Article Categories

• Advertising
• Affiliate Marketing
• Article Marketing
• Blogs & Podcasts
• Branding
• Business
• Cloud Technology
• Ecommerce
• Email Marketing
• Facebook
• Google
• Keywords
• LinkedIn
• Linking Strategies
• List Building
• Local Search
• Marketing
• Miscellaneous
• Mobile Applications
• Page Rank
• Pay Per Click
• RSS
• Sales Copy
• SE Optimization
• SE Positioning
• SE Submission
• SE Tactics
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Security
• Social Media Marketing
• Social Networking
• SPAM
• SPN Featured Articles
• Technology
• Video Marketing
• Virtual Office/Telecommuting
• Web 2.0
• Web Design
• Web Development
• Webmasters
• Website Promotion
• Website Traffic
• WordPress
• Writing

SiteProNews Blogs

• Editor's Corner
• Darren Dunner
• Jerry Bader
• John Sylvester
• Kalena Jordan
• Mel Strocen
• Titus Hoskins

On Page SEO Factors to Not Forget

By Paul M Ventura in Featured

One of the most basic things which a webmaster should understand is how to do on page SEO and the on page SEO factors to consider when both creating a new website or when adding new content and pages to an existing website.

On page SEO predominantly pertains to tweaking your site’s code, choosing the right keywords, and optimizing your content overall to make it more attractive and identifiable to Google and other search engines’ web crawling bots so that they will in turn rank your site higher in the SERPs.

Here I’ve expanded on the major techniques which you should implement on your site if you want to rank and rank well at that.

Keep in mind that the weight which search engines place on these techniques is subjective as no one knows for sure the algorithms behind Google’s and other engine’s ranking practices. No one factor is ever been unanimously considered to be more paramount than all others, so don’t overlook any of these techniques. Most of them are quick and simple to implement, so there’s really no reason not to, either.

Editor’s Note: For additional information on the techniques noted below, and in some cases an alternate viewpoint, read Jill Whalen’s article “16 SEO Tactics That Will NOT Bring Targeted Google Visitors”.

SEO Consulting Services – A SPN Exclusive Article

By Leo Alvin Alexander in Featured

With the way the economy is today, many business owners have turned to the online advertising and marketing campaigns and strategies, such as search engine optimization (SEO), for a much needed boost in online company and product visibility, which translates into an increase in revenue and profitability. With each day that passes, more businesses are becoming aware of the importance and advantages of having an online presence to supplement whatever revenue streams they have already had in place. The immense increase in the number of corporate websites online today that display their various products and/or services, has translated into a fierce and competitive market of business owners trying to ensure that their websites are ranked in the top positions of search engines. This is the major contributing factor as to why so many of these business owners continually look for ways to distinguish themselves among their competitors, in order to gain a high ranking position.

This is where companies that offer SEO consulting services come in. SEO or Search engine optimization helps business owners increase their websites’ visibility and ranking in search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, by using various techniques and methods that ultimately result in an increase in website traffic (highly qualified and interested visitors) and online generated revenue. To find the right SEO service provider, it is critical to not only look at different companies, but to also see what types of SEO consulting services each of them offers. In order to find the right match, not only in terms of the provider, but also in terms of the service, it is important to look for a specific SEO consulting service that covers all the basics and uses only standard, and approved (also known as white-hat) methods and techniques. Stay away from SEO companies that offer rapid and guaranteed search engine rank results; more often than not, this will be a sale for them, but in the long run result in negative outcomes, such as being completely blacklisted, and banned from the most popular search engines.

So what kinds of services are included in SEO consulting?

On Site Optimization - Also called On Page SEO is when SEO consultants take a look at the inner workings of a website. Items such as page structures, internal links, programming platform, meta tags, etc., are all examined and optimized to ensure that the actual website is SEO friendly, and is geared towards getting high rankings on the agreed upon targeted keywords.

Off Site Optimization - This is one of the more important aspects of the different SEO consulting services, as it helps distribute information about your website, product and/or services throughout different social media platforms, resource hubs, targeted directories and various other appropriate authoritative sources. The more links that a company’s website has on various authoritative and relevant websites, the more attention Google and other search engines will give it.

