Web Design Development Articles

“Social Media Optimization” or “SMO” was first coined by Rohit Bhargava to describe the method through which sites generate traffic and publicity through social media Web sites. Bhargava deduced that there were 6 rules for conducting SMO:

1.) Increase your linkability
2.) Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3.) Reward inbound links
4.) Help your content travel
5.) Encourage the mashup
6.) Get communities connected

The idea behind SMO is to get as many sites to link back as possible to your site using the readily available tools of the large social media Web sites such as digg, stumbleupon, and facebook as well as blogs, forums, RSS syndication sites, press release aggregators, and article hosting sites. SMO goes a step further than the standard SEO best practices because it also incorporates video and images as optimal content. SMO greatly benefits SEO though through the generation of organic backlinks and SMO benefits from the core concepts of SEO forming a symbiotic relationship.

The end goal of Social Media Optimization is to drive traffic to a site and generate backlinks. Backlinks are links from another Web site to your Web site. They help to increase your authority in the search engines and improve rankings. Organic links, such as those from social media sites, also generate traffic. Organic links are links that develop without payment to the third party Web site. These are ideal links and provide the most value to a site. They provide both authority with the search engines as well as good amounts of traffic. This essentially places SMO on the crossroads between SEO, online reputation management (ORM), and general Web marketing.

SMO as an Integral Part of SEO

The core practices of SEO are sound, but restricting. With any SEO campaign, there is always the subject of inbound linking to consider. There are many ways to go about it, but the very best links are generated organically. These links are much harder to get which is why they are more highly valued. They also make a statement about the quality of your content. Only great content has a lot of organic backlinks. The search engines know this and rank pages accordingly. Because of this, organic linking must be a part of an SEO campaign for it to be truly optimal. For many sites, organic linking and paid linking can be made to work together to maximize the number of backlinks.

If we take a typical SEO campaign that addresses text content, META tags, architecture/URLs, and inbound links, then inbound linking comprises approximately 60% of your rank. This means that it is the single most important aspect determining where you rank in the engines. Of course content is important, but the major engines consider links to be the most accurate description of a site’s authority. The keywords you actually rank for are determined by the text content on the site and the text in the inbound links, but the power and authority of a site is derived from the quantity and quality of inbound links.

This has a very powerful effect on the effectiveness of an SEO campaign. You can write the best text content on the Web on the most search engine friendly site around, but without links you will find it hard to rank for even non-competitive terms. SMO dictates that we not get tunnel vision on the search engines and consider the millions of other sites that might also like our content and direct their users to it. In this way, we are really optimizing a site for not only search engines, but Webmasters in general as well. SEO provides what the search engines want and SMO provides what other sites want. Together, they provide the most effective campaign possible.

Link Baiting Your Way to Big Traffic

Writing good articles that people want to link to is called ‘link baiting’. Link baiting is inherently viral because it relies on many different sources to pick up on it and spread it. There are a number of ways to get people to link to your articles simply by writing them a certain way. Articles should always be informative, but it takes a little more to make them interesting enough to be link bait.

The goal of a link bait article is to hook the reader enough that they want to link to the material. There are a number of different hooks that can be used in your articles.

Informational Hooks - The goal here is to provide very rare or useful tips and news that benefit the reader. Oftentimes, these come in the form of detailed guides or breaking news articles. This is the most widespread type of hook.

Humor Hooks - Create something funny that catches on across the Web. This is the hardest hook to develop because people like such a wide variety of things and it can be hard to develop something with wide appeal that will generate a lot of links. Lately, humor hooks are generally funny videos.

Negative Hooks - These are articles that are controversial or attack something popular. Negative hooks are not recommended for most business sites because they can also generate negative buzz for the company. They do however generate a lot of traffic and links.

Widget Hooks - Create a tool that is widely needed on your site or create a tool that can be embedded on other people’s Web sites and includes a link back. A great example of this is Adobe’s Acrobat Reader software. It is linked to from thousands upon thousands of Web sites so that users can view PDFs.

