Effective Use of Social Media for small business.

As a small business owner I know how hard it is to find and engage your website users to get them to become clients for your business. Today’s social media demands are hard to keep up with and I get asked all the time how I do it for me and my clients and still keep sane. The only thing that keeps me going is the use of www.hootsuite.com This little online gem lets you sync just about every social media outlet into one handy shortcut called the “Hootlet”. The Hootlet lets me send a update to any or all of my social networks from any webpage I might be on. It conviently even shortens the URL and tells me how many characters I have left. Now I try to optimize my tweets and updates but really I would rather be consise in my messages and sound human then try to sneak keyword in. The other beauty of Hootsuite is it lets you sync your RSS feed ( every WordPress site has one ) into your social networks. Whenever you update your site Hootsuite sends it our to your social networks. Here is my current set-up: Hoosuite Account Holds (feel free to add me):

• Vlad Heger Facebook Profile
• Vlad Works Facebook Fan Page
• Vlad Heger Linked In
• Vlad Works Twitter Profile
• Vlad Works Marketing Profile

Vladworks.com autosends blog posts to:

• Vlad Works Twitter Page
• Vlad Works Facebook Fan Page
• Google Buzz ( through my gmail account )
• Linked In Profile

I think this about captures the most amount of traffic and lets you grab traffic in the following ways:

• Facebook Traffic
• Twitter Traffic
• Google News Traffic
• Twitter Search Traffic
• Google Buzz Traffic
• Google Twitter Results in “Latest” View
• Google Search Traffic

That’s alot of traffic sources you could be tapping into right now! As always I am personally available to help you create and maintain your social media properties and any SEO efforts.

10 Search Engine ranking tips you can use right now!

Here are 10 things you can do to imporve your SEO right now! You know all that extra time you have to work on Search Engine Optimization? [A little sarcasm there] Actually, I tried to put together a list of quick things you can do that will help you move a little higher in your Google or Yahoo results. 1. Get listed in more search engines. There are tons of them out there. There are also many free services that will help you get listed. Or just set aside some time to get it done yourself. Here is a free search engine submission site that will let you cycle through the top 100 search engines and get your site submitted. 2. Get listed in more directories. Again, there are a lot of them out there. Look for higher pagerank directories. Improvingrank.com has some listed by pagerank. Look on the left side of the homepage. 3. Clean up your html and check your links. You want the bots to have smooth sailing through your site. Use the tools on W3c.org and have a real person check them over too. 4. Get a few more links to your site. Make them relevant and at least the same pagerank as you. 5. Make your page filenames descriptive and keyword rich. Naming your page new_page_1.html is wasting an opportunity to do some SEO. Use names that describe the content and keep the keywords flowing. 6. Check your Title tags. You can use 90 – 100 characters in the title, so add some keywords. We know Google looks at them, and so do many more search engines. 7. Check your ALT tags. Searchbots can’t see pictures. Make sure you have ALT tags on all of your pictures, and make sure they are descriptive and keyword rich. 8. Rewrite your URL (anchor) tags. Good anchor tags (the text between the http: and /a tags) reinforce the message and key words of your site. 9. Go post in a few forums and put your website in your signature. Forums are a great place to put one way links. And you can help somebody out at the same time. 10. Put together a text based sitemap and put it on your site. There’s a lot of navigation that spiders can’t understand, such as flash, forms, java and javascript. Putting together a text-based sitemap gives the bots a way to navigate around the site. Fifteen minutes every couple of days will make a huge difference in getting your rank higher. These are all things you can do right now to get a higher ranking! If you dont have the time or want a real seo expert to do your affordable seo then contact me right now!

Google Caffeine and the Post New Year Shake up.

