Hi all,

Welcome to part one of our July Newsletter.

Finding Success in Social Media is our first article. It discusses the various social media sites that you can create profiles on, and how to make it work for you. Social media is a great online opportunity, especially for smaller businesses.

In Marketing 101, we’ve got How to Blog for SEO where you’ll get a rundown on Blogging and how to make your blog search engine friendly.

Have a fantastic month.

Enjoy!

Robyn

We would love to hear any questions, comments, or ideas for future articles… just email us at info@optymise.co.nz.

In this issue:

• » Finding Success with Social Media
• » Marketing 101: Blogging for SEO

Setting up profiles for yourself or your clients on social media sites is an excellent idea. First of all, it prevents someone else from creating a profile on the social media site using your name. Second of all, it is great for reputation management (more on that in a moment). Thirdly some social media site profiles do actually pass PageRank, which you can choose to pass back to your main site.

Social media sites can be very effective in reputation management. Reputation management comes into play when someone has said something negative about you, and that negative comment is ranking highly in the search results for your name, or your company's name. It's clearly not good when this happens, but there is a way to at least partially address this problem: create profiles for yourself on major social media sites.

Many of these sites are very powerful in search engines, and having a profile there is likely to rank highly in the search results, hopefully above the negative comments. If you do this with enough profiles, you can push the negative result off the first page, and away from the eyes of many of your potential customers.

There are many places where you can create such profiles, such as:

• YouTube
• Wikipedia
• Yahoo Answers
• LinkedIn
• Flickr
• Facebook
• Amazon
• MySpace
• Technorati
• Judy's Book
• Newsvine

While it's helpful that many of these still pass PageRank, you may need to go farther to help that profile rise in the search engine rankings by getting links to your profiles. There are strategies for doing this, including linking to your profile(s) from your main site. A more aggressive approach is to provide unique giveaways from one of your profiles. These could be widgets, games, surveys, videos, podcasts, promotion codes, or whatever (Something users will want to take the trouble to go and get).

Then there are the sites you focus on for developing links. Some of them are places to submit your own content or links to content. Others are popular blogs in certain niches or general tech culture. Here is a list of some of the more interesting ones:

• Digg
• Reddit
• StumbleUpon
• del.icio.us
• Netscape
• Techcrunch
• Boing Boing
• Fark
• Engadget
• Lifehacker
• Yahoo Picks

Each of the sites listed delivers heavy duty traffic, and determining which one is the best match for your content is an important exercise. One key way to do this is to visit the sites, and spend time browsing them. See what stories make it to their first page or their popular pages. Study it for some time. Figure out if you have the right content, or can produce content that is relevant to that audience.

Also, participate actively in the communities. This is critical because people who are active in a community have more success in getting content they submit warmly received. Success will not come by lobbing self promotional stuff over the wall at them.

In terms of guidelines for interacting with these sites, there are both written rules:

1. Don't pay for votes
2. Don't create multiple accounts
3. Don't submit illegal content

And unwritten rules:

1. Don't self-promote
2. Don't add biased information
3. Don't ask friends for votes

To succeed on these sites, you need to do several things:

1. Add tons of friends, but keep only those who friend you back
2. Participate in the community in a helpful way
3. Become a top user
4. Create a social brand
5. Be ethical
6. Think long-term

One of the great things about social media sites is that many large brands are not willing to work with social media sites because they can't control them. This creates a huge opportunity for smaller businesses to compete on the web. While it's well known that they can deliver a large amount of traffic, the traffic is not the value you are looking for, because most of the traffic will convert poorly. The real win is the links that you get as a result of the traffic. Major media companies can be reached through these sites, and they can produce very high-value links.

Sources: SearchDay

Making Your Blog Search Engine Friendly

Blogs Attract More Search Engine Traffic

Your favourite thing about having a blog may soon be this - they naturally attract search engine traffic. Blogs already have optimized site architecture. Most are set up with a clear navigation, where every page is set up to link back to the other main pages. They also have the inherent potential to be well-linked.

Top Five Tips for Blog SEO

Tip 1: Blogs and SEO - Keywords

You have a choice. You can target a general high traffic keyword you have little chance of ranking well for and get barely any traffic. Or you can shoot for a keyword that gets a moderate level of targeted traffic resulting in more subscribers and sales. Whatever you call them, here’s the most important thing: They may not get you the most traffic, but they often bring the most profit.

More Web Site Traffic and More Sales? Not Always

You may be surprised to learn that high traffic doesn't always mean high sales. Many of the most profitable sites in the world get moderate traffic because their keywords result in genuine leads.

Tip 2: Blogs and SEO - Keyword Placement

Your blog can be set up to repeat the keywords that you want to target just enough times to establish a theme - get your point across and create an optimised blog.

Tip 3: Blogs and SEO - Timely Posting

You can get good results if you update your blog just once during one of three sweet spots in the day - typically early in the morning (or at least before noon).

Tip 4: Blogs and SEO - Get Linked

If you sparingly include the keywords you selected in tip two in your title and description, all those link backs will contain the keyword term you most want attention for, which is often noted by the search engines as they follow the link through to your site.

Tip 5: Blogs and SEO - Frequent Updates

The more you post, the better. Simple. I mean, don't go spamming everyone but make yourself known as a regular blogger, and the search engine spiders will come and visit you more often!

Bottom Line: Blogs and Search Engine Optimization

You’ll be happy to know that you don’t have to slave over long blog posts several times a day, all day long to get similar results from your blog. A few small changes to your blog can draw more search engine traffic without turning off your blog visitors. Done properly, this gives your audience more of what they were searching for in the first place.

Source: About

CONTACT US today to find out about any of these services, or to fill out a brief outlining your business and website goals. We will assess your needs and be in touch with our recommendations.