Scotland SEO Blog

Social marketing is all the rage at present and there are many social sites to choose from. Just to add to the confusion, I am going to throw another site at you - HubPages.

HubPages is a social site with a difference, rather than meet, greet and then bookmark pages, HubPages encourages you to create hubs, or pages of quality content. Unlike article directories, HubPages encourages social interaction between members including creating a fan list - one required component for social marketing.

Many smart hubbers are creating content based either on their websites activities or ‘how to’ type articles and then linking back to their sites. Some site owners are taking old articles and reworking them into fresh content before submitting. The social marketing power can be quite solid.

Like many sites, get your content voted to the front page and you will find yourself with even more visitors. Link your to your hubs (articles) wherever you can. A side benefit is that HubPages will time share their google Adsense units if you have a google account.

Use the same user name as all the other sites to broaden your social marketing exposure. HubPages is east to use and easy to setup. As another social site, if has its uses - social marketing being one of them.

Traditional marketing and viral marketing are two different fish in a very large ocean. Where traditional marketing has a start - finish, cost - return on investment (ROI); viral marketing has a start and cost but no finish and a difficult to determine ROI.

To plan for a viral marketing campaign, you need to be determined and prepared to take the good with the bad. There are however, three mindsets that need to be clarified prior to starting and three actions that require careful management.

Mindsets:

• Viral Marketing does not have a timeline: As I have already mentioned, viral marketing has prospective start date but no end date.
• Success bares no relation to investment:It is very difficult to determine ROI on a viral marketing campaign. However many campaigns can be delivered at a fraction of the cost of a standard marketing campaign.
• Don’t rely on stats for reach or impact: The online community is fickle so, whilst your stats may only show a marginal increase in traffic, hundreds or thousands may be discussing you or your products withing social sites. This may cause a trickle of traffic that will slowly increase over time. Not all viral campaigns lead to tidal waves of traffic. Accept the occasional king tide.

Accepting that viral marketing is difficult to measure and does not always deliver floods of responses, the following areas need to be carefully managed to capitalize on what responses are received. Failing to prepare can kill off a viral campaign as quickly as it gets started.

Management

• Innovate and Experiment: Be prepared to experiment using all technologies available. These include blogs, videos, podcasts, the social web and different styles of ad units. As you are experimenting, be prepared for failures. If one method is not working then pull it quickly and move on to another method.
• Listen and learn: Become active within the various social networks and spend time listening to what is being said. If your product or name starts to get mentioned, watch to see which target groups are talking. You can fine tune future campaigns by knowing who is prepared to talk about you.
• Engage, respond and act: if your viral marketing campaign does go into overdrive be prepared to participate fully. If negative fire-spots start jump in and water them down. If traffic arrives in their hundreds, be prepared to answer their needs.

The last point is one of the most crucial. I have seen campaigns designed to get newsletter sign-ups go horribly wrong simply because their database had not been set up to handle the number of responses. I have seen other campaigns where the site owner was not ready to handle the number of questions thrown at them.

With any campaign, remember the 5 P’s - prior planning prevents poor performance. This extremely true when it comes to viral marketing. The campaign may appear to be going badly, the minute you drop your guard, it will take off. Murphy’s law.

If your web site or blog has articles that have proven to be popular in the past then you have a valuable resource that could be added to your podcasting programs. If you don’t have a podcasting program then these articles would make a great start.

It really doesn’t matter how old the articles are, so long as the information is still relevant today. Podcast are a popular way of delivering content in this modern online world. Podcasting those articles solves the problems of finding content and provides you with an opportunity to practice your podcasting skills.

Using old articles will also provide you with a library of podcasts that you can release fairly quickly, particulalry if you can turn them into a series. Select a range of articles from the one category and bundle them together. Podcasting using this method is also easier to organise. You can sit down and record five or six podcasts in one session. This delivers podcasts that are consistent. If you listen to podcasts there are distinct differences for recordings made on different days due to a variety of issues including frame of mind, weather and health (husky voice etc).

Podcasts are popular and make great marketing tools. Your can recycle old articles, perhaps with a new slant on them, inject some promotional features, perhaps at the end of the podcast, and increase your content. If you haven’t tried podcasting yet, grab some of your best articles and give it a try.

First impressions count so your web design needs to be perfect. The moment a visitor arrives on your site you need catch them, keep them, and have them coming back.

The following web design elements will help to catch them.

1. An attractive home page. Your home page needs to be visually appealing.
2. A professionally designed logo on every page.
3. Pages should load in less than 0.20 seconds, preferably 0.10 seconds. Don’t keep them waiting
4. Useful up-to-date information. Monitor your pages and ensure everything is current.
5. Regularly updated content. Where possible include images, photos, graphs. Remember to keep it all relevant.
6. If you are selling, make it easy. No more than 3 clicks to complete the sale.
7. Contact page with a telephone number and e-mail address.
8. The web site must make a good lasting impression.

These simple tips will ensure that your visitors have a stay that leaves a good impression. An impression that they will be happy to recommend to others whilst coming back themselves. Your web design is like the cover of a book or the front window of a shop - use it to promote your business.

Internet marketing has become a full time job for many people with many web site owners entrusting their sites to professional internet marketing gurus. The question I pose is a simple one - do you know the number one rule for internet marketing - or the number two rule for that matter?

If you don’t know the rule then you shouldn’t be undertaking any marketing and you certainly shouldn’t be spending money on a professional internet marketing company. The number one rule:

If your Online Marketing isn’t working – STOP IT!

It is very simple. However there are so many website owners who continue their online marketing campaigns oblivious to the fact that they are simply going nowhere with it. So rule number two:

Learn how to measure your Online Marketing campaign

Once you are in a position to determine whether or not your online marketing efforts (and money) are achieving the desired results, you will start to reap the rewards.