Keyword Research - Identifying the most relevant keyword phrases that consumers use to search for your products and/or services is the key in determining which keywords your company’s website should be targeting. Optimizing for obscure, low search volume, or highly competitive keyword phrases will not only cause an SEO campaign to fail in ranking high in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, but it won’t properly direct the desired traffic to your site.

Content Creation – SEO consulting services shouldn’t just be about link building but should also focus on the creation of compelling, interesting content that will create interest among readers, consumers and incidental browsers, which in turn, will translate into additional revenue or start a surge of traffic resulting from these people sharing your content on their social media platforms and blogs.

Custom SEO Content Management - unfortunately, SEO isn’t a one time thing wherein you submit your content to information hubs or directory listings and be done with it. Proper SEO consulting services experts will tell you that SEO is an ongoing process which needs customized management depending on one’s SEO goals and intended results based on additional revenue and website traffic.

SEO consulting services when properly leveraged can exponentially increase a website’s potential to attract new consumers, no matter what the product or service it has to offer and more often than not, encourage these new visitors to share their experiences with other people through different social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

So now that you have the right SEO methods in place and have selected the team of SEO consulting experts to manage and keep track of everything, how will you know if these strategies and techniques are working for you?

Monitor website traffic. There are quite a few traffic monitoring tools that can accurately tell you if an increase in traffic has happened. Additionally, some of these tools like Google Analytics can tell you exactly which keywords in your SEO campaign this increase in traffic has stemmed from. Some monitoring tools also tell you how long each visitor has stayed on your site, which link or location they came from and various other important metrics to determine if additional traffic is being directed to your site. SEO consulting service experts should be able to help you determine and interpret the various metric results that these tools generate.

After you have the compelling content in place, and your website has been properly optimized externally and internally (on page and off page SEO tactics), visitors will undoubtedly begin clicking on your link which is now displayed within the top results of search engines. You now know that your SEO campaign has resulted in an increase in traffic, but what’s really important is that this traffic translates into additional revenue and profitability. That is your goal and that’s what you have to closely monitor to check if it’s being met.

Finally, it’s not difficult to add new features to your website that will positively affect the user’s experience, and increase conversions (sales). If you’re selling a product, asking your customers how they found out about your product, and if they had a good experience browsing through your website, is one of the simplest ways of finding additional ways to convert new visitors from your SEO campaign into paying and repeat customers.

Good SEO consulting service experts should be able to help you optimize your site and help you reach your goals, whether it’s an increase in daily traffic or an increase in revenue, or both.

---

Leo Alvin Alexander is a professional writer dabbling in online marketing and SEO. He has experience working for different companies in various fields and industries as a marketing officer and sales agent.

New Rules for E-commerce – An Exclusive SPN Article – Part One

By Victor Arcuri in Featured

When the Internet was conceived, it was developed as an ‘information highway.’ It has evolved into an e-commerce solution that is a mandatory component for every business.

In this article we introduce the new rules and how they impact consumers.
• In Part 2 we will discuss how the new rules impact online merchants.
• In Part 3 we will discuss how the new rules impact web hosting companies.
• In Part 4 we will discuss how the new rules impact shopping cart developers.
• In Part 5 we will discuss how the new rules impact smart phone application developers.
• In Part 6 we will discuss how the new rules impact smart phone banking applications.

E-commerce Rules Have Changed

In September 2011, both Visa® and MasterCard® launched their own digital wallets as mobile payment (m-payment) applications for smartphones equipped with NFC chips. With the introduction of these two applications, the rules of e-commerce have forever changed for both the bricks and mortar retailers and online merchants.

On the surface there does not appear to be a real advantage for bricks and mortar retailers to adopt the new hardware required to be installed at the cash register. However, there are significant advantages to the online merchants and the businesses that offer online sales.

The new digital wallets (DW`s) will be a complete m-payment solution. They will not only provide all the functions of existing retail Point of Sale devices, but will also provide several new levels of security and identity protection. In the future there will be hundreds if not thousands of DW`s offered to consumers by not only Banks but also Major Retailers.

In summary all DW`s will consist of two components. The front end will be the Bank or retailers smart phone application and the back end will be the payment side consisting of the new NFC or QR codes for payment at the retail counter and a fully functioning Personal Point of Sale devices (PPOS) for payments online via an e-commerce enabled web site.