Keep in mind that long term link baiting is dependent on quality content. If you are writing content that is not of the highest quality, it will be hard to maintain any kind of long term link bait traffic. It’s also important to keep in mind that viral sources are generally volatile; meaning they are temporary. Humor and negative hooks especially are volatile as trends and fads change rapidly on the Web. So, it is always advisable to work on your link baiting and not rest on your laurels once you have a single popular piece of content.

Opening Up Your Content to the World

The goal of SEO and SMO are essentially the same: to bring content to the masses. They just take different, overlapping, approaches to it. To bring attention to our content, we must first generate it. Text content must be interesting and appeal to your audience. If it does not, you cannot expect people to link back to it and it’ll be hard to rank the page. In this case, it can be tempting to go with a 100% paid linking campaign to make up for the fact that no one will link to your boring content, but it’s more effective to simply write the content right from the beginning. We should be improving the quality of the Web. Keep this in mind at all times when writing your content.

Once we have some good content on the site, we want to make sure everyone has a chance to read it and direct their friends to it. One way is to do it through organic search. This is why SEO works so well with SMO. It ensures we have all our bases covered. SMO directly targets social media sites, but it also refers to the method of making the content easy to share. This can be done through some of the following:

• Company profiles on social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace
• RSS feeds of your blog entries
• Optimized press releases
• Adding social media submission buttons to your articles
• Providing incentives for Webmasters to link back to your articles
• Online photo galleries through Flickr showing your offices
• YouTube channel for videos
• Submit your RSS feeds and articles to aggregate sites
• Add an ‘email this article to a friend’ button
• Set up a mini PR campaign around a new link bait article

These are all very simple ways to increase your visibility and expose your content to the world, but they are often overlooked. Individually, they are not the biggest traffic generators, but together they can form a powerful source of inbound links and traffic. The more eyes you can get your content in front of, the larger number of backlinks you’ll receive generating both authority and traffic.

Social Media Monitoring is for brand strategizers, brand gurus and brand managers, who believe in taking an organized approach towards brand building. However, social media monitoring is not just limited to businesses, bloggers find them useful too. In fact, social media monitoring in the 21st century is essential to almost anyone - a business owner, a student, a customer, a housewife, a sportsman, a journalist, an intellectual, a fool - anyone. Here are some insights about the same:

Social Media Monitoring for Businesses: Obviously as a Business Owner or a responsible Brand Manager for a business (irrespective of big or small), you definitely would love to hear what people are talking about your company, your business, your brand. For the same reason, community portals like Trip Advisor and MouthShut.com got popular in the first place. Now unlike earlier days (around a few years back) when there were only a couple of such portals where people got together and shouted, today, there are thousands of places where people are voicing their opinions. And sometimes you may not even have the slightest idea of a growing protestation in a community or group for your products / services. For instance, say some of your customers are located in Saimata (a city in Japan) where your product is being talked about on a local blog / regional community forum. Obviously you are not expecting a dream about it. You need to find it for yourself.

Secondly, Social Media Monitoring is not just for Online Business, it is as important for an Offline Business too, only because your customers have gone online. They find internet the easiest way to review your product and a place where their voice is heard by many. So an offline business would not want to be completely unaware of what is cooking against them or for them online.

Essentially, Social Media Monitoring is now an integral part if businesses really want to safeguard their integrity.

Education: Monitoring education societies, organizations, education committees is a great way for students, researches alike. You are better equipped by what courses are on offer, what courses are in demand, what are the courses educational institutions or ministry are more inclined to develop. Further monitoring communities where people discuss or speak about details on a subject is another great way to benefit through Social Media Monitoring.

News: If you want to keep yourself updated with the latest happenings in any particular area, business, government issues or whatever, monitoring social media can only make work easier for you. Twitter is known to be the fastest news release source. Bloggers collect a lot of topics to write upon through this medium. Monitoring Social Media where news spread quicker than any other medium today would be the best source if you wish to be among the first few to popularize it.

Professional Development: As with education, social media can help you in an all round development of your professional personality. Monitoring social media groups where peers of your profession gather and speak and discuss things can help you in expanding your professional learning as well as networking circles.

