Kathryn Lively

It’s not uncommon to see how many businesses have an official Facebook page in addition their main website. As this social network grows in popularity, so people are likely to first come upon your Facebook presence before they realize you are set elsewhere on the Web. The more you socialize with friends and fans on the network increases the likelihood of traffic, and conversion of visitors to customers/clients. But can it be done without looking like you are using your profile to spam others?

A client once remarked on the limited capability of the Facebook fan page – one can only customize it so much. If you look at a standard fan page, there are options for sharing photos and links, and one can import an RSS feed for content and maintain a message board for people to chat. Certain applications may be used on a page – a weather gadget for travel related sites, YouTube plugins to display offsite videos – yet page owners run the risk of applications throwing fatal errors or not working correctly. The best method for winning fans to your page remains being social.

Like other social networks, Facebook promotes a viral method of connecting like-minded people. If you have fifty people committed as fans to your page or profile, it’s through these fifty people that you must attract more. Engaging fans in conversation, and sharing informative links and notes with corresponding commentary may ignite the interest you need to compel fans to share your page with others. Note, too, that users of Facebook enjoy the release of entertainment options the network provides. How often do you log on to find friends have taken a multitude of quizzes? You just may be able to use that sort of thing to you advantage.

Say you operate a retail shop or other business. Use the create a quiz application to manage one about your company – pose questions about when you were established, what products or services you provide, how many locations you have, and so forth. Invite friends to take the quiz and watch for a viral reaction.

Do you have friends who like to collect “flair” for their Pieces of Flair board? Create buttons with your logo and URL and send them to friends. Perhaps they will do the same and generate interest in your site. For every application or game making the rounds of Facebook, there just may be a way to incorporate your brand and get noticed. Give it a try and see far your name can go through the social channels.

Kathryn Lively is a freelance writer specializing in articles on search engine optimization and professional SEO writing services.

You’re ready to take your business online, or perhaps you have an existing Web site and realize the need to upgrade the look and feel. While structure and ease of use on the front end is important for catching and keeping the attention of visitors, it’s equally vital to have a content management system (CMS) you can operate with little or no difficulty. You may find as you interview prospective Web designers that customized programs are available for your use. The question is, what should you look for in a good CMS, and what options are available to you?

Choosing the Right CMS for Your Website

Before diving right into the creation or renovation of a site, one must understand what a content management system is and does. The CMS of your website is where you, or your webmaster, handle the maintenance of the site. From adding new pages to editing current ones, setting up contact forms or widgets for social media, everything you do in the back affects what the actual site looks like. Think of the CMS as the fuse box in your home. You tinker with a few wires to make sure the lights are working correctly – so it is with content management.

Examples of Content Management Systems

Do you use Blogger or Wordpress to maintain a weblog? If so, you are using a CMS. Every time you log in to write a new post you manage your content through a specialized CMS program. Other programs, like Joomla and Drupal, allow site owners to create and customize sites for a variety of uses. You may find some designers use these systems when working with clients, or they may create a proprietary program for your use. If you go with the latter, it’s recommended to find a system with these features:

Easy Web Access – You want to be certain you can get to your site from anywhere. The backend should have an administrator log in page and dashboard for maintenance 24/7.

Drag and Drop Features – For sites with lengthy menu sidebars and widget capability, it’s nice to have a CMS that let’s you easily position links where you want them to go. A drag and drop feature for positioning modules on a web template is ideal for the novice user.

Ease of Graphic Placement – Photos can be a bear to manage online, so having a good photo editing systems in your CMS can help you upload, resize, and position graphics simply.

HTML and WYSIWYG Editor Options – For those who aren’t very proficient in HTML, an editor designed to work like a regular word processing program can assist site owners in page creation. Having the HTML option as well is a plus, for one can use it to tweak font sizes and colors. When shopping CMS systems, make sure yours works both ways.

Instant Publishing Ability – If you need to get a page launched immediately, you want a CMS system that publishes with the click of a mouse. Consequently, if you need to remove pages, you should be able to quickly.

RSS Publishing – These days RSS feeds can be imported into Twitter and Facebook. If you constantly publish new material, you should be able to syndicate as much as possible, and have a CMS that does it for you.

