SearchEngineOptimisation.com, only one way up

On your own site, it might seem a little redundant to re-post content after a few days. If your content is on your pages, you could assume that people will be able to find it. Unless it’s news content, it’s unlikely that it will go stale very swiftly. The same is not true for social media, or Twitter in particular.

Tweets go stale incredibly quickly. Whatever you post in the morning isn’t likely to hold interest into the afternoon. In fact, studies have shown that links posted in tweets tend to lose clicks in just a few hours. This gives you a very small window of opportunity for advertising your content. This is a shame, when advertising content is one of the main uses of Twitter your SEO company might put forward. You can discuss this with us at www.SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk.

The answer is to simply tweet again. It’s a good idea to work multiple tweets into your content promotion plans. For example, if you post a new SEO blog first thing in the morning, advertise it with a tweet at the same time. In the afternoon, send out another tweet, talking about some of the responses. You can even use this method to promote the piece over the next few days, depending on reader response.

There are rules of etiquette that need to be followed during social media optimisation. Luckily, reusing material isn’t one of them. Re-send your tweets when you want to ensure that your content gets the attention it deserves.

One of the sources of frustration for those link building in the UK has been the ‘no-follow’ tag on Twitter. This entered the game fairly early on, shattering the hopes of many a site owner and search engine optimisation company. Instead of reaping hundreds of high quality links from the site, SEOs found themselves getting only social rewards from their tweets. Or did they?

It has long been assumed that no-follows on Twitter has rendered links within tweets useless for link building purposes. Certainly, such links still have an SEO and marketing value, giving pages exposure to hundreds or even thousands of followers. But when you’re interested in high quality link building, the marketing value of link exposure pales into significance. Well, don’t despair. Google has revealed that retweeted links can be taken into account in rankings.

The key word here is ‘retweet.’ Both Google and Bing have been concentrating on social these last few years, and popularity on Twitter is something that comes under that purview. When a link is retweeted, it is seen as an indication that the page linked to is relevant to the terms mentioned in the surrounding text, and you can discuss this with us at www.SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk. In other words, retweeted links can carry much the same authority as regular links.

Do they carry as much weight? That is something that Google and Bing are not revealing, and it’s difficult to guess at. It will come as a relief for all those avid tweeters out there, however, that their linking efforts aren’t entirely in vain.

What happens when you try to appeal to everybody? As anyone who’s tried it knows, pleasing everyone swiftly turns into pleasing no-one. For some reason, though, search engine optimisation gurus and business owners tend to forget this when it comes to social media marketing.

It’s astounding how many social media management campaigns are utterly mismanaged. Most of the difficulties come from a lack of selection. Instead of stepping back, researching and carefully crafting their social interactions, site owners dive into the social whirl of sites like Twitter and Facebook. The lack of discrimination in choice of connection can result in a muddy campaign that doesn’t really get them anywhere.

Selection is the key word when it comes to social media. While it’s tempting to follow everyone you come across on Twitter, narrowing your focus can put you in contact with people who are more likely to help you. Selection will also ensure that your energies aren’t being dispersed across a broad swathe of interactions. You can talk to our expert team at SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk about how to effectively target your social strategies for website optimisation.

Determining which people to target is the difficult part, and one area where it helps to have your SEO company involved. It’s made easier with research. Before engaging with social networks, you must determine:
1. Where your audience is
2. Who the influencers are
3. What your focus is – what you want to achieve.

Armed with this knowledge, you can target your social activities more specifically, achieving results more efficiently.

A recent study has shown that smaller businesses certainly do benefit from social media marketing. The same survey reported some tremendous results for a lot of smaller companies and businesses using social media campaigns.

As a small business, particularly if there is only one or two people, the owners can doubt that their business has what it takes to be a competitor on a social media site. Yet other small start ups have seen huge results by using social media marketing in only a matter of months.

Social media allows a company to reach out to its customers and potential customers. The use of social media optimisation allows even the smallest company to build strong relationships with customers, conduct market research and gain valuable feedback. Social media is also an extremely clever and cost effective way of advertising your products and services.