This article discusses the new rules for e-commerce and the performance of the PPOS.

Initially, the PPOS is being deployed to interact with e-commerce enabled websites. The shopping cart applications will no longer ask for any information from the consumer. The software will simply generate a transaction number that will be pasted into the PPOS.

How the PPOS Operates

The new PPOS is not a storage device, but rather a payment application. None of the data entered on the application is saved or stored within the application. All saved and stored data resides in a cloud computing service, which is usually owned and operated by the bank or the company that issued the credit cards.

Consumers concerned about identity theft need to know that the new digital wallets equipped with a PPOS are guaranteed to protect your identity. The safest place to store your credit card details is with the bank or institution that issues your credit card. The second safest place to store your profile and card data is in one of the cloud computing services designed specifically for that purpose. After all, they already have this information.

When the PPOS is initially launched, you are presented with data collection forms to create your profile and enter your card details. The submit function uploads the profile to the gateway server that encrypts the data, returns an unlock key, and then stores the encrypted file with the appropriate cloud. The returned unlock key is stored within the PPOS, along with a description of the card, but not the card details. For example, the stored description might read Capital One MC Platinum.

New Rules Protect Consumers

Doing business online can be an alarming situation for both merchants and consumers. Merchants are concerned about fraud, chargebacks, high discount rates, and being sued if someone steals data from them. Consumers are concerned about identity theft.

It seems to us, the solution to both problems is the same. The consumer never gives the merchant any data that can be stolen. In reality, the merchant never needs the consumer’s identity or card details. The merchant only needs confirmation the credit or debit card was approved. If that is all the merchant needs, then why does current shopping cart software ask for so much more information that could be deemed to be confidential?

The new PPOS will guarantee:

1. The User is, in fact, the owner of the PPOS.
2. The Merchant is, in fact, the operator of the website and duly accredited.
3. The Service works with every merchant account provider.
4. The Service operates across all web-based applications that accept credit cards.
5. The Service will work with an ever-growing collection of smartphone applications.
6. The Data collected within the PPOS is not saved on the application but with a secure cloud.
7. The off-site data storage facility, or facilities, allows for data retrieval in the event the smartphone is ever lost or stolen.

When the time comes to make a purchase, the consumer simply enters the transaction number and selects the card description. The PPOS uploads these two pieces of data, along with the unlock key, to the gateway processor. The processor then retrieves the card details from the cloud and processes the transaction.

These security features and the employed methodology of the PPOS guarantees that confidential information of the consumer is never revealed to the merchant, and thus can never be saved, stored or compromised.

The new PPOS is a smartphone application that will be introduced in three versions. The first application is for older model smartphones which do not have forward facing cameras. The second is an application for newer model smartphones with forward facing cameras. This application will employ facial recognition software to confirm the owner of the PPOS. Third is a desktop application that will also employ facial recognition software to confirm the owner of the PPOS.
Summary

The digital wallet will protect the cardholder’s identity and will provide a new and convenient way to make purchases, both online and on multiple hardware platforms.

The PPOS equipped DW’s will be a welcome solution for merchants who wish to save costs on card-not-present sales, chargebacks and fraud attempts. With its ease of implementation for merchants and the inherent acceptance by consumers, merchants will benefit extensively.

The PPOS equipped DW’s will become the distinct leader and will set the standard in digital wallet technology by meeting the security needs of cardholders, merchants, and card issuers.

---

Victor Arcuri is a Canadian businessman who, for greater than 10 years, has operated CQRPAY, Inc., a secure gateway for credit card processing for Internet-based merchants. Our independent gateway service is unique in that it is the only application that connects to every merchant account provider and every bank in Canada and the USA.

Our platform enables merchants to use the service regardless of any affiliation they may enjoy with a merchant account provider, bank, POS device supplier or shopping cart software developer.

We invite your questions by phone 403-234-0844 or e-mail.

For more information visit: CQRp@y.com.

Technology and the Invasion of Privacy Snatchers – A SPN Exclusive Article

By David Jackson in Featured

On February 5th, 1956, a science fiction movie titled “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” was released in the US. The movie is about a small-town doctor who discovers that the population of his community is being systematically replaced by emotionless alien duplicates.

