You’re online social marketing campaign is, in it’s best form, a PR campaign. The highest value of success to your campaign may be added dollars to your income or you may have other goals. Whatever ambitions you strive for, tracking the larger success of your campaign is important.
It may seem simplistic, but the first step in your social marketing campaign will be to outline your specific goals. “My goal is to make more money.” Yes, but this is a social marketing campaign; how do you want customers to see you, what is your company personality? Playful, intellectual, serious, an everyman, liberal, conservative? You may want to avoid politically polarizing personalities, but this is an issue in how you are perceived and what people say about you. Whether or not you think of your business as having a personality, one will be assigned to you by the mouths of the media. This would be an appropriate time to focus on your mission statement. Other than making money, why are you in business and what is it you’d like to accomplish. A personal mission statement is an advantage in staging related conversations as well, spreading your “brand” through online social networks in a greater variety of ways. Social networks are a little like being in the school lunchroom again and trying to decide if you’re better off with the jocks and cheer-leaders, the nerds, or the outcasts. Deciding who you are will help you find your market foundation.
There are a number of web analytics companies available to crunch numbers for you and make pretty graphs, but if you don’t know what you’re looking for and what the benefit of those numbers is, they won’t help you. At Biznetix, we are prepared to help your business interpret these statistics and make the best use of them. Things to remember and take note of:
Visitors, Unique Visitors, Visitor Frequency- I recently had a friend telling me how certain of his blog posts were way more popular than others and he thought that meant they were the posts people liked. The number of visitors to your site or blog is comparative to how many people looked in your shop window. A lot of these might mean you’ve found a popular key-word, but it won’t tell you how effective the key-word is for you or if you’re achieving the popularity you want. And a Visitor may come to your site more than once. For a clearer understanding of your actual audience size analytics track Unique Visitors. Individuals are identified by a login or by a cookie ID downloaded to their database. Visitor counts divided by Unique Visitor counts produces Visitor Frequency. This is a better sign that you are achieving the results you set for yourself. If you’re looking for audience growth, watch to see if your Unique Visitor count is growing. For a check on the loyalty of your constituency, check your Visitor Frequency.
The Buzz, Citations, the Scoop, the Ripples- Social popularity isn’t just about who comes directly to your site or blog. It’s also about how many times and in what light you are mentioned and referred to by others. Technorati has a ranking system tracking links and citations, Facebook Lexicon tracks the frequency of any keyword you choose (this does not necessarily correlate to positive commentary). Different analytics will track different aspects and it’s important to note just exactly what they are basing their figures on.
Names to know in Analytics: Web Trends is the raw data source Biznetix works with. They are one of the original sources and offer a large quantity of data. Technorati, Google Analytics, and Google Alerts are also big names to know, ClickTracks and Feedburner are the last I’ll list but far from the last of the names in Web Analysis.
Analysis and number crunchers are important to keep you from getting shortsighted, caught in the opinions of the most recent posters. However, don’t be afraid to scan a little yourself to see what the buzz is, read the comments people leave, and participate in the conversation, after-all that’s what social media is all about, two way open communication. In that same spirit, Biznetix is available to answer your questions. It's part of our mission that our customers shouldn't just accept what we tell them; We want you to understand and be truly informed about your choices.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Personal versus Professional
There has been a lot of discussion online about the new generation publicizing their private world and not understanding the dangers of this blurring of public and private personas, but there is another blurring going on less discussed that is even being encouraged with the development of social media. Social media marketing is founded on a person to person style approach, a presentation of businesses as personal friends. How does a business maintain their professional appearance in this atmosphere? How much of that distance and polish should be held to, if any? And how does a company maintain the appropriate balance without unintentional crossings into the fake friendly “neighborhood” business, the over-sharing sales clerk, or the slimy “I know just what you want” used car dealer?