Latest Buzz: Social Media Monitoring helps in keeping yourself informed upto the last minute. What is the latest buzz around your town? Which celebrity is making a presence tonight & where? Who is offering freebies and when? If you happen to love freaking out, you can be assured of being the first ones to get updated of the buzz.

Product Development: Businesses can strategize according to the buzz, trends being followed & things people look forward to. Social Media Monitoring can only help them combine their product / service with the ongoing buzz / trends to achieve a desired product.

Engagement: This is the most important and widely accepted aspect of Social Media Monitoring. Engaging yourself with what your customers say about you or your friends talk about you or your professional peers re-iterate, can help you gain access to a lot of freely available useful information as also having a personal chat with your customers. It is like understanding the needs and behavior more effectively.

Considering the scope of Social Media and the information that it has in store and which is freely available, monitoring it can only help you expedite your efforts to your goals. But what is actually needed is to Strategize and exploit this resource in the most efficient manner. This is what I shall take up in my next article.

Why are people flocking to Twitter? What is the reason that over 3,000,000 people so far are heading to this site? Why are technologically advanced companies using it?

Let’s answer this question in two parts. First we will describe what Twitter is and then we will talk about how people are using this new tool. Let me explain this as a list, to make it easier to follow. Hopefully these answers will explain why people are flocking to Twitter.

These updates, or tweets as they are called on Twitter, allow the user to share messages, status updates, what they are doing to anyone who has decided to follow each tweet and really connect with their followers. Members can get these updates via the twitter website, an RSS feed, text message, email, a number of applications including other blogging, social media web sites and so on.

Why Do People Use Twitter? (or as my spouse would ask, “Why in the world do people care what you’re doing?”)

Networking: It’s a great way to meet people. If you’re in a niche business you can easily find people who have the same interests.

Marketing: You need to market yourself, just like big companies such as Dell and Comcast market themselves. Whether for a big company or just for you, a strong brand is very important. You need to let the world see who you are and what you have to offer. Try marketing yourself via a social networking site like Twitter. It worked for me.

Stream of Details: I get urgent news and details on Twitter long before many news stations. A fantastic example was when the Bay area had their recent earthquake. In about 10 minutes Twitter had the details before CNN put it on their breaking news.

It’s great! People from all over the planet use Twitter. You can always find someone who shares your interests and wants to chat.

Twitter is simple and easy to use. Try it out if you haven’t already done so. You can also integrate twitter into your other social networking accounts via “cross posting”.

The first question you need to ask yourself and honestly answer is “What is your true level of compassion? And how much of it are you willing to surrender fulfilling the needs a given community?” What exactly does compassion have to do with social media marketing? Compassion is having a Deep awareness of the suffering of another being coupled with the wish to relieve their suffering and fulfill their need. In Social Media Marketing you need to identify with your follower, customer, client etc., have a keen awareness of the situation that is causing them to be harassed or to feel helpless. Once you have clearly identified their need, you then must to do something about it. You need to get in touch with their pain, compassionately and not superficially. Then you need to actively take part in solving their problem. This is not rocket science, its common sense.

However trying to understand the many marketing options available in social media Internet marketing and mlm Internet marketing strategies relies on far more than common sense. This task is beyond mind boggling and ranks up there with the requirements of becoming a brain surgeon.

Unfortunately today there is so much pain and suffering, every where in the global village that we have become numb to it. On one segment of the news you view a teen aged gunman killing 15 classmates in yet another school and the next clip is how your local NBA,NFL etc team’s game went, all while eating dinner. NEXT…….. What have we become? Numb? Cold? Complacent? Disconnected? You fill in your interpretation.

Too many of us are too busy or burnt out buy our own tragedies too much to really be compassionate about fulfilling the next guy’s needs. Many of us are grasping for our own breath of fresh air… and with so much pollution in every sense, we have become caulis, apathetic and filled with hopeless despair.

