Disclaimer: These are not actual Web123 Account Managers…but they sure look the part—stoked and suited up!

For the next few months, we’ll be turning the webinars over to our Account Management team. Why? Because they’re the experts—so why not let them present on the topics they deal with every day? These webinars will give you, the attendee, the opportunity to interact directly with our account managers. You have direct responses to your burning questions: How do I stack up against my competitors for Search Engine Optimization strategy? What features are most important when creating an optimal Pay-Per-Click landing page? What the heck kind of metrics do I measure on Social Media? Each webinar will be presented by a different account manager, and your questions will be fielded by additional experts on the Webmarketing123 team.

SEO Account Manager, Cynthia Everson, kicked it off last week with her presentation, SEO and Setting Realistic Goals—thanks to all who attended!

Next up for this month:

Ben Cheng, SEO Account Manager

Danny Ligh, SEO/PPC Account Analyst

Ryan Li, Senior SEO Account Manager

Hope you can attend at least one upcoming webinar–and feel free to tweet us for any specific questions: @Webmarketing123 | #WM123

Always keep conversions in mind when optimizing. It doesn’t matter if your site is ranking number one if the user experience is horrible. Evaluate the usability of your website. Ask yourself what you want the user to do when he or she gets to your site, and make sure it’s clear what the next step is. Define what a conversion is (form fill out? direct sale?) and build your site to guide the user towards that goal.

Optimize off-site as well as on-site. Link-building makes up about 50% of SEO, so definitely be on the lookout for opportunities to place a link. Take advantage of social media as well, as more and more evidence is coming out that it affects your organic rankings.

Take advantage of free software to analyze your site. Set up goals in Google Analytics to see how people are using your site. What keywords are they using to get to the page? Where are they dropping off and exiting the site? Make sure always to look at non-paid, non-branded terms in order to most objectively see how your organic efforts are going.

See what your competitors are doing to optimize. One handy way of figuring out who your biggest online competitors are is to check Analytics for your strongest keyword. Then, search that term to see who your organic competitors are. From there, you can use Yahoo’s back-link command to see who is linking to your competitors’ sites. Once you find out who is linking to your competitors, you know where to look for new places to build your own links! You can also use your competitors’ sites to look for more keyword ideas in their meta tags.

Of course, these tips are meant for after you have done all of your on-page optimization. Be sure to optimize all SEO on-page elements: content, meta tags, and URLs, and definitely pick the keywords carefully to bring the most qualified traffic to your site. Here’s to starting 2011 with an optimized site!!

–Cynthia | @cynniebug

Google ‘Content Rank’ Checker – How Relevant is My Content?

With fresh unique content being such an important ranking factor, having a tool that gave us insight into how relevant content on a particular page is for a specific keyword would be helpful.  Similar to Google Page Rank which uses a scale of 1-10, we could have a Google ‘Content Rank’ which would help us understand just how relevant Google found a page for a particular keyword.

The Link Diversity Tool – From What Types of Sites Do I Need More Links?

How great would it be if there was a tool that helped clue us into what types of sites a specific page on our website needed more links from (e.g. Directories, Partnership Sites, Articles, Press Releases, Blogs, Forums)?! Building quality one-way inbound links is enough of a challenge, but trying to figure out the right mix of link sources adds a whole other level of complexity.  Inbound links (one-way links from external websites pointing to your website) have been known for some time to be a very large factor in ranking highly on the SERPs.  However, it’s not just the number of inbound links your site has, or even the pure strength of the individual links, but the diversity of those links sources that also matters.  A site that has great inbound links coming from not just one type of website (e.g. Blogs), but many types of websites (e.g. Blogs, Directories, Articles, Press Releases, Forums) will have much stronger Domain Authority.  So…could we see this development within Google Webmaster Tools ?

A Way To Measure Social Media Authority – How Do I Increase My Author Authority/Social Authority?

With recent confirmation that Twitter and Facebook links influence SEO on Google and Bing (http://bit.ly/f8oTbb), the world of SEO just got a whole lot more complex.  Google is now measuring what is calls ‘Author Authority’ (Bing calls it ‘Social Authority’) and including this as a new ranking factor.  While it may still be a while until Google and Bing divulge too much regarding just how these social media sources affect rankings, having a ‘Social Media Authority’ checker would be extremely insightful.  Ideally this tool would assign not only a scope of how much authority a web page has from social media sources, but also tell us what specific source this authority is coming from, and at what rate.

