Category: Marketing & Advertising

When consumers today search online for the products and services your business offers, you are not only competing with other web sites, you’re also competing with social networking profiles, online videos, blog posts, Twitter tweets, photo sharing sites, online news outlets, etc., all blended together on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

So how can your business optimize for all these different types of media now being included in the search results? By getting vertical.

Getting vertical is simply another way to think about your search engine strategy. Yes, you still need to effectively optimize your web site to do well in the search results. But in addition to that, you now must also optimize for the search “verticals” that contribute to blended search results as well.

For instance, Google determines its blended results (in part) by analyzing what ranks well in its search verticals, including image search, Google News, video search, and social networking information from Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed. That’s a lot of verticals to consider! But optimizing for blended search means that you need to have at least some sort of presence on these verticals to get Google’s attention and boost your position in the search rankings.

Social Networks

Since the major search engines now include real-time information from popular social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube, your search engine rankings can definitely benefit from implementing a social networking strategy. By participating on social networking sites, you contribute a constant stream of fresh information that not only benefits your customers and followers, but also helps get (and keep) the attention of the search engines as they gather new information from these real-time sources.

The key to being successful on the social networks, however, is to implement an integrated strategy that combines all of your social marketing efforts together with your web site and with the other marketing activities you may already have established. (See our web site or blog posts on Integrated Social Marketing (ISM)® for more details on this concept).

Online Videos

Videos can be optimized for blended search, whether on a web site, in a blog post, on a social networking site, or uploaded to a video sharing site like YouTube. In fact, video sharing sites already have built-in features that make it easy for users to share videos with friends and followers. They also allow viewers to leave comments or forward video links to their lists of contacts.

When using videos in your search strategy, be sure to add relevant descriptions and title tags to your videos, and rename the video files to include your targeted keywords in the filename for an added boost. Re-use your videos in as many places on the web as you can, including embedding them in your web pages and integrating them with your Google Place pages to help build authority for the videos as well.

News Content

Another source of blended search results comes from content found in online news from mainstream media outlets, in Google News, and on a variety of online newswire services. One way for small businesses to get online news coverage is to submit press releases to online media outlets, both paid and free, as a way to build quality inbound links and get additional exposure online. You should also try to include video and images in your press releases whenever possible. Multi-media content tends to do well – especially in Google News – and it provides additional press release content that can be indexed in the search databases.

Images and Photos

There are several ways that you can use images to contribute to your results in blended search. First, your images and photos should have keyword-rich file names, such as “keyword.jpg” or “my_company_at_eventname.jpg” whenever possible. Also, be sure to use keywords in your HTML image alt tags and in the descriptions and captions of the photos as well. Then, you can share these photos on your web site, on your blog, on your Facebook page (and other social profiles), and upload them to photo sharing sites like Flickr. Encourage your visitors to leave comments, and also leave your own comments, since this type of participation will also help provide fresh content and gain attention from the search engines as they gather real-time search information as well.

Think Vertical

So if you are serious about improving your business’ positions in the search engine rankings, you will need to expand the way you think about optimizing your entire search profile online. The more you can do to optimize the search “verticals” (like social networking, video, images, etc.), the more influence you will have over what the search engines know about your business and its relevance to searchers today. Thinking vertical can help you stay competitive now that blended search means competing with more than just other web sites.

Love it or hate it, Google has an enormous amount of influence over the way in which we find information, communicate with others online, and consume information on the web. Google is so big and powerful that when it announces a new feature, changes an algorithm, or updates its database, the ripples are felt world wide. So what can we expect from Google in 2010? We can expect it will start making waves again, starting with the full implementation of Google Caffeine which is expected to take full effect this month.

To help you be prepared, here are seven ways Google could shake up your year:

