Categories
02/10/2012
Yes, that Social Bookmarking thing still works
Posted by seo_writer_kvn as Social Websites Marketing
If you go to Wikipedia and search for the keyword “social networking websites” you’ll be presented with a list of 342 of them, none of which are dating sites. These are what are considered the “majors” in the social media world. Many will be familiar to you. Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Linked In, they’re all there. Flickr and YouTube are there (yes, YouTube is a social network), and so is Google+, so you know the list has been updated recently. One thing they all have in common – social bookmarking potential.
Social bookmarking works, but not quite the way you think it does. If you sign up for each of these 342 websites and post a link in your profile, you will have – 342 links. They won’t grow and you won’t get credited for more than that number – unless someone talks about you and sends your link to a friend. Then you could go viral and end up with a bunch of links. It happens. Just ask Tiger Woods. Post a link about a celebrity scandal and the whole world will see it in a matter of hours.
Another way to benefit from social bookmarking is for others to bookmark your site. Say you come across some really cool information in the course of researching for your next round of blog posting. If it’s valuable enough people will want to keep it, so they will bookmark it. How-to lists and recipes are generally considered great for attracting bookmarks. Obscure facts and good jokes aren’t bad either. Be creative and you’ll be surprised at the social media results you can get from a good blog post.
When creating new blogs for our clients we generally include “share” buttons for social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. These allow readers to instantly submit a link to a blog post to their social network friends and followers. You’ll see icons for some of these below this post. Please use them. As a leading Los Angeles SEO firm we know the value of social media and we’re happy to be the beneficiary of it whenever possible.
11/20/2011
Branded Social Media Profiles Boost Fan/Follower Interaction
Posted by seo_writer_kvn as Social Websites Marketing
Social media is a powerful way to connect with people interested in your business—what you do, and who you are. People expect a social media presence from the websites they visit and the businesses they patronize; that kind of “face to face” interaction will make you stand out, and keep people thinking about you. From posting on Facebook to Social Bookmarking on Digg, that presence keeps people aware of who you are, and it keeps your fans and followers engaged.
For example, there’s a museum close to my house, and my heart, that has a fantastic exhibit on the Civil War. The people who work there are constantly bemoaning their lack of visitors: they recently laid off a number of employees. The fault doesn’t lie with the exhibit or the location, though. It’s that their website is awkward and poorly maintained, they have no social media presence aside from a Facebook that hasn’t been updated in months, and the link that allows their fans to “register” for email updates is actually broken. They have no means of receiving feedback, positive or otherwise; they don’t post their special programs anywhere online in a reliable fashion, so potential visitors either luck into a presentation or leave having no idea that one exists.
Taking advantage social media is a key to success. Making it easy for your fans to “share” you with their friends, utilizing Targeted Email Marketing, or showing up when someone “likes” you on their Facebook, builds awareness and makes people feel like more than faceless consumers. Perfectly good websites and businesses can fall by the wayside if there’s no way for people to interact with you through social media.
If you want your business to truly shine, it takes more than a great product, or even a great website. The “wired” generation demands social media feedback and an interactive online presence. That presence can, and will, make or break your business; Interacting with your customers is key, and when you’re fighting to get noticed, it makes all the difference.
11/10/2011
Social Media is Time Consuming and should be done by Someone Capable of Constant Updates
Posted by seo_writer_kvn as Social Websites Marketing
Running a small business is difficult. It’s also expensive, time consuming, and risky: as a business owner, you have to bank on being noticed, and on that attention leading to customers coming your way. The key to gaining that attention is SEO (search engine optimization) and social media—it isn’t enough for people just to find you, they want to feel engaged by you, like they’re part of a group of friends rather than faceless, wallet-holding targets. Small business SEO is a challenge, there’s no way around it: and the key is to make sure you have someone who can keep up.
To keep an audience engaged requires constant feedback—and that time investment is untenable for a small business owner. Blog posting has become one of the most reliable ways to keep customers engaged: especially if it’s clever and engaging, it will encourage people to keep tabs on you, or to consider your business more strongly if they’re unfamiliar with who you are and what you do.
Putting a face on the business, if you will, is the ultimate goal: and a blog is, clearly, a great way to do that. The drawback, though, is that consumers are time-judgmental. A blog that hasn’t been updated in months can lead to the assumption that the business no longer exists, or that the information presented is no longer relevant. Custom blog creation is a great solution to these issues. The responsibility of posting something novel every day, or even every week, is daunting: it just makes sense to leave it to someone who can make it a priority.