If you hope to survive in the arena of social media marketing you need to live in harmony with the needs of the certain community you wish to serve. You have to view others through the unconditional eyes of love and we all need to become better listeners (tough one for me) to know what those needs are. If you don’t listen with razor sharp hearing you will not know how to deal with relieving others pain. In social media marketing with the MLM or network marketing industry, SEO20, we are positioned to provide purpose, promise and possibilities, not gloom and doom. If you can provide this through true compassion you can move others toward action. This is a humbling experience that will pay huge dividends providing your passion is genuine.

People are wandering aimlessly with no design or purpose but may not like to admit it. There is no need to be scattered or feel harassed by the events of the day, the harvest is plenty and the workers are few. Are you wired to be a worker? Can you deliver? Can you really be a leader? I ask myself these questions everyday.

As Ferny and Ray say in SEO Networker’s Master Mind, there is very little competition. I am beginning to believe them. After devoting months to Research, I now have a clue as to why there would be little competition. If you want to make it to the top in SEO20, you have to give it all your heart. For how long do you pour yourself into it before you experience the fruits of your labor? I’ll keep you posted.

George Orwell has been dead for 59 years. The brilliant British author, whose nightmare vision of a future in which technology and ideology combine to enslave humanity has been haunting readers for more than half a century, never lived to see the rise of the real-world inventions that might make “Big Brother” real. Orwell never encountered closed-circuit surveillance cameras, data-mining universal wiretaps, criminal psychological profiling, Air America Radio, or the Fox News Channel.

But George Orwell is on Twitter. Every day, you see, the Orwell Trust tweets an excerpt from the dead writer’s 1938-42 diary; through the magic of microblogging, you can now relive George Orwell’s life, as he lived it-just seventy years and one information revolution later. Even literary giants sometimes write boring prose. Orwell’s diary/tweet for today is surely less interesting than yours or ours: “Quite hot, but today cloudy. Most of our nasturtiums in flower & everything else growing rapidly. Mosquitoes rather bad.” Hopefully the good stuff comes later.)

Orwell on Twitter raises an interesting question: Is the information overload associated with the microblogging phenomenon just the next step on our civilization’s long road toward? Will teachers harness the power of decentralized communication to engage today’s students on their own ground? Or will students use ever more fragmented communication channels to subvert authority and academic integrity? Is the decentralization of information inherent in the Twitter model a means for us to liberate ourselves from the centralized power of “Big Brother”? Hard to say, for sure; perhaps the answer is both. Maybe George Orwell’s next tweet will help us figure it out.

Here’s a little tip. If you’re the daughter of a presidential candidate and you decide to support the opponent, don’t make it public through social networking.

Back when the election was in its infant stages, Rudy Giuliani’s daughter, Caroline, decided it was time to update her Facebook profile. She set her political views as “liberal” and joined the group “One Million Strong for Barack” a fan page for Barack Obama supporters.

The media was all over the social networking profile like flies to a picnic.

We could go through all the do’s and don’ts of social networking but the overall message in all of this: social networking websites are an effective way to get your message across and meet other people with similar interests.

According to comScore, a marketing research company serving many of the Internet’s largest businesses, Facebook is the leading social networking site based on monthly unique visitors, having overtaken main competitor MySpace in April 2008. ComScore reports that Facebook attracted 132.1 million unique visitors in June 2008, compared to MySpace, which attracted 117.6 million.

And to clear up the myth that Facebook is just for “young people,” the website boasts membership that includes the likes Fortune 500 businessmen, celebrities, political leaders, musicians and everybody in between.

While on Facebook, you can join fan pages for your favorite television show, celebrity, musician, local celebrity. There are groups for people interested in everything from fly fishing to reading the Harry Potter series. And on the more professional side of things … there are countless opportunities for networking.

There are other “business social networking sites” the most common of which is Linkedin, which is good but strictly business. The site lacks the ability to show your true colors. While this may be good when looking for a new career, ultimately your true colors will eventually shine through anyway, so if you lead a relatively normal life, networking and expressing your individuality on Facebook shouldn’t pose too much of a business risk.

To navigate your way through this economic storm will require creativity, determination, innovation, strong communication skills and the ability to do some very clever networking. Using social networking tools is the perfect launch pad from which to present yourself to the professional world. As a matter of fact, the HR recruiter who initially brought me to Denver first met me … on Facebook.

