What is Social Media Optimization?

Social Media Optimization – An Overview

What is Social Media Optimization?
Social media optimization (SMO) consists of a set of methods for generating traffic on any website through social networking websites, business networking websites, online communities and blogs (macro blogging as well as micro blogging). These methods exploit the customer base that the target social media / business networking website already have and belong to common interest group with the website that is being promoted.

We all are aware of the social networking websites like orkut, facebook etc. These websites provides platform to interact with other users, create groups for common interest, share ideas, share profiles and many more.

How can SMO benefit me?

• SMO is a great tool due to its penetration in the target markets.
• It does not cost money to run a SMO campaign.
• SMO is a good tool for branding
• SMO can do wonders for direct sales, direct marketing of products and services
• What are various methods for SMO?
• Creating RSS feeds
• Placing Social News buttons
• Setting up a blog (Macro Blogging-e.g. blogger.com , wordpress.com)
• Micro blogging through twitter
• Incorporating functionality to add third party community tools like videos, images (youtube.com)
• Active participation in community forums and discussions with meaningful inputs
  

List of websites which can be helpful in Social Media Optimization

• http://www.orkut.com
• http://www.facebook.com
• http://www.linkedin.com
• http://www.blogger.com
• http://www.myspace.com
• http://www.digg.com
• http://www.stumbleupon.com
• http://www.xing.com

Measuring ROI for Social Media Optimization (SMO)
Measuring ROI is important in any marketing campaign / advertising campaign you undertake. Similarly in SMO too it is important as based on this one can allocate efforts and invest time in sustaining the efforts.
Again, the goals matter in computing ROI for SMO campaign. The goals can be

• Generating direct sales
• Brand Building
• Generating Leads etc.

For generating direct sales, one can incorporate small software code to detect the source of traffic and associate it with sales if any comes from the visits.

For brand building, one needs to follow the depth of penetration in business / social networking website.

Summary: SMO can be a very useful tool to generate the traffic for any website if used effectively. There is no cost associated with SMO methods but it requires sustained efforts for generating quality leads.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing Firm Himshilp

All About Cloaking

All About Cloaking

Cloaking is used to serve the search engine bots with content optimized with best results. Some search engine optimizers use it in their promotional campaigns to serve pages optimized for each of the search engines. This can be utilised for Black Hat Practices for quick gains.

In other words Page cloaking is the practice of altering contents of a page depending on the software, method and/or IP address being used to access it.

Cloaking can be used to

• Provide the search engine bots, content optimized for best results.
• Conceal the real keywords and text used for rankings from normal visitors.
• Change the identity of the site depending on who accessed it.
• Protect the server and it's contents from malicious bots or misuse.
• Re-brand shared content depending on the domain name used to access it.
• Bound the options available depending on browser features or capabilities.
• Level out browser inconsistencies.
• Provide relevant information to the user based on Operating System and/or browser.
• Produce a more personalized experience for the visitor.

Cloaking can be done by several methods like:

• Identifying the browser program which is making the request
• Identifying the IP address through which they are connecting from
• Identifying the page through which they are coming from
• Using the session data

By cloaking visitors download time can be reduced by not including the meta tags which generally the visitors don’t see. One can also remove the keyword list from their page which one has made through SEO research. Text can be sent to the search engines rather than the pictures as search engine cannot interpret the images and save time and space.

Generally Cloaking is a NO NO term in SEO as once you get caught for the deed, you may be thrown away from the index and your website will not be crawled. But still many professional take this route to gain rankings quickly and use it as a part of short term strategy to attract traffic.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Suggestions while working with SEO Company

Thing to consider while working with SEO firm

Based on my experience in executing SEO projects for over half a decade, I am posting a blog entry which deals with the suggestions for a client working with any SEO professional or SEO firm for optimizing his website.

• Have complete faith in SEO professional: Once you finalize SEO professional or SEO Company, trust their skills. Also you need to trust their knowledge and experience. Do give them freehand to work on their methodology and indulge yourself in learning basics about their methodology and approach. You can discuss the blueprints they prepare for your website, in detail with them. This will help your SEO professional in gaining your confidence and also will help you in reaching a comfort level with your SEO professional.

• Have reasonable / realistic expectations about your SEO project: SEO can’t work miracles irrespective of their experience and past track record. Especially if the site is new, it may take months to really see traffic building up because of SEO work. So its quite unfair on your part to expect your website appearing in top 10 search results within a month of SEO work done. This is the reason why a good SEO professional DO NOT guarantees any results for the SEO job.

