Why Facebook?

Using social media as an internet marketing strategy is an effective way to increase “word-of mouth,” or friend to friend recommendation, of a brand while also building valuable links to the brand’s website.

Currently, Facebook leads social media sites with over 800 million users. About 75% of Facebook users “like” brands on Facebook, and 30% of Facebook users use it as a platform to share reviews and news of the companies. People are more likely to buy a product or recommend it to a friend after becoming a Facebook fan of the brand.

Facebook has recently made changes that could help small businesses to gain customers and leads through social media interaction on Facebook. Changes applied in September to the Newsfeed have positively impacted the visibility of posts and shared material. The latest newsfeed is a hybrid combining “Top News” with “Recent Stories”.

Implications of Newsfeed Changes

This hybrid Newsfeed has changed the way the users interact with posts. In the month since these updates were made, impressions per posts have gone down, while amount of “likes” and comments have increased. This is because the newsfeed prioritizes pages that are most interacted with; posts that are the most engaging with the most “likes” and comments have gone to the top of the list while less engaging content goes to bottom. Posts are also spending less time on the newsfeed. The more engaging a post, the more people will see it. However, most people will see a post only once in their newsfeed. This means that status updates, even the most engaging and shareable, are spending less time on an individual newsfeed.

Pointers to Increase Visibility

In light of the changes with the Facebook newsfeed, there are two strategies you can use to increase interactions of users with your brand.

First, create engaging and shareable content to promote friend recommendations and word-of-mouth advertising. One way to achieve this is by giving incentives for interactions. Examples of this is creating contests or discounts for “likes” of a product or brand. This has been shown to increase repeated engagements from individual users and increase “fans” of a page.

Second, to compensate for the decrease in total visibility of posts, increase the amount and frequency of posts. This includes increased responses and interaction with users posting on your page.

Finally, reap the rewards of your efforts. Remember, Facebook’s achievement of over 800 million active users really speaks volumes about how people are using the internet and the vital role social media sites are playing. Social media marketing presents a golden opportunity to grow brand recognition and loyalty in a way never before possible. Take advantage of this opportunity!

Most analysts agree that 2010 was the year that social media finally became a force in the business world. Now in 2011, it is fast becoming the “must do” on the list of marketing strategies in order for a company to avoid getting left behind in the online world. And, when you consider that most people no longer use the yellow pages to find a business, getting left behind in the online world can just mean your business is left behind period.

Social Media Marketing Basics

Put in simple terms, social media marketing is the act of creating a page for your brand on social media networking sites to promote your website, services, and products. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn allow individuals to create personal or business pages to connect with friends or customers online. Through building a presence on social media sites, your business is positioned in the light of “friend” rather than just another “ad” that is quickly ignored.

Social media marketing is, above all, about the soft sell. This is extremely important to understand when building a social media campaign. Blatant advertising mixed with a constant stream of links straight back to your site can be viewed as spam in a social media environment and cause you to lose followers. Successful social media marketing is more the art of creating interest and conversation which then leads potential clients into completing a desired action.

A successful social media campaign must strike the right balance between conversation and advertising.

Create Interest & Trust In Your Brand

Reports show that people are much more likely to trust a friend’s recommendation when choosing products or services. This holds true online as well. An effective social media campaign results in followers linking back to your website and sharing your site with their “friends” through their social media accounts. The links gained through social media also provide an added bonus in how search engines value and rank your website. The links gained through social media are akin to votes in favor of your website and send a strong signal to search engines that your website is trusted.

One of the best ways to drum up sales is to get people to recommend your services or products to their their social network. Effective social media campaigns create the online version of “word-of-mouth” advertising while providing a convenient central hub to spark interest in products, services, and other topics related to your business.

Social Media & Viral Marketing

The hot words in advertising today are “gone viral.” If an advertisement or promotion has “gone viral,” it means that people are talking about it all around the web, all around the world. Social media facilitates this “viral” process because people can share links to your company’s videos, articles, pictures, or promotions with their social network. If you create something that strikes a chord in people, they will likely forward it on to their friends, who forward it on to their friends, and so on.

While the concept of social media marketing is very easy to grasp, actually launching and managing a successful social media campaign can prove to be a difficult and time consuming task. Effective social media marketing requires strategic planning, the right tools, the right voice and an understanding of the nature of the market.

Clickbrand is full service internet marketing agency providing search engine optimization, pay-per-click, and social media campaigns tailored to the individual needs of each business. Contact Clickbrand today for a FREE quote tailored to fit your social media marketing needs.

The majority of people have made one of the “big three” search engines (Google, Yahoo!, and Bing) their main portal to search for products and services on the Web. And, people who are not using one of the “big three” search engines, are still likely carrying out their searches online via another search engine.

The search engines use algorithms to determine the value of a website which determines where the site will show in search results. For this reason, any seasoned veteran of online marketing will tell you the first step in creating a successful website is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This consists of a variety of techniques applied to your website to help ensure the site is indexed by search engines and ranks well in organic search results.

SEO Technique #1: Keyword Optimization

An important SEO technique involves making sure you use “the right” keywords in your website. Keywords are defined as the terms people enter into the search box on search engines to find products or services.

The best keywords to use in content on a website are:

a) Keywords relating to products or services offered on the website.

b) Keywords that have a favorable search volume to competition ratio.

The search to competition ratio can be determined through a comprehensive keyword analysis. Once the optimal keywords have been identified, they are then implemented into URLs, meta tags, titles, content, and links throughout the website. Keep in mind that it is important to use keywords appropriately. Over-use of keywords, or “keyword stuffing”, is frowned upon and can negatively impact search rankings.

SEO Technique #2: Meta tags

Meta tags include the meta title, meta keywords, meta description, and alt tags. Meta tags need to be filled out correctly and placed in the source code for each page of your website. Search engines “read” your site differently from human beings. Properly filled out meta tags tell search engines what each page is about and provides the title and description that normally appears in the organic search results for an individual page.

If these tags are not filled out properly, you are taking a gamble that the search engines will “know” what each page is about, which search terms are most relevant, and will provide a good description of your site’s page in the organic search results. Leaving these tags blank often means fewer pages are properly indexed with poor descriptions showing in search results.

SEO Technique #3: Quality Links

Search engine optimization is, in some ways, a popularity contest. Search engines place a fair amount of weight on high quality links back to your website. High quality links are links coming from trusted sites as determined by search engines. It is important to implement a good link building strategy for your website as these links are similar to votes for your site to the search engines. The more votes your site has from other trusted sites, the more trusted your site will be. This affects how your site ranks in search engine results.

Gain Online Success

The above three techniques are really just the basics, there are many SEO tools to help you gain an edge in your online marketing efforts. The Web is an ever-growing and ever-changing landscape. Unless you know how to get your site on the coveted first page, someone else will take that spot right out from under you. Implementing strategic SEO techniques is just one of many important steps to achieving online success.

Clickbrand is full service internet marketing agency providing search engine optimization, pay per click, and social media services tailored to the individual needs of each business. Contact Clickbrand today for a free custom quote to fit your SEO needs.

The whole business of working to get websites to these top positions is called Search Engine Optimization (or SEO), and the industry is filled with many firms that offer these services. Unfortunately, most of these firms prey on naive customers, guaranteeing 1st page results, and delivering very little. Their business model is based on aggressive sales and high turn over. It is because most people don’t really understand how the search engines work that they end up buying services and believing the promises from these rouge companies. The goal of this article is to shed some light on the mystery of Search Engine Optimization.

First off, we are talking only about the non-paid search results on the search results page, and not the paid listings (known more commonly as the PPC, CPC, Adwords or Paid Search).

1. Search Engine Indexing: Finding & Reading

The first thing a search engine needs to do is find your website and then it needs to read your site. There are two ways search engines can find a website: Links to the site and notification of the site.

If you have other sites that link to your site, then odds are that most search engines will find your website by following the links from the other sites. If you have a new website, you probably don’t have any links going to your site and you will want to notify the search engines that your site exists. All search engines have a simple process of submitting your website address, usually found on the bottom of their website through a link called: Add Your Site.

Once the search engines know about your site, they use automated programs to “read” your website and collect information it finds. The programs are commonly called “spiders” or “bot”. They are constantly roaming through the internet visiting every website they can find and gathering information about the website. It is typical that these bots will visit a website several times a week. For some sites, they visit many times a day!

The bots are designed to go through an entire website and collect all the words it finds. It stores those words in giant databases.

So, the very first thing that needs to be done to improve rankings on the search engines is to make sure the search engines know about the website, and then make sure their spiders can easily “read” the words on the site. One of the challenges in optimizing websites for search engines is creating a site that is easy for spiders to “read” while keeping the site visually attractive to human viewers. Websites often use pictures to communicate to viewers, but these spiders cannot “see” the images or know what they are about, so a good balance of images and words is essential.

2. Search Engine Indexing: Indexing

What the spider “reads” is just as important as making it easy to find and read the site. Assuming you had a website about custom furniture and on that site, you had images of all the custom furniture you sell and a description of each piece.

The Classic

In this example, it is clear to a human viewer that this is a wood chest, named “The Classic”.  To a spider, all it would know is the words “the” and “classic”. To the search engine, it would have no idea that this website had custom furniture or offered wood chests for sale.

So, it is important that the words on the page accurately reflect the content, business or topic so that the search engines can understand what the website is about.

Once the spider visits a site and collects all the information it can “read”, it will store those words in its database, indexing and classifying based on the words it sees. If it finds the phrase “custom wood furniture” several times on a page, it will save that information in its database, and because that particular phrase was used more than once, it will believe that the page is particularly relevant to this exact phrase.

3. Search Engine Results

So now that the search engine has visited every website on the internet, and has collected every word it has found and stored it neatly in its databases, it is ready for someone to perform a search:

The search engine will quickly look into its database and find all the websites it found with the words “custom wood furniture”. It will even find all the websites that have the words “custom” and “wood” and “furniture” in any order.

4. Ranking

The critical part! The search engine now needs to make a very important decision: what order to display all the websites it has found with the words “custom wood furniture”. The goal of the search engine is to deliver the most relevant sites to the user. In other words, they want to give the user what they were expecting when they typed “custom wood furniture” into the search box.

How the search engines decide what website to show first and what makes a site more relevant than another is a tightly guarded secret. That is why no one can every guarantee that they can get a site to #1 position (or any position for that matter) because only the search engine controls that, and they will not share the secret formula. However, through trial and error, and some common sense approaches, optimization specialists know how to improve the chances of getting ranked high on search engines. Some specialists are especially good at getting sites ranked high.

The most important factors that the search engine use to determine the relevancy of a site to the search term are:

• Domain Name: If a domain name contains the search term, it will generally rank much better than one that does not.
• URL: If the URL of the page contains the search term, it will help in improving the ranking.
• Title of the Page
• Content: The if the search term is present in the content of the page, optimally  about 4% of the total words, it will help lift the rankings.
• In-bound links: More on that in the next section

5. Links

Links to your website are like votes for your website, and the more votes you get, the higher you will rank. But not all votes are considered equal to the search engines. A link from a very popular website, that has a lot of its own votes, counts as much more than from a site that has no votes for it. Likewise, links from government sites (.gov) or educational sites (.edu) count more than links from commercial (.com), organizational (.org), or other top level domain (.net, .biz, .info, .us, etc.).

How the in bound link is structured is also very important. If the visual part of the link: Custom Wood Furniture contains the search term, it is much more valuable than a generic link back to your site, like this: www.MySite.com

It is a misconception to think that links on your website going out to other websites help in anyway. They don’t. In fact, they actually decrease the overall ranking because your passing out some of your clout to the websites you link to. Outbound links should be used very sparingly, never for search engine optimization, and only to increase the user experience of your actual users.

This outline is a very high level explanation of how search engines decided what sites to show for a particular search and how Search Engine Optimization works. In practice, there are many advanced techniques to improve rankings. Some companies pay firms many thousands of dollars each month to improve their rankings. But, by applying these simple principals, anyone can improve the rankings of their site.

You might ask, what in the heck is ORGANIC SEO? Can’t only food be considered organic? Well I can relate to the confusion, but was intrigued by the outcome of my research.

What is Organic SEO?

Organic SEO is the process of optimizing a website to increase its rankings in unpaid search engine listings.

Goals of OSEO:

- Improve business brand visibility

- Expand market share

- Attract larger targeted volumes of Search Engine users

A benefit of Organic SEO is that their organic listings consist of keywords or phrases, which are unlikely to find on other sites. A good technique to this is to arrange the words carefully and in a planned manner. A long list of ineffective words would only move consumers away.

Essentially, Organic SEO refers to manual page optimization. This is basically automatic page alteration submittal. The two different SEO’s are being used quite equally. Although, General SEO follows concepts of PPC Advertising. The main difference between the two is that SEO is automated to optimize the ranking of the particular website, where as Organic SEO is not. Search Engine browsers are used in favor of organic search and general search listings. General SEO is completely based on the company’s advertising budget, however OSEO places the website in the search engines on the basis of relevancy of subject matter given by the client.

Basically it comes down to your preference and goals of your business in choosing what type of SEO works for you. I hope this breaks your confusion and opens doors to new ways of handling your business techniques.

Marketing a website is generally divided into two categories called Paid Search (aka PPC, CPC, Pay Per Click) and Organic (aka SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Natural Listings).

Paid Search

Paid Search is basically buying positions on the search engines for specific search terms, like “medical malpractice”. You set a price your willing to pay each time someone clicks on your ad and comes to your site. Your position (top, 2nd, 10th, etc) is based on the amount you bid relative to other bidders for the same term. To get a Paid Search marketing campaign to pay off, you need to manage these keyword bids very carefully so that you don’t over-bid and waste money, but also so that you don’t underbid and simply  get nothing in return. The entire system is pretty (no, very) complex typically requiring daily, hands-on management.

The quality of your website has a direct impact on how well a Paid Search campaign can do. A well designed site will have a much higher rate of “return” (more people will call you after coming to the site), so that the actual costs leads you get from the clicks will be reduced. In essence, you will save money because your advertising is much more efficient. That goes back to my argument that a well designed site will save money in marketing because it does a better job turning marketing dollars into real clients.  Using poorly designed sites on Paid Search campaigns will waste a lot of those advertising dollars.

The amount you decide to spend on Paid Search is very controllable and measurable which can be changed at a months notice.

Oragnic Search

Organic is a completely different approach. Every search engine will show two categories of results: The Paid sponsors and the regular listings. The goal of Organic is to “convince” the search engines to list your company, for a given search term, at or near the top of these free listings. They are free – you don’t pay the search engines for them – and they bring in a lot of traffic. However, there is no direct method of getting your site to those coveted top positions. That is where SEO/Organic marketing comes in.

The way search engines work is that they send out these programs called “spiders” that visit every website in the world, and revisit them, on a continual bases. These programs collect the information they find on the websites and store that information in a database so that when a user does a search on a term, like “medical malpractice”, the search engine can then just query its database and display all the websites that contain information about those words.  The complexity comes into play on the “ranking” or the order in which the search engine decides to display these websites. Their goal is to present the most relevant, or “on topic” sites on the top. They keep their algorithms under tight wraps so no knows exactly how to get their website on top.

However, through experience and trial and error, SEO experts have figured out how to design websites, position the sites and manipulate the organic search results to get their listings ranked high. This processes is called Search Engine Optimization and is an on going process of manipulating things under our control to get higher rankings (which are not in our direct control).