Internet Marketing 24-7: Social Media Marketing for Business

Internet Marketing 24-7: Social Media Marketing for Business: Social Media Marketing  for Business So if I'm a prospective customer and I'm looking for a local place to buy gourmet cupca...

Social Media Marketing for Business

So if I'm a prospective customer and I'm looking for a local place to buy gourmet cupcakes, I would go to Google or Bing or Yahoo! and type in 'west palm beach  gourmet cupcakes', hit Return, and your web site would come up on that first page or the second page.

Social Media Marketing for Business

Then after everybody started getting comfortable with the idea of web sites, along came the notion of a blog, which is a web site, but it is something that is much easier to keep up to date and it has some unique features about it that helps you market your company as well. It could replace your existing web site; your entire web site could be a blog with pages that allow people to purchase services and so on. Or, more often, it's a supplement.

So then we come to social media, first, we had web sites, then blogs, and now social media. So it gradually opens up as we talk. Social media is a place where everybody sort of on equal footing. It's not just a blog author who responds to comments, but basically everybody is talking via comments to each other. There are all sorts of social media venues. There are ones where you share your pictures, like Flickr or Pinterest, or your business contacts, like LinkedIn, your videos on YouTube, bookmarks on del.icio.us.There is Twitter, which is like a micro blog and Facebook, which is like a little neighborhood, all these different kinds of venues.

What do all of these have in common? First of all, they all form social communities. Once you set up an account on one of these, you get to feel like it's your second home, and the other people who'll become part of your group in those social communities become like your friends. It adds a human touch to what's essentially everybody sitting alone in front of their computer typing. Many of these online social networks allow a business to establish themselves as a community member just like any other individual, and so when you are there representing your business as just another citizen of the online network, you can also pick up friends or fans of your brand.

You can speak as though you are writing a blog post in that there was an actual human being hiding behind your company name. As long as you're a good citizen on the social network, that you are not trying to spam anybody or scam or just use it for your own advantage, that you're actually contributing to the network as a regular community member, then you will usually get very good reception from people, and the stature of your company is elevated. And of course, while you are there interacting with other users, sharing video, sharing pictures, whatever, you also have the opportunity to subtly and quietly market your service. to promote upcoming events, to provide customer service to your clients over there.

One of the most powerful features of a business being involved with social media marketing is that your message can get spread virally, what we call Word of Keyboard, because in all of these services, everybody has a group of friends and when they share something, it's shared with those friends, and those friends can re-share.

This is what we call viral marketing, and it's extremely powerful. Now, normally, the kind of work that you are doing on these services isn't just for itself. What you're trying to do is establish a funnel.

You are trying to engage people in these social venues and make them want to go to another location, to your web site or to your blog or to walk into your store, for that matter. So, you're using it to talk about products and services and events that people can actually commit to, or could get one step closer to closing in, in another place. Out of all of these services that I've mentioned, and there are many more.

So what this means is that your customers are on Facebook, Twitter and others. And if there is an opportunity for you to get there as well as your business, you know you want to be where your customers are Essentially, all you need is an email address and online access. They work together synergistically; you can use Twitter to help your Facebook presence, use Facebook to help your Twitter presence, and they're both quite friendly to businesses.

Facebook has this whole concept of Facebook pages, for example that are just for promoting your business. There are a great number of businesses who are on Twitter and who are able to promote their businesses there as well, and Twitter loves that. One of the best things is that both of these services are completely free. So, in view of the overwhelming number of your potential customers and existing customers who are already on Facebook and Twitter, the fact that they are free and they are easy to get started with, why aren't you there?

We can help you establish a successful business presence on both Twitter and Facebook and other social media properties.

Steve Steinberger

www.klicktwice.com

561-281-8330

SEO and Website Analytics (+playlist)

Internet Marketing 24-7: Website Link Building

Internet Marketing 24-7: Website Link Building: The perfect website link What kind of website links do you really want pointing to your site? You can't always get exactly what ...

Website Link Building

The perfect website link

What kind of website links do you really want pointing to your site? You can't always get exactly what you want of course, First, you should try to get textlinks rather than image links. I'll take an image link over no link of course, because even if ypu can't get keywords into my links, the links still provide some value, such as passing through PageRank.