Fast forward to today, and life is imitating art, with a real life version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers being played out. But it’s not just happening in one small town. It’s happening in cities and towns all across America. Only it’s not bodies that are systematically being snatched, it’s our individual right to privacy.

Where’s Waldo?

“If you win this case, then there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day, the public movement of every citizen of the United States.” Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer

I just read a disturbing article on the BBC News website titled How Much Privacy Can Smartphone Owners Expect?

Among other things, the article discusses how The US Supreme Court could soon make a ruling allowing police to monitor the movements of US mobile phone users without a warrant – which legitimately begs the question, now that most of us carry sophisticated tracking devices in our pockets, how much privacy do we have a right to expect?

5 Easy Ways to Override Google’s Geolocation Results – A SPN Exclusive Article

By Alesya Krush in Featured

What is geolocation as applied to SEO? It’s when a search engine identifies your whereabouts (by your IP or GSM) and serves you the search results relevant to that particular territory. Some folks find it limiting, while others are quite happy with the feature.

However, when it comes to checking rankings, geolocation is mostly bad for SEO’s, since many of them work on websites that target multiple countries, in which case it becomes rather tricky to collect SEO data (rankings and other metrics) for a particular country when you yourself are in a different location. So, how does one manage to do it? Let’s see what possibilities there are.

1. Use a Proxy Server

Proxy servers are INTERMEDIARIES between the searcher and the remote server he/she is addressing. And, being intermediaries, they can disguise a search and make it appear as if coming from a different location. Say, you are browsing from Argentina using a proxy server that’s located in Australia. So, your search will appear as if being performed from Australia.

How do you find a respective proxy server and begin to use it? Well, there are free and paid proxies available on the Web – just search for “proxy list”, “free proxy list”, “free proxies” or similar. It’s best to use the lists that also specify the country each proxy server belongs to, unless you can easily tell by the IP address. Here (http://hidemyass.com/proxy-list/) is an example of a proxy server list.

Then you need to configure your browser to work behind a certain proxy from the list (you’ll basically need to enter the IP address of the proxy server and the port number it uses). For example, here is how you set it up in Firefox:

- Go to Tools >> Options >> Advanced >> Network >> Settings
- Check Manual proxy configuration
- Enter the proxy’s IP and port
- I also normally choose No Proxy for: localhost, so that no proxy is used when I connect to the local network.

For other browsers, just search for “how to configure Chrome/Opera/Internet Explorer/any other browser proxy settings”. For instance, here (http://googlechrometutorial.com/google-chrome-advanced-settings/Google-chrome-proxy-settings.html) is a tutorial that teaches how to configure Google Chrome.

Pros and Cons

- Along with giving you a certain degree of anonymity, proxy servers also help you avoid CAPTCHAs and IP blocks, which is good.

- However, free proxies are sometimes not safe to use and quickly become overloaded, while paid proxies cost money. Plus, it’s not always the case that the proxy from the country you are targeting is available when you need it.

2. Use a Proxy Management Tool

Another option is to use a proxy management tool, which spares you configuring the browser each time you need to change the proxy server (because your free proxy server is down or you need to collect data from “a different location”).

Proxy management apps are good for those who run lots of checks targeting lots of locales on a daily basis. One such tool that I recommend is FoxyProxy. Originally, this was a proxy management browser plugin for Firefox, and now it’s also available for Internet Explorer and Google Chrome.

FoxyProxy allows you to store all the info regarding the proxies you are using in one place and right at hand, and rotate proxies easily. It also allows you to assign URLs specific proxies, so that, whenever you visit those URLs, you access them via the assigned proxy servers.

FoxyProxy also offers “reliable, high-bandwidth proxy servers in 35 different countries”.

Pros and Cons

- What’s good about proxy management tools is that they save you time and effort and allow you to switch between proxies with almost no effort at all.

- The setting-up process is probably quite difficult. Besides, the proxies need to be checked upon regularly to make sure they are alive and working.

3. Use Google’s Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool

The Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool was designed for Google AdWords advertisers to let them see where their ads show up for different keywords in different countries. However, it can also be used to track rankings in non-paid search results as well.

Pros and Cons

- A huge advantage is that the tool allows you to choose the language you are pretend-searching in, as well as specify the exact area you are targeting (region and city).

