What does Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media have in common? More than you might think. Most individuals and businesses use social media as a way to get their name and voice out there in Internet-land. But unless your motives are based purely on the socializing side, utilizing SEO practices within your social media products is a more effective tool in the online game of “he who uses all the tools available, wins the page rank game”.

So how exactly do you make your Twitter tweets and Facebook posts SEO friendly? It’s very easy; just employ great information with just a tiny sprinkling of a keyword or two; nothing over the top just good content and important information. Due to the instantaneous message sending of social media, it is imperative that you get your point across quickly and simply. No messing around with keyword stuffing and by no means should you ever “spin” anything you previously posted via a social media site. That just won’t work well as posts stay up on your “wall”, so everyone will know instantly that the information is redundant.

SEO and social media are best served together by sparingly applying SEO practices within your posts. The purpose for this is in case a tweet or post becomes viral, the SEO will facilitate higher rankings for it. This will allow for greater ease in finding your popular post and increase the possibility of further distribution by followers and web surfers. Ideally, a news and information site will pick up your post and run with it.

It is important to lightly mix SEO practices with your business usage of social media; however do not go outer limits or you will destroy your credibility and damage any reputation you may have established with high quality tweets and posts.  Now that there are starting to become more means of social branching, you need now more than ever to make sure that your business has the adequate means of conglomerating SEO and social media as soon – too soon, in fact – search engines will incorporate their search queries with Tweets, wall posts and perhaps even relevant Linked In information.  If you’re simply a ‘wingman’ in your business and feel that you could boost business by combining social media and SEO, it would behoove you to talk to the boss immediately since these practices will soon be the decisive factor in who gets seen, and who will not.

It has simply been proven time and time again that combining SEO and social media will incrementally prioritize your business offerings, generate real traffic, and give businesses the steady flow of lead generation that is needed for future business.  Get on the right track and optimize your business with tomorrow in mind.

Greg Henderson, an astute web marketing genius with plenty of self-help articles to his name, provides you with plenty of insight through his readings. Current projects include a reverse phone lookup service Free Phone Tracer along with an email search site with a groovy graphic, My Free Email Search.

You probably assumed that this could have been about sewing without knowing the current state of SEO affairs; however, this is the year of interesting optimization trends, bringing forth new means to gain website notoriety.  And today we’ll discuss how Pinterest can make your pictorials become a means to harvest excellent sources of traffic for your website.  All you need to do is read, get yourself a Pinterest invitation, and begin to pin the tail on your search rankings.  Really.  This stuff does work.

Optimize Your Own Images

Firstly, you need to simply make sure that your images are all anchored with both a relevant page keyword and have some form of internal linkage.  Try to pick pages on your site that are different than your home page as this will make your relevancy carry more weight (sub pages that tend to get more attention make the root domain more wholesome, in other words.).  Once this step has been completed, and you’ve pumped the brakes on the Javascript, you can now head to Pinterest.

Add Pins

When you begin to pin your images, you’ll simply need to enter the URL at the (+) tab up top once logged in.  Type in your root URL and wait for the images to become viewable in your tiny window.  Give your pin a name that contains your site’s keyword.  In the description, you’ll need to write something clever related to the content and anchor keyword and, if you wish, at a link with http:// affixed to beginning.  Now you’ve just won yourself 2 links with one image!  Once you hit ‘pin it’, your specific image now has a url located at http://www.pinterest.com/pin/BUNCHOFNUMBERS.  You’ll need to cut this link from the status bar and keep it with you for a few.  It’s about to come in handy.

Ping

First, take the link and let the search engines know about it.  You can go to http://www.mass-ping.com and put the URL in the box with keyword that is relevant to both the pin and your site.  Once pinged (Pingomatic and Google Blog Search pick this link up nearly immediately).  Now the world knows about this single image attached to your site located on Pinterest.  This simply isn’t enough.

Link Build With It

With the same Pinterest link your image just received, head back to your site, first, and located which page has that image.  Once found, you’re going to find a keyword within the content that is also anchored in your image.  Create a contextual link with your Pin link using the chosen keyword.  Once placed, ping your site as well.  Next, you can build a few forum links with it.  Or comment links.  Unsure how?  Use the below for comment link places: (copy as shown and exchange your keyword)

For blogs, use this:

site:.com “powered by WordPress” + “YOUR KEYWORD” -”comments closed”

For forums, use this:

inurl:memberlist.php “Powered by phpBB” intext:”Website” -”index.php” -”showthread.php” -”viewtopic.php”

For the forums, you can simply use this as a means to find yourself a home to put some profile links.  To get on first page of member lists, use exclamation marks in front of your name (i.e.”!!!AA” is a viable username).  Then, when asked to place your website info, use the Pin you just made.  Bam! You bagged a forum profile link with your Pin.

Same concept flies with comment links.  Just use your Pin URL when prompted to put your link in “website” field.  Please make sure to stay on the blogs topic – comment spam is rude.  In other words, say something other than ‘Nice site.  You did well’.  Talk about their topic related to your keyword.