So are you ready to catch the Facebook frenzy? Be sure to add me as a friend!

Social Media is a digital medium and as such it is extremely measurable. Granted there are a number of closed communities, like FaceBook - when you can only access information when you have permission… that aside, but we estimate that around 80% is visible whilst Facebook does not share its data unless invited, there are open pages. There is more to social media than Facebook of course, and a lot of it is just plain, open. Twitter, most forums and nearly all blogs are accessible and search engine technologies already read them - to your advantage.

Interpretation is key Before you start anything, you need to see what is going on… Search engines are used to viewing a lot of data and search engines such as Google will help you find the data that you need. There are a range of dedicated and sophisticated tools out there that can help you develop your world view. Examining the underlying data will tell you whether you are working with positive or negative sentiment. Clearly interpretation is key, but the first top tip is to find ways of examining the data.

You cannot form an opinion if you do not have the data. There is a lot that you can see, links to posts, comments on posts, comments via Twitter, Technorati, Facebook and Forums. They all add up to providing a world view and the amount of data available across a range of media - paints a picture that will direct your future actions if you take notice of what you find. There are now a number of famous case studies for instance the one around Dell and its laptop battery problems referred to as Dell Hell…

However due to close monitoring and lightning reactions they were able to deal with the negative sentiment quickly and offer laptop owners assurances and handle returns to reduce the overall negative stress that this occasion caused and so in turn help to resolve the issue for consumers and ultimately repair their reputation. Here is another view - your business receives a letter of complaint - would you ignore it or would you write back with your side of the story hoping to solve the problem and demonstrate that you care about each of your clients, especially those that are having problems. The same should apply on the Internet yet some brands and most small companies are simply unaware. The very least your company should do is to monitor what is said about your brand online.

If it is good commentary - you should encourage this and thank them! This is common sense. It is a bit like the company who ignores feedback. Odd as it might sound, imagine a store where clients keep asking for ice cream - would the store get in ice cream and start satisfying demand or does the store put up a sign saying NO ICE CREAM SOLD HERE! There are a lot people out there talking about brand issues whether they know it or not. Discussions are taking place and you can find out what is said when and by who just by monitoring you keywords - and this works in every niche. With google keywords we can see the words people use, with social media monitoring you can see the level of interest and the conversation relating to those issues. Finally you can enter the conversation…

Most people using Twitter are connecting to new members so they can say what’s on their mind, what their doing, and sometimes throwing in their sales pitch to attract new customers.

If you’re new to Twitter, setting up a new account takes just seconds.

Okay, Now what do i do with it?

This is the easy part…just talk about what your doing, or talk about events that happened during your day.

It doesn’t get any easier than that, does it?

Once in a while you put up a post about a product or information pertaining to your website.

This will help you get the exposure to your business…not to mention all for free, and from time to time, you’ll get a new customer, or someone will subscribe to one of your newsletters, or put a link to their site from yours.

The best part about this is that it required very little work on your behalf, and many of the masters of Twitter know what I’m talking about when it comes to this.

Just remember that if you do get a purchase from someone through Twitter, and the purchaser starts complaining about the product on Twitter, it could drag your website sales and creditability down the drain.

If you can, I would recommend that you try to settle the dispute directly with the purchaser offering them a refund for the product, or give them free incentives.

I would also recommend that you settle the dispute quickly, because Twitter posts spread like wildfire, and there’s nothing like having bad news going around about your website’s products.

Even if Twittering just gets you a few customers, then it’s a few more customers than you had before, so keep on Twittering, and who knows, you might get even more customers!

Happy Twittering!

A week ago I posted a tweet that I was looking for someone to do a twitter background for one of my accounts. Of course within minutes I was responded to. One thing was different…

Instead of loads of professionals responding to me I was pleasantly surprised with recommendations from followers. Personal friends and twitter followers sent me DM’s saying they had used such and such person for their twitter background. I’d much rather be referred to a professional a friend of mine already used that is proven.