The ideal is a text link, so that you can use anchor text keywords to tell the search engines what the reference page is about.

Link Building | The Perfect Link

If we have enough keyworded links, we are in effect, Google bombing the site we're linking to. Of course, the text needs to contain useful keywords not "click here" or not your company name or URL, but rather the keywords for which you want to rank well. You can add a title attribute to the tag if you wish. Where should this link be placed? Well, first of all, it needs to be on a web page that is indexed by the search engines. If it's not indexed, then of course that link has no value.

That's not to say that you necessarily turn down links on pages that are not indexed. If the page is very new for instance, it maybe indexed soon. In fact, one technique that used to be popular was to figure out which links to your site are on non-indexed pages, then get those pages indexed by linking to them from other already indexed pages. Anyway, as far as the ideal link goes, it needs to be on an indexed page. What kind of site do you want your link placed on?

The idea here is that a link from a related site is more valuable than a link from a non-related site. A link to your olive oil website is more valuable when it comes from the cooking site, for instance, or some kind of food site, rather than from a blog about American history. This may be true to some degree, however it's completely untrue that a link from a non-related site holds no value as some people claim. I'll take a well keyworded link from anywhere I can get it. Relevant is the ideal, but not 100% essential.

Let's not forget trust either. As we're link building, the ideal link, the very best link we can, we might as well put it on a well-trusted site, perhaps a major newspaper website or the website owned by a highly respected university;.edu domains are thought to carry extra weight in the search engines, as are .gov domain names, government websites.

 Our ideal link will also be on a high PageRank web page. PageRank is a measure of value, so as we're dreaming about the perfect link right now, we might as well get that link from the highest PageRank page we can.

It also needs to be on a readable portion of the page. For example, if a page is pulling content from another source using JavaScript and your link is in that content, it may not be read. Actually, Google can read JavaScript and sometimes does, but quite likely not all the time. It does, for instance, read the content in Facebook pages that is being pulled in using JavaScript, all the dynamically updating content that appears as you scroll down the page.

Where within a page is ideal? Preferably within content, rather than in a list of links. Again, I'll take a link anywhere on the page, rather than no link, but links embedded into paragraphs are likely to be more valuable than links in a big list of links. The theory is that links in paragraphs tend to be surrounded by other related words. The search engines may see these related keywords as associated with the link giving the link more value. On the other hand, it's not at all a bad thing to get a link in say a blog's blogroll, its list of favorite sites, as then you end up getting a link from every page in the blog.

It's fair to say that it's better to have a hundred links from a hundred different sites, rather than a hundred links from one single site. However, it's also better to have a hundred links from one site, than just one link from that site. A hundred links from a single site is not a hundred times the value of a single link from that site, but it's worth more than just one link. As far as where to put a link on the page goes, perhaps there really is no ideal, rather it's good to get a variety; links embedded into paragraphs, links in blogrolls that appear hundreds of times, links in page footers that appear on every page, and so on.

To summarize then, what's the ideal link? It's a text link with good keywords in the anchor text and a title attribute if you think that may be important, or want to cover all bases. It will be on an index page on a relevant site, a trusted site in fact, perhaps a .edu or .gov domain with a high PageRank. The link should be in static text, not text created browser site dynamically. Getting the link into paragraph text is a good thing though I like to see a variety of link types really.

So that's the ideal. But as I mentioned before, you can't always get what you want. You have total control over the links in your own site of course.  Even internal links are important. As far as links from other sites are concerned though, it's harder to get the ideal. Sometimes other site owners will link using your URL or your company name, rather than the keywords you want for instance. Still, do what you can to get as close to the ideal as possible. But even non-ideal links have value.

If I can't get a text link, I'll have an image link. If a text link has to use my URL or company name, so be it. And most links I get won't be from high PageRank pages. In fact, if there's one thing that I think is most important, more important than PageRank or site relevance or placement on the page, it's keywords. The single most important thing is to get plenty of keyworded links pointing to your site.