The first sad truth to deal with is, you’ll never please everyone. No matter how careful you are, there will always be someone who takes offense. What one person finds offensive another may find courteous. For instance, calling your waitress by name after reading her nametag; some think this the considerate thing, the customers have taken the time to notice them as an individual; others grit their teeth and bear it because it’s part of the job, the customer acting like they know you without ever having introduced themselves. The best you can hope for is to minimize the damage. Take note of the current conventions in emails and network introductions; on Twitter courtesy suggests you follow people who are following you, on Facebook or LinkedIn don’t try to friend people you don’t have a connection too. Get an introduction from a mutual acquaintance or send an introductory message. Avoid computer plug-ins of names and usernames especially in combination with titles because computers can rarely recognize that Miss Greatandpowerfuloz isn’t really a name. Besides computers don’t do personal- people do. Your social marketing campaign should be handled by a real live person who cares about your company.
The advantages of engaging in this personal style marketing have already been proven. Beyond the well-explored statistics of people turning to their friends for advice and recommendations about products and services, passion and excitement are better carried through personal connections, and passion sells. A little of that personal passion leaking into the email, tweets, or posts is good for business. Likewise, though there is a myth of the cool professional being able to deal with anything from the perspective of distance- it’s only business after all. In actuality, it is that human connection, that tiny bit of intimacy, that encourages better business. That connection makes it easier to accept the imperfect and deal around our foibles instead of letting little things become a full-blown rant to friends and a campaign against your business. The truth is we use that professional distance to protect ourselves from hurt, not to sell products. To bring out that personal side is to risk rejection, personal insult, and unwanted connections (many find it hard to draw the line in personal connections and so they avoid offering any invitation to more intimate interactions). It takes a particular personality to handle the personal nature of social marketing.
On the other side of things, with Tweets and status updates and the feel of a personal forum made public, it can be easy to forget the public and get caught up in the personal. Private jokes and in-speak on the message boards between people who know each other can be intriguing in part, but can also be alienating to newcomers. It’s important to always be open to new commentary. If there is chatter about an event most of your followers didn’t attend, be clear about what event it was, maybe turn it into an invitation for newcomers to attend a future event, or if it is an exclusive event create a side forum for discussion rather than making your public feel excluded.
Some obvious but important things to remember in striking the balance and maintaining a social and professional attitude:
Avoid negative language. Speaking ill of any person or thing could quickly backfire. You likely won’t avoid all negative commentary, but try to keep the overly sarcastic bites out of your language. A surprising portion of the population does not understand sarcasm and many others will automatically empathize with the victim rather than you. If you have venting to do, do it elsewhere. However personal this space seems, remember it’s actually professional space.
Be honest about how close or not you are to your connections. Assuming a closer intimacy than they have offered will turn people off and make them feel defensive. Actually, be honest about everything. Companies have been bitten before by trying to pretend they were just outside appreciators instead of admitting their connections to various blogs. Internet junkies are pretty good at sniffing out the truth so always lay your cards on the table and don’t prevaricate.
Allow interests outside of the company to show through. It makes your social identity more human and you never know when those alternate passions may feed back to improve your business. Does your company have a favorite charity or do they have a baseball team that competes against other companies- it’s all interesting and makes for new avenues to connect with people.
Relax and be human, show some personality. You may make mistakes and you may alienate some people, and true with the internet those people and their connections could do some damage- but, as a human, you can always apologize. Social media is about finding your business’s place in the school lunch room. That identity won’t make you friends with the whole population, but it’ll connect you with the groups who will care the most about the things that matter to your business and the people who need what you have to offer. Those connections will offer more per person value than you can get from bland mass appeal advertising.
