December 2009 Biz Talk Articles

Feature Article:

Real-Time Search: A Game Changer

Most web users today – more than 80%, use search engines when looking for products, services, and information on the internet. Search engines make it easy for them to type in a combination of keywords and phrases, and in return get a page full of results that may or may not match what they were looking for in the first place. Sometimes, the information is really good, but sometimes it is totally off-target, not relevant, or really old and outdated (or a combination of these). But now that real time search has arrived, things are changing quickly.

Earlier this month, Google announced that it has started using information from blogs, news sites, and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter as a way of providing users with fresher, more relevant search results. This is great news for search engine users, but what does it mean for small business web sites? It means that if you have a “static” web site that doesn’t get updated very often, it’s likely that your site will fall into obscurity in the search engine results in favor of fresher, more recent information that Google finds elsewhere on the web.

It also means that if you have not yet incorporated a social marketing strategy into your regular marketing mix, it’s definitely time to get started!

Why Social Networking is Important to Search

Social networking is not only a great way to connect with your customers and reach countless new prospects, but it turns out that it can also help you stay relevant in the search engines. Google’s list of current social networking partners includes Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed, and Jaiku, to name a few. But, Google also includes blogs, news sites, and YouTube information in its search results. So if you want your web site to be listed in Google’s search results, it wouldn’t hurt to have a presence on as many of these social web sites as possible.

Other search engines like Bing and Yahoo are also on-board with real-time search results, and they have formed their own partnerships with the social networking sites as they strive to incorporate fresh, real-time social information in their search results as well. So it’s not just Google that’s taking the value of social networking seriously.

Participation IS Necessary

Even if your small business has already set up a Facebook profile or a Twitter account, it doesn’t mean it will help you in the search engines. Google also takes into account your social “authority” and participation on these sites; including the number of connections you have on the web and the type of content that you post, as well as the frequency with which you share it. When you provide useful information and consistently give value to your social networking followers, Google notices and rewards you.

Now What?

So as you can see, social marketing has turned into far more than a passing fad into a mission-critical business objective for many small businesses. However, you might be wondering how you can create a social marketing plan, implement the plan, and also maintain the flow of information without hiring additional staff members or adding more tasks to your already impossibly long to-do list. Well for starters, you could consider creating an integrated social marketing strategy for your business.

Integrated Social Marketing (ISM)®

We think that an integrated social marketing strategy is so vital to your business’ online success that we have actually trademarked the term! With good reason, too – integrating your social networking profiles with each other, with your web site, and with your existing marketing initiatives lets you take advantage of the true power of social networking, and makes it easy to keep information flowing seamlessly, without creating additional work for you or your staff.

With an integrated strategy, you can avoid creating a bunch of little “islands” of social profiles on the web – if you create five stand-alone profiles on five different sites, that just means you have to update five additional things on your task list. But by integrating your social marketing, you can “write once, but publish to many”, and the information automatically spreads among all of your integrated profiles for you. This naturally creates additional places for the search engines to find your fresh, updated information right where they are already looking for it – in the social networking and real-time search sites.

So as search engines continue to evolve and change to provide better search results to their users, it’s naive to think that your “static” web site can somehow show up in the search results without a steady supply of fresh content and at least some social media participation. The web today is a much more sophisticated place, and if you want your site to show up in Google, Bing, Yahoo, and be found by customers online, then you have to get serious about following the trends. Lucky for you, Google and the other search engines are already telling you how to do that – with social networking and real-time search.

Marketing Tips:

Thinking About SEO? 5 Things You Should Know

There are so many misconceptions surrounding search engine optimization and how it works that often it’s hard to know what to believe. One report says keywords are the most important thing, while another says inbound links are what matters the most in getting good rankings. How can you know what’s real and what’s not?

Here are five things that most SEO experts agree you can count on when optimizing your web site for better search engine positions:

1. There are NO guarantees, regardless of what anyone tells you.
2. Keyword meta tags do not help with SEO, but keyword usage does
3. Meta titles and descriptions are important to the search engines
4. The keywords YOU think searchers use to find your site are not always the best terms
5. Inbound links from authority sites carry a lot of weight in the search engines

There are NO guarantees, regardless of what anyone tells you.

Search engines are constantly changing, improving, and tweaking their algorithms, and the details on how their algorithms work are kept secret. This means that optimization is a constantly moving target, and it is virtually impossible to guarantee any type of results. If your SEO company guarantees top results, make sure you understand what they mean by “top” results. They may be able to get your site to rank for keywords nobody ever searches on, but is that helpful to your business? Of course not.

Keyword meta tags do not help with SEO, but keyword usage does.

Once upon a time when search engines first started appearing on the web, site owners could add keywords in the “behind-the-scenes” meta keyword tag to let the search engines know what the site was about. However, as unscrupulous web sites and spammers started to misuse and abuse this feature, the search engines had to figure out other ways to determine a page’s relevance. One of the things that search engines measure today is how often you use your keywords in the text of your pages. You need to use them enough to be useful to the search engines, but not so much that it’s considered keyword spamming.

Meta titles and descriptions are important to the search engines.

Although the meta title of your page displays in the top of the browser window, many small businesses mistakenly use only their company name (e.g., “My Company Web Site”) in this tag. This is a valuable tag that the search engines do pay attention to, and it is often used as the actual link text on the search engine results pages. Also, the description is typically displayed under the link on the results page, making this an important tag as well. Be sure to use your keywords appropriately in these meta tags, as it not only helps searchers understand what your site is about, but also helps the search engines rank your site higher.