1. The Caffeine Update: Caffeine is one of Google’s biggest behind-the-scenes updates in more than three years, and is intended to improve the speed and accuracy of searching on Google. The beta version was launched back in August 2009, with users reporting a definite increase in search speeds, and an advantage for web sites with fresh content. Caffeine also seemed to reward information from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, although since the beta in August it has already started including real-time search results in its regular organic search listings (see item #2, below). But the big question for small businesses remains – what will the impact of the Caffeine update be on their web site rankings? Historically, any time Google performs a major update, it tends to wreak havoc on search engine rankings and positions for a while.
2. Real-Time Search: in December 2009, Google announced that it has started using real-time information found on blogs, news sites, and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter as a way of providing users with fresher, more relevant search results. This is great news for users, but what does real-time search mean for small business web sites? It means that if you have a “static” web site that doesn’t get updated very often, it’s likely that your site will fall into obscurity in the search engine results in favor of fresher, more recent information that Google finds elsewhere on the web.
3. Google Goggles: This is a new app from Google designed for use on mobile devices and cell phones that enables users to interact directly in real-time with Google. A user can simply take a picture with a mobile device and use it as a search query – no typing necessary! Google then provides search results based on the photo the user submitted for the search. Of course, this seems very promising and like it could be incredibly useful, but it also introduces an entirely new search method that doesn’t involve keywords or inbound links or any of the SEO elements that are typically important to Google.
4. Google Sidewiki: This tool shows up as a sidebar on your browser window and displays user-contributed information next to any web page. Users can read and write entries in this sidebar, and the comments are saved and displayed beside that web page when subsequent visitors view the page (but only if they have Sidewiki installed as well). The entries are not ranked with the most recent entries first; instead, they are ranked using a Google algorithm that ranks the most useful, high-quality entries first, and takes into account other criteria Google deems important. What type of effect this will have on a web page’s rankings in the search engines remains to be seen; for instance, what if you write keyword-rich entries beside your own web page? Or what if your competitors leave not-so-nice comments on your web page for subsequent visitors to read? This definitely adds another layer of complexity to managing your company’s online reputation, since now you need to monitor your web page comments in Sidewiki as well as all the other tracking & reporting you do for your web site and social media marketing efforts.
5. Google Place Pages: Another business resource to watch is enhanced Place Pages in Google, which extends your existing Google Local information into an online profile for your business. Although this provides your business with added visibility and content in Google (including video, photos, online coupons, etc.), the pages also display aggregated information about your business that Google finds elsewhere on the web. Monitoring your Google Place Page becomes important since you will need to check the accuracy of your Place Page. However, it is also a great opportunity to provide Google with the most complete, updated, search-engine-optimized information about your business.
6. Site-Loading Times: According to Google’s unofficial spokesperson, Matt Cutts, the time that it takes your web page to load into a browser window is now a much more important factor in your Google positions. If your web site is image-heavy or has been built with Flash, a tables-based layout, or contains local formatting code, chances are that your page download times will cost you in the Google search results. Now might be a good time to invest in a web site upgrade to convert your site from old, tables-based HTML to a new, cleaner, and faster CSS-based site with modular files for formatting.
7. Personalized Search: First Google introduced Universal Search, which included results not only from web pages, but also from images, videos, blogs, and other types of information on the web. Then Google introduced Real-Time search, as discussed in item #2, above. In addition to these two concepts, Google is now experimenting with something called Personal Search, where it can deliver specific results to individual users based on their search history and personal preferences. If this is truly the case, doesn’t that mean that each user will get a different set of results from the same search, tailored to what Google believes is that user’s personal preferences? This poses a very interesting challenge for companies trying to get higher rankings in the search engines – how on earth do you optimize for each person’s individual preferences? (Hint: you really can’t).

So there you have it; seven things that could cause some unpredictable results for small businesses trying to improve their rankings in Google. For now, the best strategy is probably to continue following established best practices and “white-hat” SEO techniques, provide great content on a regular basis, and keep building inbound links from quality sites. But don’t be surprised if your rankings bounce around a bit in the New Year as Google shakes things up.

There are so many misconceptions surrounding search engine optimization and how it works that often it’s hard to know what to believe. One report says keywords are the most important thing, while another says inbound links are what matters the most in getting good rankings. How can you know what’s real and what’s not?

Here are five things that most SEO experts agree you can count on when optimizing your web site for better search engine positions:

1. There are NO guarantees, regardless of what anyone tells you.
2. Keyword meta tags do not help with SEO, but keyword usage does
3. Meta titles and descriptions are important to the search engines
4. The keywords YOU think searchers use to find your site are not always the best terms
5. Inbound links from authority sites carry a lot of weight in the search engines

There are NO guarantees, regardless of what anyone tells you.

Search engines are constantly changing, improving, and tweaking their algorithms, and the details on how their algorithms work are kept secret. This means that optimization is a constantly moving target, and it is virtually impossible to guarantee any type of results. If your SEO company guarantees top results, make sure you understand what they mean by “top” results. They may be able to get your site to rank for keywords nobody ever searches on, but is that helpful to your business? Of course not.

Keyword meta tags do not help with SEO, but keyword usage does.