Businesses need people who know how to ensure they can be found, how to consistently create content that will show up through complicated search engine coding and can dedicate the time to making sure their content is fresh. It might not seem like a challenge to keep up, but it is: and businesses need to ensure that they don’t fall behind. Web presence will make or break a business—it’s important to make sure it’s being done right.
10/21/2011
Submit Regularly to your Press Release Service for Best SEO Results
Posted by seo_writer_kvn as Organic SEO Marketing, Social Websites Marketing
Is your company newsworthy? Many business owners and marketers feel that a press release service would not be beneficial to them because they don’t have any newsworthy stories to publish with them. This is a mistake. All companies have something they can put in a press release, and submitting press releases regularly to a good press release service is one of the best things you can do for organic SEO. We here at Webwise Media use this strategy regularly to boost both our own and our clients’ respective search engine page ranks and positions.
Press releases are a great source for links. If you have a link or two in the body of a press release, with the volume of traffic that most of these services get, you’ll end up seeing dozens, maybe hundreds of visitors when you publish just a single press release. Do that regularly every week and you’ll start to see the backlinks pile up. Every time someone views your press release, you have a shot at getting a new customer. Even if they don’t buy that day, their interest and the time they spend browsing your site after they click that link count towards page rank calculations.
Time on site and traffic aren’t the only algorithmic variables you can count on when you publish press releases. Say something interesting enough to be shared and you could be looking at backlinks from social bookmarking and social media websites. All a user has to do is click their de.li.cious, StumbleUpon, or Google bookmark icon on the toolbar and you will gain a backlink. Put out enough press releases and those backlinks will really start to pile up over time. You’ll soon be getting traffic from direct sources and organic ones that you had no idea existed. It’s all part of a good organic SEO strategy.
What is the ultimate goal of any legitimate internet marketing firm? You want your client to get regular, sustained traffic that will generate a steady income all the time. When that happens, the client will be happy with their marketer and want to retain their services for a longer period of time. Here at Webwise Media, we service clients that have been with us over ten years. Our press release strategy is part of the reason why we have that kind of customer retention rate.
10/01/2011
Are Facebook Posts a Social Bookmarking Strategy?
Posted by seo_writer_kvn as Social Websites Marketing
Internet users love information. Think of how many times you’ve read reviews about a product or service that you might want? In the midst of your quest you may become overwhelmed with the sheer number of information sources you use during your Internet travels. One tool that many individuals avail themselves in order to keep their information sources straight is social bookmarking. Think of social bookmarking as cataloging and tagging your favorite websites either for later use or for other people to see. If you’re an online business social bookmarking is one staple tool that can help you land more clients. In order to use that tool however, you need a strategy.
If you’re an information provider you not only want your content to be found, you want it to be shared. While many individuals still share information via email, social media sites are now providing rapid pathways for your content to be spread. One of the biggest social sites to date is Facebook. Can you leverage Facebook posting as part of a social bookmarking strategy? Or, more specifically, is posting to Facebook considered a social bookmarking strategy in and of itself? The simple answer is no. You can however use individual Facebook posts to populate your profile on a social bookmarking site such as Digg.
Let’s say that you’ve gone and done some fantastic blog posting that you’ve shared on Facebook. Every time one of your posts makes it to Facebook an individual link to the post is created. In order to access this link you must click on the time stamp beneath each new entry. This will bring you to the static page for that entry. From this point on you can copy and past the individual URL and then share it on a social bookmarking site of your choosing. While the simple act of posting on Facebook doesn’t constitute a social bookmarking strategy, it is one of the conduits that can feed into your overall marketing strategy.
If you’re an online business, using Facebook posts as fodder for social bookmarking sites is an excellent way to disperse your materials through multiple channels. Part of having an effective social bookmarking strategy is the understanding of what does and does not constitute social bookmarking. Remember that the ultimate goal of a social bookmarking strategy is to have your content aggregated by a user and subsequently shared. What does social bookmarking ultimately mean for you? In a nutshell: exposure.
09/21/2011
Did that last directory submission help you or hurt you?
