One way for local companies to benefit from social media is by using Twitter. Let’s take an example from a local company here in the Windy City – Birchwood Kitchen.
Birchwood Kitchen is a gourmet sandwich shop located in Wicker Park. They use their Twitter page to communicate lunch specials and upcoming events . Fans can follow Birchwood Kitchen on Twitter to get these updates and not worry about calling or stopping by to stay in the loop.
Social media is especially powerful if your store is a local favorite. The more attached locals are with your brand, the more likely they are to follow you on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook, for example.
Homer’s is a local music store in Nebraska that might benefit from such a strategy. They have a Facebook group page, but not a Twitter page that I’m aware of. At the time of this post, they have over 700 fans on Facebook, which represents a strong local following. By communicating with locals through these social platforms, they strengthen their brand by making their friends and fans feel like part of a community. Not to mention they are able to communicate what’s happening with their store, including special deals and promotions over the holiday season. A great way to prompt an already targeted market.
If proper precautions aren’t taken before launching your site, Google may crawl and index content that you don’t want available for display in search results. This can include secured pages or any other pages that you simply don’t want indexed.
Luckily, there are processes that allow you to have content removed from Google’s index. If you already have a Webmaster Tools account, you can use the Remove URL tool to speed up the process. If you don’t have a Webmaster Tools account, you will need to add a noindex meta tag and wait for Google to crawl your content again. More details are available at Google Webmaster Central.
Before finishing up this task, you need to make sure that additional steps are taken so that your content isn’t re-crawled by Google spiders and indexed again. These steps should be taken before a site is launched, but are often overlooked or unknown to whomever owns the site. You can learn more about this on Google’s help pages.
Creating a successful link building strategy can be difficult, but it’s much easier if you have something interesting to offer your community. The idea is to produce some type of content that Linkerati in your industry will link to. This could be a fascinating article about a breaking trend or something as simple as a widget. Let’s use the social media badge below as an example:
Notice that the link within this widget that points to the SEOmoz domain. By simply providing users with code to embed this widget on their blog or other Website, SEOmoz gains valuable links back to their domain, thus improving their number of backlinks and the position of their Web pages in major search engines. This is a classic example of a well-thought long-term link building strategy.
I was reading a Search Engine Journal post today about Scribd and it got me thinking about how this service might fit into an SEO strategy.
If you don’t already know what Scribd is, it’s a social site that allows you to upload your documents and share them with others. Scribd has a large community, which makes it an ideal place to have a presence. This allows a company to promote its content and create brand awareness. However, there are SEO benefits, although they may not always be direct.
If you’re seasoned in the SEO biz, you know that a strong content strategy is critical for a long-term campaign to be successful. A content strategy is important because creating great content will eventually result in links back to your site. By sharing your documents on Scribd, you are sharing your knowledge with their growing community. This may lead to members promoting and sharing your content within the Scribd site or on their own Web site.
You don’t have to worry about duplicate content, either because your documents are embedded in such a way that the text cannot be crawled by spiders. Instead, the sharable document is more like a widget that you can paste on your side by copying some available code snippets. I’ve pasted an example below of a b2b article written by my employer, Movéo Integrated Branding.
If you have content to share with the Scribd community, I suggest you get started. It may lead to some links down that never-ending road of link building.
During a presentation last night at the Website Magazine Social, Richard Stokes of AdGooroo mentioned that banner advertising clicks were decreasing. But this post isn’t intended to discuss that.
What I want to discuss is the unfair standards that Internet banner advertising is held to. Because of technology, we can track how many users view the banner, how many click and how many of the clickers complete a conversion. But just because we can track this doesn’t mean it is the ultimate metric on whether a campaign is successful.
Think about traditional advertising for a minute. Millions upon millions of dollars are spent every month on advertisements that are placed on billboards and in the pages of a magazine. This is brand advertising. Obviously, there is value in these forms of advertising or they wouldn’t be used as often. But advertisers can’t track who bought what from them after seeing a particular billboard or magazine ad.
So why, then, are banner ads held to such a standard that they are only successful based on clicks and conversions? The answer is because we can track them. It’s not because it’s the best solutions, but that it’s available. Online advertisers need to be aware of the brand advantages that banner advertising to the right audience can produce. This is especially true if you can reach a large audience for a small price. Click-throughs and conversions may be low, but think about exposure you will receive. Something to keep in mind when analyzing your campaign.
Advanced Web Ranking (AWR) is a program that allows you to track search engine rankings. You can see the position of you or your competitors site in hundreds of search engines for whichever keywords you choose.
AWR is the only Web ranking software I’ve used, so I have nothing to compare it to. It’s always done an ample job for me, however, so I have no problem recommending it. It’s great for agencies who have clients that expect tracking reports. Remember that no matter what program you use, none is completely accurate. It’s important to communicate this to your clients, if you have them.
Overall, AWR is easy to use and has a help system in place if you have any questions. You can learn more about what AWR can do for your Web site by visiting them at www.advancedwebranking.com.
If you have a Web site, it’s worth the time to submit your content to Google Base. You can contribute all kinds of information to the Google Base database, including activities and events.
Why go through the trouble? Submitting your feed to Google Base means that you know your content is getting indexed and it also allows your results to be enhanced with additional information like the day of the event, pricing, location etc. It may be the difference in getting a click.
It’s all part of a new era in search, sometimes referred to as blended search. Search engines (not just Google, but Bing and others as well) are displaying content in search results instead of only pages. It gives the user a better experience because they have a good idea of what they’re getting when they click on the link.
Yahoo! has a similar database called SearchMonkey. Try them both out if you haven’t already.
In a previous post, I mentioned that one of the advantages of shopping offline is the social environment it creates. Social shopping is evolving online, however, with technolgy like ShopTogether from DecisionStep.
ShopTogether allows users to share their online shopping experience with others. You can view products at the same time and have a live chat in the meantime. ShopTogether also has capabilities with Sites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter that lets you share product links for friends to join in.
Some Sites already using ShopTogether include Charlotte Russe, Rugsale.com and NetShops. Visit one of these domains and try it our for yourself.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term “lifestream,” it is an aggregate of your social media feeds. In other words, it is a collection of your Tweets, images, blog posts, boomarks, etc all in one stream. See an example on my new lifestream page.
If you have a Wordpress blog, it’s extremely simple to add a lifestream page. Just follow these steps:
1. Login in to your WP admin page and click the “add new” link in the plugin bar.
2. In the search field, type “lifestream’ and hit enter
3. Install and activate the lifestream plugin by iBegin
4. On the very bottom of the left hand column, click on the lifestream tab
5. Add as many or as few feeds from your social media accounts
6. Create a new page and in the body section type [lifestream]
7. Publish the page and check your new URL to make sure everything is working
Questions? I’d be happy to answer any I can in the comments.
