Social Media is as big, if not bigger, than ever in terms of a great place to use for marketing your business.  You’ve got to make sure that you use them correctly, though or you’ll run the risk of being labeled a spammer on every social network that you’re on and you’ll quickly lose friends/followers/etc. quicker than you can snap your fingers.  You can market yourself indirectly, rather than just including links to your site and saying “HEY – Go here and buy my products/services!”.  Including social media in your email marketing campaigns is a great example of this.

A recent study by Marketing Sherpa concluded that simply including sharing buttons to an e-mail marketing campaign led to a “25% boost in reader interaction, and a surge in inbound traffic from social networking sites.” Moreover, huge gains were reported in traffic via social sites: 2,070% from LinkedIn, 1,680% from Twitter, and 1,351% from Facebook.

Above all, don’t forget to “cross-pollinate” your marketing efforts.  If you are including sharing buttons in your email marketing campaign, don’t forget to remind your friends/followers on your social media sites that you have an email newsletter that they can sign up for.  This gets the promotion to them indirectly, as they feel that they are in control of having your advertisements show up in their Inbox, rather than showing up on their social media pages just because they’re you’re friend.  They can unsubscribe (theoretically – make sure this works!) from your e-mail marketing campaign if they feel that it’s not a good fit for what they are looking for, without de-friending you or unfollowing you.  It’s a much more user-friendly way of advertising to your audience.

Global time spent on social networking sites saw an 82% increase year over year in the month of December ’09, amounting to five hours and thirty minutes per user per month, according to a just-released study by the Nielsen company. Facebook  led the way in time spent, and in traffic.  With this in mind, you simply cannot ignore the importance of utilizing social media for marketing your business.  Customers are more frequently turning to social media rather than simply using traditional search to find what they are looking for.  If you don’t capture the lead from social media, you can certainly bet that one of your competitors will.

SEO is pointless if your bounce rate is nearing 100% and the average time a visitor spends on your site is a matter of seconds. That’s the equivalent of having a storefront on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles where you get a lot of people opening your door, looking around for a few seconds inside, then turning around and leaving. All you’ve ended up doing is invested a lot of time and money into your store and pay a lot of rent to keep it open but no one comes inside to buy anything. There are some very simple concepts that you absolutely MUST follow in order to convert visitors to your site into bookmarkers, clients, customers, or whatever the goal of your site is.

Research shows you have about 2 seconds from the time a visitor hits your landing page before they decide whether to stay on your site and look around or if they want to click the back button and go to a different site. Here’s some basic tips on what you can do to win the hearts and minds of your visitors during that brief time period:

• Invest in a good site design. No one wants to visit a site in today’s Web 2.0 world that looks like it was taken right off of a generic free template site or designed by a firm that hasn’t escaped from the year 2000. Design concepts change very quickly in today’s web world. Keep up with it, or your competitors will leave you in their dust.
• Update your site frequently with new content. No one wants to see a stale site (including the search engines). If you post news to your site and the last post was 2 months ago, visitors will think the site is abandoned and they’ll leave. If you have an e-commerce store, let your customers know what’s on sale, upcoming sales, new product promotions, etc. If you’ve got a corporate site, let your visitors know what’s happening with your company right now. No news in this case, is probably bad news. If you don’t have anything interesting to say or can’t quite figure out what to post on your site frequently, don’t include dates on your previous additions. You absolutely do NOT want your latest addition/post/etc. to your site to be a date far in the past.
• Use proper grammar and punctuation. Spell check is a beautiful tool. USE IT FREQUENTLY! Misspelled words, incomplete sentences, and other common grammatical problems make a site appear unprofessional and, for lack of a better term, “cheap”. You know what you want to say, but please take the take to double check your work and run your text through a grammar checker. This is probably my number 1 pet peeve when I visit a site. If you can’t take the time to double check your work, you will appear lazy to your customer. And how is a lazy company going to treat its’ clients?
• Provide value to your visitor. This should go without saying, but I think it’s important to mention it anyway. You MUST provide value to your visitor. Do your research before you ever start your site. If you sell products and your cost for the product is $3.00 higher than what a competitor sells that same product for, what value are you bringing to the web community by starting up a store to sell that product? Sure, you may get a few sales from people that don’t do their research – but you should focus on bringing value to the net as a whole. If you offer value, you’ll capture your visitors’ attention right off the bat.
• Clearly outline the benefit your visitor will get from your site. If you run an e-commerce store, let them know why they’re better off doing business with you than your competitors. If you publish news, why is your visitor going to be better off bookmarking your site than your competitor’s site?
• Be honest in your claims. Again, this is something very basic that everyone should already understand but I felt it was necessary to include in this list. If your advertisement promises your visitors a “Black Friday FREE SHIPPING Special!” (I use this analogy because I’m writing this post on Black Friday), make sure that once that visitor makes it to your site that you are re-enforcing your claim that if they shop with you today on Black Friday that they will indeed receive free shipping. If there’s some sort of coupon code that they need to use to get free shipping, make that code readily available. If that’s the catch that brought them to your site to begin with, don’t make it difficult for them to purchase and receive free shipping.
• Make it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for. In reality, you should be using specific landing pages based on what the visitor searched for to make sure that they end up on a good page where they are seeing EXACTLY what they searched for, but if that’s impossible then it is imperative that you have clean, easy to use navigation on your site so that they can find their way around your site. Search boxes are good, drop down category lists of products are good, easy to search lists of manufacturers are good. Use your imagination and think to yourself, “If I were a visitor on this site, how would I try to find what I am looking for and where would I look on the page?”.
• Don’t overdo marketing/sales hype. You’ve already gotten them to your site with your marketing and sales techniques, so you don’t need to overdo that once they’re on your site. You don’t want to come across as pushy, and you definitely don’t want to come across as “cheesy”. Be clear and concise on what it is that you are offering in a meaningful, educated fashion.
• Be security conscious. Identity theft is rampant these days, which is unfortunate because there are so many ways to prevent it. You’ve invested in the 128-bit encrypted SSL key for your store, so why not advertise that? Make your visitors feel safe at your site. Do you offer something that requires them to give you their email address? Ensure them that you don’t sell your email lists to other companies (and don’t lie to them if you do!). People are very hesitant to give out their information online, so you need to concentrate on ways to ease their fears and convince them that your company is safe.
• Keep trying to find ways to make your site better. There are numerous free and inexpensive ways available to track analytics on your site. Track your checkout funnel, see where you’re losing visitors, and find ways to better those pages to keep your visitors on your site. There’s no such thing as the perfect site, but as an active, responsible business owner it’s in your best interest to continually find ways to improve your site. Not to mention that as your improve your site, you’re making it better for the web community as a whole.

• KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
• BUILD YOUR NETWORK
• ADVERTISE EFFICIENTLY

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
For any business to be successful, you must know who your audience is and what their specific needs may be prior to beginning your marketing efforts. Narrow down your key audience and focus on those products and/or services that will capture their attention. This is a good head start for any business strategy. Starting out too broad or starting with a niche that is highly competitive are frequent reasons that small businesses fail. Find your niche and exploit it! And furthermore, don’t try to sell your audience something that they are not interested in. You will come across as being a pushy salesman and you will lose credibility and trust with your audience immediately.

BUILD YOUR NETWORK
In order to build your network, begin with current contacts and expand upon those. Network with old friends and colleagues and build relationships through those with others. There are several ways to do this: attend local and national events, host an event yourself, and utilize internet web sites to build your current network such as facebook.com, myspace.com, etc. These sites are usually free to join and very helpful in building a network of contacts.

ADVERTISE EFFICIENTLY
Advertising is a key factor for any business. Without appropriate advertising, you are limiting your business potential. Depending on what type of business you have, you may want to advertise in local or national newspapers and magazines to target all audiences or travel to local areas and pass out flyers, business cards, etc. for more local prospects. Billboards are another option, but can be quite costly. Another, more economical avenue would be the internet to market your business. There are free web sites such as craigslist.org, backpage.com, local classified websites, etc. that can be a very effective tool. Whatever you choose, know what you want to advertise to get the most bank for your buck!

Client A hires us for a link building campaign and requests weekly reports. This is fine – we give daily reports if you want them, so no big deal there. Once the reports start rolling in, the client begins questioning the links which we are getting for them. “Why don’t we have any .edu or .gov links?”, they ask. So I answer – “Because I have not found any relevant pages on .edu or .gov domains that I can get links to you from.” Ok, problem averted – for now. The next week comes, and so does the same question. “When are we going to get some .edu and .gov links?”, they ask. So I begin to wonder if there’s a pattern forming here. I went on to explain to our client, as I’ll explain to everyone here right now: It is a myth that .gov and .edu links give you a bigger SEO boost than any other domain out there. This started some time back, many years ago, and while it may have been partially true in the old days of SEO – I see absolutely no benefit from it in today’s SEO world. Don’t believe me? Let me quote Matt Cutts:

“This is a common misconception–you don’t get any PageRank boost from having an .edu link or .gov link automatically. Hah John, I beat you to it! If you get an .edu link and no one is linking to that .edu page, you’re not going to get any PageRank at all because that .edu page doesn’t have any PageRank.”

The one thing to keep in mind here though, is the fact that .edu and .gov sites tend to not ever be involved in any “bad neighborhoods” and therefore you have less chance of getting involved in a bad linking scheme if you DO get links from .edu and .gov sites. These sites also tend to be considered authority sites in their niches and the domains are more than likely fairly old, all factors which help rankings. However, don’t think that just because you get a link from a .edu or a .gov that you’re getting something extra for the extension that you wouldn’t get from a .com, or even .info for that matter.