Posted by seo_writer_kvn as Directory Submissions, Social Websites Marketing
Once upon a time you could buy an unlimited number of directory submissions and not have to worry about whether they helped you or not. There was no such thing as “going backwards” due to a poor choice in backlinks. Alas, that is no longer the case. Every time you make a directory submission now you need to ask yourself the question, “Did that help you or did it hurt you?” Linking your site to a low PR directory or link farm could actually result in you losing your high page rank and position. If you’ve been monitoring your site and wondering why it’s dropping, that could be the reason.
Of course, there are other reasons why a site might drop in search page rank. If you haven’t made any content additions in a while, you’ll start to see your site slip. If Google came in and indexed after February 2011, you might have seen a change, either up or down. It’s been reported that 11.8% of all websites worldwide were affected by the Panda update. If your content isn’t relevant and comprehensive, you won’t rank anywhere near page one. These are all new rules to some, but we’ve been following them for over a decade. It just made sound business sense to do so.
When it comes to directory submissions and social bookmarking, Google saw both as a way to abuse the system. Their algorithm was created to ensure better quality and help searchers find exactly what they are looking for, but when you can buy your way to the top with directory and bookmarking purchases that system doesn’t work. By decreasing or eliminating the value of these links in their algorithm, Google has made sure that you have to build your site with relevant content and link it to sites that are connected to your industry, not just any directory that will take your listing.
Are directory submissions still worth doing? Yes, they are in fact a key part of our organic SEO strategy. What has changed is the way in which those submissions need to be made. The days of auto-posters and bulk purchases are over. The way the internet is structured now, you need to think about what you’re doing, not just throw money at it and expect high page rank. Contact Webwise Media to learn more.
08/15/2011
Should you re-do your social bookmarking strategy?
Posted by seo_writer_kvn as Social Websites Marketing
Google Panda was six months ago. Your link count has gone down, then up, then down, and up again. Have things leveled off? With Google, who knows? Their latest venture is a cooperative effort with Bing and Yahoo called Schema. Will that change things in the search marketing world? For those of us who have been at it for a while, change is one constant we have learned to expect. Other constants that we now embrace are variables in the Google algorithm like quality content and high PR linking. Neither changed with Panda and neither will be affected by Schema.
Should you re-do your social bookmarking strategy? If you’re still buying links and directory submissions, yes you should. You might also want to move out of that cave you’ve been living in. Those tactics didn’t work very well before Panda and they don’t work at all now. If you want link juice today you need to think about where your backlinks are going to be coming from. Sites with poor quality content and low PR will hurt your search rankings, not help them. Google link counting isn’t about quantity anymore. It’s about quality and relevance. That’s been our strategy for over a decade.
When it comes to linking on social media, or bookmarking as they often call it, stick with the big names like Digg, Propeller, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and of course Del.icio.us. Others to consider are Newsvine, Fark, Blinklist, Clipmarks, and Shoutwire. Why are we telling you all this when we offer social bookmarking for a fee here at Webwise? We want you to go through and set up each homepage to see how long it takes to actually do what you can simply pay us to do. How much is your time worth?
Webwise Media is the undisputed leader in Los Angeles SEO. No one else has been around as long as us, so we can easily claim to be the best based on that alone. Despite our history of success, in this business you need to stay on top of what’s happening currently. Social media is still alive and well, and it can be a valuable marketing tool, if you know how to use it. We do. You can try doing social bookmarking on your own or you can contact us and let us do it for you. We’d recommend the latter.
07/16/2011
The Impact of Social Media Marketing on Business
Posted by seo_writer_kvn as Social Websites Marketing
Does it really work? Social media marketing is a different animal, one that doesn’t work the same way that any other type of marketing does. For one thing, it needs to be done indirectly, even casually if you want to get the best results. Those who are spending time on social networks aren’t there to buy anything and won’t respond to a direct solicitation, but they will remember when something is mentioned in a conversation thread, even if its not their own. That’s the key to social media.
There are two results that you can expect from social media marketing – the seen and the unseen. The seen is when someone actually responds directly, clicking a link in a conversation thread that you or someone else took part in. The unseen is the organic SEO benefit – the backlink. You score one automatically just by posting the link on someone’s wall or page; you score many more if that link goes viral and gets picked up on other networks and social bookmarking services. The domino effect with social media can be breathtakingly fast at times. When it catches on, it moves pretty quickly.