- The tool does not let you click on the results it displays. Actually, there is a warning, saying that “This page is a tool for AdWords advertisers to test their ads. For full Google functionality return to the Google homepage.”

4. Add the gl Parameter to the Query URL

Apart from working behind a proxy or using a special tool to see the results visible in different locations, one can use another trick that quite a few SEO’s are familiar with. I’m talking about Google’s gl parameter that, technically, marks the country the search is being performed from.

Where does this parameter go? It goes into the query URL that appears when you do a search on Google. You simply add gl=US (if you’d like your results to be relevant for the United States) or, say, gl=BR (for Brazil) and hit “Search” once again. Here is a full list of country codes.

5. Use SEO Rank Checking Software that Supports the “gl” Parameter

Some possibilities to overcome geolocation are hidden right inside SEO tools that help one monitor rankings. Thus, if you use SEO software to keep track of website positions in the SERPs, see if the particular tool you are using allows you to use proxies or offers other geo targeting-related options.

For example, Rank Tracker (the keyword tracker and keyword suggestion tool
we built at Link-Assistant.Com) allows one to check rankings from behind a proxy as well as manage different proxy servers.

Besides, as of late, Rank Tracker also enables you to specify what gl parameters (multiple options are available) you’d like to add to your queries while checking website rankings for different keywords. You enter them while choosing your target search engines, PRIOR to the rankings check. The results for queries made with various gl parameters (as if performed from different locations) will then be displayed side by side:

So, these were 5 quite no-brainer tricks one can use to substantially diminish Google’s geo-targeting. In fact, you can hardly eliminate it completely, since Google uses other signals to associate you with a specific country (such as your browser’s languages, etc.). But using the 5 methods described above will help you largely beat it.

---

Alesya is a blogger and a marketing manager at Link-Assistant.com, the company behind SEO PowerSuite toolkit. Link-Assistant.Com is a group of SEO experts with extensive SEO experience. Based on their expertise, the company’s SEO tools http://www.seopowersuite.com/ were developed, setting the SEO industry’s benchmark for technology-powered link building and Web promotion.

My Website is Ranked High – Where’s the Traffic?

By Steve Shaw in Featured

Since you started your website, you’ve probably noticed that there is a continual quest to get a high ranking in Google and the other search engines.

The reason why a high ranking is so sought after is the resultant traffic that accompanies being listed at the top of Google’s results lists. Google is the biggest referral source on the planet. It can send you more referrals than any human being can. It’s open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and whenever a person has a question, his first step will usually be to “Google” it to find the answer.

If you can get your website to be #1 in the rankings when people search for topics related to your niche, then your website can get around 8.5 times more search engine referrals than the website in the #5 spot.

That’s a substantial difference – you can see why website owners are panting after the #1 spot!

A website owner presented an interesting question to me the other day. He had been doing article submissions consistently for a while. His website was ranked very high for his keyword terms, but yet he still wasn’t receiving the massive amount of traffic that he was expecting. He wondered what was wrong. Why did the high ranking not result in a ton of traffic?

Let’s think about this for a minute. Each phrase that a person types into Google (or any other search engine) is called a “search term.” From the website owner’s perspective, it’s called a “keyword term.”

If you have a lot of people searching for a particular term, then the keyword is in high demand. If you can rank highly for that term, then you can see a huge traffic increase. That is a keyword phrase with a big potential payoff.

If, on the other hand, there are not that many people searching for that phrase, then even if you rank high for that term, you won’t see a dramatic impact on your website’s traffic. You can be ranked high, even #1, for a keyword phrase, but it won’t necessarily translate into a traffic breakthrough because the demand for that phrase is not very high.

What does this mean for you as you’re starting to use article marketing to market your website?

You need to do keyword research. Look at the demand that a particular phrase has (how many people are searching for that term each month) and compare it to the supply – the supply is the number of websites that are competing for that term.

Ideally, you would be looking for a keyword term that has high demand and relatively low supply – that would mean that with a little effort, you could rise to the top of the rankings for that term, and you would see a dramatic change in the number of website visitors you receive.

If you’re in a competitive niche that already has lots of competition, this might not be an option for you. You might have to work harder to get to the top of the rankings for your keyword terms. That’s okay, as long as the demand for the term is still high. When you rise up in the rankings, you will see your traffic grow too.

