Ideate Media SEO Web Marketing Blog (2)

Posts Tagged ‘internet marketing’

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SEM Strategy: Building better websites, with logic.

Thursday, July 21st, 2011

As a starting search engine marketing professional working on a brand new Internet marketing website, you are very keen on learning the “rules of SEO” and you dutifully subscribe to the blogs of the biggest heads in search engine optimization and marketing, hanging on their every word in Youtube videos, and doing everything they say to make your website business’ Internet ranking soar through the sky.

Or so you hope.

While we certainly recommend learning the rules, acquiring the books about zen, motorcycles, SEO, and all of that good, optimized stuff, the real lesson you learn is one on one with your website business, its audience, and your analytics page. You build that keyword list, albeit painfully at first, and you make some serious mistakes. Hopefully you don’t get flagged by Google in the process of optimizing your website. Most new SEOs get so caught up in the dramatics of what’s new and good in the industry, that they forget the roots of being a good SEM website manager.

Common sense.

If your website business is small, your Internet marketing business in a tiny niche of the World Wide Web, and it’s lucky enough to be attached to a storefront business that survives those hectic first few years, then your attention shouldn’t just be on what the head of Google is blogging about, but what your Google analytics metrics are saying about your website. Do you have your click paths defined to see your user behavior? Can you find the top 50-100 keywords that are drawing search results to your business? Are you going to bother bidding in AdWords, or will that be for later? Do you own your company’s name on GoDaddy? Does Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, and whatever other registerable map out there, know how to find your business?

Your website is not going to gain a tremendous website following overnight, so, if you are new to SEO, take a deep breath, and write down the first 10 common sense questions you would have about your website business and go to town…you can always Re-Tweet Cutts blog later.

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SEM Strategy: What’s in a title tag?

Wednesday, July 20th, 2011

In Internet browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox, you will see this common piece of search engine optimization–the title tag. It’s that block of text in the blue bar of IE, or in the gray tab of FF. Although title tags exist in Google Chrome, they are not as prominent, so we will focus on the Internet Explorer display, for ease of understanding.

For many people in search engine optimization and marketing, the title tag is one of those nebulous areas where you may not be entirely sure about what to place in the text. Sure, it may not get immediately noticed, but, it is an important SEO feature that can help gain Internet ranking for your article or blog, or Internet marketing website.

An example would be if you wrote a social media fodder article on your blog called: 10 types of alternative energy. Now, while this title tag is descriptive, and contains a keyword that is relevant to your article (and hopefully to your website business), it wouldn’t do much for your Internet ranking in a SEO sense.

A bad SEO thing to do, however, would be to take that title tag and keyword stuff, like so: Alternative Energy | Biofuels | Solar | Battery Technology.

Although this title tag may contain more of the keywords that your website business ranks for, in the world of search engine marketing, this is keyword stuffing and rather shady. Also, it’s the type of title a human reader would glaze over, and possibly not click on, because it has no information.

The solution is to merge the two–get more descriptive, but leave the stuffing for the teddy bears, with something like this: 10 alternative energy facts about biofuels, solar, battery tech and more. It’s got the keywords, but it’s got some kind of a sentence to make it seem like a SEM person, not a spambot, wrote the thing.

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SEM Strategy: How to detect secret spambots on Twitter, Step 2.

Monday, July 18th, 2011

Following our last post on Twitter spambots is the more challenging post, of detecting and deleting the SEM spammers. As a search engine marketing expert, you may be expected to “magically” tell the difference between a spammer and a real life account, but, it isn’t always intuitive.

Some of the myths about spammers on social media being easy to spot by tricks like no information listed, or no “real” image provided, are completely false. Spammers troll web content and Internet marketing businesses online because it is their job, so they may plug in enough relevant keywords to keep you thinking they’re “real.”

Unfortunately, unless you don’t care about the quality of followers on your page, you don’t have much of an option in finding spambots than to actually click on their account and see what they’ve been posting. Our top recommendations for deleting accounts generally falls under these ideas:

1) If all they do is tag accounts, and occasionally post some kind of obscure link with no explanation, they may be a good candidate for blocking.

2) We also recommend generally blocking any account that tries to capitalize on your name and brand awareness/branding to promote their product. Especially if their product is a competitor.

3) If you notice them posting the same link to 100s of pages, and it’s lacking in information, but “Mentions” several big names in your industry, then has an unidentified link, you should flag them and block the account just to avoid a malicious link making its way around your circle of followers.

These behaviors may not be the actions of spambots, necessarily, but they are incredibly rude, so if you wish to protect your social media and branding, do not be afraid to block.

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SEM Strategy: How to detect secret spambots on Twitter, Step 1.

Friday, July 15th, 2011

Although it is a definite ego boost to any search engine marketing person to see a large number of followers on the Twitter feed, it is a mistake to assume those “people” are all there to enjoy the pearls of social media wisdom dropping from your fingers in 140 characters or less. Twitter is a fun, friendly atmosphere that encourages SEM naturally by making it easy to boost your branding with high-visibility web content that fits your niche market (and is interesting enough for people to click “re-Tweet,” or just click the link). Like most of the online world, Twitter has a seedy element of spambots that crop up like weeds. Even if one is struck down, several will take its place.

No matter what industry you are promoting through Internet marketing and social media, the spambots will find you. Once they do, they will post links on your wall and attempt to make mischief of some sort among your followers—whether its by spreading viruses, attempting hacks, or generally trying to push whatever agenda they have.

In culling the spambots from your social media profiles, you need to be aware of what constitutes spamming, and what could just be an overenthusiastic fan interacting with your Twitter. Most of the time, it is laughably apparent, because the post will be vague, some kind of a call-to-action, and not necessarily pertaining to your Twitter posts. Other times, they may sound somewhat legit, but still somewhat off base. Your first step, then, as an online community manager for your Twitter account, is to identify potential spambots, and click on their pages to see what information you find. The rule of thumb for this process—if they look shady, flag them first and monitor their actions.

Stay tuned to step 2 of detecting and deleting spambots from your Twitter account.

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SEM Strategy: What the “#” are you talking about?

Friday, June 10th, 2011

As a search engine marketing expert, promoting your online business with social media should be an almost automatic reflex. Any time your company has something worth putting on a blog, press release or other announcement, it should immediately post to your social media platforms.

While the simple solution is to just copy and paste your article/announcement to your Twitter feed, it’s not the best way for a SEM to gain a social media audience, or start amassing followers for an online business. If you want a viable Internet presence for your website, then you have to make your Twitter posts unique in some way. You also need to add them to trending topics, or make them the subject of a trending topic by using hashtags.

A hashtag is the “#” symbol placed before a word. In Twitter, it denotes a topic that you either want to become a “trending” one (where other people use the same hashtag) or that you want your Tweet to be a part of. This is an important part of your message because people who are interested in the topic you’re writing about, like, “organic” (which would look like #organic) or “diet tips” (#diet tips), for example, would see your post in the trending tags.

Hashtags basically give your Twitter posts a slight increase in visibility to the general social media audience, who can re-Tweet (copy and paste your Tweet on their profiles), or MT (modified-Tweet—where Tweeters keep the link or part of the info you posted, and add their modification) your post.

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