The keywords YOU think searchers use to find your site are not always the best terms.

Sometimes, small businesses make the mistake of thinking they know the keywords that customers or potential customers would type into a search engine to find their business. While these terms may provide a good starting point for real-time keyword research, they are often not even close to what real people actually type into a search engine to find these products and services. By performing real-time keyword research, you can identify the exact terms that searchers really use, making it far more likely that you will connect with the people who are looking for what you have to offer.

Inbound links from authority sites carry a lot of weight in the search engines.

Inbound links that point to your site from other sites on the web are like a seal of approval (or a “vote”) for your web site. If another web site thinks enough of your site to actually link to it, then the search engines give you credit for having useful information worth linking to. If an “authority” site (a site that Google deems as authoritative or important) links to your site, then that carries even more weight. Not all inbound links are valuable, however. Avoid reciprocal links (“I’ll link to you if you link to me”), and links from “link farms” – sites with pages of links but little or no other content of value to a visitor. The most valuable links are from other quality sites in your industry, from relevant blogs in your industry, from established web directories, press release sites, news sites, and from appropriately using social networking sites in your marketing mix.

The Best Small Business Strategy

Since the nature of search engines (and the web in general) is one of constant change and non-stop innovation, the best SEO strategy for a small business is to stick with the tried-and-true techniques that get results. Research your keywords to find the right terms for optimizing – don’t just guess. Then use them appropriately in your text, include the right meta data behind the scenes, and intentionally build your inbound links from authority sites and social networking initiatives. But most of all, be sure to provide fresh content on your site that gives visitors a reason to come back, and the search engines a reason to notice.

Building Effective Web Sites:

Inbound Links - 8 Ways to Build Visibility

By now, you’ve probably heard that inbound links are critical to helping your site show up at the top of the search engine results. So what exactly are inbound links? Inbound links are one-way links that point to your site from another “site” on the web; however, not all inbound links are created equal. The inbound links that will help you the most are those that come from authority web sites, industry and/or expert blogs, social networking sites, and other quality sites that provide solid, one-way inbound links to your web site (see the section on inbound links in the previous article, above, for additional details). But how do you actually get those quality, one-way inbound links that point to your web site?

Here are eight techniques you can use to build the types of inbound links that will not only help your site perform better in the search engines, but can also help improve your web visibility and drive new traffic to your site at the same time!

1. Social Networking: This web phenomenon is just too important to ignore. The major search engines have already announced that they now include social networking information in their search results, and the number of people using these sites continues to grow exponentially. This is where your customers are “hanging out” online (the fastest-growing demographic in Facebook is users over the age of 35). This is also where the search engines have told you they are looking for information. If you are truly interested in building links and getting noticed, it’s time to get serious about a social marketing strategy. (And do consider using an Integrated Social Marketing (ISM)® approach!)
   
   
2. Press Releases: Sending out press releases is one of the fastest ways to build quality inbound links, as well as promote news about your business. Just be sure to use your keywords as links in the body of your press release, since these then become the inbound links to your site once the release is picked up.
   
   
3. E-Newsletters: Publishing a monthly (or weekly) e-newsletter is a great way to stay in touch with your customers and prospects, as well as keep your business name “top of mind” with your readers. But when you publish useful, quality information, people will naturally pass it on to their own network of contacts, which has the potential to plant multiple inbound links to your web site each time an article is shared on the web.
   
   
4. Article Syndication: Re-use the articles from your e-newsletters by syndicating them on article marketing sites. Include a keyword-rich author resource box (your contact information and bio), with links back to your web site. Your links will be visible not only on the article marketing site, but also each time someone else re-publishes your article as content elsewhere on the web (blogs, web sites, e-newsletters, etc.).
   
   
5. Blogging: If you don’t already have a blog for your business, you may want to consider adding one just for the boost it can give your web site in the search engines! Most search engines index blog posts almost instantly, and you have complete freedom to use your keywords in the content of your posts as well as using them as link text, both of which will help you gain points with the search engines.
   
   
6. Google Alerts: You can use the free Google Alerts service to help identify other quality blogs and web sites where you can plant inbound links. For instance, if you set up your Google Alerts service to monitor the keywords “office supplies”, Google will alert you when it finds web sites and blogs containing those keywords. You can then go visit those pages and leave a comment and add your link, (depending on the content of the page, of course). Just be sure to leave valuable information in your comments, and not just your link. You want your comment to not only be approved, but to also flow naturally as part of the discussion.
   
   
7. Web Videos: Research shows that using video on a web site improves user engagement and retention, and today’s video sharing sites like YouTube make it easy to publish and share videos on the web. Video files can also be “optimized” with keyword tags, and can be linked back to your web site. Video sharing sites also let you share videos through your social channels as well, giving you even more opportunity to plant inbound links to your site in various places around the web.
   
   
8. Viral Marketing: If you have a whitepaper, e-book, or presentation just sitting around gathering virtual dust on your computer, consider taking it viral. Give it away for free, and encourage people to pass it around to their network of contacts as well. Make sure the piece has plenty of links back to your web site, since the piece may end up being posted in lots of different channels on the web.

By using these techniques, you can help build the quality, one-way links that your site needs in order to improve in the search engine rankings. You may not be able to use all of these suggestions, but you can use as many different techniques as makes sense for your particular small business. Since many SEO professionals estimate that about 60% of your web site’s ranking in Google comes from the number of quality inbound links, it makes sense to give some serious attention to building inbound links to your site.

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