The first sad truth to deal with is, you’ll never please everyone. No matter how careful you are, there will always be someone who takes offense. What one person finds offensive another may find courteous. For instance, calling your waitress by name after reading her nametag; some think this the considerate thing, the customers have taken the time to notice them as an individual; others grit their teeth and bear it because it’s part of the job, the customer acting like they know you without ever having introduced themselves. The best you can hope for is to minimize the damage. Take note of the current conventions in emails and network introductions; on Twitter courtesy suggests you follow people who are following you, on Facebook or LinkedIn don’t try to friend people you don’t have a connection too. Get an introduction from a mutual acquaintance or send an introductory message. Avoid computer plug-ins of names and usernames especially in combination with titles because computers can rarely recognize that Miss Greatandpowerfuloz isn’t really a name. Besides computers don’t do personal- people do. Your social marketing campaign should be handled by a real live person who cares about your company.
The advantages of engaging in this personal style marketing have already been proven. Beyond the well-explored statistics of people turning to their friends for advice and recommendations about products and services, passion and excitement are better carried through personal connections, and passion sells. A little of that personal passion leaking into the email, tweets, or posts is good for business. Likewise, though there is a myth of the cool professional being able to deal with anything from the perspective of distance- it’s only business after all. In actuality, it is that human connection, that tiny bit of intimacy, that encourages better business. That connection makes it easier to accept the imperfect and deal around our foibles instead of letting little things become a full-blown rant to friends and a campaign against your business. The truth is we use that professional distance to protect ourselves from hurt, not to sell products. To bring out that personal side is to risk rejection, personal insult, and unwanted connections (many find it hard to draw the line in personal connections and so they avoid offering any invitation to more intimate interactions). It takes a particular personality to handle the personal nature of social marketing.
On the other side of things, with Tweets and status updates and the feel of a personal forum made public, it can be easy to forget the public and get caught up in the personal. Private jokes and in-speak on the message boards between people who know each other can be intriguing in part, but can also be alienating to newcomers. It’s important to always be open to new commentary. If there is chatter about an event most of your followers didn’t attend, be clear about what event it was, maybe turn it into an invitation for newcomers to attend a future event, or if it is an exclusive event create a side forum for discussion rather than making your public feel excluded.
Some obvious but important things to remember in striking the balance and maintaining a social and professional attitude:
Avoid negative language. Speaking ill of any person or thing could quickly backfire. You likely won’t avoid all negative commentary, but try to keep the overly sarcastic bites out of your language. A surprising portion of the population does not understand sarcasm and many others will automatically empathize with the victim rather than you. If you have venting to do, do it elsewhere. However personal this space seems, remember it’s actually professional space.
Be honest about how close or not you are to your connections. Assuming a closer intimacy than they have offered will turn people off and make them feel defensive. Actually, be honest about everything. Companies have been bitten before by trying to pretend they were just outside appreciators instead of admitting their connections to various blogs. Internet junkies are pretty good at sniffing out the truth so always lay your cards on the table and don’t prevaricate.
Allow interests outside of the company to show through. It makes your social identity more human and you never know when those alternate passions may feed back to improve your business. Does your company have a favorite charity or do they have a baseball team that competes against other companies- it’s all interesting and makes for new avenues to connect with people.
Relax and be human, show some personality. You may make mistakes and you may alienate some people, and true with the internet those people and their connections could do some damage- but, as a human, you can always apologize. Social media is about finding your business’s place in the school lunch room. That identity won’t make you friends with the whole population, but it’ll connect you with the groups who will care the most about the things that matter to your business and the people who need what you have to offer. Those connections will offer more per person value than you can get from bland mass appeal advertising.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
What do you do with social media?
Do you know the difference between Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Gather, and Myspace? Social media is the hot new thing; it is web 2.0. This means it can be overlooked as a fad that won’t really make a difference, or it can be over-hyped. It may be unclear how this platform can help your marketing and what strategy is the best to adopt. With the following breakdown of the most commonly used sites, we hope to clear up a few issues.