Twitter- Finding Talent

Twitter can be a misunderstood application to many newcomers to the online marketing world. In principle, it is a social media or social networking platform that offers the ability for friends to share what they are doing with each other. However, like most other social network applications online, business owners have discovered ways to utilize Twitter to market their businesses.

Posting Tweets

Twitter allows you to post comments or tweets on your profile page to share with your network of friends and the Twitterverse. Your tweets can be things such as, “Searching for freelance writers” or “Does anyone have a great freelance writer that they use?” To build the largest and most cohesive Twitter network, you want to vary your posts between questions, comments, statements and marketing. Remember twitter is not a glorified RSS feed.

Questions should be used to tap the knowledge and network resources of your Twitter network. Comments should be insightful thoughts about other people’s Twitter posts or about resources that you have come across that may benefit your network. And, it is appropriate to let your network of friends know about your company sales, promotions, new product launches and any other news on a regular basis. While all of these uses are available on Twitter, one of the most underutilized opportunities on the site is to find quality outsourced talent.

Search Keywords

In addition to building your network of friends organically, you can also search for specific individuals using the keyword search tool on Twitter (search.twitter.com). For example, if you are looking to hire programmers, you can type that keyword as well as any other relevant keywords into the search engine on the site. Posts that have contained those specific keywords will come up, allowing you to search through them.

You can then take the search function one step further by asking for regular notifications of posts containing those relevant keywords. Simply search the posts to find individuals or groups that provide those services. You will instantly start to come across outsourced talent within your given niche or needed area.

Things to Remember when posting work over twitter

Everyone can see- the one good thing about freelance sites is sometimes you don’t want people to know your outsourcing a specific task. Staying hidden behind an Elance user name and not your public twitter profile is still sometimes preferred.

I have been using Elance for the majority of my simple job postings. However I’m shifting forward. Social Media is powerful and we all know it. Twitter is my new favorite and probably yours. Before posting on any of the freelance websites I will now be asking my twitter followers for their favorite talent first. A recommendation is always preferred.

After reviewing feedback from over 120 professionals on LinkedIn on how they are using twitter we’ve distilled the strongest themes into 20 simple points on how companies are gaining an advantage to beat the economic downturn. It is true some companies are still getting familiar with this new tool and see it as a time consuming and there can be an overload of non-valuable information but over 80% of comments we received indicated the pro’s far outweighing the con’s

What we were delighted to see is that although twitter is strong in news and social interaction, it is playing a fundamental role in giving a number of companies a competitive edge during challenging economic times by:
- creating access to new customers
- receiving customer and public feedback that leads to more successful sales
- opening networking opportunities with contacts companies wouldn’t have had access to.

20 of LinkedIn’s Strongest Group Discussion Themes from over 120 Comments

Following are the strongest themes many companies said they’re enjoying as they’ve learned how to grasp the culture, grow their followers, and when needed apply external technology tools that simplifies the vast amounts of information.

Here’s how companies have benefited from twitter:

1. Build relationships with people they would have not met before
2. Exposure to lots of new business thoughts, technical ideas and leadership styles
3. Finding new clients by commenting back on others’ tweets
4. Access to thinkers and doer’s one wouldn’t normally interact with
5. Can follow businesses you want the latest updates from with less effort
6. Clients have asked for accounts to be opened so they can get regular updates
7. Can assist Google rankings, sometimes it gets first page results
8. Can assist in getting real questions answered real time during the day
9. Been a great way to gain interactive access with new clients by following their tweets
10. Received access to publicity: radio, TV, press, speaking engagements
11. Allows leaders to connect to followers on a personal level
12. Without being pushy, it can generate buzz/talk about your company
13. Great for bringing traffic to your site if you offer truly valuable information and links
14. Provides a premier marketing tool when used correctly
15. Can be a great resource for getting push information versus searching the web
16. Can act as a news wire for journalist who are looking for story content
17. Can save time by getting the latest news without having to go search for it
18. Enables expansion of your database by removing budget or geography barriers
19. It can increase your market reach if you actively promote your presence on twitter
20. A great way to showcase your expertise and differentiate from competition.