SEO Marketing

Yes! It may seem strange, but believe it or not search engines look at various different criteria on your site for ranking purposes and will penalize you if they decide that you are trying to trick them in any manner.

What they are looking for is any type of unnatural behavior that they will flag for “over optimization” reasons. Basically, this means that you will rank poorly for relevant key phrases in your niche. This is one of the reasons why it is so important to have your site optimized by a professional SEO company or at least someone who is very familiar with what the search engines are looking for and what the latest trends are.

Here are some tell tale signs that you may be over optimizing your website:

• Identical Page Titles and H1 headings
• Excessive internal links
• Keyword stuffing
• Excessive poorly written text below the fold (for the search engines and not the users)

If you find that your website is using any of these tactics, you should make adjustments as soon as possible to get your site back on the right path. The search engines are getting smarter everyday and the best optimization you can do has always been in regards to content. Content is still king! You should always write for the intended audience and not the search engines. Stuffing keywords is definitely old school, but I am often surprised when analyzing prospective clients sites and just surfing the Internet that this tactic is still going on and quite prevalent.

Internal linking is a great strategy and you should definitely use it as part of your on-page SEO arsenal, but be careful not to over do it as the search engines can easily spot this. Finally, please make it a point to write unique title tags and headings for each page and never create a block of optimized copy exclusively for just the search engines (below the fold of your website), which again is obviously not intended for your users and the search engines can easily detect.

Pick your favorite restaurant. Any cuisine, any location. Now search for it on Twitter. Chances are, if it is a larger company or chain, you will find it. If your search doesn’t result in an official page, send out a tweet asking if anyone else has heard of the place. “A recent study from LinkedIn and Harris Interactive showed that only 8% of advertisers and consumers think Twitter is a "very effective" promotion tool.” That is quite interesting. However, it is much easier in some respects to measure the effectiveness of a Twitter campaign than traditional forms of advertising.

For example, Taco Bell has a Twitter page. They use it to inform their customers about new coupons, contests, and interact with fans. How effective is their Twitter page? Here are some basic ways any business can track their Twitter statistics and compare them to traditional media metrics. “For raw broadcast reach, your number of Followers is the leading indicator because it quantifies your baseline Twitter audience.” Taco Bell has 16,040 followers. Not bad when you compare it to McDonalds’ 16,727 followers. Pizza Hut, which often partners with Taco Bell locations, has 26,454 followers.

Google Analytics is one of my favorite tools to use to see how much of your website’s traffic is coming from Twitter or any site for that matter. “What are they looking at? What is working? What is not?” Third party tools come in hand and are a valuable way to easily see how effective your Twitter page is. For example, check out Tweet Stats, it puts all your tweets into an easy to read graph that shows you how much you tweet and how often other reply to your tweets. “@Replies, Twitter’s public conversation feature, is the most significant engagement quantifier because your audience is responding to your message.” Taco Bell has an average reply rate of 30.37%. See how simple it is to find the effectiveness of your Twitter promotions?

Social media marketing has become the hottest new way to attract, inform, and influence customers. There are several uses that Twitter is especially effective at such as: updating customers of deals or coupons, offering real-time customer support, or gaining customer loyalty by responding to comments and complaints. Many larger companies are already using Twitter for these purposes.

For example, DellOutlet posts bargains on refurbished Dell computers, DellSMBnews offers advice and information for small and medium businesses, while DellLounge is more of a fan community “bringing you cutting edge trends in Music, Film, Art and Technology.” Walmart.com and HobbyLobbyStore posts current deals and coupon offerings. Comcast, JetBlue, and TheHomeDepot offer customer support with JetBlue even posting the names of those “currently on duty”.

Many major companies use Twitter as a mean to connect with their customers. McDonalds for example states “we’re here to listen and learn from all of our fans and followers” in their biography of themselves. Other examples include SouthwestAir which has “non-official, entertaining discussions with their customers”, HRBlock which answers questions, SnickersIceCrm engages with fans, BBy_community is Best Buy’s online support page, WholeRecipes offers recipes from Whole Foods Market, and WholeFoods offers “fresh organic tweets” from their headquarters in Texas. TacoBell_jobs even offers what available positions there are in all their locations.

Twitter is a wonderful way to communicate with customers on a more personal level without expending a lot of effort. It is simple to set up and maintain a Twitter page, making it a cost-effective method of public relations. Further, the marketing applications you can use it for: pointing people to your blog, website, current deals, or even video commercials makes a Twitter page an important part of any social marketing campaign.