While there are other bells and whistles one may desire on a Web site, ask about these features when you talk with your site developer. Your Web should be simple to weave.

Kathryn Lively is a freelance writer specializing in articles on SEO writing services and local ppc management.

An author friend once noted this advice on promotion via social networks from a book marketing professional: follow and you will be followed. Essentially this means one should set up a Facebook or Twitter account, then seek to follow and friend anybody with similar interests – an author, other authors and readers; a musician, others in the field.

While it may appear to be a good idea in theory, let’s look at the result: if you were to blindly select a thousand people on Twitter to follow, chances are a good-sized percentage will follow back. Sounds good, huh? In theory, you might think you can convert all these followers into customers or clients, but consider why many people are on Twitter in the first place: to market their own products. What is more likely to happen is that a thousand people will follow you with the intent of converting you to purchase their goods. A top turn-off for some who choose to follow Twitter users is receiving that initial automated greeting message – you know the one, there’s usually a URL and a pitch. You haven’t read one of the person’s “tweets” yet and already they’re on the hard sell.

In order to get the most out of social networks as a means of promotion, a few things you’ll want to bear in mind are:

It isn’t necessary to follow everybody who follows you. If you follow too many Twitter folks the chain of messages received becomes diluted. Posts from people you truly want to follow may get lost in the shuffle of numerous advertisements. True, you want people to follow you, so it’s important to set your profile up as one that contains pertinent content, yet doesn’t appear to constantly hustle readers. If, however, you are set on using Twitter to promote your business, set up a separate account for personal use.

To become attractive to Twitter users, be an expert. “Socialization” is the key to succeeding in any social media network. Not only should you use your Facebook and Twitter accounts to relay information on your favorite subjects, but you should interact with users as well. If you sell sporting goods, ask followers and friends what brand baseball bat or glove is the best, or who they think will win the Series this year. Put a personality behind the avatar and you may find people will recommend their friends to follow you.

Don’t be afraid to promote other things. If you see a news item related to your line of business, share it. Never feel as though you are helping “the competition” in any way. In fact, sharing this information could help you in a way, as it might inspire followers to “re-tweet” your findings and credit you. This in turn could lead to more followers, and perhaps more business.

Kathryn Lively is a freelance writer specializing in articles on Virginia web design.

Too often these days, we see advertisements on the Internet calling for bloggers to make “fast, easy money” through simply writing content. You post articles, maybe add an optimized link here and there, put up a banner on the sidebar and expect the cash to come rolling in the next day. Suffice to say, it doesn’t always happen, and while there may exist people who do bring in a modest income through regular blogging, one thing to consider when owning a blog is that in order for it to work well for you, it takes more than monetizing it. A blog needs to be visited and read by many, many people before you begin to see results.

If your primary function for the Internet is promote your business, it is imperative to have a web blog connected to your site. Whether you host the blog software on your domain or use a third-party host like Wordpress or Blogger, regular use of the blog to optimize keywords for your main site can be of some help in boosting your search rankings.

What should you write? Regardless of the purpose of your website or business, the blog should have a down-to-earth, friendly appeal. Though it is to be utilized for promotion, perhaps alerts on sales and new services, it shouldn’t be constantly used as a means to hard sell visitors every time they come to read, lest they be turned off altogether. Keep a good mix of blog posts active; talk about what you do and what you offer, but take the time to hold an online conversation with visitors. Post about local happenings, use pictures or embedded links to related videos, and try to stimulate feedback from visitors.

Combining these efforts with social media networking can improve traffic to your blog as well. Open accounts with Facebook and Twitter, for two, and use them to refer people to new articles on your blog. Sign up for social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Digg, and save the URLs of specific articles and posts you feel have a wider appeal. The more “word of mouth” enthusiasm you can generate, the better for your stats, and business. You just may find that blogging can bring you a decent income as it leads people to your main site.

Kathryn Lively is a freelance writer specializing in articles on Virginia web design.

If you are new to pay per click advertising, chances are you haven’t quite grasped the lingo associated with it. You may be aware that as you bid on keywords relevant to your business, your goal is to spend as little money as possible for the highest visibility for your ads. The better the quality of your ad, the more affordable local PPC becomes for your campaigns. Click-throughs from the ads to your site are recorded to give you an idea of how well the ads perform, but there is another statistic you should study as you spend. This is the conversion rate.