A Keyword Tool That Forecasts Search Volume – What Keywords Will Be Most Searched In the Coming Months?

Hopefully most of you reading this are familiar with Google’s Keyword Tool (http://bit.ly/9FqW8F) that shows the approximate number of internet searches conducted on a given keyword over the past month.  While that tool is useful for understanding recent search volume trends, what it doesn’t tell you is any predictions of what future search volume on keywords will be.  Right before the release of the iPhone 4, if you were to use Google’s current Keyword Tool to see the number of searches conducted on that keyword over the past month, you would find barely anyone searching on it.  Today, there are well over 2 million global monthly searches conducted on Google.com for the keyword ‘iPhone 4’ on exact match.  That means over 2 million people last month went onto Google.com and entered ‘iPhone 4’ as their search.  How powerful would it be if there was a tool that could predict future search trends for any given keyword – talk about being able to prepare in advance with SEO!

I’m hoping this isn’t all wishful thinking, but that will be determined once 2011 hits. Feel free to share your SEO wishes as well!

–Antonio

]]> http://blog.webmarketing123.com/search-engine-optimization/seo-wishlist-for-2011/feed/ 0 http://blog.webmarketing123.com/search-engine-optimization/social-influence-on-seo/ http://blog.webmarketing123.com/search-engine-optimization/social-influence-on-seo/#comments Fri, 10 Dec 2010 23:28:53 +0000 Webmarketing123 http://blog.webmarketing123.com/?p=581 Yesterday, Ben Cheng, our SEO specialist and Barbara Dizon, our Social Media expert, presented an analysis of the Google and Bing revelation that social media does influence search. The majority of the webinar was spent discussing the different ways social media affects your search rankings, and what Google and Bing take into account when incorporating social media posts into your website’s ranking. Below are some key take-aways you probably won’t find on the slides .

Barbara reminds us that:

• Social media engages with a community, not a specific generation. The point of Twitter, for example, is to give relevant information that will be helpful for your followers.

• To continue the topic of Twitter, it is generally used for specific information and/or as a news filter. When people realize that you are consistently sending them to pages and links that they consider relevant, they start to trust your company.

• Social authority does depend on the quantity of fans and followers you have, but they MUST be relevant and active as well! In other words, having 100,000 followers where 50% of them are irrelevant spammers will do no better than having 1,000 followers that are completely relevant, and actually engage with your content (RT, @ reply, etc.).

• Social Media for B2B is less about marketing and more about thought leadership. The best way to get people on your brand’s bandwagon is to have great content that will make the ride much more pleasant.

Ben reviews:

• The links you share on your Twitter or Facebook have a direct impact on your rankings. Why? Because they can be shared and Re-Tweeted, which impacts the level of authority you have.

• With enough social/author authority, your company will be indexed. Getting your website pages mentioned on Twitter, for example, is synonymous link building.

• Another important component of authority is not just the amount of friends or followers but also how often they visit your site, or ping it!

• Make social waves through Bing and Google’s discussion tab. This allows real time tweets to be in the feed if you are well-followed and connected.

• A product page can be crawled by Google spiders up to three times quicker if it is tweeted (tested in-house at Webmarketing123).

The main point in integrating social and search now lies in your social authority. If you are a trusted authority with decent amount of fans/followers that all repurpose & engage with your relevant content, your rankings will benefit from social media. Repeat after me: trust, repurpose, engage, relevancy, rankings. Therefore, get social to get noticed!

If you would like a copy of the slides from this week’s webinar, e-mail Mark Powers at mark@webmarketing123.com. Ask him to hook it up with that good social/search knowledge—he should know what you’re talking about .

]]> http://blog.webmarketing123.com/search-engine-optimization/social-influence-on-seo/feed/ 0 http://blog.webmarketing123.com/social-media/social-media-wishlist-for-2011/ http://blog.webmarketing123.com/social-media/social-media-wishlist-for-2011/#comments Wed, 08 Dec 2010 19:46:54 +0000 Webmarketing123 http://blog.webmarketing123.com/?p=572 Social media is such an adaptive space, constantly changing in form and functionality—lately we’ve been thinking about a few capabilities that we would like to see included on our various social platforms in 2011:

Better Facebook Analytics. We’re sure Facebook is working hard to improve their insights, but considering how much Facebook Pages has grown in the past year for business use, you’d think they’d get a quicker move on this feature! ‘Impressions’ is a start…

Facebook Video Chat. Recently, Mashable ran an article about how they’ve spotted references to Skype popping up within the coding framework of Facebook. This is definitely one thing that we would like to see from Facebook in the near future—video chat! We’re surprised they haven’t rolled that out already…

Embedded video within Tweets. The same way that you are able to watch videos hosted by Youtube and other such websites, directly from Facebook’s newsfeed/profiles, we would like to see Twitter incorporate this functionality into the display of Tweets that contain video.

‘New ReTweet’ Accommodations. Some 3^rd party Twitter applications (cloud and mobile) don’t display any RTs that use the new button, which might make you miss an opportunity to reach out. Other apps also only allow you to RT with the new button, leaving you no chance to add a comment on RTs *ahem Twitter for Blackberry*

Accurate Facebook Ads. More accurately targeted ads on Facebook’s display network. No, we’re not looking to “Meet Single Christian Girls in your (my) Area,” but thank you anyway.

iFrames—STAT! Not to discuss Facebook too much, but we’re interested to see how the new ‘iFrames’ (rolling out in January 2011) for business pages will compare to the old FBML structure—it’d be great if you didn’t need as much knowledge of web development to create a highly functional, and elegantly designed Facebook application. Anywho, we hope this really does roll out in January 2011.

Twitter Police. Can we find a way to put all the Twitter-using spam artists in check? We wish that people wouldn’t use Twitter to flood the world with, “get rich quick on the internet” schemes, and silly “get a million-billion followers in one month” advertisements—as marketers using social media, we would just like to say to all the spammers out there that what they’re doing isn’t effective, but good effort.

We think that’s it for now. Check back for more additions to our Social Media Wishlist!

–Social Media Team

@coachgoot | @barbaradizon

P.S. We’ve been good this year…

This topic has been in discussion for the past month now, and after keeping up with countless articles, it all comes down to the creative mind. Yes, Google launched a few innovations that haven’t really taken off (e.g. Google Wave), but everything is a learning process. Creativity sparks innovation, but some of the top engineers that left Google for Facebook was due to a struggle with their creativity being hindered.

The most recent article I’ve read still provides insight on former Google employees feeling the liveliness of Facebook compared to Google in getting things done. Though all this talk doesn’t mean Google is going out of business any time soon, this rivalry is interesting to follow, and Facebook is definitely becoming more appealing to those with the most out-of-the-box ideas. As I was searching for a quote to relate, I came across this one, by Brian Graham: “Competition creates better products, alliances create better companies.” We’ve already seen this happen with Yahoo! and Bing, as well as Facebook and Bing, so I’m curious to see how these partnerships will flourish (or fail) in 2011.

Anywho, I’m anxious for what Facebook has in store for 2011, but I’m hoping whatever they release will spark even more innovation—from Google, Bing, whoever can keep with this rapidly moving snowball. Speaking of snowball, it’s that time of the season…hope everyone is enjoying the start of the Holidays!

-@barbaradizon

Loyalty:

Consider this when you’re evaluating your target audience’s loyalty to your brand:

Are social community members interacting with your brand a) regularly, and b) repeatedly–sharing content and links, mentioning your brand, and, most importantly evangelizing?

The key is to get as many people as you can, telling their peers about “how great” your product is—this is essentially FREE advertising, and a variety of promotion that is invaluable because people tend to trust their peers over marketers!

These are people telling one another about your brand--what are they saying?

Brand Mentions:

The term we use to describe the number of brand mentions online, is Share of Voice. Your Share of Voice is equal to the percentage of mentions you have versus those of your competitors—whoever you determine those to be. The Share of Voice figure will give you a good idea of how often your brand is being talked about on the internet–figure out where you’re being discussed, and how users are describing your brand—this will indicate users’ Sentiment.