Steve Steinberger
www.klicktwice.com
561-281-8330

Keyword Attributes

 Keyword Attributes... What are they

There's an enormous amount of data available to us about the keywords people are typing in the search engines, and it's important to be able to evaluate the different attributes of a keyword before we decide whether or not to target one with our SEO strategy.

Keyword Attributes | Relevance, Volume and Competition

There are three things you'll need to consider when choosing your keywords: relevance, search volume, and competition.

Keyword Relevance:

The first thing you need to do when you're deciding whether a keyword is relevant to your business, is to ask yourself one simple question: Does the keyword you found accurately reflect the nature of the products and services that you offer? If so, you've nailed it.

The number one objective of a search engine is to find and deliver the most relevant content to its users for a given search term. The best way to understand your customer's search behavior is to put yourself in their shoes. If you were in the market to buy a car, how would you use a search engine? You probably wouldn't type the word car in and click search. Instead, you would use something very specific to what you're looking for like "2010 jeep wrangler" Now, if you are selling 2010 jeep wrangler and you have a page on your website dedicated to them, then that is a relevant keyword.

Relevant keywords are much more likely to drive conversion actions on your website than more generic ones.

Keyword Search Volume:
While "2010 jeep wrangler" might be extremely relevant to your business, it might not be used to very often in a Search Engine. Search Volume is the number of searches per month for a particular keyword, and if you use a tool like the Google Keyword Tool, it's represented as the average number of searches for the last 12 months. Because this number is a rolling average, seasonality and other trend patterns are not accounted for. If your business is seasonal, you will want to take a look at the Local Trends column in the Keyword Tool. 

Keyword Competition:
What we mean by this is essentially just how difficult it is going to be for us to rank in front of our competition on a search engine results page. Unless you're introducing a new product or technology to the market you're probably going to find content similar to yours already on the web. We can look at things like the number of pages about a given topic, authority, and trust of the websites competing with you, back links to their websites, and more.

One way to look at this is by evaluating the keyword in the Paid Search, or Cost per Click markets. The number of search advertisers actively bidding on a keyword can be a good proxy for just how difficult the keyword is going to be on the organic side. The Google Keyword Tool has a Competition column that shows you this.

In our car example where we looked at"car" versus "2010 Jeep Wrangler." We might find that there are lots and lots of these specific types of keywords that don't get a lot of volume but are very relevant to our example, and not very competitive. Keywords like "used 2010 jeep wrangler red" or "used 2010 jeep wrangler  off road package might not give us a lot of volume by themselves, but taken together, we could be attracting lots and lots of relevant, likely-to-convert visitors to our website.

So let your competitors go after the word "car," and let your keyword research be your guide as you balance how to get as much relevant search volume as you possibly can with the least competition.

Steve Steinberger
www.klicktwice.com
561-281-8330

Website Content Optimization.

Understanding content optimization.

Website content optimization is the process of improving the quality and relevancy of your site's content. We'll discuss a number of things about how both users and search engines interpret what makes good content. But first, let's go through an examples of how you and I, as human beings, might read a piece of content and figure out what it's all about. Let's take a look at the example of “Canvas Shoe Design”. Let's pretend that someone gave us a one- page document, and they told us that the document was about canvas shoe design.

We read some text describing some shoe styles , we see some pictures of shoes and people modeling the shoes, and we read about how to maintain your shoes, etc…

Website Content Optimization 

Now this might be about canvas shoe design, but reading the document, it's not very clear. You put the page down and you're probably disappointed. Even if the exact phrase "canvas shoe design" was used in the text here and there, the narrative was all over the place, and there's really no central theme to focus on. Both people and search engines expect clarity and quality from your web pages.

They want to know without any hesitation what your content is all about. Even more importantly, they want content they can trust. If I ask you to find me a resource on canvas shoe design, and you come back with a piece of paper with a few mentions of the term and some text that's loosely related to shoes and design, I'm not going to ask you next time. Or if I do, I'm not going to trust you quite as much. On the other hand, if you give me content that's truly remarkable, discussing how to canvas shoe are made and realted information with images and design ideas, descriptions of colors and how they wear that you might need to hear, I'm going to come back to you with more questions in the future, and I'm going to trust your answers.