What is a PPC Conversion Rate?

When an Internet user sees your ad and clicks through to your site, you have a visitor. When that same visitor performs a function on your website, such as purchase a product or fill out a form, you have a conversion. A conversion is a goal you set for your website, and as a PPC program like Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing can record visits and money spent, they can be set up to track activity by all users come to visit via the paid ads. A conversion need not be an actual sale, but can record a variety of actions you wish to see accomplished by site visitors:

• Signing up to an opt-in newsletter
• Filling out an online form for information
• Registering online for an event
• Downloading a PDF document or freeware
• Registering to a message board

As each task is completed, the conversion is recorded and your PPC management dashboard will note the conversion rate compared with the actual number of visits to your site from the paid ads. Most PPC programs will allow you to set more than one conversion goal to track for your campaigns, so you can compare which ads are more effective achieving the results you want for your site and business.

What should your conversion goal be? Consider your website and how you want it to function for you. If you sell online, most assuredly actual purchases are one goal to attain. Collecting customer information for future promotions could be another. If you run a non-profit, you may wish to track visitors who leave information or sign an online petition. Only you know for certain what your site should do for you.

As for what is a good conversion rate, this is also dependent on the type of work and the scope of your business. A small company garnering a 1% conversion might not look successful, but if you factor how much is spent and how many ads are distributed, this small percentage could easily compare to a larger site enjoying a 6% rate. In short, as businesses have different models, so will the mark of success differ. Determine what is good for you and work from there. Hiring the expertise of a PPC management firm can help you plan a conversion goal strategy that works for you.

K. Lively

While waiting to speak at a regional science fiction and fantasy convention this past weekend, I sat in on the panel preceding mine. The topic, using social media in promotion, is one that always holds my interest, as social media optimization is more a part of my job than ever before. I took away from the discussion a better sense of using networks like Facebook and Twitter with regards to promoting products and services. What I learned at this panel could be applied to anybody new to SMO who is not sure how to use these networks to their advantage.

Avoiding the Hustle

So let’s say you set up a Twitter account, and slowly but surely people are following what you have to say. That’s great, that’s what you want to happen. Once you establish this captive audience, however, you want to keep them in place and perhaps get them to “re-tweet” your posts and spread the love. It’s important to do this in a way that doesn’t lead followers to think you are constantly trying to sell to them. If every tweet you post implores people to buy this or buy that or hire me, you risk losing followers. The point of social media networks like Twitter and Facebooks is the social aspect of them. To keep people tuned into you, you must engage them directly.

So what does this mean? Well, if you’re an author and readers follow your social profiles, talk to them via the medium. If you receive a note complimenting your work, return with a thank you but don’t feel pressured to deliver a hard sell of your other works. You would be amazed with how your name or brand can stick in someone’s mind just by being yourself. In talking to some authors this past weekend, I discovered how well this tactic could work. One author trading tweets with a reader found that person bought his entire backlist, while another author noted that hits to her website spike when she posts about a new book cover or pictures from a con, not necessarily a new book release. You may think this is not productive, but visitors come to the site. They just might return to buy.

Maybe you operate a business catering to local markets - talk about the weather, what is going on in the city. Reply to a follower’s remarks about favorite television shows and music…let people know there is an actual human being behind the social avatars, lest anyone suspect the profiles are there merely to regurgitate sales copy. If a follower enjoys your content enough to click through to your site, your profile has served its purpose and may just attract new followers through word of mouth.

Give it a try. You just might find you can build trust among your online following…and customers.

These days a potential client coming to your door wants to know two things: 1) Can you put my website at the top of search for my relevant keywords, and 2) How soon can you make it happen? While we all would like to have the crystal ball that tells us when to expect the fruits of our SEO labors to bloom, answering either of these questions can’t occur without some heavy explanation into how search engine optimization works. As you win the confidence of clients and take on the tasks, you might find utilizing social media is a good way to expedite some goals, but what happens when you take on too much work?