Websites owners concerned about Google Caffeine and the recent Google dancing have been emailing me over the last few weeks and wondering what is going on. Well Google is just playing catchup with us SEO Experts and changing the way we rank and get ranked on Google. There is nothing to fear since I have noticed most clients getting better rankings in Caffeine then before. This is good news for my clients and do it yourself website owners is that all the methods you find in my blogs and pages will continue to give you strong rankings on Google. If your website has slipped then I suggest you keep building those backlinks, creating those blog posts and making sure that your page loads quickly and you have a solid social media plan that is focused with SEO. Here are some TIPS:

• Make use of your twitter and facebook pages. If you have linked in and MySpace all the better. Use something like Hootsuite to manage it all.
• Write a good blog post focused on your keywords and make it interesting and valuable. Send the link to your social media profiles.
• Keep building those high PR backlinks and switch up your keywords. Use a mix and even your site name sometimes.
• Use a quick loading page design.
• Work on your SEO every day.

Agian these are tips anyone doing SEO can follow and if you don’t have the time or want an SEO expert to do it then please contact me and see how affordable seo experts can really be.

Free High PR Backlink from Bostonist

Continuing my free high pr backlink give-a-way here is a another juicy PR 6 backlink. This free high pr backlink comes courtesy of a newspaper in Boston, MA in the USA. http://bostonist.com/ is a high profile newspaper that post qaulity news articles on their website.  Since it is a top rate newspaper Google has given their website much weight. The Bostonist is good enough to use a community software that allows their users to put anchor based text links on their profiles. They are giving back to the SEO community and you should take full advantage. Head over to their website and find the register button. Here is a short link: Register Link Once you have registered and verified click the edit profile button. Fill in all the information you want to or can. Once you have completed that look for the field called: “Tell us about yourself” write something useful in there and make sure to include your anchor text ( keyword) and link to your destination url. Save and surf to: http://bostonist.com/profile/YOURUSERNAME to see your new links. All you have to do is Ping Google and tell them about your new link. Google will index you faster. I know its only one free high pr backlink but every bit helps. If you don’t have time to build your own backlinks you can always hire us to build them for you. Check out our Buy Backlinks page and check out all our deals for 30,50,100 or 150 backlinks and more.

Google Click through rates based on position

We know the power of onsite seo, backlinks and other search engine optimization methods. They get you to the top of Google. Depending on how well a campaign does the higher your search position ends up being. So you end up on the first page of Google for your highly researched keywords and you are just waiting for the traffic to roll in and make you all that money. Then you start to wonder “How many people actually click 1st place, 2nd place and all the way down?” and “Does it really make a difference to be 1st or 2nd or 3rd as far a traffic goes?” Let’s take a look at those numbers and answer those burning questions. There are no current stats to show what has happened in the last few years but a study in 2006 showed that the difference between positions is enough to open your eyes and work extra hard to achieve first place. Now these figures may have slightly changed since we live in a world of multi-tab browsing yet they do show just how proper SEO of your website is. If you reach 1st place in Google Organic search you will receive approximately 42% of all the clicks. This number was surprising low when you think about. One would have guessed this number to be in the 80% range or so. The next staggering result is the google click through rate for the 2nd position. You would think that if 42% percent click on 1st place than 2nd would give at least 30%. In today’s multiple tab browser’s it is all too easy to open the top 5 searches and find the one that suits your needs best. Again this is not the case. Only about 12% of all users will click the 2nd search position. That is a 70% drop in traffic from first to second. That is astronomical when you consider popular search terms. After that the drop off is quite proportionate:

• #3  gives you 8.5%
• #4  gives you 6%
• #5  gives you 5%
• #6  gives you 4%
• #7  gives you 3.4%
• #8  gives you 3%
• #9  gives you 2.8%
• #10 gives you 3%

Interest thing to note here is that 10th place gets more click through than 9th place and equal to the clicks that 8th place gets. Marginally but still when you deal in volume it can matter alot. Now what about 2nd page and beyond? The same study showed that 11th place or 1st place on second page received only 0.66% of all traffic and it really gets ugly after that with less than 0.4% of all traffic. Unless you are dealing with search volume in the millions 2nd page really doesn’t get you anywhere. What this tells us is that it really pays to take the time to do proper SEO and get yourself as high as you really can. Obviously 1st place on Google is the holy grail but anywhere on the first page will get you some good targeted traffic. If you need to buy backlinks or an affordable seo company do not hesitate to contact me for a free consultation and let’s get you to that 1st spot on google now that you have seen the Google click through rates by position.