Whilst these two rules are commonsense, we can often be blinded in our quest to achieve more visitors and more sales. Internet marketing can be a tricky affair and what works today may not work tomorrow. Learn to read the trends, measure the outcomes and be prepared to change your online marketing to suit the current environment.

Website visitors have millions of pages at their disposal when navigating websites and a lot of those pages are competing against your content. If you are looking to make a convincing sales argument then your content development needs to be spot on.

There are so many distractions with email, pop up chat windows, online games and the thousands of other graphics, videos and sounds and competing for the attention of the visitor. Add to this the increased sophistication of web users and you can start to understand why ‘bounce’ pages seem to be rising. Content development now needs to focus first on what users are demanding.

In the past it was easy to get away with writing what you wanted to write about. If I sold widgets then I write whatever I wanted about widgets. Now, users are fine tuning their searches to the point they are likely to search for terms like ‘pink widget’ or ‘thin widget’ or ‘animated widget’. Your content development needs to show an understanding of these requirements.

With competition growing rapidly each day for both keywords and visitors, your content development needs to stop producing words. If you can learn the art of truly communicating with words then you may be in a position to develop a bond with internet users. This is becoming one of the most important issues with today’s internet - two way communication.

If your content development can produce content that communicates with your visitors, engages them and satisifies their needs, you are going to be far more successful than those website owners whose content development is solely focused on selling a product or service. The motto for the 21st century appears to be, ’show me why I should prefer your product or service’ - the emphasis on ’show’ - not ‘tell’.

There is a lot of value in using Yahoo! Local for your online advertising campaign. It certainly provides a great way to get started in the area of local online advertising. While offering a range of benefits, Yahoo! Local is easy to use with a straight forward interface that is user friendly for first time users.

Yahoo! Local may well challenge Google when it comes to effective local online advertising. The coverage and quality certainly is on a par with Google and recent changes have seen the service improved even further.

Yahoo! is continuing to expand their services. They have joined Google for image searches and have recently released a webmaster tool called SearchMonkey. Once this comes on stream, particularly if they remove the opt in requirement, then Yahoo! may well be in a position to take back some Google’s market share when it comes to online advertising.

Whilst Yahoo! may be the smaller of the two search giants, it is certainly a great place to get started in local online advertising. If your are an online advertising novice, then Yahoo! Local may be the best place to get your hands dirty.

Putting together an e-mail marketing campaign can be a complicated task. One area that many businesses fail to plan for is the post campaign support. What are you going to do during, and more importantly, after the campaign?

If your e-mail marketing campaign is successful, you may find yourself with hundreds of visitors to your website. If your website includes a checkout facility, is your server able to cope with the demand and are your payment links able to cope? Sometimes a little planning such as mirroring or cache your site could prevent embarrassing and costly problems.

The bigger issue often is the post campaign support. If you are looking for newsletter subscribers, are your data files able to handle hundreds or more requests simultaneously? Are you able to deliver an newsletter to 1000 subscribers? These are all questions that need to be asked.

Finally, once the smoke has cleared, what are you going to do with the data? Do you know how to read any analytics, how to interpret and then how to transfer those results to future campaigns? E-mail marketing should not stop once the last email has been sent. You need to plan for all outcomes and monitor the processes.

E-mail marketing campaigns have proven to be very fruitful over the years. However many businesses have not been prepared enough to capitalise on the results. Do you have an e-mail marketing post campaign support plan?

Search engines and PageRank - here we go again. Another day another toolbar release of PageRanks. I read many articles where the webmaster is either jumping for joy or having a good gripe complaining that Google have got it all wrong - again.

Given the option of having a good page rank or appearing in the top three of SERP’s, I would much rather take the later. PageRank is an out of date number that on a day-to-day basis means very little. If you want to know how well you are doing then spend a couple of minutes each day on the search engines doing a search on your keywords.

If they appear on the front page, you know you are doing your SEO job reasonable well. If they don’t appear on the front page, you know you have more work to do. That is the bottom line. I see web pages with PageRanks of 4,5 or 6, however they don’t always score that prime page one result.

If your PageRank has dropped, check why. Check your SEO strategies and see whether or not others have out gunned you in the optimization race. Better yet, check that your pages can all be read by Google’s spiders and that what they are reading fits within all the white hat options.

Your PageRank has gone up? Congratulations, now get back to working on your search engine results - that is what matters, that is where your organic traffic will come from. After all, the search engines don’t look at your PageRank, it’s too old. They have already recalculated your score.

Web design has been utilizing image, video and audio to a far greater extent in recent years and now search engines are indexing these media files as separate entities. As such they represent a valuable addition to your search engine optimization program.

Having an image file is not enough. The image must be optimized correctly in your web design if you want to receive the maximum benefit in the SERP’s. These four areas should be addressed for each image in both your web design and your blog posts.

• Size: yes, size does matter particularly if it is too small. If your web design calls for thumbnails or very small images then link them to larger images.
• Name: make your image’s filename search engine friendly. If possible use a keyword within the image’s filename.
• Tags: use the alt and title tags to effect by including the keyword or keyphrase. This makes the tags search engine friendly as well as providing a neat description for browsers that have images turned off.
• Text: if your image has text associated with it then use the appropriately keywords or keyphrases in close proximity to the image. If the image is not associated with any text then include a caption below the image that includes your keywords or keyphrase

By optimizing your images within your web design you are making it much easier for any search engine to find, categorise and index. Search engines are quite slow at indexing images at present. They are even slower at updating them so wherever possible, optimize them at the time of publication, not at a later date.

Images have become a powerful inclusion to all web pages and blogs. These tips will help maximize their inclusion in your web design.