You could also choose to target a keyphrase that had a lower demand (fewer people searching for it), but also low competition. You could have a relatively easy time getting to the top of the rankings for that term. One thing to keep in mind though is that the benefit will be in proportion to the popularity of the term. If there are not that many people searching for the term, then being ranked #1 can only get you as much traffic as there are searchers for that term.

I hope this explains why you can have a high search engine ranking and not see a big boost in traffic. The traffic you receive is dependent on how “in demand” that term is – how many people are searching for it. Do your keyword research on the front end of your article marketing campaign, and you can decide which keywords are worth your effort to pursue.

---

Steve Shaw has helped thousands of business owners worldwide build traffic, leads and sales to their websites, and he wants to help you do the same – grab his free report giving you a blueprint for attracting sustainable, dirt-cheap, long-term, targeted traffic to any website…
including yours! Go now to http://www.submityourarticle.com/ report – some people have used the same information to boost their traffic by up to 600%!

Recognizing the Power of Video Marketing

By Roddy Smith in Featured

Video Marketing

The use of online video as a marketing tool is a relatively new innovation but is one that is proving to be very popular with businesses. Video has been used for some time by the corporate sector, but online video has a shorter lifespan although that is changing.

Businesses have recognized the power of this medium which enables their products or services to be demonstrated to audiences all around the world. This is what we mean by ‘global reach’.

Visual Engagement

Video is a highly visual medium for connecting with your customers. People enjoy watching video and in some cases would prefer to watch a video than read a book as they prefer the immediacy of this medium. Then there is the fact that attention spans are shorter than previously which means that people are less likely to spend time reading about a subject, e.g. product specifications. Product information can be condensed into a short video which appeals to an audience which may be cash rich but time poor. When you stop to consider the popularity of YouTube and other similar platforms then you realize the benefits of using video as part of your marketing strategy. But use this to complement existing sales channels rather than as a replacement.

Visual Demonstration

Video is used as a means of demonstrating how a product works or to show the benefits of a particular service to your customers. Customers can then post and share comments with others which helps to promote your brand, establish credibility and boost your reputation. Visitors will spend more time on your site if you have a professionally produced video which is aimed at them and their needs. It can reduce your site’s bounce rate.

Video SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is another reason why video has been eagerly adopted by businesses. Video tends to rank well and, if deployed correctly, will help to drive more visitors to your site. This increase in traffic means an increase in conversions and sales. Plus video can also be used to improve your position in the search rankings, hopefully driving you to the top of page 1 in Google. For this to occur, videos need to have well thought out titles and accompanying descriptions, all of which contain relevant keywords. And don’t forget to use links as and where necessary because these will also improve your ranking.

Benefits of Video Marketing

These include:

* Visual Appeal – a medium that people respond to
* Growth Opportunities – the medium is still evolving and has potential for future development
* Brand identity promotion
* Interactivity and accessibility
* Niche audience targeting
* Targeted traffic

Other benefits include low cost, emotional impact, increased exposure and credibility building – all of which are vital for any business that is looking to expand in the current climate.

Think about how you can include video in your marketing strategy, but ensure that it is pre-planned and measured over a set period of time. Measure your return on investment (ROI) in the same way you would with any marketing tool.

---

Article by Roddy Smith, Adaptive Consultancy is a London-based digital agency specializing in website design, eCommerce, and internet marketing, including SEO, PPC and SMO. For more on ecommerce solutions visit: http://www.adaptiveconsultancy.com/ecommerce

Social CRM Strategy: A Five-Step Guide

By Chris Bucholtz in Featured

The five steps to developing a social CRM (SCRM) strategy are oriented toward the specifics of the social media ecosystem you’ll be working in and the customers you’ll be working with. Your strategy should also fit the time and resources you have. Take an inventory of your staff resources and the budget you have for sentiment monitoring and listening tools.

Step 1: Find Your Customers

You need to learn how your customers relate to social media. Many people connect to the major social media sites, which have broad appeal and large user communities. Facebook, for example, has 750 million users. In 2011, the site’s fastest growing age segment was 55+.

A second class of sites attracts people based on their interests. There are social networking sites for all kinds of people, from schoolteachers and sports fans to parents and programmers. A simple Web search reveals many of these sites.