Recently we scored phenomenal success with a client by creating a Facebook page that attracted nearly 2,500 fans in less than a month! That the client practically sells itself - a southern travel destination - helped enormously, but the fixes we made to the site allow us to update with pertinent information without having to log into every single network profile we set up. As you take charge of more accounts, knowing the shortcuts to take when promoting websites can be a boon to your own business.

RSS is Your Friend

The beauty of syndicating content is that once you place it in a primary spot, usually a blog, you can set up a feed practically anywhere else. If you have a client for which heavy article marketing is conducive, you can set up a weblog with RSS capability (Wordpress and Blogger, for two), and use the content to feed an accompanying Twitter account and Facebook page. Squidoo, a growing social network for business users, also accepts multiple feeds into their pages.

Maintaining a blog for a client, too, permits the use of widget to bring in supplemental content that can be helpful for blended search. Feed the blog with RSS or XML links from video sites like YouTube, plant the client’s social bookmarking links from Delicious or pictures from Flickr.

Essentially, one task for an SEO client could look like this:

Article posted to off-site hosted blog > fed to Facebook page, Twitter, Squidoo lens, and RSS widget embedded on main site.

Depending on the business involved, more specialized networks may permit feeds. A good SEO trick for a book author would be to sign up for Amazon.com’s AmazonConnect program and feed a blog into that client’s page.

The only caveat to this approach: it is advise to check up periodically on the social pages and profiles you create. You can’t always rely on e-mail to notify you when a visitor makes a comment or when somebody tries to spam your space. Plan your course, monitor your progress, and you will find you can become quite adept at juggling multiple SEO clients through social media.

Kathryn Lively is a freelance writer specializing in articles on social media optimization and local ppc services.

If you Twitter, or use some other form of microblogging, you’re aware that URL shorteners are seen sometimes as a blessing. If you need to get out a message and find the URL link is too long to accommodate everything you have to say, the use of a URL shortening service allows you the wiggle room. It’s not uncommon to see the same URL root spread out among dozens of the Twitter accounts you follow - in this respect the shorteners are convenient and quick and, depending on the type of microblogging service you use, automatic.

Users of Twitterfox, a handy Firefox extension that lets you track folks from a pop-up screen on your browser, will note that URLs too long to appear in posts are cut using TinyURL, perhaps the best known of the shortening services. What TinyURL does is take a long URL like this:

http://www.highsearchranking.com/index.php/2009/05/01/are-url-shorte…s-good-for-seoare-url-shorteners-good-for-seo/

and make it shorter through its own root and a random extension, like this:

http://tinyurl.com/djvfvq

Some services, like TinyURL, have recently allowed users to customize the URLs, so the first string above could be also marketed like this:

http://tinyurl.com/urlshortshsr

The downside to this, for one, is that more popular names may be taken. “url-shorteners”, for example, was.

Good to use on the go if you Twitter constantly, but are shortened URLs good for your site’s SEO? In observing recent trends in Twitter, it isn’t difficult to see spam accounts are on the rise, and the inclusion of such a URL, however innocuous the preceding text may appear, could lead to a phishing link. It stands to reason one should look on shortened links carefully, clicking through only if you are certain the source can be trusted. The use of another company’s URL root in your posts, aside from your own domain, might also set back marketing efforts. The more people see your name, the more apt they are to remember your URL. Long strings cut short risk the dilution of your brand as you micro-blog.

This is not to say you should never use a shortening service. One suggestion, if you must promote long URLs for specific pages on your site, would be to use a service that lets you customize their link name. Make a spreadsheet and record all the customizations - using your brand in every way possible - and drawing from that list as you Twitter. With many services the shortened URL is permanent, so you can reuse them as needed.

Another suggestion for marketing via Twitter is to create alternative pages on your site with short file names that best describe the content. This way, you can provide good text before your link and get everything in under the character limit.

URL shortening services are handy in a pinch, but ultimately it is important to promote your own domain in Twitter, Facebook, or other social networks.

So you have decided it’s time to embark on a pay per click campaign to advertise your website and business. Wonderful! PPC has proven to be a cost effective, highly visible method of marketing products and services. Depending on the scope of your business, it is possible to bid for high positions in Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing for pennies a day. The question of whether or not Internet users will click through your ads, however, depends on a number of factors - the primary being the name you wish to present to visitors.

Do a search in Google, and take a look at the ads that appear on the right hand side. Let’s say somebody is looking for baseball cards and uses that exact phrase to find a dealer. The results that show in search may range from strict card dealers, to collectibles shops that buy and sell all types of card, to even major auction sites like eBay. A look at the URLs presented is a good exercise in determining whether or not you should use a generic URL name - one that utilizes you preferred keywords - as opposed to a more business-oriented domain.

A recent PPC study on URLs found that users are more likely to click through an ad with a generic domain. The repeated use of the keywords, in the ad text and URL, may be factor in a user’s decision to explore said sites. That the click-throughs eventually convert visitors to buyers remains to be seen, but in order to have buyers the site must bring in the traffic.

Businesses may buy generic domain names as a means of improving organic SEO, and use of said URLs in pay per click advertising can prove beneficial. Even if the URL is not connected to your main page, but set up as a satellite site for the purpose of catering to PPC traffic, you have the opportunity to gauge the success of your campaigns. If you sell baseball cards, or offer accounting or housecleaning services, purchasing a domain name relevant to your line of work can help improve the performance of your online advertising.

If your business targets a local or regional audience, the addition of localized keywords may especially boost interest of the people you want visiting your site. The accountant interested in serving clients in his immediate area may want to purchase a domain that combines his city and job. He might find a boost in his PPC traffic in addition to organic SEO efforts.

Before you implement your PPC ads, take the time to consider the name you’ll present to potential clients and customers. If you have a brand not yet as recognizable as major companies, defining yourself with a keyword-driven URL may be the ticket to bring traffic to your site.

Attending a recent keynote address at a writers convention, an author friend was impressed by the advice of the marketing expert chosen to speak. MySpace, this speaker stressed, didn’t have the clout other social network and media sites have - in her opinion.

From an SEO standpoint, this does make a bit sense, considering how MySpace toys with outbound links to make it difficult to track inbound referrals. This speaker recommended alternatives: Squidoo, a helpful tool if one uses it constantly, and bookmarking sites like Digg. By conference’s end, my friend and others had set up several lens and created account to “dig” blog posts about their books.

Thinking about these sites from the perspective of an SEO agent working for various clients, I considered the effectiveness of these tools for the purpose of building rank relevancy. Is it worth the time and effort to post your site and blog links to a multitude of bookmarking sites, given the chance the links will simply languish under the weight of more popular entertainment and news blogs? If you choose the bookmarking route, which sites do you use? To look at the names of these sites: Digg, Diigo, Reddit, Sphinn, Yigg, Mixx, and so forth, one might think he’s stepped into a bizarre spelling bee. What can these sites do to help your SEO progress?

Depending on the purpose of your site, using news bookmarking networks may be useful in attracting local and regional interest. Many of these social media sites track top stories in entertainment, technology, and sports, so very likely you’re going to see the same players at the top - national and global sites like CNN and Reuters and Yahoo! News. If by some stroke of luck you are able to create something viral - a crazy video for Youtube, for example - you may be able to bring in traffic.

To look at Digg, you’ll realize you have a lot of competition for the top spot. Whether you are writing about new technologies or opining on college sport regulations, there are certain to be hundreds of articles similar to yours jockeying for attention. Attracting attention via Digg and similar sites could be helpful if you befriend other Digg users and arrange some schedule of mutual “digging” - scratch a few backs, get scratched in return. With enough persistence, you may be able to produce a submission that catches fire. Depending on how often Diggs user take advantage of the search function, if you make your submissions keyword specific you could gain viewers that way.

If you are unsure whether or not such a site would be helpful to your main site rankings, try an experiment. If your site doesn’t feature a blog, choose a page and create an article relevant to your site. Include embedded video or audio if applicable, then submit it to Digg. Establish friendships with like-minded people on the site, or recruit friends to register and help “dig” you story - one can argue whether or not this is “gray hat” SEO, but word of mouth remains the strongest form of marketing. Friends and family have mouths, or in this case, mouse buttons.

Pay close attention to your stats. Do you see many views for that particular page? Are people entering your site there? If you find the traffic is valuable enough to continue, then “dig” away. If not, don’t worry. Given the climate of SEO and social media optimization, another site is bound to come along that can help.