Where are people talking about your brand?

Activity Ratio:

How active is your brand’s social network? In Facebook for example, compare (using Facebook Insights) the ratio of active members to the total number members–chart this number over time to determine the ebb and flow of your social followership. There will always be some members of your social network that are inactive, but if you initiate a campaign to increase interaction, by say, incorporating more multimedia (people love to interact with and share multimedia!), measure the resulting data and see if that doesn’t jump start users interaction!

There are a variety of social analytic tools that measure activity—one that we use at Webmarketing123 is called Lithium (previously known as Scout Labs)—check it out!

Conversions:

Everyone wants to measure the volume of leads generated by their social media efforts, but that number is only important relative to your conversion rate on those leads. While the volume of leads may not be there yet, the opportunity to convert on the leads you do have may be staring you in the face. Figure out where your leads are coming from (the flow of traffic through links) by creating campaigns in Salesforce or Marketo, then figure out how many of those clicks are turning into deals.

Over the past week, I’ve read about and experienced a number of integrations with current Social Media platforms that are pretty huge for people like me (Social Media enthusiasts). I’ve listed the most impactful ones below, along with links that provide a great overview of what these changes, merges, and additions bring to the table.

Login to Myspace (whoever still uses it) with your Facebook:

http://mashable.com/2010/11/18/you-can-now-login-to-myspace-with-facebook/

• Article includes a video that helps to make more sense of this odd partnership.
• Interests from your Facebook get transferred to MySpace, which updates your profile with a stream of your favorite music, movies and celebrities. Pretty cool–if you still use MySpace!

Facebook Messages—or rather, The Social Network’s ‘Social Inbox’:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdzuFG6q63k

• Great video that illustrates how this feature can be of use to you…and your grandmother. And not to mention, the narrator is a little easy on the eyes
• Interested to see how this pans out. I requested an invite, so I’m waiting to see if I can get access to it, and probably blog about it soon. Anyone out there using it yet??

Twitter Analytics (awe-some):

http://mashable.com/2010/11/17/twitter-analytics/

• Article gives you visual insight on what the dashboard will look like—very cool.
• Just found out today that it will be FREE as well! We’ll see how long that lasts though. Or maybe, how good the analytics will be. Regardless, exciting news!

LinkedIn Recommendations:

http://blog.linkedin.com/2010/11/01/linkedin-company-pages/

• Blog from, who other than, LinkedIn themselves! Great overview of the new company page offering, how to use it for your company page and examples of companies that have already began implementing successfully on their pages.
• Great feature for more brand awareness on your products/services, and a chance to further increase product inquiry (and eventually brand loyalty) in a professional niche community.

Hope you all find these articles and videos useful in understanding all the new changes within today’s most used Social Media platforms. Stay tuned for more updates—particularly on Facebook Messages and Twitter Analytics!

-Barbara | @barbaradizon

]]> http://blog.webmarketing123.com/social-media/social-media-platform-announcements%e2%80%94when-will-they-stop/feed/ 0 http://blog.webmarketing123.com/search-engine-optimization/the-low-down-on-having-on-site-v-off-site-blogs/ http://blog.webmarketing123.com/search-engine-optimization/the-low-down-on-having-on-site-v-off-site-blogs/#comments Wed, 10 Nov 2010 18:26:45 +0000 Ben Cheng http://blog.webmarketing123.com/?p=467 We frequently have clients ask us, “What’s better, having an on-site or off-site blog?” They want to know what each option means for their site. Here’s some of our insight—both the pros and cons of having an on-site vs. off-site blog, and how each affects your SEO and user traffic.