Now that you’ve made a quasi-pinwheel with a Pin, you’ll see your images literally pull your website’s ranking for you.  Enjoy!

Greg Henderson, an astute web marketing genius with plenty of self-help articles to his name, provides you with plenty of insight through his readings. Current projects include a reverse phone lookup service Free Phone Tracer along with an email search site with a groovy graphic My Free Email Search.

When seeking a new niche for SEO-based online marketing, it pays to follow a few simple guidelines, in order to avoid the SEO deserts and truly make the most of your monetisation. Here’s three to bear in mind…

1. Avoid the “obvious”. Although a niche may have a lot of traffic volume surrounding its keywords, it may still not be the right one for you. See if it can genuinely be monetised by Google-searching the major keywords and seeing if there is much PPC advertising there. If not, it’s likely to be a sign that it’s a desert when it comes to revenue.
2. See which players are involved with the major keywords. If your Google search shows that it is only large corporate brands that are associated with the keywords, then you will have your work cut out to match resources with them – you will need the services of a top online marketing company with a great site strategy, and you will need to be prepared to make a lot of effort.
3. Check out the competition. If it is not all big brands in the niche, then take some time to see exactly who it is you’ll be competing with. There are various backlinks tools which can tell you exactly who is involved with the top search results associated with the keywords, and what kind of links you will require to compete with them. Again, a good internet marketing company will provide this service and bring a level of expertise to it that maybe you cannot.

Google remains the undisputed king of the search engines, according to new research – news that will come as no surprise to online marketing professionals.

The study by Experian Hitwise found that Google controlled a massive 90.64 per cent of the search engine market, in a year where British consumers have used search engines 2.3 billion times in January alone.

Yahoo and Microsoft Bing slightly improved their market share, with 4.16 per cent and 2.98 per cent respectively, but Google was untouchable, despite taking a slight drop in search share compared to December 2011.

The implications for online marketing are clear, Experian market analyst James Murray pointed out.

“Search is one of the most crucial elements of online marketing and our data shows that search is growing, with nearly 100 million more visits going to search engines this January than last January,” he said.

As well as the likes of Google, social networks like Facebook, Reddit and YouTube are becoming ever-more popular in driving internet traffic to commercial sites, Experian said. Internet marketing efforts need to bear this in mind and make content that is easy to share.

For its part, Google is striving to capitalise on the lucrative social network market, with researchers finding out that in December 2011 in the US some 49 million internet users visited its new social network Google+, a 55 per cent increase compared to November.

photo credit: Henriksent

Online marketing is a constantly developing field of expertise, with innovations emerging weekly – but no development has been quite significant over the past year than the rise of mobile devices. With more people than ever before owning smartphones and tablets, mobile devices are fast becoming the most important factor among internet marketing experts, who all advise that optimising a website for mobile traffic is the priority for 2012.

Because smartphones and tablets such as the iPhone and iPad have a full browsing ability, unlike the previous generation of mobile phones, they can still navigate a “normal” webpage without too much difficulty. Nevertheless, they still benefit from a more mobile-friendly site – and this is especially true for commercial sites. From an online marketing perspective, increased mobile traffic leads to more sales and conversions, as nowadays an ever-increasing amount of online transactions are being conducted via mobile devices.

Search engine giant Google has confirmed once again that mobile queries reached a peak the week before Christmas last year – the same as in 2010 – which indicates that mobile users are making the most of their devices for the busiest shopping period of the year. With this in mind, retailers need to be offering internet marketing campaigns that target mobile devices and use adverts specially enhanced for these devices. They could even consider separate campaigns for mobile consumption with tweaked messages and offers – such as discounts for customers that place orders or make purchaes via their smartphones or tablets.

A report published last year by tech research company Gartner estimated that mobile traffic will overtake traffic from desktop and laptop computers by 2013 across the globe. With this “deadline” looming, any company or organisation that relies on its online presence should be optimising their sites for mobile traffic, if they have not already done so. The research also showed an underlying trend that is more worrying: many online marketing professionals had not woken up to this sea change in internet behaviour and did not trust users of mobile devices to register with their sites or make online purchases – although all the evidence points the opposite way.

Fortunately, good online marketing companies are perfectly placed to assist clients with the process of mobile traffic optimisation, and can offer both advice and technical expertise.

Make sure that your website is not left behind in the mobile revolution!

One of the biggest keys in writing and submitting SEO-rich articles and content is having the perfect balance of quality and keywords present at all times. You need to provide web publishers and readers with well-written, entertaining and informative content. You also need to be keyword smart so that your articles will do well in searches in both the article directories and on the major search engines. In doing this, SEO-savvy webmasters often try to balance both, albeit for naught or success.

