Do-it-Yourself Marketing /Pt 12 Social Media Strategy

Social Media Strategy 

Today will conclude my examination of Dan Zarrella's book on social media.

Monitoring
This is an ongoing process. Use  tools that allows you to search for your name(s) &
product names, and then subscribe to the search(feed) results via RSS. Search Set

up account on Google Reader with these feeds.

Monitor your industry,niche & competitors keywords as well.
Here's a list of places to do it:
technorati search
google news search
twitter search
digg search
reddit search

Here are a few sites that don't  do feeds of keyword searches, 

but are also important. Dan recommends visiting them 1x week.

Stumbleupon
delicious
linkedin aswers

Research
Get to know the individuals you found ,as a result of your monitoring efforts.
Find out who they are; what their favourite sites are, blogs they read etc. .
Use QUANTCAST to get data on these sites, so you can pin point your target 

market.
Alltop.com  is good place for finding blogs, in over 700 categories.


Integration
All social media should be inter-connected.
There are countless ways.
eg. TweetMeme buttons on your blog to allow easy tweeting
your blog should hav ebuttons for easy submission to social news & 

 bookmarking sites.

Calls to Action
Sticky CTA's keep visitors returning to your site.
If your content is hosted on your blog( as most of it should be)
use feed & subscription options. Include invitations to subscribe. 

Also offer exclusive content for subscribers.
Ask visitors to follow you on twitter, facebook,youtube.
Also cross-promote. eg. tweet a link to your Youtube channel & ask people too
subscribe.Conversion CTA's involve asking visitor to give you their info in 

return for a piece of content.

Measurement 

Analyzing the ROI regarding for your social media marketing campaigns, will indicate 

where changes need to be made. 

The easiest of metrics to use is the time spent on your site & page views.
All social media has stats data, so use it.

Here is some software for on-site metric tracking.
Google.com/ Analytics
getclicky.com
hubspot.com

Do-it-Yourself Marketing /Pt 11 HOW SEARCH ENGINES WORK pt [ii]

How search engines work [pt ii ]

Semantic Connectivity 

This is an added advanced,advantage to help with:
i- figuring out keyword phrases
ii- figuring out relationships of text on high ranking pages
iii- finding pages with relevant themed links
iv- finding which keywords to include on a page

The source for this information is highly technical,but the principles used 

are basic. Search engines try to recognize connections between words, 

phrases & ideas on the web using the following types of searches.
1. proximity searches eg. terms that may have different order from
   original query
2. fuzzy logic  eg.. misspellings, close enough for jazz
3.boolean searches  eg. Yes,Or,Not
4. weight shifting  eg. the importance of each search term

Search engines are getting better at recognizing the connections between 

words, phrases,& ideas. Therefore this semantic connectivity will eventually 

put greater emphasis on theme of pages,sites & links.
eg. zebra & lion would be connected. because they are both animals.

   
TOP 11 BASIC RANKING FACTORS
1.keyword-rich title page
2. keyword-rich of inbound anchor text
3.global link authority of site
4. age of site
5.popularity of link within site's internal link structure
  - all pages should be on the site's global navigation to increase it's own importance
6. relevance of in bound links
 - all links are good, related ones are best
7.link popularity of  of site, in it's topical community
8. keyword-rich content
- include semantics
9. global link popularity of sites that link in
  - number of inbound links use https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
  - quality of links use www.seomoz.org/linkscape
10. number of ranks per day increases/decreases
11.  user Data ...personalization like geolocation, language preference




AMBIGUOUS QUERIES
When search queries that are too general, search engines offer diverse results.

Do-it-Yourself Marketing/ Pt. 10 HOW SEARCH ENGINES WORK[pt i ]

How do Search Engines Work ?

A Preview 

Software programs called spiders/crawlers visit all the web pages on the internet, 

to read/interpret their stored data. The pages that show up with the engines 

search results are termed  search engine results pages(SERP).The SERP is divided  
into sections,  see fig. 2-1 below.

1. Vertical Navigation, includes images,news, videos,maps etc.
2. Search Query Box shows your query
3. Results information provides a little meta info about your query results
4. Paid search advertising
5. Natural results
6. Query refinement suggestions

Crawling and Indexing
Picture the World Wide Web is a a series of stops on the subway. Each stop is

a unique document of some sort (usually a web page). Spiders need to crawl 

the entire subway line,so they use the best path available, which is the "links" 

between the web pages. This link structure binds together, all the pages that 

were made public, by someone who had linked to them.