On-site Blog:

Having an on-site blog makes it easy to maintain a simple URL, such as: www.mysite.com/blog

Here are some pros to having an on-site blog:

• Great for internal linking
• Builds deep links = increased crawlability
  
• Helps add content to the site—websites with strong, crawlable content receive more traffic
• Helps build a greater theme to your site–search bots feed on this
• Great content silos—they allow you to store rich written content as well as multimedia
• Add pages to your site, creating stronger domain & authority
• Allow URLs to be increasingly keyword-rich and statically generated by title
• Beneficial for your website’s Google Universal Search results–blog search

Off-site Blog:

Having an off-site blog will require you to have a separate URL, for example: www.onsiteandoffsiteblogs.com—sometimes that’s not a bad thing, especially if it makes more sense to label your blog differently than your primary website. You can also use a sub-domain for your blog to maintain your site’s name–example: www.blog.mysite.com

Here are some pros to having an off-site blog:

• Having a blog that is contained outside of your primary website is a great way to give your site some free inbound linkage!
• If your site is built with a specific backend, your blog may not be compatible with that same server

On the flip-side, here are some of the cons to having an off-site blog:

The Rule of Diminishing Returns – Think about the links between your blog and your site like a basket of oranges on a hot summer day. You’re feeling parched so you take an orange—it tastes pretty good and is quite refreshing so you take another, and another, and another. Pretty soon you don’t want any more of those oranges. My point? You want inbound links coming from all over the place, not just from one direction–having an off-site blog that points to your site, or vice versa can result in this limiting effect.

If the purpose of your blog is to get people to visit your website, having a different domain makes it that much harder for people to find what you want them to find—having this external domain may ultimately deter users from finding your website.

In conclusion, an on-site blog is ideal for most sites unless there are specific restrictions or goals that are being targeted.

-Ben

Some Key Takeaways:

• 70% of Social Media websites affect purchasing decision in the buying cycle.
• 50% of social network users, factor information shared on their networks into their purchasing decision.
• Social Media users are 3 times more likely to trust their peers’ opinions over advertisements.

The Importance of Social Media Today:

Social Media marketing is not about talking to different generations–it’s about creating a community based on common interest that thrives on user support.

Social Media for B2B Companies is about:

• Building loyalty and trust for your brand.
• Increasing community following and brand awareness as well as increasing traffic to your site.

Social Media is becoming increasingly integrated with customer service and influence on purchasing decisions. However, direct sales are difficult to track with Social Media. Social Media can offer direct sale opportunities, but without a defined metric for success, it will be difficult to determine its rate of return.

Integrating Blogs, Web Pages & Social Media for Optimal Search Results:

As with any form of communication, it’s important to have a plan for integrating your blogs and websites with your social media initiatives:

• A little planning goes a long way when starting a Social Media campaign.
• Map out what your marketing goals are – What does your company want to accomplish?
• Identify and understand your audience – Who are they, what Social Media platforms do you they use?
• Do not limit yourself to one Social Media platform. Determine which ones your target market use the most then establish your brand accordingly.
• Utilize/optimize Social Media profiles fully to reach your marketing goals.

Here are the Top 3 Starting Points for Optimizing Social Media & Search–where your company should start and how:

Blogs – Generate fresh, unique Content
Inbound Links – Establish your site as an industry authority

Social Media – Build your brand image with Social Media:

• Facebook Fan Pages
• Google Buzz
• Twitter
• Yelp
• LinkedIn
• Website Resources & Content

How to Measure Your Overall SEO & Social Media Efforts:

When starting Social Media campaigns, there are many ways you can measure your overall success. Here are some tips:

Blogs  = Content:

• Search engines love content–this is the single most important aspect of Social Media for SEO.
• Write casually, as though you were speaking to someone.

Inbound Links:

• Show that your site has good content and is the “real deal”.
• Also shows that your content is relevant, which is key to being well-optimized for search.

Interconnectedness:

• Social Media is about connecting and communicating.
• Social Media will help your brand/company remain transparent—increasing its credibility.
• Your website should be constantly updated, giving search engines new content to crawl. The more current search spiders determine your site to be, the higher they will rank it in search results.

Key Takeaways Continued:

1.      64% of marketers already integrate social media into their Search Engine Marketing plans today.

2.      Social Media and SEO go hand in hand.

3.      B2B is in fact equally, if not more active on Social Media sites than B2C.

4.      Social Media is more about increasing engagement and building relationships than broadcasting your message.

5.      The role of SEO for Social Media is to directly influence discovery of social communities and content through search, boosting sales and increasing conversions (conversations translate to Share of Voice).

6.      Content is king. Start with great content on your blog to increase inbound links.

-@SarahShakour