There are no guarantees that your article will be appearing on the first pages of the search engines within days, or perhaps ever. However, if you maintain these methods over a period of time you will find that your articles will begin to bring the traffic you desire to your website. Without a doubt, good content should always take precedent and the major search engines are finding more and more ways to reward good content on the web, while penalizing keyword heavy content that holds little value for readers.

Many of us have run searches and clicked on one of the results only to be presented with a pointless, barely readable article that is stuffed with keywords. In 88% of cases, the immediate reaction is to click away from such a page as quickly as possible. The point here is that whoever published this page effectively used keywords to get a high search engine page ranking and get visitors to the page. However, the poor quality of the page’s content means that the visitors are lost immediately.

Therefore, the secret is to find a good balance. With a little work you can produce an article that reads well and has enough targeted keywords to help with SEO. In general, keywords should never go above the 3 percent mark on your density. So, if your article reaches 600 words, you shouldn’t have more than 18 keywords to avoid looking spammy.

When you are writing article marketing content, you will first need to decide on a subject you wish to write about and the keywords and keyphrases you want to use. Researching these keywords well is vital and there are many tools available online to help you with this. In general, your keywords should match the words a potential reader who is interested in the subject of your article might type into a search engine.

Also, it is not about how many keywords you have, but where you place them. Above all, the keyword should appear in the headline, the description, the opening paragraph and the last paragraph. These are by far the most important. The remaining keywords can be interspersed with the main content at any points you choose and where it reads well. If this is done well, the reader won’t even realize that there are keywords in the article.

Once the article is written you should edit it to make sure it reads well and achieves the purpose you intended. In general, an article should be informative or entertaining. When you are happy with the article you can then worry about inserting the keywords. Sometimes you will find places where they will slot in naturally with the flow of the articles, while in the other cases you may have to change the wording a little. However, do not leave keywords interfere with the structure, meaning or readability of the content.

It’s always suggested that you give your work a glance-over to assure that there are no grammatical or spelling errors. Sometimes, as you reread your article you will often see more opportunities to subtly work in a few more keywords without disrupting the article. Now, you have an article that will serve you on two fronts. It has the good content to get it noticed and published by web publishers and it has the keywords needed to draw the attention you need to both the article itself and your website, which tends to create the perfect balance of quality and keywords you were seeking.

Greg Henderson, a California-based businessman with over 11 years in SEO/SEM, provided this piece based on personal endeavors and education in search engine optimization with a concentration on content optimization for the social media future. His current projects include a background checks website Easy Background Checks as well as a marriage records website Genealinks.

If you were born in the early 60′s or 70′s, you would hardly think socializing through online media would ever be a possibility; in fact, I distinctly remember sitting at my old Commodore 64 learning how to program nifty graphical syntaxes while chatting with my friend next to me; time has evolved to the point where we can chat with people in Iceland as if we were right in their living rooms. Whereas many people see this as an opportunity for global connection, businesses find this as a way to harvest potential worldwide traffic and potential customers. In this passage, we look at the need to direct your online media traffic wisely to not only cultivate targeted customers, but to cultivate life-long business and interpersonal relationships built on trust.

Seeking social media traffic is more than simply busting out Tweets and updating Facebook profiles; in essence, humility is necessary on both the business and personal levels in order to truly understand the people you wish to attract. You have to treat each person as number one, listening to the needs, trends and wants of each individual person before you even attempt to show them anything you are promoting. Sure, you’ll want to definitely geotarget traffic that will have a specific interest in what you’re selling; if you treat each person as a ‘sales push’, however, expect to get nowhere. Finding a comfort zone that both your potential customers and your business can exist on is the imminent key when cultivating online media contacts, always addressing each friend or colleagues concerns as an individual instead of categorizing them as a whole is also necessary, too.

Directing your online media traffic wisely also entails finding the best resource available for your niche. This would entail understanding what business-minded people or groups exist that closely resemble your niche and making sure to join those specific circles; simply going out and making friends just ‘because’ will often times land you disinterested people who simply wish to talk about life’s general happenings. Find organizations – Linked In being a great starting point – and find groups that closely resemble your primary directives, joining conversations that can cultivate new angles and eventually new friends. If you choose to use Facebook, it would be best to begin your efforts on a local level and slowly expand outward instead of joining global groups that may not be suited towards your niche.

It’s no secret your goals are to promote a business or product and expand operations; everyone wants to be considered prosperous. Having a tactical yet conservative approach to directing online media traffic wisely can surely be a huge catalyst in sustaining your efforts while building friendships that will last a lifetime and help to push your efforts across the board. Emailing the world with your offers and pushing affiliate links through Tweets is not what people want to see – it is the person that takes the time to outreach that will end up reaping the benefits of well-planted friendship seeds.

Greg Henderson, a California-based businessman with over 11 years in SEO/SEM, provided this piece based on personal endeavors and education in search engine optimization with a concentration on content optimization for the social media future. His current projects include a background checks website Easy Background Checks as well as a marriage records website Genealinks.