SEO Traffic King

My first post in 2008 will be about the value of SSM or for you 3 letter acronym haters “Social Media Marketing.” I have repeatedly evangelized the intrinsic worth of social media communities and there role in today’s Internet marketing.

Social media marketing is the process of promoting your site or business through various social media channels. It is simply another SEO strategy of obtaining links, getting attention and if done right can lead to a massive amount of free traffic. The key here is learning how to harness this low-cost promotional method. This entails understanding the concept of viral content, link baiting and a through understanding of the social media channel you are engaging.

What is viral content? Viral content is self-propagating practice or pattern of Internet use that moves from person to person. Viral content is a brilliant concept and is especially important when you’re looking for traffic or attention which is at the heart of SSM right? Viral content engages the reader, viral content is what people vote on, and it is what they bookmark and share with their friends and family. Viral content tends to spark emotions and debate. Crafting Viral Content takes time and care to produce, and it shows in the finished product. Viral content is also the foundation of a good linkbaiting campaign.

The next question I always get is what is linkbait? Link bait is any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. Link-bait is a component of SEO and marketing, link baits work to increase inbound links, organic search and referral traffic to a site. Link baiting from social media marketing produce two types of traffic sources. The first traffic source is the direct result of your social media campaign you simply get a large amount of visitors who come from the social media channel itself. The secondary traffic is considered referral traffic, because it comes from webmasters which read your post on the social site and decided they wanted to blog about your viral content, company or point of view. These inbound links have several benefits the first being the increase in visitors (free traffic) and the second comes from the direct result of multiple inbound links. Soon the Google Gods will bless you with higher PR ratings to your internal pages.

Ok, I hear what some of you are saying out there… Richard I now understand what viral content is and how link baiting works tell me more about the benefits!

Here are a few:

• SSM provides a low-cost promotional method
• Increase in links
• Increase in Search Engine Rankings
• Generates two types of traffic - Direct traffic and Referral traffic
• Helps build your brand awareness
• Helps build awareness in your website, product or service
• Helps build your reputation management or company (profiles)
• Increase word of mouth
• Increase in bookmarks or social tagging
• Increase in RSS Subscribers
• Helps build community popularity

Conclusion, as you can see the benefits of marketing in the social media channels are far too numerous to sit on the sidelines and not participate. Create a strategy; pick a social media channel to target. Read blogs on how to market successful within each of the major social media channels. (i.e. Digg, Reddit, Facebook, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn &, del.icio.us) Once you start you will see the benefits begin to grow and grow and in no time you will be a SMM master!

To help get you started on your SMM adventures read these five marketing articles!

1. How to Become a Digg Top User (without doing anything shady)
2. Reddit - Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About It
3. Internet Marketers Guide to StumbleUpon
4. 12 Ways to Use Facebook Professionally
5. Effective Marketing on LinkedIn

On a side note, with all of the above, it is important to find as many ways as possible to track the success of your social media campaign. Tracking the success of your campaign comes in many forms and depends on your goals. I will touch upon SMM ROI tracking in a future post!

Also read: Social Media Optimization (SMO) using Social Bookmarking

Search Engine Optimization For Images

Images are great they make the whole experience of web browsing that much better. The problem is Search Engines can’t read them, neither can mobile devices nor screen readers. So don’t let the picture tell the whole story of the page. The key is to make sure your site is accessible and can be understood by visitors viewing your site with the images turned off. If you do that, the SE’s will properly index your site. Here are 3 simple steps to ensure proper Google Image Indexing:

Best SEO Image Practices

1. Take advantage of alt tags for all of your images. Alt attribute was originally developed to display alternate to the image i.e if the image doesn’t load on the browser the alt text loads explaining what image was supposed to be there. Selecting a good filename for the image is a good SEO practice. Select a name that suits the content of the website. For instance, alt text such as “picture1″ or “image1″ doesn’t provide much information about the image. “Soaring Blue Bird” and “Honeycomb Shades Almond Color” give more details for Google Image Indexing.

2. Don’t overload your alt text. Be descriptive, but don’t stuff it with extra keywords.

3. Look at the image-to-text ratio on your page. How much text do you have? One way of looking at this is to look at your site with images turned off in your browser. What content can you see? Is the intent of your site obvious? Do the pages convey your message effectively?

Taking advantage of Google Image search

Shoppers are now more then every relying on image search to see the things they want to buy. If you have a retail site, make sure that you have images of your products (and that they can be easily identified with alt text, headings, and textual descriptions). Searchers can then find your images and get to your site using Google Image Search.

One thing that can help your images be returned for results in Google Image search is opting in to enhanced image search in webmaster tools. This enables Google to use your images in the Google Image Labeler, which harnesses the power of the community for adding meta-data to your images.

Someone asked me, “What’s the maximum number of images per site that Google accepts for the Image Labeler.” There is no maximum or minimum, Google allows you to opt in no matter how many, or how few, images your site has. You too can practices good Search Engine Optimization for images and start ranking within Google Image Search!

Part 1 of 3

How do I get to the top of the Search Engines naturally? Or more accurately “What are the ranking factors that determine my position in the organic listings for a precise keyword or phrase and what is their relative importance?”

These two questions are on the minds of everybody who is trying their hand at Internet Marketing. The big trend taking place is Natural SEO or Search Engine Optimization as known as Organic SEO. So let’s work through some answers.

To be truthful, the only people who can answer this question honestly are the search engine engineers who are making the rules each and every day. However, I have over 5 years of experience of working knowledge not to mention every once in a while we will get a disclosure from the Search Engines themselves. I am also a ferocious reader of all things SEO/SEM related. I have compiled a comprehensive list of the most important factors which determine position in the various SERP’s.

Let’s first explore, what determines ranking position in the natural position.

Ranking for a particular keyword or phrase is dependent on the search engine ranking algorithms. Lets start from the beginning, but don’t worry I won’t get to deep into search algorithms.

Once you enter a search query and hit submit an algorithm uses various rules to identify the most relevant pages, based on the Keyword Use Factors, Page Attributes, Site/Domain Attributes, Negative Crawling/Ranking Attributes and various outside influences such as inbound links. Inbound links also known as (IBL’s) indicated by links from other pages and sites to your website.

Every search engine uses its own set of algorithms. Some of the smaller SE’s use the other larger SE’s as their engine. To see a graphic example check out this Search Engine Decoder. The algorithms are always striving to produce the best relevance to better server its user. These algorithms have developed over the past ten years based on a long history of indexing and retrieval history. Search engine engineers are consistently refining the process and change it. However, these search engines tend to use common search engine ranking factors. Ok… Ok… I hear you out there saying get with the ranking factors already!

Now for the four key ranking factors and sub factors…

1. Keyword Use Factors

2. Page Attributes

3. Site/Domain Attributes

4. Inbound Link Attribute

In the next article I will touch upon each of these sub ranking factors (part 2 of 3). The following article I will discuss “Negative Crawling/Ranking Attributes.”(part 3 of 3)

Please bookmark the site and come back soon!

NOTE: This is not a document that attempts to reverse-engineer Google’s algorithm, nor does it attempt to inform web developers or marketers about how to optimize their sites.