Don’t get me wrong here, I am not downing my client in any way for questioning the means in which we are getting them links. I expect that our clients will have many questions and concerns – after all, they hired us because they did not know how to do proper SEO themselves. We are here to help them and guide them every step of the way. This is just an example of how bad information permeates the Internet on a daily basis.

Fact of the matter is, this is just a common SEO myth that you should not pay any attention to!

First of all, if you’re going to worry about your business sinking every time Google has a blip, changes an algorithm, mixes up the SERPs, etc. then you may want to think about getting into a different business.  That’s a harsh truth, but one I feel that a lot of people need to hear.  These days, PageRank is constantly changing, SERPs are constantly changing, and you really need to stay on top of your game to make sure you aren’t doing ANYTHING even remotely close to black hat.  If you do, chances are you’ll have a short lived top ranking followed by a penalty that may outlive you and your kids.  Yes, they are that harsh.  So, that being said, back on-topic here.

As an alternative to good search engine traffic, I’ve been hearing a lot of people talking about the benefits of the social media sites, namely Digg and StumbleUpon.  These are indeed great sites, and they do offer something to the web community as a whole.  Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not downing these sites one bit.  I’d like to touch base on people’s perceptions of them though, and how they may affect the bottom line of your company.

My first suggestion is this: don’t rely on social media as a driver of consistent, quality traffic to your site.  As a general rule of thumb, traffic from social media sites are of very low quality, and are extremely inconsistent.  Even if you write a phenomenal article and somehow make it to the front page of Digg, the traffic you get, while very significant, will also be very short lived and the targeting of that traffic is extremely poor compared to targeted, optimized search traffic.  Sure, the traffic statistics on your site look impressive and you think you did something great (and you may have, don’t get me wrong), but chances are all you did was get a boatload of people to your site in a short period of time — and hopefully your servers could handle all of the traffic — who will probably never come back.  If you’re lucky, you got some bookmarkers or subscribers to your feed who will check back again later because they liked your style of writing.  But I’d almost bet you got little to no sales if you look at conversion ratios.

The moral of this short story is this, and it’s very simple.  In the time you took writing that “perfect” article to submit to Digg in hopes of hitting the front page, you could just be continuing to look at the BIG picture and working towards the long term of building links, creating solid, optimized content for your site, and hoping that Google notices you sometime soon.  Trust me, in the end, it will pay off and your work will be rewarded.

Short cuts get you nowhere, but certainly do give you the false illusion that you’ve done something great.  Take the long, proven path to success instead of the short cut.

In any event, the question of the day that someone posed to me this morning is this… Do MFA websites still work? Lots of people would disagree with me on my answer but I’ll say it anyway. I’d have to give an emphatic YES they still do work….BUT not in the way you would think….

Being on the net since the dawn of time (ok, since 1990 or so, anyway) I’ve seen things constantly evolving. This is one of those times. Do you have a bunch of MFA sites that used to make you money but for whatever reason they aren’t anymore? That’s fine… evolve them. Unless Google has banned you completely, you can still get a lot of miles out of those sites. You just have to (gasp) work for it now. Evolve the sites. Make them into something that is an actual resource for web surfers. Instead of just plastering AdSense ads all over the site, take some time and sit down and start writing some content on the sites. You have a (supposedly) aged and indexed domain, so make use of it.

You already know that “content is king”, so why aren’t you following that adage? Get to work and write, write, write!