• Be patient with the results and be realistic: SEO is not a fuse wire which can trigger a chain reaction and your site will be bombarded with huge traffic in a matter of time. You need to be patient with SEO. It takes time to implement SEO as it’s a scientific approach and can be implemented after taking a series of steps, each requiring thorough analysis. The approach implemented by a SEO professional may take time to get indexed properly and it may take a little while to get appreciation by search engines in terms of rankings.

• Work in detail with SEO and treat him as a partner: You need to detail SEO about every minute thing related to functionality of your business so that he can come up with a decent research on keywords. Talk to him about the nature of business, customer behavior, product range, your competitors, target group / area. Based on the information provided by you, SEO can pick right sets of keywords and can boost your website rankings and get the right traffic.

• Be ready to pay for quality work: Chose a SEO professional / SEO company based on the track record. Once zero in on any professional based on the capabilities, then be ready to pay for the quality work which you expect from him. “If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys”. There are plenty of people who are ready to do SEO in a couple of hundred dollars. Their job is just to stuff keywords and create metas and they are done. So my advise is be cautious while picking SEO and be ready to pay for quality work as it is something which is going to bring in more MOOLAH to your business and your growth depends on this.

• Do not hesitate taking an elementary class from SEO professional about SEO approaches and methodologies: Learn the basics of SEO from SEO professional working on your project. It takes little efforts but the reward is quite satisfying. You will not be in dark about the SEO progress and you will attain a comfort level with your SEO professional.

• SEO is not a one time effort: SEO is not doing a one time job and then sit and wait for the results. You can equate it with the regular marketing and sales efforts. You need to keep refining the approach based on the results which you get crawl after crawl. You need to measure finite parameters and make changes in your website / content / visuals accordingly so that you get better and better visibility. After the work is done, its about putting in time & efforts to sustain rankings and continue taking actions for improve rankings.

• The success of your business does not depend entirely on SEO: This is one of the most important points. Do not rely on SEO for generating more revenues and increasing your business reach among the potential buyers. A SEO can drive targeted traffic to your website, however he can not force visitors to buy from you whether its service or any product. The actual SALE entirely depends on your product line, service levels you offer, after sales service, product / service pricing and many other factors. So its unfair to hold SEO professional responsible if you are not getting desired jump in sales even after increase in traffic to your website.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Inbound links & SEO

Importance of Inbound Links in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Inbound links are the links which are pointing to your webpage/website from any other source apart from your own website. Inbound links are an important source of increasing your Search Engine Rankings. If you wish to appear in top search engine results for your category, you need to give emphasis on the quality and nature of inbound links. In a nutshell, the effect of 1 quality inbound link is far better than 10 irrelevant inbound links to your website, so you need to be extra careful regarding the quality of inbound links to your website.

There are certain points which you can keep in mind while designing a campaign for generating inbound links to your webpage/ website.

• Relevance: The source of inbound link should be relevant to the category of your website/webpage. For example, if you have a website selling electronic gadgets, then its good to have inbound links from the directories displaying latest gadgets rather than having a directory listing road construction contractors of your town.

• Effective use of anchor text in inbound link: The anchor text should be used effectively to include the keyword which your webs page is focusing. This will enhance the relevance of your web page for the keyword you are targeting, and hence the Search engine rankings will be high.

• Page Selection: Carefully select pages and use them as landing pages for various inbound links. Make sure that you use proper distribution and target right kind of page in order boost your search engine rankings.

• Links from .ORG, .EDU, .Gov, etc carries special weight age. Try to get more links from these websites and you will see improved search engine rankings for your website.

• Constant periodic review: Over a period, review the quality of inbound links, the anchor text, and the landing pages for inbound links. This will help you in fine-tuning and getting improved results over time.

• Avoid inbound links from NO-Follow instructions home page. No follow instructions are given by web pages, not to follow a particular links to the search engine crawlers. For example, wikepedia.org is an open encyclopedia project where anyone can post/edit/delete articles along with web links. The links provided there have No follow instructions thus there is no importance given to the links posted there by anyone.

Design and work on a systematic approach for inbound link creation campaign and you can see tangible result in medium and long term in term of enhanced sales/ leads and conversions.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Importance of HTML Sitemap

Sitemap and your Website

If you visit any website, you will find a fine print usually at the bottom which says “sitemap”. This link takes you to a page where the website’s organizational structure (page wise listing) will be there. One can call it as hierarchical listing of a website structure.

