Ideate Media SEO Web Marketing Blog (2)

Posts Tagged ‘sem’

SEM Strategy: Maintaining a professional attitude while emailing

Monday, December 5th, 2011

Whether you’re dealing with an irate customer or your nagging, but genuinely sweet auntie via email, you may come across something they say that could prompt you to respond in an unprofessional manner. Before you send that email, step away from your monitor for a few minutes to reconsider what message you are sending out.

A search engine marketer’s job is to provide professional, crisp and optimized web content for an online business. This should translate to your email correspondance, especially when it concerns issues involving your website business, or your workplace. Here are a few reasons when you should not respond–at least, not right away.

1) If you are angry–No matter what the other person writes, it is not in your professional interests to respond when you are angered. It is bad SEM and even worse manners. When your words of anger are recorded in print, they remain long after your feelings have changed. This could make you look extremely childish.

2) If you are distracted–Unless it’s a one-line email that requires a one-line answer, it is never in your best interest to quickly dash off a response to an email when you are distracted by being in a rush, stressed, on a deadline or dealing with some other issue. You may not get the point right away, and you may have a better response than just shooting from the hip. Ultimately, this will help you, your SEO and your online business look like you have your stuff together.

3) If you are tired–Tired can’t be helped quite as easily as the other two, given the fast-paced lives of most people, but if you can avoid responding to emails when you are too tired to consider the implications, then you will be better served.

SEM Strategy: Good punctuation for better SEO

Monday, November 28th, 2011

Although it might seem as though people communicate with “text speak” these days, your website business should not take that approach to building your brand’s reputation online. As a search engine marketing expert who wants to sell your online business and its services or products, you will get much more mileage out of a well-written and thoughtful website.

Despite your best intentions, though, your web content may get speckled with a few punctuation errors that can change the tone of your message (or just make your online business look silly). While web design is important for the functionality, if it’s too annoying to read, your bounce rates are not going to look pretty. To keep you honest about your website business’ brand management, here are a few common punctuation errors to look out for with your website’s content.

1) !!!!!!!!!–Nothing is so exciting that it requires multiple exclamation points. In fact, your website may be better served without having any exclamation points in the web content. It’s the difference between sounding like an overexcited teenager, and like a serious SEO online business.

2) Apostrophes.–The difference between it’s and its is fairly important. One mean’s “it is” and the other is a possessive. For example– “It’s a lovely day.” v. “Its a lovely day.” The first is correct, because it says “It is a lovely day.”

3) Semicolons–The rule of thumb is, if you don’t know how to use these—don’t. Nobody’s impressed by a semicolon so don’t risk your SEO or the quality of your web content by trying to get fancy for no reason. If your heart is set on a semicolon, however, please consult a grammar guide.

4) Ellipses–These are the “…” that are used to shorten a long sentence so you can get to the point sooner, by glossing over some fine, non-crucial details. You cannot, ever, use ellipses to change a sentence, especially a quote. Generally speaking, for SEM, it might not be necessary to use these, unless there is some definite style purpose.

SEM Strategy: Managing social media overflow. Part 3

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011

Another way to streamline the process of social media for your online business is to do physical things to actively separate the social media aspect of your SEM activities from the main processes you are working on. While you may be dealing with creating optimized web content on a day-to-day basis, there will be those three or four times you will check on your channels to make sure they are progressing.

We recommend adding a second monitor to your workspace and “parking” things like your social media channels, aggregate tools, schedulers and other attention stealers on this monitor, while you use your main space to get things done. it isn’t too much of a challenge to link the two monitors and have one mouse travel across both screens, but if you prefer a larger amount of separation, just hook up two separate systems on your desk. (This may come in handy from a web design perspective if one of your systems is a PC and the other a Mac, but otherwise, it might be a little extraneous.)

Generally speaking, having one “place” where you social media is housed can streamline your process, not just in terms of time, but in terms of how you plan a media campaign. It will also let you know if you are dealing with social media overflow, because it will be a separate task that you have to deal with, and possibly encourage you to re-evaluate how necessary a particular channel is to the success of your online business’ brand awareness.

SEM Strategy: Managing social media overflow. Part 2

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

Continuing our post from yesterday about managing social media overflow—is the step you take after creating a list of the channels you are using to promote the SEM and visibility of your online business.

Managingyour social media channels, and the message each one is conveying about your company is an important part of the search engine marketing and brand awareness process. If you have one diluted message that you push out across all of your channels, you are missing an opportunity to create a network in the “language” of the channel. You are also risking having your online business come off as sounding like a generic spambot.

Once you’ve created a list of the channels you are currently using to address your target audience, go through each channel and list the value of each of them for your everyday life. Is it something that you’re using to enhance your website business’ message, or is it really just something you are using for your own entertainment. Identifying the value of the channel should be something you’re doing in terms of the amount of time spent, and the kind of response you are getting from it.

After you’ve identified the value of a channel, then you may decide to ditch some of them, but if not, then you should examine the channel closely to see what ways you can cut down the amount of work you are doing. Whether it’s by using schedulers to cross post, or working with email updates, try and cut down the amount of time you spend working in these mediums so you can figure out how to grow your target audiences better with quality content.

SEM Strategy: Managing social media overflow. Part 1

Monday, November 21st, 2011

Whenever you hear of a new social media channel that promises to elevate your online business of the next level of visibility and reach a whole new realm of brand awareness, take a deep breath and a big SEM step back. If you add every single social media channel that pops up on the market, you are risking burn out for the SEM/SEO in charge, and you are also risking diluting the message of your online business.

While social media can help increase the popularity of a website business, most search engine marketing experts should realize that it is hard to pinpoint the ROI of what social media can actually contribute to the bottom line. As a result, any effort spent on social media should be as cost-effective as possible, and take up the least amount of an SEO’s time. So, when the latest, greatest, and neatest new media channel comes out, the first two questions you need to ask yourself are, “Why is this important?” and “Do I really have the time for this?”

There are a few gold standards every online business should be participating, at least as of November 2011. Those are the big, recognized players like Facebook, Twitter and now, LinkedIn. Having some kind of social media effort to increase the optimization and brand awareness of your website business is pretty much par for the course at this point. If you have any extra channels past these few, then you may need to take the first step to managing social media overflow, and make a list of everything you’re using. Stay tuned for the next post on managing social media overflow for your online business.

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