1. Search engine friendly URLs – Can’t stress this one enough. Some people claim it doesn’t matter anymore, but looking at it from a purely aesthetic perspective, “friendly” URLs are more pleasing to the eye than obtrusive URLs and will generate more clicks from the SERPs if nothing else. However, I still believe there’s a value in SEO for using friendly URLs as well. An example of an obtrusive URL would be: http://www.site.com/page.php?c=23&p=238&hash=df837238592x72, while an example of a friendly url would be: http://www.site.com/products/bikes/schwinn-10-speed.html — This serves both purposes noted above, it is both visually more appealing for the surfer to click and much more descriptive so that they know what to expect when they click through to your page.
2. .htaccess Rewrites – You can’t accomplish #1 usually without implementing #2. If you’re using the Apache web server on UNIX, you’ll want to learn about .htaccess ASAP. Learn as much as possible about 301 redirects and friendly 404 pages. Learn about domain canonicalization and use your .htaccess to tell the engines which page should be your main page. This tip could go on forever so I’ll leave it at this and please let me know if you have any more specific questions and I’ll help you out.
3. Duplicate Content – This is a big one which really should be my #1 tip. In today’s search world you’ll constantly hear that “content is king”. This should really be renamed to “unique content is king”. With the advent of auto-bloggers, article distribution sites, and just plain old plagiarism in general, duplicate content is a real problem. Fortunately for us white hat SEO guys (and unfortunate for the black hatters and lazy people), the engines have caught on and are now applying a filter when they spot duplicate content. If you have something to write about, write it yourself, or at the very least pay a copywriter a couple of bucks to write it for you. The days of doing a search for the #1 site for your keyword and copying their text word for word to knock them out of #1 are over. Now, they’ll stay at #1 and you’ll be banished into the Supplemental Results index for eternity. Quoting someone else’s work is fine, but you need a unique spin on it, otherwise no matter how you sugar coat it, it’s just plain old lazy and most of the time illegal.
4. Backlinks - Invest a lot of time into building QUALITY backlinks to your site. This means if your site sells widgets, try to find other sites that have information about widgets and see if they’ll link to your domain. Ideally you’ll want to have a lot of inbound links to your site and few outbounds. Avoid joining the link exchange programs that stick links about gambling, cell phone ring tones, online pharmacies, etc. in the footer of your site. Think link relevancy. Use common sense here.
5. Unique META tags – You’re going to want unique title and meta tags on each page of your site. Avoid spamming these tags with keywords. Just write what comes natural and accurately describes the page you’re designing. For instance (unless I change things later), the title tag for this blog post is “Back to SEO Basics”, and the meta keywords are “seo basics”.
6. Go for PR, not for PR – Confused? I mean, Go for Public Relations, not for PageRank. Always write and optimize your site for the public and provide them with good, useful content and the PageRank will follow. Practicing good link building techniques as mentioned above will get you the PageRank as well. I’ve found that if you practice normal site building, the PageRank actually comes a lot quicker than if you chase it. Besides, Google only updates their PageRank every few months anyway, so you chase your tail for a few months just to see if you gained a point or not. Time is much better spent writing unique content for your site and developing good business relationships, in my opinion.
7. Be in it for the Long Haul – Make sure you’re in it for the long term, not the short term. I see many people that start MFA (Made for AdSense) sites, etc. hoping for a quick buck (and that’s usually about how much they make in a month, $1 buck) rather than designing a site around a good business model and working towards a bigger goal. I know of small, non-corporate websites that make $5,000, $10,000, and even $20,000 per MONTH by practicing these basic skills. Spend a few years of your life developing a good website that is something people will enjoy visiting and learning from and the almighty dollar will follow. Your website is, in essence, a business. You’re giving someone information in exchange for dollars. The dollars might not be coming directly from your visitors, but if you’re hoping that they click ads so you make money, you need to keep them happy.
8. SiteMaps – Create both a Google and a Yahoo SiteMap and submit it to them. Aside from the fact that you’ll be telling the engines where to find every page on your site, you’ll also get a little added bonus – by signing up at Google you’ll have access to Webmaster Tools. They show a lot of information about your site, which pages have been crawled, which pages have problems that you need to address, and the sites that link to you.
9. Analytics – Google also has a great tool called Analytics. It’s a very in depth statistics software that you get for FREE. Yes, FREE. It shows the traffic your site is getting, what your most popular pages are, demographics of your visitors, you name it. I’m simply amazed at the number of people who have no idea how much traffic their site gets or where it comes from. You want to direct your marketing efforts into something that works, and the first step of this is finding out where your traffic is coming from. That way you know where to multiply your efforts.
10. Use Common Sense – This is more of a “wrap-up” tip than an actual tip, but it holds a lot of weight nonetheless. When doing ANYTHING on your site, it’s a great rule of thumb to just use common sense. Think of yourself as the surfer. Would you click on annoying popup ads that are in your face constantly? Probably not, right? Would you buy something from a site that looked like it was designed by an 8 year old in between lunch and recess? Nope. Are you going to regard someones comments very highly if they use derogatory language or misspell words on their site? I doubt it. Use good clean common sense when designing your pages as well as applying these basic SEO tactics and the traffic will come. Cheating the system will only hurt you in the long run. And just when you think you’ve thought of a way to cheat the engines, let me remind you that Larry and Sergei are much smarter than you and I and I’d bet that they’ve already thought of that AND developed a way to punish people for doing it.

And if I hear one more person tell me that “Google PR is constantly being updated and only gets exported to the toolbar once in a while” I’m going to slap them. Yes, I know that. I’m in the SEO industry. Most everyone KNOWS that these days. The purpose of looking at the actual real PR after the update is to see how well your work for the past 2 months has paid off.

And yeah, again, don’t think that just because you get a little PR bump this time around that you can sit back. I personally don’t give PR a whole lot of credit (even though it’s nice) – I still practice constant link building and traffic building ALONG SIDE of SEO. In the long run you’ll be much better off if Google decides to drop your site from its’ index for some period of time which does happen occasionally.

Now get back to work and start doing more link building and relationship building.