A sitemap has got important presence and role in overall website structure.

• It gives an easy navigation option to the website visitors. A visitor can jump to various sections of the website looking at the sitemap without getting lost in the website. Navigational menus can be confusing, so sitemap is used to aid visitor navigation.

• It organizes various sections, themes of a website in proper way. Thus a visitor can get a feel of the website and also a broad structure of the website. Thus, it helps in giving visitor an idea about the website theme and scope.

• Now, sitemap also plays an important role with respect to SEO. Implementation wise, a sitemap is a single page, which has links to all the pages of the website. When a search engine crawler comes to a sitemap, it gets all the links of the pages of a website. Thus, a sitemap helps search engine crawlers in crawling all the links and indexing all the pages of a website.

The key aspect is to create a sitemap and place it strategically on the home page so that when search engine crawler comes to the home page, it gets the link to the sitemap and it can crawl all the links specified in the HTML sitemap. Creating sitemap is bit tedious job but the benefit it provides far exceeds the efforts spent in creating it.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Anchor Text and SEO

Importance of Anchor Text in SEO

What is an Anchor Text?

An Anchor text is the text which is the visible pat of a hyperlink. For example, "SEO services Bangalore". The hyperlink is pointing towards http://www.himshilp.com/ but the text is “SEO services Bangalore”. This text is known as anchor text.

Anchor Text is used to describe the summary of the target page. In above example, the page http://www.himshilp.com/ gives details about the SEO Services and various other services provided by the firm Himshilp which is a Bangalore based firm, so the anchor text “SEO Services Bangalore” is justified.

Anchor Text gives an idea to the visitor of a particular page that what is in store for him if he clicks a particular link on that and move to another page. Thus anchor text indicates the nature and type of content on the target page. This increases the importance of the page and enhances the relevance of the target page.

A brief on the importance of the Anchor Text

• Use of keywords in the anchor text increases the possibility of target page getting higher position in search engine rankings. Reason: Anchor Text increases the relevance of the target page.
  
• Anchor Text is liked by the search engines as they can give weight age to the target page based on the text used in the anchor text.
  
• A good interlinking of pages within a website using Anchor Text increases the changes of the website in attaining high search engine rankings.
  
• While doing link building, ensure that the Anchor Text you are using are relevant to the target pages of your website. Use keywords intelligently to increase relevance and weight age of your website pages.

To sum up, you must use Anchor Text Optimization as a part of your SEO strategy effectively. Search engines love them so you must use Anchor Text to benefit your website.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Internal Linking and SEO

How does Internal Linking Helps?

The links coming to your website from outside that is other websites matters a lot. The inbound links help the website and the page in terms of increased weight age for PR calculation. The links received from any external website / source is one part of the overall linking program of your website.

What about the internal links within the website? This is a very important technique for SEO which is ignored by many websites. The more internal linking you have, more suitable your website is for crawling. In fact some improvement in the internal linking, navigation can improve your visibility in search results drastically.
There are few factors which are required for improving internal linking of a website

• Easy to understand sitemap: En easy to understand sitemap can be a well beginning. It is an important element of any good website. It serves two purposes, firstly it can give crawlers a good starting point to crawl all the pages on a website and secondly it can give visitors also a place to start looking for the information they need.
  Tip: While setting up a sitemap, use your internal directory structure to group the links within a heading. This gives a neat, uncluttered site map.

• Footer Links: Footer links are placed at the bottom of the page. This also services two purposes, first it helps the crawlers to crawl the entire site and second it helps the visitors to jump to other page in case the page is very long. They need not to go back to the top of the page to navigate to other pages. I short; it facilitates movement of crawlers and visitors within the website.

• Using Menus: Menus are the best possible tools for navigation. They guide the visitors to the various pages and sections of the website. Similarly the crawlers also follow menus and move around the website. This is the one of the way to facilitate the deep crawling of a website. For this purpose, the menus should be in a readable format for crawlers. Avoid having FLASH menu items as it can confuse the crawlers. Though they can read if but why to make it complex for them. Feed crawlers with easy to understand HTML menus so that they can do their job effortlessly, this is what an objective of SEO is, isn’t it?

Use a judicious mix of the keywords while strengthening the internal linking structure. A good structure helps crawlers to crawl properly and better search engine rankings and it helps visitors too to find the relevant page of your website thus improving sales conversions.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp