Ideas for Business

This morning the 8th social media breakfast meeting (started by Rick Mahn) was held at the Deluxe HQ here in the Twin Cities.  In a very short time this meeting of a few social media enthusiasts at a coffee house has grown to over 125 people hosted by the likes of  Best Buy and PartnerUp, a company acquired by Deluxe.

The main speaker at this morning’s event was David Meerman Scott, popular author of several books including, “New Rules of Marketing and PR” which I recently recommended to a crowd of about 400 at the PRSA International conference earlier this week.  Graeme Thickins was able to convince Scott to stay an extra day for the smbmsp event from another speaking engagement, much to the benefit of the MSP social media crowd.

In the presentation, Scott offered a mix of insights, guidelines and social media examples, including some very entertaining videos, that represent the new rules of marketing online. The opportunity presented itself to take a moment and shoot a quick Q/A video on the topic of the need for marketers to become publishers:

After Scott spoke, Steve Nielsen from the event host, PartnerUp/Deluxe presented followed by Aki Spicer and Marty Wetherall from Fallon who presented a Twitter and SciFi’s Eureka case study. If you’re in the Midwest and interested in participating with the Social Media Breakfast and Social Media Club of Minneapolis, check out the network site.

Sponsored By: Digital Publishing & Advertising DPAC II Next wave of digital content & ads October 27th & 28th NY Marriott Marquis

            Subscribe to this Feed

I hear this question “How do I increase traffic & sales on my website?” all the time, and the funny thing is most of the time its from clients who’s sales have doubled and even tripled over the past year.?? The answer to this question is simple but applying the principles is not quite as simple because it usually requires some work. To increase traffic & sales on websites, I like to use what I call the “CLUB” method which is:

C = Content (Content needs to be fresh, think of your website as grocery produce department,??shoppers??look for the fresh stuff, So??do search engines)

L = Links (Links, and when I’m speaking of links I mean internal and external links.?? External links (links??pointing to your site)??act as vouching for your website and internal links (Navigation) should lead the visitor to where or what you want them to do, internal linking should support the sales process not hamper it)

U = Uniqueness?? (Uniqueness refers to the appearance and the content, your content needs to be unique so it can stand out in the crowd and the appearance also needs to be unique to make your site easy to remember)

B = Beauty (Beauty refers to appearance and cosmetic appeal of your website, the cosmetic appeal of your website directly correlates to several things: Users??trust better looking websites.????Users are??more likely to purchase from appealing sites??than a spammy looking site.?? In sales, its a known fact that so called “good looking” sales people tend to do better than not so good looking sales people, the same applies to websites.)

So that my friends is how you increase traffic & sales on your website.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is an effective online marketing strategy that increases your search traffic by improving the search rankings of your site’s pages. By know, most webmasters realize that getting multiple top 10 rankings on Google is a very good thing.

There are technical aspects to SEO that are complicated, but luckily, the fundamental SEO principles of SEO are not rocket science.

To learn SEO, you should first understand the most weighty factors that search engines use to rank pages.

These following four elements make up a big chunk of the search engine algorithm. If you can nail these elements, you’ll be ahead of most bloggers and webmasters.

1. Title tag

Search engines look at the keywords in the title tag. If you have relevant keywords in the title tag, you’ll automatically rank better for those keywords.

In html code, the title tag looks like this:

The keywords in the title tag show up at the very top right of a web browser. Here is a screenshot.

For the popular blog software WordPress, the words in your post title will be included in the title tag.

2. Quality links from other sites

Search engines also look to see if quality sites are linking to your site. If you get a lot of links from quality sites, then you’ll see an increase in search traffic.

3. Anchor text

Anchor text are the words contained in a link. For example, I can link to my home page with the anchor text business blogs to rank better for that search term. However, it’s much more effective to get anchor text on links from other sites.

4. Body text

Finally, we have body text. With people using keywords to search, it makes sense that search engines would check out the text on a page.

Now you don’t want to mindlessly repeat keywords and make your blog posts spammy and hard to read. That’s called keyword stuffing and can get you penalized or even banned by the search engines. My guideline is to insert the keyword 1-2 times for a short post and 2-3 times for a longer post (500+ words). But don’t worry too much about this. As long as your content is readable, you don’t have to worry about keyword stuffing.

The Importance of Keywords

With three of the four factors above having to do with keywords, you can see that keywords are very important to search engines.

So, one of the first steps to improving your search traffic is doing keyword research.

For many people, keyword research is the most tedious part of the SEO process. However, most of your keyword research only has to be done once. Once you’ve generated a keyword list, you probably won’t have to do it again unless, of course, you start a new site in a different niche.

Also, keywords research is made a lot easier with keyword tools. I like to use these two keyword tools: SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool and Google AdWords Keyword Tool. They are free to use.

I would type in the name of your industry. The keyword tool should then give you a lot of keywords. Next, simply look through the keywords and collect the ones that are relevant to your business. Then, begin to write blog posts that target those keywords.

If you have existing search traffic, it’s a good idea to check your keyword logs to see which keywords are already generating traffic. Oftentimes, you don’t have content that directly targets those keywords.

For example, my sister runs a dating blog where she plans to sell a dating ebook. One of her most popular keywords is “questions to ask girls”. She has an article entitled “Best Questions To Ask A Potential Love Interest” gets traffic for that keyword. I told her that if she wrote an article with words “questions to ask girls” in the title, she would even get more traffic.

Well, that’s it for this intro post about SEO. For more SEO and blogging tips, subscribe to our RSS feed. Also, feel free to email me at deebarizo ATT gmail DOTT com with your questions.

Matt Cutts stated a very interesting comment on twitter a couple of weeks ago and it goes something like this:

“Only 4% of web pages comply w/standards: http://bit.ly/2BJMnZ . That’s why Google can’t return only those pages; too few of them. “

You can view that quote here.

I have been thinking about that lately and wanted to put my thoughts in a blog post. My first thought is, it’s quite pathetic to only have 4%, excuse me, 4.13% of the web complying with web standards.

My second thought is, should search engines reward websites that comply with web standards? I think with their efforts and compliance with the web their should be some sort incentive. But, what could you reward these websites with? Well, my thought is to have a weighted value on web compliance in the search engines algorithms. I would love to hear what others think so be sure to leave a comment!

Please welcome guest blogger Jessica Rosenberg, a freelance writer and active social media user who blogs daily at It’s my life… and does product reviews at The Lemonade Stand. Jessica attended  BlogWell: “How Big Companies Use Social Media” event this week in San Jose.

As sponsors of BlogWell, TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog also did a pre-event group interview with social media gurus from Wells Fargo, Home Depot, UPS & Graco who presented at the event.

Eight major companies gathered in San Jose, CA this week to demonstrate how they are using social media the “right” way.

The goal of the BlogWell conference, organized by GasPedal, specialist of word of mouth marketing, was to show corporations interested in entering this new and nontraditional field how to navigate the scary waters of social media marketing.

As Ken Kaplan from Intel put it “seeing Social Media as a new way of communication makes sense. It’s not something to fear, but something to embrace, and learn more about, by trying it and sharing experiences.”

A wide array of companies ranging from Graco, a small company with very strong “mommy blogger” ties, to Intel who is using social media to unite their staff members and reach out to their customers, and others like Home Depot, Wells Fargo, Walmart, Cisco, and UPS, came to talk about their social marketing experiences and share what they had learned along the way.

The universal feeling was that they all believed in the power of social media; that it’s more than just another way to market to customers and staff. To be social media players companies have to learn to “talk to people like real people”. And the general understanding is that, while it’s relatively easy for small companies and start-ups to jump into the social media arena, it’s pretty scary for the bigger and more established companies to join the party.

The Blog Council, made up of companies passionate about social media, is working hard to help corporations who are terrified to make the jump by giving them tools and support and by showing them how to get started. Their website offers a series of checklists that make it possible for companies to “learn the appropriate and transparent ways to interact with blogs, bloggers, and the people who interact with them.”

Disclosure Best Practices Checklists available on The Blog Council site include:

• Disclosure of Identity
• Personal/Unofficial Blogging and Outreach
• Blogger Relations
• Compensation and Incentives
• Agency and Contractor Disclosure
• Creative Flexibility

Disclosure and honesty are key. As Andy Sernovitz of The BlogCouncil puts it, whenever you enter a Social Media space “just say who you are, don’t fuzz the line, don’t trick people, and if you ever have to ask yourself is something is OK, then the answer is probably no.” Always open with “I work for X. This is my personal opinion about Z.” and you’ll do just fine.

The message shared at BlogWell was clear:

• Listen before you act.
• Get to know your audience well.
• Make sure you know the rules of engagement before you start interacting.
• Then, when you do speak, be candid and transparent.
• Disclose, disclose, disclose.
• Make sure your legal department is on board with all your innovations.
• But most importantly be human, and be receptive to the changes.

Social media is a new place where roles can be flexible and the strongest players are those who are willing to explore new ways of thinking. There’s a lot of money to be saved and new customers to be reached. Graco’s entire Social Marketing budget for a year is the equivalent of 4 print ads. Walmart, by implementing money saving tactics submitted by their staff through internal Social Media channels, is now saving $39 million a year. It might be daunting to enter the Social Media space, but the payoff is huge and well worth the effort.

Other blogs that covered BlogWell include:

• Voce Does BlogWell 2008
• Highlights from BlogWell
• The Ethics of Disclosure
• The BlogWell Breakdown
• Blogwell / San Jose Recap

Sponsored By: Blogwell San Jose Oct 28 How Big Companies Use Social Media

            Subscribe to this Feed