Once upon a time when search engines first started appearing on the web, site owners could add keywords in the “behind-the-scenes” meta keyword tag to let the search engines know what the site was about. However, as unscrupulous web sites and spammers started to misuse and abuse this feature, the search engines had to figure out other ways to determine a page’s relevance. One of the things that search engines measure today is how often you use your keywords in the text of your pages. You need to use them enough to be useful to the search engines, but not so much that it’s considered keyword spamming.

Meta titles and descriptions are important to the search engines.

Although the meta title of your page displays in the top of the browser window, many small businesses mistakenly use only their company name (e.g., “My Company Web Site”) in this tag. This is a valuable tag that the search engines do pay attention to, and it is often used as the actual link text on the search engine results pages. Also, the description is typically displayed under the link on the results page, making this an important tag as well. Be sure to use your keywords appropriately in these meta tags, as it not only helps searchers understand what your site is about, but also helps the search engines rank your site higher.

The keywords YOU think searchers use to find your site are not always the best terms.

Sometimes, small businesses make the mistake of thinking they know the keywords that customers or potential customers would type into a search engine to find their business. While these terms may provide a good starting point for real-time keyword research, they are often not even close to what real people actually type into a search engine to find these products and services. By performing real-time keyword research, you can identify the exact terms that searchers really use, making it far more likely that you will connect with the people who are looking for what you have to offer.

Inbound links from authority sites carry a lot of weight in the search engines.

Inbound links that point to your site from other sites on the web are like a seal of approval (or a “vote”) for your web site. If another web site thinks enough of your site to actually link to it, then the search engines give you credit for having useful information worth linking to. If an “authority” site (a site that Google deems as authoritative or important) links to your site, then that carries even more weight. Not all inbound links are valuable, however. Avoid reciprocal links (“I’ll link to you if you link to me”), and links from “link farms” – sites with pages of links but little or no other content of value to a visitor. The most valuable links are from other quality sites in your industry, from relevant blogs in your industry, from established web directories, press release sites, news sites, and from appropriately using social networking sites in your marketing mix.

The Best Small Business Strategy

Since the nature of search engines (and the web in general) is one of constant change and non-stop innovation, the best SEO strategy for a small business is to stick with the tried-and-true techniques that get results. Research your keywords to find the right terms for optimizing – don’t just guess. Then use them appropriately in your text, include the right meta data behind the scenes, and intentionally build your inbound links from authority sites and social networking initiatives. But most of all, be sure to provide fresh content on your site that gives visitors a reason to come back, and the search engines a reason to notice.

Most web users today – more than 80%, use search engines when looking for products, services, and information on the internet. Search engines make it easy for them to type in a combination of keywords and phrases, and in return get a page full of results that may or may not match what they were looking for in the first place. Sometimes, the information is really good, but sometimes it is totally off-target, not relevant, or really old and outdated (or a combination of these). But now that real time search has arrived, things are changing quickly.

Earlier this month, Google announced that it has started using information from blogs, news sites, and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter as a way of providing users with fresher, more relevant search results. This is great news for search engine users, but what does it mean for small business web sites? It means that if you have a “static” web site that doesn’t get updated very often, it’s likely that your site will fall into obscurity in the search engine results in favor of fresher, more recent information that Google finds elsewhere on the web.

It also means that if you have not yet incorporated a social marketing strategy into your regular marketing mix, it’s definitely time to get started!

Why Social Networking is Important to Search

Social networking is not only a great way to connect with your customers and reach countless new prospects, but it turns out that it can also help you stay relevant in the search engines. Google’s list of current social networking partners includes Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed, and Jaiku, to name a few. But, Google also includes blogs, news sites, and YouTube information in its search results. So if you want your web site to be listed in Google’s search results, it wouldn’t hurt to have a presence on as many of these social web sites as possible.

Other search engines like Bing and Yahoo are also on-board with real-time search results, and they have formed their own partnerships with the social networking sites as they strive to incorporate fresh, real-time social information in their search results as well. So it’s not just Google that’s taking the value of social networking seriously.

Participation IS Necessary

Even if your small business has already set up a Facebook profile or a Twitter account, it doesn’t mean it will help you in the search engines. Google also takes into account your social “authority” and participation on these sites; including the number of connections you have on the web and the type of content that you post, as well as the frequency with which you share it. When you provide useful information and consistently give value to your social networking followers, Google notices and rewards you.

Now What?

