Archive for the ‘HTML’ Category

Four SEO/SMM Strategies to Get Your Blog Listed on the First Page of Google

By Marci Reynolds, Director of Operations for Global Help24 at ACI Worldwide

Business blogs have become critical tools in any social media marketing tool box, and they are an excellent medium to share expertise and build your business brand. But just creating a blog is not enough. You must also focus on blog SEO (search engine optimization) to ensure that it receives top placement in Google, Bing, and the other search engines.

I began blogging in 2009, when I launched The Sales Operations Blog, and in 2011, I launched a second blog called Rat Terrier Mom. What do the two blogs have in common? They both appear on the first page of Google for multiple search terms and get the majority of their traffic from organic search engine links. Social media marketing nirvana!

Here are four strategies that I recommend and have leveraged to get my blogs listed on the first page of Google:

  • Focus and differentiate the content on your blog. There are thousands of blogs on the Internet, so if you want yours to stand out and appear on the first page of Google, it must offer something unique. Before I started The Sales Operations Blog, I did some research on blog competition and the popularity of search terms related to my content. I found that there were thousands of blogs on “how to sell” but very few on sales support. I also discovered that the phrase “sales operations” was one of the more frequently used search terms related to my topic. So before launching your blog, check out the competition, do some research on how potential readers search for your content, and attempt to focus and differentiate your blog.
  • Include a power search term in your domain name. Google does not like cute, it likes relevant. For this reason, I chose the domains SalesOperationsBlog.com and RatTerrierMom.com. (Okay, Rat Terrier Mom is a little cute.) When choosing your domain and blog name, select a frequently used search term that aligns with your content. In my domain research, I have found that many of the most popular words or phrases alone are already taken, but if you add the word “blog” at the end, most of them are available. For example, B2Bemail.com is taken, but B2BemailBlog.com is still available. Check out GoDaddy.com to research domain options.
  • Identify and leverage the top 20 search terms in your blog content. Use Google Adwords or a similar tool to identify the top 20-ish search terms that readers use to find content like yours, and then use this intelligence throughout your blog. This includes your post titles, post content, categories, HTML image labels, and in-post HTML tags. Note that the search terms should enhance your high-quality, interesting blog content, not actually make up your blog content. In addition to using the Google Adwords tool, monitor the “real time” search engine terms driving traffic, as reported in your WordPress dashboard. Copyblogger is an excellent resource for tips on keyword research and blogging SEO.
  • Keep the content fresh. As part of your social media marketing plan, publish high-quality, relevant blog content, ideally once per week. There is a direct correlation to the frequency in which you publish content, your ranking on search engines, and your website traffic. Add your Twitter stream or another user’s topic-relevant Twitter stream to the home page of your blog. Every time a tweet is posted, your blog home page will get fresh content. Add a specific page to your blog that includes links to other similar, recent online content. Refer to the Other Sales Ops Articles page on The Sales Operations Blog for an example.

If you focus and differentiate, choose a powerful domain name, include popular keywords in your content, and keep your content fresh (and high quality), there is no doubt that your blog popularity and traffic will climb.

I wish you good luck in your adventures in blogging and social media marketing!

Posted in Analytics, Bing, Blogs, Branding, Competitors, Content, Exclusive Content, Google, HTML, Marci Reynolds, Marketing, Metrics, Sales, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Strategy, Twitter | Comments Off on Four SEO/SMM Strategies to Get Your Blog Listed on the First Page of Google

The Practical Marketing Applications of Facebook (Part 3 of 4)

By Sam Mallikarjunan, Chief Executive Officer of Mallikarjunan Media Group

Part 2

Personal Information

Interestingly, Facebook recently went through a big “scandal,” where applications such as Farmville and others may have compromised users’ IDs for some people on Facebook. Facebook’s history is fraught with concerns of privacy violations and what they’re willing to share with marketers. As a marketer who spends a lot of time trying to squeeze demographics data out of Facebook, I can assure you that gathering your personal information isn’t as easy as it sounds.

However, Facebook does allow sites and applications to request “extended permissions” to access additional personal information, such as e-mail addresses, birthdays, photos, and more. Facebook users can revoke these permissions, and for the most part, Facebook users seem very willing to grant extended permissions to applications. Again, though, you may want to build a basic and extended application that can utilize different levels of personal information. That way, users who are nervous about granting extended permissions can still register on your site.

Is there any information you’d like to gather? Birthdays? E-mail addresses? Locations?

Facebook Pages for Brands

Formerly called “fan pages,” Facebook now allows users to “like” specific brands, which connects them to the page that they’ve set up. These pages are the bread and butter of marketing on Facebook. However, they have advantages and disadvantages.

Traditionally, the consensus has been that “profiles” are for people and “pages” are for businesses. However, the functionality of Facebook has blurred those lines to a great extent, since pages and profiles each have unique features.

Users can “like” your page, and the information that you can gather about them is very limited. Your connection is also fairly limited. It shares some of the same features as profile pages, such as the ability to share photos, post status updates, share links, etc. It has some very unique advantages as well. It has a fairly robust reporting system, which gives interesting information on demographics. It also has the feature of FBML (Facebook Markup Language), which allows you to code custom HTML landing pages. This is very useful for creating vivid landing pages to capture e-mail addresses, show off special offers, and anything else you can imagine in HTML.

Facebook also has a very interesting pay-per-click (PPC) advertising system with which you can advertise your page. Also, users can “like” it with a single click. This is fantastic for getting off the ground and building more fans. In also has a very unique target system. Since Facebook’s PPC ad system is technically paid traffic, I don’t classify that exactly as social media marketing, and we’ll have to discuss that in its own article.

Do you want scale of interaction or quality? If you have hundreds of thousands of consumers to connect with, consider a page.

Part 4

Posted in Advertising, Demographics, Facebook, FBML, HTML, Interaction, Marketing, PPC, Privacy, Sam Mallikarjunan, Scalability | Comments Off on The Practical Marketing Applications of Facebook (Part 3 of 4)