You also need to keep an eye on sites that might have a peripheral connection to your products and services. For example, the customers of an outdoor equipment company may frequent a site dedicated to adventure travel. You want to be where your customers are and when it comes to social media that means following their interests not just their buying habits.

Step 2: Learn the Language

Once you’ve located the places where customers are either talking about you or about things that relate to your business, don’t jump in right away. Spend some time observing how the group works, who its leaders are, and the kind of language and tone the members use with each other. Your first step is to behave like you deserve to be part of the conversation. Take Mark Twain’s advice, “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than it is to speak and remove all doubt.”

Step 3: Listen

Once you’ve located the sites where your customers congregate and spent some time getting a general idea of how they talk with each other, dig a little deeper. If there are subjects that you want to follow and the site has search capability, take a look at what’s been said in the past about those topics. This is listening in the social media world; it should precede participation.

Since you’ve probably identified multiple social media channels to track. How do you listen in on all of these conversations? If you have the resources, consider a staff member dedicated to social media. That person can keep track of the sites you’ve chosen, coordinate responses to conversations, and incorporate data from conversations into your CRM system. Don’t engage in more channels than you can monitor effectively.

Listening is made easier by social media monitoring and sentiment measuring tools. Listening tools can tell you what’s being said and where; sentiment tools can gauge the general tone of the conversations that mention you. Both can increase your social media productivity.

Your company also has great monitoring tools already in place–your employees. Many will use social media outside of work, and they may run across topics that pertain to your business. Employees should be encouraged to report anything they learn to the person you’ve designated to monitor social media.

Step 4: Engage

When your business is ready to engage with customers in a social media conversation, establish clear rules about who does the talking and where they do it. Someone from service could participate in conversations on a site where service issues are discussed. An engineer would be appropriate on a site geared toward developers.

Look for places to engage that will have an impact. If you see the opportunity to make a difference in a conversation, jump in–even if it’s only to say that you don’t know the answer to a question but can find someone who does. Then be sure to follow up. That level of authenticity coupled with tangible assistance builds loyalty with the person you helped. It also establishes you as a reliable participant in the community.

You can also start your own conversations. You could begin with a legitimate question about your customers and what they’re thinking. This approach can deliver actionable intelligence more quickly and inexpensively than a formal survey. Don’t make these the only conversations in which you participate. You’re there to participate as a peer not an interrogator.

Step 5: Make Use Of What You Learn

You can use two types of social media information: the data you uncover in conversations and the data that your customers and potential customers volunteer in setting up their profiles. Don’t focus only on the latter. It ignores the truly social aspects of social media and the richer information that conversations can bring to your attention. It’s also a source that’s likely to diminish as social media users become more sophisticated in their use of privacy controls.

There is no technology that can automatically detect the social media data relevant to your business and sort it by your customers or accounts. People engaged in conversations and monitoring social media sources will need to manually incorporate important information into customer records.

But the use of social media information doesn’t stop there. It also involves careful process design. For example, since a call for help in social media is heard by many people, the transfer of responsibility from social media monitor to designated service contact to the service personnel who can respond is vitally important. The same is true for sales, marketing, and product development.

Finally, make sure your employees know that social CRM can be an all-hands exercise that benefits the entire company, just like traditional CRM.

---

A recognized influencer in customer relationship management, Chris Bucholtz is Editor in Chief of CRM Outsiders and a founding editor of both InsideCRM and Forecasting Clouds. For more information on how to build your small and medium size business’s customer outreach and empower your employees with Small Business CRM please visit http://www.sugarcrm.com

The Most Popular Social Networks and Who Is On Them

By Caitlin Rambo in Featured

How much time do you spend online?

According to a time use survey compiled by ComScore Media Metric, the average American spends 33.9 hours on the Internet every week. Depending on age and other demographics, this number can double! And for those lucky individuals whose occupations rely primarily on computers: the Internet commands their lives and they are never not connected.

Computers have drastically changed the technological landscape. The Internet has facilitated efficiency in a number of offline processes. We use the web to communicate with our family, friends and business acquaintances in real-time chats. Books and other multimedia are available for online viewing and instant download. We can even shop for gifts online – often offered at a deeper discount than in brick-and-mortar stores! The Internet has revolutionized the way that we live, as we now spend one-sixth of our lives in the digital world.

Exhibit 1: 100 Most-Visited Websites by category, according to Google Ad Planner

Where are We Actually Spending Our Time Online?

Google has compiled a list of the 100 most-visited websites in the United States. (Being the modest company that they are, Google has chosen to omit their website and statistics from the study.) These 100 websites are sorted into six categories: social networking, search engines, shopping, entertainment, business and software.

Prevent Your SEO Bleeding Before It Starts! – A SPN Exclusive Article

By Bryan P. Hollis in Featured

I see it everyday. Someone wants to start a new blog, e-commerce site, or other site, including non-profits. The excitement is mounting, you start to see pieces of the puzzle come together, and the next thing you know, you’ve made the ever-important connection string from your database to your file manager – your site is now live. Did you forget anything along the way?

Depending on the Content Management Solution (CMS) you have chosen, upon the initial launch of your site, there are several “add-ons” you’ll want to install right away. I’ll use the ever-popular WordPress blogging platform for this example. Chances are, you don’t want to run your site these days without a single plug-in. Your initial choices should be related to site security, SEO (I am biased!), and site mapping. Other social items can be added or changed along the way according to your theme lay-out. But what is even far more important than this? Blocking search engines.

Unless you were able to completely design and develop your new site on a developer’s server that is not crawled by search engine bots, surely your site is not prepared. Important basics like the “About” page, “Contact”, and other critical information have not been written, or if they have, not yet installed. Before I use a different CMS, I will stick to WordPress for the conclusion of this example. The first thing I ALWAYS do right away is go to “Settings” and “Block this site from search engines”. This allows you to finish your basics or even the entire site structure before letting it go live. Now onto perhaps a little trickier CMS, Joomla.

This Content Management Solution is ideal for those that want a nicely designed, and feature-packed e-commerce solution. However, Joomla needs a bit more “commanding” from the developer. Anyone that knows me or has ever read articles written on SEO basics in the past by me, know that my personal rule when initially checking a website of ANY kind, is simply viewing the page source. In doing so, you see what the search engines bots do. That simple. I immediately go to the meta title, description, and keywords. My most recent experience actually got a well-deserved laugh.

Our company is located in a nice office park with many people with companies like us, small businesses with few employees. We have become “business friends”, and often joke with each other in passing. I knew that my neighbor was in the process of building another website to compliment one that has been around for some time. Each day, I would poke my head in the door and ask him how it was going. “Looks great”, he said, “Take a look”.

I have gotten so far into SEO that – while the site appearance is important – that is not my initial concern. (I leave this to those that are Photo Shop experts). I immediately ask my neighbor to right-click and select “view page source”. I started laughing. About two weeks previous to this encounter, I told my neighbor, “You are still developing your site, you are adding new products every day, the “About” tab is a “dead link”, “You need to hard-code into each page the “noindex, nofollow” attribute until you are ready. As of now, according to Google, you are “Joomla, a free open-source content management solution…” Oh, and you also sell antennas!”.

I had told him that with each passing day, his site is steadily “bleeding”. It would have taken him (or me) literally ten or fifteen minutes to code the “noindex, nofollow” attribute into each page until his site was ready for its big debut…and now we have to stop the bleeding.

He has since hired me to perform all of the SEO work on his site. It is not quite ready for launch, but I have done my due diligence as his newly hired SEO agent. I spent fifteen minutes adding the “noindex, nofollow” attribute to all pages until his site is ready.

Don’t let search engines crawl your site until it is ready!

---

Bryan P. Hollis is the owner and founder of Mid Carolina Freelance, LLC – A Complete Online Marketing and SEO Firm located in South Carolina. He has been in the SEO industry for over 5 years. The company owns several diverse sites, including their popular social media and bookmarking site, Blog Interact.

© Copyright 2012 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

Home Newsletter Archives SEO Forums Webmaster Tools Webmaster Resources Link to SPN Top SEO Tools Website Templates SPN Partners Contact Us Privacy Advertise

ExactSeek SiteProNews MetaWebSearch SPN Videos EzineHub ISEDN DropJack NewWebDirectory.com SEO-News SEO-News Forums Blog Search FreeWebSubmission SmartWebGadgets