Where do crawls begin ? At the most trusted websites.
The click distance of your website from the most trusted, is an indication of how 

trustworthy your site is.

Rankings
After retrieving the results most suited to any particular query, engines  rank 

them in order of importance/popularity, after taking the trust & authority factors 

into account, by using algorithms.

Relevance of a document increases if the search terms occur several times, 

showing up in the title,headlines,subheads, or links from other relevant pages, 

that use relevant anchor text.
Importance is gained by the number of references from other documents.

Evaluating Wed Page Content
Engines place high value on content. They analyze all of the words on the page 

& builds a semantic map, that it uses to match web pages to queries.
Because navigational elements are not generally unique to each page, they are 

not considered by engines, as they look for the unique content of each page.

What Content is Seen By Search Engines?
The spiders see the HTML code for your website, & ignore anything not related to 

the "real" content.

The page title is one of the most important factors determining ranking, however 

it is not always used, as with Yahoo or DMOZ directory listings, that may choose to

use the title that was used in your listings in these 2 directories. This problem can 

be solved using meta tags such as NOODP tag or DOYDIR tag.

 Meta keywords are ignored by Google, because of spammers, however Bing & 

Yahoo do seem to reference it in some way.

The meta description tag does not influence ranking, rather the engines use it as 

the description in the SERP, thusly your description should be well written.

The 4th element seen is the "ALT" attribute for images.
It tells engines what the image is about, which gives more info about the page 

content. ALT serves vision impaired people.

An image tag example:(img src+"http://www.websitename.com/img/nameofimage.jpg" alt="description of picture"border="0"/)
The src tells where the image is located. The section starting with ALT is the alt 

attribute. The attribute is what the engines read.

The Anatomy of a Search /Do it Yourself Online Marketing Pt 9

The Anatomy of a Search 

The continuation of  my SEO research, based mostly on "The Art of SEO, 

Mastering Search Engine Optimization"by Eric Enge et al
This information is valuable for anyone who owns a website, from musicians
& artists, to accountants & retailers...any type of businesses.

There are about a trillion pages on the internet that Google knows of. 

A company named Jupiter released a report stating that, paid search 

advertising should continue to be the largest category of online spending, 

growing from 9 billion in 2007, to 21 billion in 2009, even though it's a 

proven fact that  if your websites  dwells among the top 3 rankings in a 

natural search, your link has 2-3 times the valuable of paid advertising.

You have to ask yourself, " Why does business continue to spend their 

advertising this way? It's because the Pay Per Click  model is easiest for 

business to understand, as it is more similar to traditional marketing 

methods, than SEO, in that the ROI can be tracked more readily.

Based on this value ratio of SEO  to paid ads, SEO path will become the 

way of the future for advertising budgets.

There are 2 arms of SEO

1.Offline: This is things done on your actual site such as keywords, content, 

meta tags, etc.

2. Online: Getting link backs to your site, from other sites on the internet

      

A search engines' main goal is to generate revenue via advertising, mostly 

through pay-per-click ads, which means advertisers pay only when people 

click on their ads.

People use the  search engines that are perceived as delivering the most 

relevant, & accurate answers, in the least amount of time. Resultingly, 

search engines are forced to invest a lot of their resources on achieving these 

goals in order to be successful, and people who try and manipulate their 

search engine rankings, that result in non-relavent results, (spam) are

seriously penalized by the search engines.

The 3 Steps of the Search Process areas follows

1) The need of an answer to one of the following queries

i) navigational, where the intent is to arrive at a specific website, eg. acme plumbing

ii) transactional, where the intent is to buy something eg.digital camera

iii) informational,looking for knowledge with no particular source in mind. eg.hockey score

2) Expressing that query in a string of keywords or a phrase ComScore shows 

the average query is 3 words in length

3) Executing the query

Who Searches

Almost equal between male & females

Determining Intent of the Searcher

Most searchers don't understand how search engines work. Searchers often 

provide a query that is too general and doesn't provide the search engine or 

marketer with the info needed to determine the intent of the searcher.