Facebook: Originally a college social site, it’s open now to the public. Facebook’s design encourages increased networking, constantly suggesting further possible people and groups with whom to connect. Options are available in the setup to create fan connections as well as friend connections. Likely an effect of its original manifestation, Facebook has a more severe aesthetic, lacking the bright colors and originality of Myspace page designs (There are options for color and “tattoos” for home pages, but these are not network wide.) Quizzes and games abound here. Created by third parties, many applications are designed as marketing opportunities. Personal referrals are still the best advertising and Facebook has a built in referral method showing friends what companies and people their friends are connected to. Facebook is one of the most widely used and respected social networks. A page here is fundamental to a successful social network campaign.
Myspace: Suffering from an association with internet predators, many college bound or parentally restricted teens were directed away from Myspace. However, its bright aesthetic allowing for strong independence in page design and its easy and active music play options have kept it popular in some circles, especially with youth oriented bands and their fans. Not to be confused with internet radio sites such as Pandora, Myspace is still an ideal spot for band promotion. Fans and potential fans can sample music offerings, research upcoming shows, and connect with other fans. Myspace doesn’t actively press networking. It requires more direct work to build a network here.
LinkedIn: Is marketed towards job hunters and business people. An excellent interface for business connections and resume sharing, it isn’t designed for stronger and broader ranging social connections. There are discussion groups available and strong connectivity possibilities within professional spheres, school or organizational. Inversely from the potential of more lightly social connection sites, LinkedIn might be best taken advantage of by use of targeted and personal connections rather than an all-inclusive fan building strategy. Joining and actively commenting in group conversations is one of the best ways to take advantage of LinkedIn.
Twitter: has a lot of buzz going around about it, and it can be a highly effective tool for marketing, but it does have deficiencies. It is a short line communication, updating connections with a brief updates, rather like what a Facebook update may seem like. The difference is in how these updates are used, and the frequency of postings. Marketing gurus have taken advantage of viral aspects of Twitter by posting coupons tied to a mention of the product or company (Consider if real value is not offered in these coupons, or if a company is not prepared to meet the generated demand, this strategy could devastatingly backfire). Twitter is work intensive requiring regular updates in order for a company to stay on the register. Those updates need to feel personal, be entertaining, and still hold to their marketing purpose. Updates containing links to other content are also a good use of space, but remember the Tweet then must hold all the interest of a headline, drawing its audience into the material. If your company is capable of generating a continuous flow of engaging short updates and links, then it may be convenient, otherwise another social media may be a better option.
Digg: This site is an aggregate for blogs and other media content. In this venue, participants can submit particularly interesting content and have it voted on for entertainment value. Votes are accomplished by the functions Digg or Bury (this option of disliking a viewed site is a nice counter to the mathematical programs that equate popularity only with number of visits.) Achieving notable success here is a popularity contest with participants swimming upstream until they reach a certain level of success at which point popularity is easy to acquire for new submissions.
Technorati: More often referred to in marketing blogs with greater respect, Technorati is designed along similar principals as Digg. Popular submissions rise to the surface for greater visibility thereby further increasing their popularity. There is no obvious voting system on the Technorati site, but it has a more professional newspaper style design well organized for surfing. With both Technorati and Digg the social marketing strategy would necessarily focus on the commentary- interaction with other similar postings and actively engaging in conversation with the readers.
Gather: This site advertises itself as the adult option for social networking. It lacks the games and quizzes that abound on both Myspace and Facebook, and has no real options for personalizing your homepage with Myspace style decorations, however in keeping with it’s adult persona, it is an excellent spot for following and connecting with blogs and interest focused conversations. It may be an ideal place to host conversations regarding market specific topics, keeping in touch with customer concerns and proving your company to be up to date in the conversation.
Giza Page: offers an aggregation of each individual or company’s online identity. It is not uncommon to have multiple accounts on several of these social networks. Giza Page provides an application for managing all the accounts from one network.