So as you can see, social marketing has turned into far more than a passing fad into a mission-critical business objective for many small businesses. However, you might be wondering how you can create a social marketing plan, implement the plan, and also maintain the flow of information without hiring additional staff members or adding more tasks to your already impossibly long to-do list. Well for starters, you could consider creating an integrated social marketing strategy for your business.

Integrated Social Marketing (ISM)®

We think that an integrated social marketing strategy is so vital to your business’ online success that we have actually trademarked the term! With good reason, too – integrating your social networking profiles with each other, with your web site, and with your existing marketing initiatives lets you take advantage of the true power of social networking, and makes it easy to keep information flowing seamlessly, without creating additional work for you or your staff.

With an integrated strategy, you can avoid creating a bunch of little “islands” of social profiles on the web – if you create five stand-alone profiles on five different sites, that just means you have to update five additional things on your task list. But by integrating your social marketing, you can “write once, but publish to many”, and the information automatically spreads among all of your integrated profiles for you. This naturally creates additional places for the search engines to find your fresh, updated information right where they are already looking for it – in the social networking and real-time search sites.

So as search engines continue to evolve and change to provide better search results to their users, it’s naive to think that your “static” web site can somehow show up in the search results without a steady supply of fresh content and at least some social media participation. The web today is a much more sophisticated place, and if you want your site to show up in Google, Bing, Yahoo, and be found by customers online, then you have to get serious about following the trends. Lucky for you, Google and the other search engines are already telling you how to do that – with social networking and real-time search.

As budgets become tighter, many small businesses look for lower-cost alternatives to the traditional marketing activities they have been using for years. But is that really a good idea? Well, in many cases it is a good idea AND can help even the smallest of budgets produce great results. What type of marketing can help a business do more with less and still get great results? Online marketing.

Often when budgets get tight, marketing is the first thing to be cut in order to save money and reduce costs. While that’s not typically a good strategy (especially in the long-term), it is nonetheless a reality for many small businesses today. So instead of cutting too deeply into the marketing budget, it can be helpful to simply switch out some of the older, more expensive methods of marketing to the newer, more cost effective e-marketing methods available today. For instance, sending email campaigns and e-newsletters typically costs less than a penny per recipient, which is far less than the cost of sending hard-copy marketing pieces through “snail mail.”

With online marketing, you can reach people through email, web sites, mobile phones, social networking, search engines, etc., which almost always costs less than older marketing methods (e.g., newspaper and magazine ads, yellow pages ads, direct mail pieces, print materials, etc.). In fact, some online marketing opportunities are very low-cost or completely free – such as some online directory listings, organic search engine results, and business profiles on social networking sites.

In addition to saving money, online marketing provides other benefits as well, including:

• Tracking and measuring – unlike print ads that may or may not be noticed by readers, most e-marketing activities can be tracked to see how many recipients viewed your message, which links they clicked on, how long they spent looking at your message, what time of day they viewed the message, and many more statistics depending on the type of e-marketing used. This makes it easy to determine the ROI on e-campaigns, since you can see and measure your results directly.
• Instant delivery – many types of e-campaigns can be instantly delivered to an email inbox, published to a web site, posted to a social networking profile, or uploaded to a video sharing site such as YouTube (in the case of videos).
• Multiple channels – e-marketing can be re-used on many different “channels” without much (if any) additional work on the part of you and/or your staff. For example, you can publish the same online coupon on your web site, send it as an email campaign, post it on a social networking site, use it as a web banner ad, etc.
• Viral potential – e-marketing has the potential to travel even further on the web as recipients share materials, forward emails, link to videos, re-post on blogs, and basically “spread the word” to their friends and contacts if they like what you have to say. All of this extra publicity, by the way, is typically free!

With traditional marketing materials like print ads or radio spots, there’s no direct way to track who saw (or heard) your offer, or who took action as a result of your message. Online marketing, on the other hand, provides you with specific tracking data that can show you the number of recipients who opened an email (or visited a web page), which links they clicked on, and if they “converted” by following whatever call to action you provided in your e-campaign. Few (if any) other marketing strategies can provide you with this level of detail to show you what worked, or to indicate what could be adjusted for future campaigns to improve your outcomes the next time.

E-marketing is an effective way to reach customers and potential customers, and can be a great addition to any small business marketing strategy. It is easy to do, measurable, and typically less expensive than the older marketing methods you may currently be using. By replacing some of your traditional marketing activities with lower-cost e-marketing initiatives, you can not only save your budget, but you may also improve your marketing results overall. During this time of shrinking budgets and assorted cutbacks, can you really afford NOT to try it?