SEO OPTIMAL

04 January 2010

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Posted: 03 Jan 2010 09:24 PM PST

Social Media is like having a conversation over the back fence with your neighbours. It could also be like getting that unexpected phone call from an old high school friend and catching up. Social Media is laid back and conversational. Many individuals and businesses that enters the Social Media Marketing arena fails to market themselves, their services or products because they are trying to hard.

Find below the most common mistakes marketers make when entering Social Media Marketing.

Self promoting

Only promoting yourself and not providing value is a huge mistake. The Social Media world is all about entering into the conversation and participation. There’s thousands of companies entering Twitter, blogging and social networking that spends all their energy and resources to market themselves. This is a sure way to get people to run the other direction.

Not listening

Social Media is supposed to be conversational. This means that two or more people listening and then interacting. If you only focus on broadcasting yourself, services or products, then you are not engaging at a social level. The building of relationships requires listening to understand the other person’s point of view.

Not conversational

Never try to control and force your point of view. Your goal is to build trust, listen and understand the other person’s viewpoint. Of course you want to voice your own point of view, but avoid criticizing and offending. Avoid being to formal, boring and proper. Interact and let your personality show.

Too much participation

If you try and participate in too many forms and channels of social media, your participation becomes spotty and inconsistent. You may experiment with a wide range of tools. Find the few areas that you really enjoy and that you are good at. Settle in on your favourites and focus on them. You will enjoy it more and build better relationships.

Giving up after a short time

Social Media Marketing is about creating and sustaining lasting relationships. It takes time,dedication and many conversations. Social Media is not the instant solution. Be prepared for a long term commitment or don’t bother with it at all.

Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding Social Media Marketing or if you know of any other mistakes that people/companies encounters with Social Media.

28 December 2009

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Target your audience to increase your readership

Posted: 27 Dec 2009 11:07 PM PST

Targeting your message to the right audience is the key to growing your readership and at the same time reaching interested people. By directing and targeting your message to the people most interested will greatly increase the number of readers that will actually read your website or blog and respond. It sounds like a contradiction, but it is true.

Targeting your audience is a form of online and website marketing.

I always ask my clients who their targeted market is. Many times I get the response of “everyone”. They are actually saying “I don’t want to exclude anyone, because they might be interested”. The sad truth is that they will spend much more money and reach fewer interested people without targeting. People naturally want to read something that is meant for them.

The two most important parts of targeting is based on demographics and attitudes.

Attitudes

These are the psychological or personality factors. What is the target market's attitude regarding the company's product? How do they arrive at the purchase decision? These include price, fashion, status, latest technology, etc.

Demographics

This describes who your customer or audience is. This includes things such as age, gender, occupation, education level, lifestyle, nationality, etc.

By knowing your audience, you can write in a way that catches their attention and draws them in. This is how you increase the interest in and conversion rate for a website.

Let's look at an example:

Price Shopper: There are many people in this world that shop based on price alone. Their attention will be grabbed by special deals, discounts and sales. They need to see a price related call-to-action. They need to see your special offer the second they arrive or they will wander off in search of a better deal. They will sign up for newsletters that announce sales. Even the design of the website should be simple and use bright active colors. This works well for products such as cell phones, printer cartridges, etc.

What ever your message, your product or service, it will be best received by those that are already interested. If you write in a way that is directed to your targeted audience, you will get more readers and more results.

Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding website marketing

23 December 2009

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009, 2010 and beyond

Posted: 23 Dec 2009 12:09 AM PST

It’s almost the end of December and I can’t believe how fast this year has gone by. This year has been quite full of surprises with the economic crisis and all. Can’t believe Christmas is on Friday! Holiday time for me!

This year has been full of achievements and downfalls both personally and business wise.

I think I’ll just mention a couple of things I did business wise and keep the personal ones to close friends and family. Don’t want to write a 10 part blog series.

Open Circle Solutions has grown over the last year and we will step into 2010 with a bang! Busy working on a project that I will announce soon!

I’ve been offered a great position a couple of months ago as a Social Media Manager in a big international internet marketing franchise and it’s been going great. It’s quite nice to see what the social media impact can be for big companies. I have also done allot of project management for them and will most likely focus allot on that in the near future.

This year I have already developed and configured 38 websites where roughly 16-17 are blogs. Why can’t you just install an open source system out of the box with all the bells and whistles? Why do I always need to fix the code? Feels like I have been a developer since I was born and I don’t think I’ll ever stop. It always finds me.

This year I have written over 340 blog posts on all my personal and business blogs and written many (too lazy to count) articles on other Web 2.0 sites spread around the world. Maybe I should become a full time content writer or just write a book “Social media South Africa“… sounds too familiar on something else that I’m trying to do.

It’s been a fun year and I can’t wait for the holidays. Going down to the wild coast with a couple of friends. Will most likely write a couple of blog posts while I’m there.

2010 and beyond

Plans, plans, plans! I believe 2010 is going to be a great year. Once again business and personal wise. My wife and I decided to start with a family and I’m planning to grow Open Circle Solutions even more.

What have you done in 2009 that you are proud of and what are you planning for 2010?

20 December 2009

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Social Media, Web 2.0 and SEO – Everything has changed

Posted: 20 Dec 2009 01:55 AM PST

Blogs, Wikis, Web 2.0, Social Networking and the changing of search algorithms has changed the search engine optimization industry. What worked well a few years ago, does not work that good now. With all the changes, content and link popularity is still critical to get top SEO results with the transition into Web 2.0.

The rules for SEO keeps on changing and evolving as search engines constantly improve their search algorithms. Why all the changes? It is quite simple; most of the search engines makes their money through Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising such as Google Adwords. Better quality search results will bring more people to the search engines and this brings in more advertising money.

Search Engine Optimization

A while back it was all about building quality links and waiting for the search engines to discover and index your content. This was a slow process and many people in the website marketing industry still believes this is the only way to get your website indexed. They are wrong!

With the transition into Web 2.0 (Social Media), it is easier to get your content noticed and be read by interested people.

What has stayed the same?

The foundation for SEO is still quality content with keywords. I’m not talking about the keywords found in the meta tags for a specific page, but how relevant the keywords are in the content, links, anchor text of the page,etc. Choosing the right keywords that accurately describe your services or products that also have visitor traffic is at the heart of SEO. By optimizing “visible text” with keywords and phrases is very important for SEO.

Web 2.0 and Blogs

The search engines (talking about Google again), adores blogs. A blog together with the right Social Media Optimization is a powerful way to increase the search engine rankings of a website or online profile. If you haven’t yet embraced Web 2.0 or blogging, you are behind the times.

Link rich blogs is a very important part of building link popularity and it should be considered by any business that is seriously working on promoting and optimizing their website. In addition to link popularity, blogs are responsible for introducing new content at an ever accelerating rate.

Blog marketing, corporate blogs, Web 2.0, Social Media is at the heart of the new SEO.