Society is evolving and the majority of people are now either tweeting, chatting or blogging and social media marketing is definitely the way forward. You can have a personal interaction with your customers, and studies and surveys have shown that this is what the public wants.

By incorporating a social media site into your online marketing plan, you can listen to the views and opinions of your customers and clients, which in turn will help you gain the knowledge and understanding what it is that your customers require from you as a business.

At www.searchengineoptimisation.co.uk we will assist you in advertising your company on any social media site and offer you help and advice on social media marketing.

A 15-year-old girl diagnosed with a form of terminal cancer known as Hodgkin’s lymphoma, uploaded a blog earlier this week.  She wrote her ‘Bucket List’; a list of things she wishes to do before she dies.

The blog was started by Alice earlier in the week, and was originally created to be a ‘little blog for a few friends’.  However, it was discussed in parliament, and this bought it to the attention of a lot more people.  This led to thousands of comments being posted on the blog, and on Twitter #alicebucketlist was on Thursday morning, the highest trending term in Britain and the third highest trending term globally.

Alice’s story doesn’t stop there.  At the top of her ‘Bucket List’ is the dream to make everyone sign up to become a bone marrow donor.  This has led to the bone marrow register site being inundated with people looking for information on how they can become a donor.  Also, her sister has been able to raise £10,000 for the Cancer Research charity through the support and coverage Alice has gained through her blog and Twitter.  So, not only has the internet played a part in helping Alice achieve some of her dreams, it has also increased awareness of an illness, inspired people to donate bone marrow, and helped to raise a large amount of money for a great charity.

This story must be taken in context.  It is incredibly touching and tragic, rich with the humanistic desire to help someone who is suffering.  Still, it can be used as an analogy for those working in search engine optimisation, as it shows how quickly the internet can spread a positive message.  Social-media strategy is a consideration for many digital marketing strategies these days, and this is another example of how quickly a story or piece of content can spread.

While I have used Alice’s story to reflect an aspect if internet marketing, I hope I have no way trivialised her story.  I hope everyone reads her blog, and I’m sure Alice would appreciate it if everyone who looks at this blog went to http://www.nhsbt.nhs.uk/bonemarrow/ for information on how to become a bone marrow donor.

When you’re looking for ways to augment the efforts of your search engine optimisation company, operating an SEO blog is a great start. A search engine optimisation blog serves the dual purpose of bringing fresh content onto your site and engaging site users, something that regular content may struggle with. Even so, simply hosting an SEO blog is no guarantee of it being a successful addition to your plan for organic SEO.

There’s one way to easily further the reach of your blog, and handily, it’s free. It’s Facebook.

Almost any search engine optimisation agency would recommend exploring Facebook as an avenue for SEO. The audience on Facebook is huge – it’s more popular now than Google in the UK – and its workings offer great potential for developing a loyal following. With this in mind, it seems wasteful not to pursue Facebook.

Developing a following on Facebook isn’t easy, but there are some good approaches to take:

1. Set up a page directly linked to your blog. You can use your blog and Facebook page to help each other. Publishing status updates whenever you blog post keeps you appearing in your followers’ news feeds, and publishing your status on your blog promotes your existence on Facebook. Talk to us at SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk about economical use of assets in SEO.

2. Add a Facebook campaign to your general SEO, then promote your blog. This option is more general. Many SEO experts would recommend promoting your business on Facebook. If you do, work your blog into your updates.

Website optimisation is a complex set of processes that have to be adapted in line with the ongoing shifts in the search sector. However, the techniques which are used have to be appropriate for the individual site in question. Due to the increasingly sophisticated techniques being used to drive site performance, it is not possible to be competitive through the use of a formulaic approach.

At Searchengineoptimisation.co.uk we typically combine conventional optimisation and social media marketing. However, we always tailor our strategies and tactics to fit with the particular features of a site. This enables users to be approached with a high degree of subtlety.

Using networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Digg for commercial purposes is not easy for inexperienced individuals. Assessing how best to improve the prospects of a site can be a little tricky as an ‘off-the-peg’ solution will be suboptimal. It is vital to track down where the various elements of a target audience are interacting with one another. It is then a matter of gradually inserting the firm into the social buzz.

