic.

Blogging Benefits SEO

You  Need A Blog Now More Than Ever! Here’s Why …

Despite the popularity of Twitter and Facebook , people continue to post to blogs. Blogging platforms provide users with a simple way of instantly publishing material. Content continues to drive visitors. Blogging raises awareness of your brand and increases your authority.

Blogging is a good way to boost your main site’s search engine optimization as well.  Here is how that works.

The best way to draw visitors regularly to a site is to offer something new upon every visit. Your core audience is more likely to share your URL and information if you have something to give, and blogging provides a good way to get content live and distributed easily. In the process, you are likely to gain high positions in relevant search by having updated content on hand.

Bloggers Can Shine!
Yahoo and Google are now pulling results from more than static sites – videos, Tweets, and social links. Search engines place special emphasis on blogs as reliable sources for updated content. So as you continue to post and link back to your main site, you increase the authority of your presence under your given expertise.

Links, Relevance and High Search Results
New content drives people to a site. If your static main site is constructed to present your products and services, the supplementary blog keeps visitors returning. Social media may change the way people promote online, but blogging is a tried and true strategy you need so you can promote via social media.

Other ways blogs benefit SEO:

Crawlable URLs
Most blog software offers uncomplicated URL structure, making it fairly easy for search engine spiders to find and crawl blog content.

Incoming Links Magnet
Blogs link freely to each other  … more than web sites do. Blogs are a significant source of many posts to social news and social media web sites. Text, audio and video are all easily supported for syndication by blogs. The more media available, the more likely it will attract incoming links.

Active Community
Comments and trackback features in blog software encourage interaction. An active blog community creates the kinds of citations or signals from other sites that search engines tend to reward in the rankings. Loyal blog readers can boost a site’s visibility through advocacy on other blogs, in forums offline at conferences as well as on their own blogs and within the comments of your blog.

SEO & Google. Same Story.

Just build it … and they won’t come.
Certainly no small business owners should be under the illusion that simply throwing up a website is sufficient to launch their business on the web! Do you know what you’re up against? Here are just a few things you need to consider …

Google remains the  key to online marketing.
You may have heard plenty about the new social media revolution, but make no mistake. If your business model still depends on organic online search marketing in any way to bring customers to your website, then your fate remains in the hands of Google.

A new way of marketing.
This new approach of reaching your customers over the Internet is about changing your outlook. Think micro markets instead of the masses. “It’s not 1924, and this isn’t Hollywood, but it is a revolution”, says Seth Godin. Read more about it on Seth’s Blog.

Tricks for getting your website found.
The solution to getting your small business site found by potential customers is Search Engine Optimization and it’s more involved than you think. SEO is  a must-have for any company with a web presence, but it is especially important for small businesses with limited brand recognition.

The bad news? Because SEO does not follow an exact methodology taught in most business schools, and the algorithms that power Google and other search engines are covert operations, there is a lot of bad information floating around on the topic.

I suggest going to the source, GOOGLE and downloading their Starter Guide to SEO. 32 pages, but free, accurate, very complete,  and no bull. In fact, I think this PDF by Google is the best one I have yet read on the subject.

“In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Your Web Real Estate

This is a simple graphic of a complicated piece of real estate! Your Internet Presence.  It reveals how interconnected all platforms are and how essential each is to the other.  Because the Internet is constantly changing, your business needs some, most, or all of  these tools.

When you click on the graphic,  it will take you to a larger view with an overview, and descriptions of terms and concepts.

Web Equity by Mike Blumenthal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.blumenthals.com.

Websites For Businesses That Don’t Have Time For Websites

You know the importance of your business having a presence on the internet. You may have heard or read about the buzz surrounding the new local search initiatives on the part of Google and other major search engines. Maybe you already know that 73% of all searches are somehow related to local searches and that 51% of people who search for product information characterize themselves as “shop online purchase offline.”

There’s a huge hungry crowd of customers out there. But you just don’t have the time or resources to put up an efficient, effective website. You’re too busy doing what you do best, running your business.

Maybe you’ve done a few things like signing up with some directories. Maybe your industry has a directory service as well. You get your name and contact info out there along with millions of others. But have you ever received a lead or a sale from those efforts? Would you even know if you did?

The Challenge
Marketing is a vital part of any business. You can have the best bicycle shop, or be the best tax accountant in town but if nobody knows you exist it just doesn’t matter does it? That’s why you spend money on the yellow pages and local advertising.

But websites are different in your mind aren’t they. With the yellow pages you call your account representative, work out an ad, pay the bill and it’s done. You don’t need special skills. But a website? A website takes technical skills and knowledge of search engine optimization so it can be found. Specifically local search engine optimization so it can be found by local people who are potential customers or clients.

You simply don’t have the time for that which means you’d have to pay big bucks to outsource the job right?

The Solution
Actually the answer to that question is “not necessarily.” There is a remarkably functional, flexible and user friendly free website software called WordPress. It is an open source platform available to everyone and millions have used it for their blogs and small businesses. The only costs associated with it are the purchase of a domain name ($10) and a hosting service ($10 a month).

Word Press websites are loved by Google because they are structured in a way that makes it easy for the Google spiders to crawl. It’s loaded with automatic features that even let the search engines know immediately when you update the site with new content.

But the design and the structure of a blog is not ideal for either the professional look of your business or, more importantly, local search.

There is a solution though that is effective both in terms of ranking in the search engines and low maintenance. The SmallBiz WordPress Theme provides a professional business theme and design that can quickly get you in front of local customers and do it with a minimum amount of time required by you. You can have an effective presence on the web without digging into the time you need to run the business. That of course does not count the time you spend responding to customer requests that are generated by the site.

If you want to take advantage of the enormous marketing power of local search, do give us a call at 561.906.3436 and at least investigate the possibilities of a search optimized website for your business.

Facebook Advertising for Local Small Business

simple seo steps

Optimizing for LOCAL search is a great way to learn SEO. Why?  Because there is less competition. Here’s how.

• Write down your goal. Why are you doing this? Why do you want people to find your site?
• Brainstorm and write down search queries. What words would people type into the search engines to look for your company?
• Research your chosen keywords. Sign up for Google Adwords and learn how to use the provided “keyword tool” and “ad text ideas” generator. Learn how to use Wordtracker (paid) and/or the Keyword Difficulty tool (free).
• Using what you learned from keyword research, record what you believe to be the best keywords .
• Analyze the current search engine results pages  for your keywords. Who is ranking? What are they doing effectively and ineffectively? Investigate and get to know your competition.
• Create a list of your competition. Use the information from the previous step to create a list of competitors.
• Use Yahoo Site Explorer to find the sources of your competitor’s links. Record the sources of links your competitors have and save them for later.