In the online world, when people find content that they like, they share it. Search engines can see a lot of this sharing, and they view it as a sign of trust, and they'll reward you with more search engine visibility. When we think about website content optimization, keep in mind that we're optimizing your content so that it benefits both users and search engines, and we're focusing on both themes and building trust.

Steve Steinberger

www.klicktwice.com

561-281-8330

Internet Marketing 24-7: Web Site Citations

Internet Marketing 24-7: Web Site Citations: Web Site Citations Having accurate information on the web is extremely important. If your information is incorrect, it can hurt the chan...

Web Site Citations

Having accurate information on the web is extremely important. If your information is incorrect, it can hurt the chances that people will find you, and that's not good for you or the customer that you could have served. The more a search engine can trust your location information, the more confident it can be in returning your pages to the local searcher, and for this reason, web site citations are extremely important. A citation is any mention of your business name, address, and phone number on the web, and this combination of information is often referred to as NAP (Name, address, phone) for short.

Web Site Citations and Local Search

Aside from having as many as possible on quality sites, citations should also be exactly the same wherever they appear. You can check how your business looks on lots of directory websites by visiting getlisted.org. Get Listed is a site that provides information on local search, and you can use the tool to find out how well your business is listed online by entering your businesses' name and ZIP code. Get Listed will then look up the listing across a host of different popular directories, and give you a listing score that tells you how well you've used the free listings search engines used to collect local search data.

Clicking on each of the tabs to the left will provide even more information onthe accuracy of your business information, reviews, and other things you can do to improve your listings online. For example, in the Accuracy tab, you'll see your business information listed on a number of local directory websites. Here, we can see that the Google listing still needs to be claimed, and the Bing listing doesn't even exist. And we can also see that there are some subtle differences between the name, address, and phone number among some of these listing sites.

For example, Yelp has the business listed as White House Press Room, while Foursquare has it listed as White House South Lawn. You can also see that there are slightly different phone numbers that are shown across different directories. Having this information is crucial, and by claiming each of these listings, you can make the changes to the information to ensure that the name, address, and phone number is consistent across them all. Another great part of Get Listed are their studies on local citation sources for each city and category, found in the Learning Center area.

These will tell you which local citation sources are the most popular in each city and for each business category, and they can be very helpful in finding specific listing sites that you'll want a citation from. When you run out of things to discover on Get Listed, there are still lots of places that you can list your business, and it's just a matter of digging a bit deeper to uncover them. If you are having trouble locating additional places to list, we can help with your web site citation needs..

Send us your  Key phrase or a Phone Number. For example, let's say we are looking for citation sources for an auto repair shop in West Palm Beach, Florida. We can generate a list of suggestions on which local directories we could list your business. This is a great way to find potential citation sources. If we find citations that you already own, we can mark them as “owned”.

These options can help you organize your citations in a meaningful way, and help you keep track of which ones you're getting over time without wasting hours looking at the same websites over and over. The quantity, quality, and consistency of the citations that search engines find around the web for your business are an important factor in how well you rank in local search. Better citations can make a big difference in your overall local search strategy.

Steve Steinberger
www.klicktwice.com
561-281-8330

Internet Marketing 24-7: Optimizing your website structure

Internet Marketing 24-7: Optimizing your website structure: Optimizing your website structure As you focus on more and more keywords and themes, you'll be developing more content on your web...

Optimizing your website structure

As you focus on more and more keywords and themes, you'll be developing more content on your website, and you'll start to have a lot of pages to hold this content. It's going to be important to structure all of these pages in a meaningful way, because in order for search engines to return your pages to searchers in response to relevant search queries, they need to understand how your pages relate to one another. Let's imagine that you're visiting a bookstore for the first time. You're looking for a fiction book written by an author whose name starts with the letter J. Since it's your first visit, you don't know where anything is, and you're going to have to learn the layout of this new bookstore.

Optimizing your website structure

Fortunately, the bookstore has some really good navigation to help you out. You look at the  directory to find where the fiction section is located. Once you reach the fiction section, you identify the specific shelf that has fiction books written by authors whose names start with the letter J. You then look at that shelf, and you find the specific book that you were looking for. Now imagine you keep going through this process to learn the entire layout of the bookstore. You'll figure out all the different sections and shelves, categories, and authors. And eventually, you'll end up knowing about all of the individual books.

This is exactly what a search engine does, it crawls and navigates an entire website to learn what's there, how it's organized, where exactly all of the content can be found, and what it's all about. Now imagine that instead of simply visiting the bookstore, you now work at the bookstore. You've learned everything about how the store is laid out and where specific books are. If a customer walks in the door and says, hey, I'm looking for a fiction book written by an author whose name I can't remember but I know it starts with the letter J, you'll be able to immediately guide them to the book they're looking for.

Now, you're the search engine. People come to you looking for information, and you point the way to it. And you can do this quickly and efficiently because you've understood the content and how it's structured. On the Web, a search engine will find your homepage and start to navigate through your website, through your links. The way you link to pages within your own site is important, and it's known as internal linking. If you're an online store, for example, you might have a system of product categories that link to subcategories that hold links to individual products.

If you're an informational site, you may be organized by topics and then dates of publication. Whatever structure and strategy you choose, a clean site structure will really help search engines understand your entire website, find your content, and help searchers find what they're looking for. On the other hand, a bad site structure can be detrimental to a search engine understanding your site. You might find websites that have no navigation at all, or force you to scroll for hours through a single page, single tier site map to find what you're looking for.

You might see links that take users down at dead-end path with no way to get back to where they started, or you might click on links that go to pages that don't exist anymore. If a search engine can't understand the layout of your site, or doesn't believe that the structure makes sense, or finds all kinds of missing pages, they may not come back as much, and they certainly won't be recommending you to other people. Because everyone's websites and objectives are different, there's no right structure that works for everyone. The most important thing to remember is that your site structure should be clear to you and it should be clear to people.

Remember, search engines are just trying to emulate human processes. So once you spend some time designing and developing a site structure that's logical and easy for people to understand and navigate through, you can feel confident that search engines will understand your site structure as well.

Steve Steinberger
www.klicktwice.com
561-281-8330

Press Releases and SEO

The first step you want to take when you're optimizing a press release for SEO and get better found in the search engines, is to have a focus. Focus on a phrase that you want to be searched and found on.

Press Releases to improve your SEO

For example you are a Shoe Vendor looking to get more information out about your new canvas shoe style, you would focus on a phrase like “Canvas Shoe Styles” in a press release.

Focusing on your phrase early and often

When optimizing a press release to get better found in the search engines, use your focused phrase, early and often. Early and often is a, kind of thrown around SEO term. You'll hear that a lot if you go to SEO, conferences.
Its really, is true. You know, you need to use a phrase, high up on a web page. Often becomes its own HTML webpage on, an organizations website. So, that phrase, having it early, which would be in the title and if not the title, the subhead which is the, the, italicized section under the title.

Gives that phrase, a little more playing power for search engine optimization.So early just means higher up in the release. Often just means using it through out the release. There's a phrase in marketing tell 'em, tell 'em, what you told 'em and tell 'em one more time. So when you have that focus phrase, like "Canvas Shoe Styles”. It can be woven into the title, or the subhead or both, and it can also be woven in, throughout the body of the content.

Another step in optimizing your press release to get better searched and found is to include links in your overall strategy. Search engines are looking for three main things when they're pulling up sites and giving them relevancy. They're looking for architecture, which is essentially the code of a website. They're also looking for content, which could be the content on a web page, a press release or a blog post. And they're also looking for linking. And so many folks think that linking is just from other websites linking into a website.

But let's say you're uploading a press release to your own website, you can have a phrase link to another specific page of your website. Like learn more about press releases for SEO at Klick Twice Technologies, Inc.  Just highlight that phrase in the press release and link it to the other page on your website.

Internal linking is not only good for visibility it gives the search engines a little more algorithmic content to feed on but it also boosts usability. Meaning the user experience so let's say someone is generally is interested in learning more about the phrase that your linking to, they can click and instantly go to another page.

Steve Steinberger
www.klicktwice.com
561-281-8330