Because of this, general queries are important because searchers at least find 

out about you, & thus begins the start of the sales process...building trust.

Be aware that many of your website visitors arrive looking for something 

else, & are not likely to help your business goals.

For the purposes of marketing, it's crucial you understand how your 

target market searches for your service/product, therefore, we use queries 

to help us determine keywords

Queries are ranked in value as follows.

Transactional: very high...the potential for some kind of transaction, be

                        it financial,or subscription etc.

Informational: middling...the potential attract inbound links, followed by the potential

                         to convert to a transaction

Navigational: low...except with searches on the publisher's own brand

                         he potential  to pull searcher away from intended destination

Using this info you can build your own keyword chart, to help determine the intent of each one of your primary words, as seen in table 1-4  below.

Do it Yourself Online Marketing Pt 8/ 12 Interesting Facts about Internet Searches

12 Interesting Facts about Internet Searches

Taken from  " The Art of SEO, Mastering Search Engine Optimization"  by Enge et al

1.    4500...is the number of searches performed every second, of every day

2.    2900 ( 65%)...is Google's search market share

3.    1 second...is the normal time it takes for search engine to respond to an inquiry

4.    50-50 almost... the percentage of searches done by males & females

5.    6-1 ..is the ratio of dollars earned offline for every dollar spent on advertising online

6.    74% of subjects of a 2007  Nielsen survey, used search engines to find local business

      -  44 %  used traditional newspapers

      -  86%  used the internet  to find local business compared to 70% in   

           2006

7.      20% more clicks come your way if you have a natural ranking of #1 and you

        have paid advertising that same search page

8.      62% of searchers click on search results on the first page

     

9.      90% of searchers click on results within 1'st 3 pages

10.    90% of searchers concentrate on the 1'st 10 results

11.    72% of searchers click on the 1'st link of interest

12.    46% of searchers who made a purchase did so within the 1'st hour

        -26%  who made a purchase, did so after 3 or more days, which

          suggests that marketers should have complex interactions with searchers

       

Do It Yourself, Online Marketing/ pt 7 microblogging on Twitter

Microblogging via Twitter  

Today I'm looking at chp. 3 of  "The social media marketing book", by D.Zarrella.

Microblogging is a form of blogging that limits size of each blog.
Twitter limits blogs to 140 characters, so it's a good tool to announce news, events, new blog posts etc.

Here's some research that Dan did on Twitter
1.Using your first & last name as a handle is good, but if you have a common name( Ken Smith) the use of characters/numbers ( ken_smith) results in fewer followers on average.

2.Accounts that have bios have better chances of getting more followers.

3.Here is a chart that shows relationship of content of your blog and the average number of followers that the blog attracts.

Accounts labeled official,founder,expert & author also rank high.

4. People who refer to themselves as a spouse or parent have higher than average followers.

5. Those who refer to themselves as boy or girl have fewer followers.

6. Using emotions in your blog content results in a negative relationship with number of followers.

7. People who have more followers, than people they are following,themselves, have larger audiences.

8.Retweets is a powerful, viral marketing tool.
i) 11:00 am - 6:00 pm EST is the most popular time to retweet
ii) asking to retweet " please retweet"  works, if used in moderation
iii) posting about social media, especially Twitter itself, gets retweets
iv) use "clients" to help manage lots of followers & do updates from your phone.
      Dan's fav client is hootsuite

Online marketing at a Fraction of the Cost: pt 6/building backlinks

Today I'm looking Dan Zarrella's "The Social Media Marketing Book",

where he talks about getting links to your website, by searching for

industry related blogs and then becoming acquainted with these 

bloggers by responding to their posts.

When you respond to posts, (either positively/negatively) you can 

usually put in a link to your site.

I did some extra research into links, and here's what I found at

http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-build-backlinks-article-16.php

Anchor text is the most important item in a backlink. It must also

include your keywords. Anchor text is the word(s) that you click 

on to open the hyperlink. So if you have the best search engine, 

then “the best search engine” would be the anchor text.

Other Ways to Build Backlinks

The Backlink Builder tool is a source to find links. When you enter 

the keywords of your choice, the Backlink Builder tool gives you a

list of sites where you can post an article, message, posting, or 

simply a backlink to your site.

Affiliate programs and news announcements and press releases 

are also good for boosting traffic. Look for these directories in web.