So how do you create conversation threads and get others to talk about your service or products. Start by having conversations with close friends who already know what you do. Mention events of the day, new projects, or drop job references into a thread about some drama going on – Facebookers in particular love that type of post. Put yourself in their position and cater to what they’re looking for. It’s not hard to do if you think carefully before you start the thread. Here at Webwise Media, we have experts that do it all day long as part of our organic SEO marketing campaigns.
There are millions of people going online every day to check their Facebook wall, tweet from their Twitter account, or Digg new websites. Techies are looking at Technorati, networkers are checking StumbleUpon, and professionals are updating resumes on LinkedIn. Who do you want to get the word out to? Social media is a good way to do it, but you need to know how. You could learn, or you could just run your business and let us handle the social media marketing for you.
06/26/2011
Can Google +1 compete with Facebook Like?
Posted by seo_writer_kvn as Organic SEO Marketing, Social Websites Marketing
Click on a Google +1 button and you can leave a comment that will be seen by Google searchers the next time they are looking for a product or service in that category. Click a Facebook like button and a post will appear on your wall telling all of your friends that you like the page or post you just visited. Both are powerful marketing tools, but which is better. Can Google’s latest entry into the world of social media compete with the platform created by the masters who created the platform in the first place? It’s not that simple, especially from an organic SEO standpoint.
Facebook gets great numbers but Google is still the undisputed king of the hill. The accomplishments of the social media giant in just a few short years have been nothing short of amazing, but if you want to rank you’re not going to do it by soliciting for Facebook likes. The Google +1 button will not only compete. It will blow away everything that Facebook has accomplished with their like function. Even now, their growth appears to be slowing down and Google is once again gaining momentum. Was there ever any doubt? Not over here at Webwise there wasn’t.
Social bookmarking and social media marketing are wonderful tools to promote your business, but they work best when used to complement legitimate website SEO, local internet marketing, and link building to improve page rank and position. The most effective way to get sustained traffic on the web is by optimizing your website and building your web presence through backlinks, press releases and article submissions. Posting on your Facebook wall will get the attention of your friends, but don’t most of them already know what you do. Facebook is not a search engine; they’re a social network. Don’t make the mistake of thinking the two are one and the same.
Webwise Media has remained the top Los Angeles SEO firm for ten years by watching carefully while the search engines evolved. One of the major factors in Google’s success has been their ability to bring emerging technology and potential competitors into the fold. Their greatest threats along the way are now partners, tools, and apps that sport the Google logo. Facebook is still attempting to make it alone. Are they a powerful force? Absolutely, but they’re not Google. Put your money on the +1 button. We’re thinking it will be more beneficial to you in the long run.
06/01/2011
A Proven Strategy for Social Bookmarking and Forum Posting
Posted by seo_writer_kvn as Social Websites Marketing
Have you heard the rumor that social bookmarking and forum posting don’t work anymore? Do you believe it? Have you done the research to prove or disprove it? Here at Webwise Media, we have. There is absolutely no truth to it whatsoever. What doesn’t work anymore are the tactics that black hat SEO firms use when they submit to social media sites or discussion forums. Putting a generic comment into a discussion thread just to get a backlink is not organic SEO best practices. We don’t do it.
If you’re a webmaster, you know what we’re talking about. How many times have you built a client website or set up a forum for a quality product or service and gotten a generic comment like “I really enjoyed reading this”, followed by a link for an online pharmaceutical company or affiliate program? It’s annoying, it’s pretty inefficient on the part of the link builder, and it’s unfortunately a common practice that is actually being taught to newbies breaking into internet marketing. Sadly, those teaching it are charging those who are learning. If you’re one of them, cancel payments now and get a refund.
Here at Webwise Media, we have a proven strategy when it comes to social bookmarking and forum posting. We use common sense and only enter discussions that are relevant to the company we are marketing for. The links we post aren’t wasted. They will lead the reader back to a website that has something to do with the discussion topic, not a site that will try to sell them Viagra or cheap car insurance. You know the offers we’re talking about. Just check your spam folder in your email account and you’ll see a list of them on any given day.
The search engines have recently taken steps to improve the quality of content on the internet. Forums that have an editorial process to screen content will continue to rank high in search results. Those that publish spam comments won’t. That seems pretty simple, right? It is. For those of you out there who are sweating and stressing about your techniques that no longer work, change them. Once you start doing it the right way, you’ll find the long term results are much better. Just ask any of our clients.
|
|
 |
Archives
-
Recent Posts
-
Feeds
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