Being aggressively self-promotional is not the best way to make progress. Users of the networking sites are generally turned off by individuals or companies who appear self-absorbed. It is much more effective to show an interest in other users by asking questions and so on. Valuable information about the tastes and desires of a target audience can be gathered in this way. This can be fed back into the campaigns to good effect.

LinkedIn was once one in a long line of small social media sites, but it has grown so much over the last year that it now pays to be LinkedIn. The professional lean of the social networking site makes it a valuable business tool, and the links that the popular site provides makes it worth including as part of your search engine optimisation campaign.

A lot of the profiles on LinkedIn don’t make proper use of their opportunities. You can avoid this by following the steps below.

Points to hit in your LinkedIn profile:

1. Snatch a unique profile URL if you can. Like Facebook, LinkedIn offers profile URLs that are a little more user friendly than the usual random number URLs. Having your name in your profile makes it a lot easier for people to find you, and the SEO advantages are obvious.

2. Use your links. Another great SEO point to hit is smart use of your link allocation. You can feature up to three links on your profile, so make sure your website is on that list. As for the others, you can either choose to go the marketing angle, and refer contacts to a review site, or use your links to strengthen pages that then link to yours.

3. Good content. Content is just as important on a LinkedIn profile as it is anywhere else with search engine optimisation. Make good use of your bio by making mention of significant keywords. Making your LinkedIn profile page as relevant for your main keywords as possible gives it a better chance of ranking on its own. This helps you to take another place in the SERPs. A powerful profile page also boosts your organic SEO.

It wasn’t too long ago that the death knell sounded for Bebo and it was sold off to new owners in the form of AOL. One of the earliest social networking sites on the internet, it used to draw comparisons with MySpace, but attracted a very youthful following.

AOL though seem to have plans for Bebo – the site has recently been redesigned and re-launched, supposedly to attract users who have become disillusioned with Facebook and the constant changes being made to it. AOL will have to be careful with its strategy though – one of their rivals, MySpace, went down a similar path not too long ago. They lost approximately 10million unique users between January and February 2011.

So is there a market anymore for the likes of Bebo and MySpace? Michael Birch, one of the original owners of Bebo has been helping with the new design, and has been working alongside chief executive Adam Levin who recently commented: “There are lots of gaps in what Facebook provides. The site stays largely the same – whereas on Bebo we are going offer users an online location they can really personalise.”

Interestingly enough, the ‘About’ section on the new Bebo mentions a ‘Social Inbox’ feature, saying ‘The Social Inbox now features updates from Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and AOL Mail, and media recommendations that deliver you the most relevant online entertainment (including video, music, groups and games) into one place.’

Wait… isn’t that a service similar to the one Facebook announced in November 2010? Has Bebo stolen a march on the largest social media site around??

Whatever the future holds for Bebo, we wish it all the luck in the world!

Twitter’s enormous – but there was a lot of speculation and reports at the start of the year that Twitter was being bought out by either Google or Facebook, with a hefty $10billion evaluation slapped on the microblogging site. With so many rumours flying around, a lot of attention turned to Twitter’s finances – long before the $10billion dollar valuation, there were questions raised about its business model. The Industry Standard, in May 2008 for example, wrote an article questioning Twitter’s long-term future because of a lack of revenue.

The latest rumour to be doing the rounds is that Twitter is going to start a new service for businesses which is similar to Facebook’s brand pages to maximise revenue potential. Apparently, brands would be able to create pages bursting with content which will help to grow a proper user following. This would help them to create branded content on-site, which would attract more users in an engagement sense.

Brands are currently relying on Twitter’s promoted accounts service and sponsored hashtags for visibility, so would more content be a way forward from a revenue perspective? Dave Parfect of Facebook though feels that companies need to work on an overall strategy and the bigger picture instead of just amassing followers and ‘likes’.

“Just because a brand has 17,000 fans on Facebook, that does not mean these fans are engaged with them. That is just where the marketing should start. Marketers need to transform the way they think, and social media should not be siloed.”

A lot of brands are beginning to understand the power of social media when it comes to SEO, and what a useful tool it can be when communicating with a user base. Twitter’s evolution over the coming months and years will be interesting to see, especially from a revenue standpoint.