“Advertising always works when you have the right message sent to the right audience with the right media,” says John Crowley, President of Biznetix. “It’s all about the right time and place.” How people are looking for the services your company offers is one of the most important questions for a marketing strategist to ask. Included in the answer is almost always--they ask their friends. This means social media is not a platform that should be overlooked. Biznetix is available to assist with your social media strategy questions. Watch for future articles on getting the most from your social media campaign.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
SEO 101
By now you probably know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is that magic thing people do to improve their web site ranking on search engines like Google or Yahoo!, but what does this mean? What is it these companies really do? Are they modern day snake oil salesmen or alchemists using pseudo-science and magic to make gold (or in this case dollars)? Surprisingly, alchemistry is actually a pretty fair analogy. The best SEO companies use real science and the magic of human intuition and understanding for their alchemical marketing mixture. The worst companies or SEO packages could explode in your face. To clarify the process and pull things out of the dark ages we are going to break down the elements of search engine optimization and provide much sought answers to questions about the companies and the process.
First, what is Search Engine Optimization? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of taking a Web site and altering content, META tags, and elements of structure and design to push that site to a higher ranking on search engines for specific search phrases. I emphasize the term “specific search phrases” because the choice of those phrases is another element of optimization that we will review later. In any case, if you go to a search engine and key in, for example, “Rochester search engine optimization,” the sites that come up first on the list are the ones that have been “optimized” for that phrase. That high ranking, we all know, means more people seeing your site, that is, if customers are likely to key in “Rochester search engine optimization.” If you don’t provide Rochester search engine optimization, optimizing to that phrase won’t really improve your traffic. This may seem obvious, but there is a difference between increasing your traffic and increasing your quality traffic. We’ll go over this more later as well.
Okay, so in short Search Engine Optimization tailors a site for the search engines to read and rank higher than other sites. What is it that the search engines search for then? There are many elements search engines weigh in order to determine ranking. Complicating matters more, each search engine applies a different weight to the various elements. To simplify the complex, search engines need to understand a) what your website is about and b) how it is navigated.
Websites are divided into two important segments, the header and the body. Elements in the header are referred to as META tags. Most of these elements are not visible to normal web surfers but search engines use these META tags in determining how to rank and display your site in the search results. The META tags are the first lines telling the search engines what your site is about. Want to see what the search engine sees? Check out the code.
The source code is the half and half computer/human language that makes up the software program (remember all these web sites and search engines break down to simple computer programs.) When you are looking at a site, most will let you see the code if you click on “view” on the top menu bar, then “source” or “source code.” This will show you the text version of your site exactly as the search engines see it. From here, type control-F to bring up the find window. Now you can search your site for the search terms you think it should be “found” under. If the response comes back “cannot find” then you know your site is missing something. Your site will not be listed when a potential customer is looking for you using those terms.
Although other elements are considered, search engines rely heavily on the frequency and positioning of key phrases in the text of your web site. These determine where your site will be ranked in search results. Repeating important keyword phrases, preferably near the top of the page is the first step toward having a successful Web site that’s ranked top in search results. Other factors will play in, and each search engine is a little different, but without exception, the most important thing to consider in optimizing your web site is the frequency and position of your chosen key phrases. Of course, choosing those key phrases is nearly as important.
Now for the hard part. It may seem simple, but it's harder than it first appears. Use and repeat the right phrases in the beginning of the pages on your site and you’ll rate high in search results. Search engines use algorithms, math really, to determine your rank so for the computer’s sake you just need a good mathematician, right? It’s all science. Never forget the human element.
First, in the META tags you decide to put SEO SEO SEO over and over to rate the site high for that keyword. Put it in the title tags and when the list comes up with websites for the search, “SEO” and the description of your website is SEO SEO SEO. The description of the next one is “A full service internet company offering web design, internet marketing, search engine optimization, software development, ecommerce web hosting…” As a potential customer, which would you click on? So you see, rating is only part of the equation. The human element, if left out, can devalue all of your careful computer tailored results. Well done Search engine optimization optimizes for people as well as computer algorithms.
META tags are considered by Search engines in determining ranking, but they are not the most important element. It is more important here to remember your human audience. Your description must be accurate and interesting to catch the eye of potential customers. Likely you are halfway there by showing up in the search, the description tags have to be the sound bite advertising that makes you stand out from the competition.
Another aspect of the human element is selecting those key words and phrases you want to tie to your site. Simple enough. Common sense, right? You pretend you are the customer and select the phrases they would look for to find the service you provide. Watch the tricky endings and the insider lingo. For instance, web design is rather different than web designer, and SEO might not be recognized by the people who need it the most. And which is more likely to be searched, content management or function options? Common sense will carry you far, but little can replace good market and keyword research. This part of the process can easily take the most time, but it can be the most rewarding. First position on a key phrase that only receives 100 searches cannot return more than 100 visitors, but fourth place positioning on a key phrase that receives millions of requests can generate thousands. Then again, quality is more important than quantity, especially on the internet.
Web surfers are usually very directed. They know what they are looking for and they can click away from what they don’t want in a second. If you use the phrase “Britney pics” to increase traffic it may work really well—and earn you nothing because disappointed surfers will click away to another site without examining your site, which clearly does not have pictures of Britney. The swift moving determined nature of the web surfer can work against you if you are trying to draw their attention away from their purpose, but it can work for you and earn you dollars if you position yourself right. A percentage of those surfers are looking for exactly what you are. If you can put yourself in their path and make it easy for them to identify what they need from you, those sales are yours. SEO is best used when combined with a well considered web market strategy.
Among the methodologies available to increase your ranking on the search engines there are tricks and ways to mislead the algorithms. Invisible text, doorway pages, link farms, cloaking, mirror or duplicate content, all of these are known generally as black-hat techniques or spam. These are the components of SEO alchemistry that could blow up in your face. Spam, as far as search engines are concerned, is any attempt to mislead or trick the search engine into producing any document that is not as honestly relevant to the given search as it is portrayed. Search engines can and have banned sites for these practices. Be aware that even though these practices are known to be unsavory and can produce the exact opposite effect desired, some companies market packages that use these methods. It is a buyer beware market and when seeking an SEO company or package, you should be aware of their strategy. If they are not clear and upfront with you on their process you would do better to look elsewhere.
Is it worth it to work this magic yourself? A little common sense, a little research, some clarity on the technical side and you could handle SEO in house maybe, right? Right. You can do it yourself. It’s not really magic. But it is work. For most people learning the process, keeping up with the best practices, avoiding the common pitfalls like broken links and misuse of frames, not to mention the time consumption of research is simply not worth it. If you can buy everything inexpensively and focus your life and your business resources on the many other complications life and business throw your way it is as worth it as pre-sliced bread. Cost, then, is the key.
Since search optimization is a fairly new industry, there are many companies with optimization packages - and the price varies wildly from company to company. Some offer optimization for a predetermined number of keyword phrases, but they may not guarantee a particular placement. Other companies may charge you for how well they optimize for certain phrases - for example, you get charged more for being #1, that you do for #2. A fixed fee, monthly or yearly, is another method of billing used. It isn’t only the cost and the billing style that differ, each company may also have different levels of service. There is no EASY answer to the question, how much does this cost. In general, if you consider the labor effort involved, expect to pay between $2000 and $3000 for a competent and reputable company to do the work for you.
That's a lot of money! I got an email yesterday that offered to submit my site to thousands of search engines and get my site #1 for only $20. Why not just use them?
While an uncommonly large site with many different topics may cost more to optimize, basic time requirements to perform the minimum research and tuning prevent the costs from being much less even for a less complex site. Many firms out there offer service for "Only $29!" or a software package to do-it-yourself. Remember the explosive mixture from earlier? These services are most commonly spammers using black-hat techniques that could leave you banned from the search engines while they spend your “Only $29!” along with a few hundred other peoples’ “Only $29” on a Mexican holiday. Also, keep in mind pay-per-click offerings, which do not optimize your site at all, but work instead on the highest bidder approach. Pay-per-click (PPC) methods offer a reliable way to generate traffic on your site, but are often more costly in the long term, and may not produce the quality traffic of a good SEO campaign. Remember how easy it is for the wrong web-surfers to click on and then click right back off.
First, what is Search Engine Optimization? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of taking a Web site and altering content, META tags, and elements of structure and design to push that site to a higher ranking on search engines for specific search phrases. I emphasize the term “specific search phrases” because the choice of those phrases is another element of optimization that we will review later. In any case, if you go to a search engine and key in, for example, “Rochester search engine optimization,” the sites that come up first on the list are the ones that have been “optimized” for that phrase. That high ranking, we all know, means more people seeing your site, that is, if customers are likely to key in “Rochester search engine optimization.” If you don’t provide Rochester search engine optimization, optimizing to that phrase won’t really improve your traffic. This may seem obvious, but there is a difference between increasing your traffic and increasing your quality traffic. We’ll go over this more later as well.
Okay, so in short Search Engine Optimization tailors a site for the search engines to read and rank higher than other sites. What is it that the search engines search for then? There are many elements search engines weigh in order to determine ranking. Complicating matters more, each search engine applies a different weight to the various elements. To simplify the complex, search engines need to understand a) what your website is about and b) how it is navigated.
Websites are divided into two important segments, the header and the body. Elements in the header are referred to as META tags. Most of these elements are not visible to normal web surfers but search engines use these META tags in determining how to rank and display your site in the search results. The META tags are the first lines telling the search engines what your site is about. Want to see what the search engine sees? Check out the code.
The source code is the half and half computer/human language that makes up the software program (remember all these web sites and search engines break down to simple computer programs.) When you are looking at a site, most will let you see the code if you click on “view” on the top menu bar, then “source” or “source code.” This will show you the text version of your site exactly as the search engines see it. From here, type control-F to bring up the find window. Now you can search your site for the search terms you think it should be “found” under. If the response comes back “cannot find” then you know your site is missing something. Your site will not be listed when a potential customer is looking for you using those terms.
Although other elements are considered, search engines rely heavily on the frequency and positioning of key phrases in the text of your web site. These determine where your site will be ranked in search results. Repeating important keyword phrases, preferably near the top of the page is the first step toward having a successful Web site that’s ranked top in search results. Other factors will play in, and each search engine is a little different, but without exception, the most important thing to consider in optimizing your web site is the frequency and position of your chosen key phrases. Of course, choosing those key phrases is nearly as important.
Now for the hard part. It may seem simple, but it's harder than it first appears. Use and repeat the right phrases in the beginning of the pages on your site and you’ll rate high in search results. Search engines use algorithms, math really, to determine your rank so for the computer’s sake you just need a good mathematician, right? It’s all science. Never forget the human element.
First, in the META tags you decide to put SEO SEO SEO over and over to rate the site high for that keyword. Put it in the title tags and when the list comes up with websites for the search, “SEO” and the description of your website is SEO SEO SEO. The description of the next one is “A full service internet company offering web design, internet marketing, search engine optimization, software development, ecommerce web hosting…” As a potential customer, which would you click on? So you see, rating is only part of the equation. The human element, if left out, can devalue all of your careful computer tailored results. Well done Search engine optimization optimizes for people as well as computer algorithms.
META tags are considered by Search engines in determining ranking, but they are not the most important element. It is more important here to remember your human audience. Your description must be accurate and interesting to catch the eye of potential customers. Likely you are halfway there by showing up in the search, the description tags have to be the sound bite advertising that makes you stand out from the competition.
Another aspect of the human element is selecting those key words and phrases you want to tie to your site. Simple enough. Common sense, right? You pretend you are the customer and select the phrases they would look for to find the service you provide. Watch the tricky endings and the insider lingo. For instance, web design is rather different than web designer, and SEO might not be recognized by the people who need it the most. And which is more likely to be searched, content management or function options? Common sense will carry you far, but little can replace good market and keyword research. This part of the process can easily take the most time, but it can be the most rewarding. First position on a key phrase that only receives 100 searches cannot return more than 100 visitors, but fourth place positioning on a key phrase that receives millions of requests can generate thousands. Then again, quality is more important than quantity, especially on the internet.
Web surfers are usually very directed. They know what they are looking for and they can click away from what they don’t want in a second. If you use the phrase “Britney pics” to increase traffic it may work really well—and earn you nothing because disappointed surfers will click away to another site without examining your site, which clearly does not have pictures of Britney. The swift moving determined nature of the web surfer can work against you if you are trying to draw their attention away from their purpose, but it can work for you and earn you dollars if you position yourself right. A percentage of those surfers are looking for exactly what you are. If you can put yourself in their path and make it easy for them to identify what they need from you, those sales are yours. SEO is best used when combined with a well considered web market strategy.
Among the methodologies available to increase your ranking on the search engines there are tricks and ways to mislead the algorithms. Invisible text, doorway pages, link farms, cloaking, mirror or duplicate content, all of these are known generally as black-hat techniques or spam. These are the components of SEO alchemistry that could blow up in your face. Spam, as far as search engines are concerned, is any attempt to mislead or trick the search engine into producing any document that is not as honestly relevant to the given search as it is portrayed. Search engines can and have banned sites for these practices. Be aware that even though these practices are known to be unsavory and can produce the exact opposite effect desired, some companies market packages that use these methods. It is a buyer beware market and when seeking an SEO company or package, you should be aware of their strategy. If they are not clear and upfront with you on their process you would do better to look elsewhere.
Is it worth it to work this magic yourself? A little common sense, a little research, some clarity on the technical side and you could handle SEO in house maybe, right? Right. You can do it yourself. It’s not really magic. But it is work. For most people learning the process, keeping up with the best practices, avoiding the common pitfalls like broken links and misuse of frames, not to mention the time consumption of research is simply not worth it. If you can buy everything inexpensively and focus your life and your business resources on the many other complications life and business throw your way it is as worth it as pre-sliced bread. Cost, then, is the key.
Since search optimization is a fairly new industry, there are many companies with optimization packages - and the price varies wildly from company to company. Some offer optimization for a predetermined number of keyword phrases, but they may not guarantee a particular placement. Other companies may charge you for how well they optimize for certain phrases - for example, you get charged more for being #1, that you do for #2. A fixed fee, monthly or yearly, is another method of billing used. It isn’t only the cost and the billing style that differ, each company may also have different levels of service. There is no EASY answer to the question, how much does this cost. In general, if you consider the labor effort involved, expect to pay between $2000 and $3000 for a competent and reputable company to do the work for you.
That's a lot of money! I got an email yesterday that offered to submit my site to thousands of search engines and get my site #1 for only $20. Why not just use them?
While an uncommonly large site with many different topics may cost more to optimize, basic time requirements to perform the minimum research and tuning prevent the costs from being much less even for a less complex site. Many firms out there offer service for "Only $29!" or a software package to do-it-yourself. Remember the explosive mixture from earlier? These services are most commonly spammers using black-hat techniques that could leave you banned from the search engines while they spend your “Only $29!” along with a few hundred other peoples’ “Only $29” on a Mexican holiday. Also, keep in mind pay-per-click offerings, which do not optimize your site at all, but work instead on the highest bidder approach. Pay-per-click (PPC) methods offer a reliable way to generate traffic on your site, but are often more costly in the long term, and may not produce the quality traffic of a good SEO campaign. Remember how easy it is for the wrong web-surfers to click on and then click right back off.
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