There are plenty of considerations to make when thinking about starting a social media campaign.  Here I have listed just a few things that you might not have though about yet.

It is a Quick Response code or QR code for short.  If you haven’t heard of QR codes yet, here is a brief introduction.  The codes were originally used for tracking parts in vehicle manufacturing and quickly became popular with the Japanese youth culture to tag outdoor events.

It’s similar to a bar code that is on most packaged goods, but this code links you to all kinds of great information.  This unique code can be used to link to rich media content on the web like a YouTube video, a web page, a text message or PDF document.

The process is pretty simple, you need a mobile phone that has a camera and can run a special application to process the QR code information.  On your phone, open the reader application which turns on the camera.  Point the phone’s camera at the QR code.  Scan the QR code and the application will redirect you to the media.  I have an iPhone so I was able to find several free QR Reader...

• Social Media Optimization
• Website Speed and On-Page SEO Activities
• The Web Is Going Mobile
• Online Videos
• Personalized Search
• Local Search

The following are a few recommended practices to optimize your webpages for the search engines. Of course we recommend using a professional firm like Narrow Gate Media for this but for educational purposes we wanted to share these points with our existing and hopefully new clients utilizing our sweet Edit On Site CMS.

A) Write your content for your page first without thinking about SEO. Think about your target market and what you want to communicate to them without worrying about keywords, yet. Since you are an expert in your industry and you know your customers, you will probably end up including keywords (in this stage) without thinking about it.

B) Now identify your target keywords that describe what the page is about. This is where you start thinking about optimization. Identify from your list of target keywords, any that best fit the pages content. If you find more that one keyword describes the page, try and use the one that has the greater search volume. If none of the keywords on your list are appropriate, you may need to do some further keyword research.  If so, we recommend the Google AdWords Tool because it makes it quick and easy.

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How do you handle negative comments or outright lies being posted about you or your company on social media platforms across the web? This is becoming a bigger and bigger concern. The root problem is that social media can’t really be "controlled". The best defense is of course a good offense. Providing consistent company information and keeping engaged with your community can go a long way towards building and retaining loyalty even when you’re under attack. But what happens when you are targeted by competitors, or a political group and the negative impacts begin to take on a life of their own? The first rule is to remain cool. Don’t immediately respond and don’t try to stop the discussions all together. Instead, read through the comments and take the necessary time to understand the issues being raised. Then research within and beyond your company to gather factual, accurate data about the situation. Honesty and accuracy are going to be your best weapons. Once you have all of the facts it will be important to...

What do you do with a social media website with almost 200 million users and almost 70 million daily posts? I suggest you use it to promote your business.

Using Twitter for Website Traffic

After posting to your Blog or updating your website content, you should tweet about it. You’ll be glad you did because many users look for useful info on Twitter. However, don’t think you’re going to get thousands of visitors just by posting your website link. You need to do something more interesting like, “Top 5 ways to …”. Even though this won’t help your rankings in the search engines, it should provide some good traffic to your site.

Using Twitter for Link Building

First, you must build a large group of followers. Do this by following people who share your same interests and those in your industry. Many users will follow you back. Some will actually repurpose your content in their blogs, too. This is where the link building begins. You should also know that Google doesn’t index Twitter’s shortened...

If you have done research on search engine optimization and how SEO can help improve your website's performance, than you have undoubtedly come across the word SERP or SERP’s. If you are like most, you are probably curious as to what role this has in SEO.

 

Well, contrary to what some people think, SERP is not what you put on pancakes. It's actually an acronym for Search Engine Results Page. So a SERP is a page of results (list of links) that is generated after someone has gone to a search engine like Google and typed in a keyword phrase and then hit "enter".  In the simplest terms, it’s the results page.

 

Since the goal of every SEO campaign is to have high rankings on the SERP’s, you now know why this term is so widely used. 

 

Good luck on the SERP’s.

Karen Bannan recently posted a story that said that paid search marketing is up in a big way for technology marketers, according to a report from interactive marketing analytics company Covario Inc.

The report, Covario's “Q3 2010 Global Search Spending Analysis,” which aggregates about $300 million in paid search spending from a variety of consumer electronics and technology-related companies (including Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp.), found that spending behind paid search advertising was up 19.8% in the third quarter of this year compared to the second. Year over year, paid search spending rose 46.8%. Meanwhile, cost per clicks (CPCs) rose 14%.

Some of the growth came from the fact that Bing's search engine, rather than Yahoo's, now powers Yahoo search results, said Craig Macdonald, senior VP-products and CMO at Covario. “Advertisers are increasing budgets because companies that may have had the No. 1 search spot on Yahoo now might be below the fold,” he said. In order to stay above the fold, tech companies are buying their way onto that first search results page, he said. ...

Search queries, the words that users type in a search box of a search engine like Google, contain terms and phrases, for example "Indianapolis Web Design". These "keywords" help dictate what websites the search engines deem worthy of appearing in their results.  The search engine displays the best suited results for your particular search based on the main functions they perform, which are “crawling”, building an index, determining relevancy & rankings and providing results.

The three largest search engines; Google, Yahoo, and Bing, drive most of the traffic on the web.  If your website can not be easily found by these search engines or your website content can not be indexed in their databases, you will miss out on the opportunity to appear in their search results. This means less people will see and visit your website. So whether your site provides products, services, or information, the search engines are the primary method of navigation for most people online.  Dont get left behind, get SEO today!

SEO is the process of optimizing your website by improving the internal (behind the scenes web tech stuff) and the external (website content, web pages, images, etc.) setup in order to increase traffic to your website from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

One of the best ways to determine how effective your website performs is to analyze your visitor’s behavior while they are on your site.  This can be accomplished by using a valuable tool called web statistics or web analytics.

All of the Edit On Site website packages come with the SmarterStats website statistics and SEO software.  You’ll want to use your website’s stats to gather useful information that will make your site user friendly and ultimately more profitable.

Since the server records everything, SmarterStats could potentially present you with a lot of data.  With the following tips and a little time you can tame this data.  Then you will be on your way to knowing which pages of your site are finely tuned and which pages need help.

The biggest misleading statistic for your site are “hits”.  You may have talked to someone who brags about the thousands of hits their website gets every week.

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