Social Media and Branding

Posted: Monday, January 30th, 2012 by | Filed under: , ,
Online branding

Online branding

Since social media now has such a strong presence on the internet, search engines have been including and incorporating them into search results. Google, as well as other search engines, now pull data feeds from social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. For SEO experts, traffic is important and since social sharing yield website visits, social media sites can’t be ignored.

Social media can fall into any type of marketing campaign, including SEO. It’s an important strategy to build into an SEO campaign, but social media is much more than helping your business appear in search results. Social media is all about engagement and interaction. Aside from appearing in search results, social media can help your brand become more recognized. By engaging with customers, employees and others you can build your audience and in turn, your brand.

What’s important to remember about social media and SEO though is it’s more than just automatic status updates. Keywords are important and so is interaction. If you have experience with SEO and social media, it’s very beneficial for your business to work these together. Read more …

Social Media Marketing Basics

Posted: Thursday, January 26th, 2012 by | Filed under: , ,

 

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing

Social media has become an important aspect of marketing, public relations and SEO campaigns over the past few years. With the growing integration of marketing and SEO, it’s important to optimize your website (and brand) by influencing Google and other search engines in as many ways possible.

Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook now hold high credibility in search engine results. By sharing your website and blog content on your social media feeds, you are adding to additional “backlinks” to your content, but it doesn’t end there. The whole idea behind social media is to interact with clients, friends, customers and other experts in your industry by being social.  The more “shares” and interaction around your content triggers the search engines to look at your social media feeds and eventually your website, giving it higher rank.

There’s a lot more behind social media than just sharing content on Facebook and Twitter. Interacting and joining conversation is a large part of social media, but in terms of helping your website and business rank in search engines, combining SEO and social media can be very beneficial for you. Here are a few SEO tips to keep in mind when posting to social media feeds and networking with others. Read more …

What are SOPA and PIPA?

Posted: Wednesday, January 18th, 2012 by | Filed under: , , ,

If you’ve never heard of SOPA before, you probably did today after trying to access one of your daily go-to websites, just as Wikipedia or even Google’s homepage. These websites, as well as many others have come together and blacked out their websites for 24 hours in protest to SOPA and PIPA. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) are getting negative attention across the internet, today.

So what are SOPA and PIPA? 

Right now, federal law enforcement has the ability to shut down any US-based website that offers pirated content. What they can’t do, is shut down any foreign sites, like well-known torrent site, Pirate Bay. If these new bills pass, U.S. Internet providers will be able to block access for foreign pirated sites as well as any funds, advertising or partnered sites. The overall purpose of the two bills is to make it harder for websites (including foreign websites) to sell or distribute pirated movies, music and other media content.

What does that mean for the internet? Read more …

Black Hat SEO vs. White Hat SEO

Posted: Saturday, January 14th, 2012 by | Filed under: , ,

White Hat SEO is what is considered legal/acceptable techniques to reach your search engine optimization goals. Black Hat SEO would be the illegal/unethical tricks used to cut corners and increase your site’s ranking on search engine results pages.

Black Hat SEO

Black Hat

Black Hat

Examples of black hat SEO are link buying, keyword stuffing, and invisible text, to name a few. Link buying is exactly what it sounds like. Buying backlinks to your site so that you can increase your search engine ranking is unethical

The field of web marketing keeps evolving, and as search engines continue to improve on their algorithms to better meet the search needs of their users, the definition of what is white hat SEO and black hat SEO continues to change as well. Read more …

Link Building is Important

Posted: Friday, January 13th, 2012 by | Filed under: , ,

Last time we talked about how fresh content can help you out in your search engine marketing goals. As you probably already know, link-building is crucial for SEO. Because links are such a critical component of web marketing, we’ll spend the rest of this blog discussing the various types of link building strategies that can boost your rank in search engine results pages.

Link Building strategies

Link Building strategies

Natural link-building growth Read more …

Internet Marketing Tips That Have Stood the Test of Time

Posted: Friday, January 6th, 2012 by | Filed under: , ,

Some SEO techniques work for a few months or years before they become antiquated by revised search engine algorithms (link farms, anyone?). However, there are a handful of tips that worked in the past and will most likely continue working in the future. Read on for internet marketing tips that have stood the test of time.

Internet Marketing

Internet Marketing

Fresh Content

With today’s technologically savvy generation, many companies feel the need to use social media to keep up and maintain the interest of their current and prospective clients. And given that platforms like Twitter, Facebook fan pages, and blogging sites are generally free, most businesses (old and new) tend to view social media as a low-risk investment. However, once you decide you want to have a blog or Twitter, you absolutely MUST update them frequently. Even though Twitter and WordPress may be free, you still have to spend time writing new content on a regular basis, or at least you’ll have to pay an employee to do the updates for you. Just having a Twitter, Facebook fan page, and blog isn’t enough to increase your ranking in the search engine results page. Here is a good example that better explains the often over-simplified benefits of social media on web marketing: A company blog ranks relatively high in a SERP. However, one day, the owner finds that his traffic has suddenly dropped significantly. The culprit? His popular blog had not been updated for more than five months. However, once he makes a new blog post, that is enough to bring his traffic back to its standard volume.

Fresh content is good because search engine crawlers will recognize it. But more importantly, fresh content is good because it will naturally attract the attention of users and help you build organic links. Read more …