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

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

Smart Tips for Managing PPC Programs

Pay per click programs are highly effective way to get instant traffic on your website. This is a good tool to attract quality and highly targeted traffic. The bids normally start from .05 cents which is quite good as you can get a good number of visitors by spending a little amount. Even if bid is .10 cents, you can get 10 visitors by paying $1

Smart Tips for Managing PPC programs

• Identify the set of keywords which clearly defines the services / products you offer. This clearly means that you need to remove unnecessary keywords which might be related to your category but can not generate quality traffic to your website.
  
• Focus on product/service which you wish to sell. Remember, its selling service and you have to be specific in PPC approach. You can not have your whole catalogue on your single campaign.
  
• Take bottom up approach for bid management. Start with a certain minimum value and the scale up the campaigns on a day to day basis till you arrive at an optimum level where your goals are met. ( an optimal combination of your budget / CPA / Bid / position)
  
• Come up with a precise ad copy. Include text in the campaign which clearly states about the service / product you are promoting in the ad campaign. If possible, try to include pricing in the ad copy if you are selling any product. This will increase the CTR if your pricing is competitive.
  
• Setup the campaign and bid on maximum relevant keywords possible. This will increase the possibility of clicks.
  
• Track you campaign: This is the most important step. You need to place tracking to track the ROI. You need to restrict your CPA (cost per acquisition). Big programs like adwords/overture can generate huge volumes and your money can vanish in a day. So you need to track your returns, and this is the only way by which you can know whether its working out for you or not.
  
• Keep tweaking the campaigns in terms if bids and ad copy by looking at the reports. An attractive ad copy can increase the chances of getting clicks.
  
• Do not rush for position #1. Settle for positions 4/5/6 as bids will be lower and visibility will also be OK. This will lower your CPA and increase ROI.
  

If you try the above points, you can expect improvements in your ROI and in the long run, constant bid management can get you sustained success in managing PPC programs.

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

Organic SEO Vs PPC

PPC and SEO

Pay Per click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are two of the main techniques to generate visits on your website.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is the approach where you bid for the position in search results which are sponsored.

1. higher the bid, higher the position
2. higher the competition, higher the bid

In principal, it is very straight forward. You pay for the position you wish to be and you have a greater control in terms of spending etc.

Organic SEO: Here you try to optimize your web pages around a set of keywords which you feel are suitable to your category. Once search engine crawlers indexes your website and all the pages then your ranking / listing starts appearing in the organic search results for the keywords you have targeted.

So which one of the two is better?

Organic SEO

• ROI from organic SEO is substantially better than PPC
• Organic SEO pays good in long run
• The top positions of search engine results are not for sale. You can get there through organic SEO only
• The CTR of organic listings are higher usually
• The conversion of organic listing is also higher (lead / sales)
• Organic SEO does not require regular maintenance once SEO is done perfectly and is refined for few iterations
• There is no recurring cost associated with SEO
• There is nothing like “click fraud” as you are not paying per click in organic SEO
  

PPC

• PPC gives you instant traffic
• PPC gives you targeted traffic as you can define a set of keywords for which you need traffic
• Results can be measured in PPC programs
• Marketing strategies can be formulated based on PPC as a tangible forecast of clicks is
  available over a period of time
• PPC requires professional management once you attain a certain level of spend as maintaining
• ROI is very important. An inefficiently managed PPC program can make you loose hundreds of dollars in one night !!
• PPC usually is second most cost effective form of web marketing (After organic SEO)
• PPC campaigns requires recurring / ongoing management
• There are chances of loosing money due to click fraud but most of the major search engines have placed mechanisms to check this.

Final Take: For any website an optimum balance and mix of PPC campaigns and organic SEO is must as they can generate quality traffic if managed properly. PPC gives instant traffic and can be a good source to generate traffic in long run too.

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

Importance of TITLE TAG in SEO

Importance of title tag in SEO

Title tag makes up the text which appears in the title of a web browser.
It is very important while considering SEO exercise. There are few tips you need to keep in mind while writing Title tag for your web page.

• Must include keywords for the webpage in the Title tag: Title tag is the tag which gives information about the webpage. You can take analogy of a bus number and route display on any metro route. The route is displayed prominently on the bus and that is the identification of the bus. Similar is the Title tag. A search engine crawler would like if you display the title clearly. It takes the title and then matches with the content and links on the web page. If all are in sync, the search engine will love it and assign a certain weight age to it. So, try to stuff your primary keywords for the web page in the title tag of the page
  
• Ordering keywords / phrases in the title tag: If you are using keywords in the title tag, then make sure that the primary keywords are given priority in the position. Ideally you can start your title tag with the primary keyword for that page. This gives strong signal to the search engine about how important you feel the keyword is.
  
• Make your title readable: The text you write in the title should be pleasing to eye, in short readable. Avoid using ALL CAPS. If you use it intelligently, it will make people to click the link while searching through search engines as the title tag appears with a hyperlink in the search results thrown by the search engines
  
• Have unique title tag for each page of your website: Try to keep title tag uniquie for each page of your website. This will help in proper crawling and proper indexing of all your web pages within a website.

Points to keep in mind:

1. Never leave Title tag BLANK or UNTITLED.
2. Write only relevant text in the title tag
3. Do not spam keywords in your title tag.

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

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization services

Search engine optimization is the process of analyzing a web site and modifying it to enable search engines to read, understand, and index it correctly. This dramatically increases the traffic to the web site. Many web sites are expensive to build and are technologically advanced but they cannot be ranked by the search engines because they were never optimized.

The objective of search engine optimization is to increase web visitor counts by ranking very high in the results of searches using the most appropriate keywords describing the content of your site.

It is not enough to simply add META tags and do submission of your site to the available search engine indexes and directories.

The initial step is to build a great content-rich website. The last step is the proper submission of your great site to the search engine or directory.

There are no search engine optimization secrets - just ranking and promotion methodologies to follow in order to beat your competition in obtaining a high ranking for desired search keywords

What I suggest is to carefully , by using your instincts and Internet experience, do the following

• Identify your competition
• locate potential back links to your URL
• Identify the relevant keywords (its far better to have ranks for more than one keyword or phrase than to be at the top for only one keyword)

Avoid these

• Repetition of keywords
• Use of irrelevant keywords
• Use of colored text on same-color background
• Duplication of pages with different URLs
• Use of different pages that bridge to the same URL

After keywords identification, follow these

• Add keywords in content
• Submission of website to major search engines
• Recheck search engine registration (it will take few weeks to get your site listed in engines and directories)
• Check the search engine placement (please keep on checking the results as you have to feed this input to your further optimization process)

Repeat all the steps mentioned above periodically to keep your listing improving

Search engine optimization has become a necessity for companies that are serious about increasing Internet business and achieving prominent rankings in the major search engines.

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