Social Media Do's and Don'ts

You may have an online presence and may have developed a great online personality but it doesn’t matter if you’re on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr; until and unless you’re not maintaining those thing properly.

Lemme tell you how to improve and where you need to focus in terms of online branding. So here are some essential do's and don’ts when using social media.

Be active: Be active in relevant member groups, forums and associations and add value by posting useful links or just comments that offer some information that will help establish a candidate as someone who knows things about their niche and area of expertise.

Get recommendations: Get connected to professional networks and try to get recommendations from former employers and current supervisors is always good. If possible look outside of your organizations and get some valuable recommendations and get endorsed by clients, business partners and leaders that carry weight.

Fastidious Selection: Be careful with what information needs to be posted. A good practice is to restrict posting personal information that may not be relevant to professional career growth and development. You must know that Social media when used the wrong way can backfire and put at risk a job offer or even your current job. I am amazed that people still post "I hate my job" on Facebook / Twitter or complain about their boss without thinking of the possible complications. Then they're surprised if, all of a sudden, they don't have a job.

Don't talk about current or past employers: Show attention and make sure not to displeasure you’re current or past employers in your online profiles. Also, if you are currently employed, keep in mind any confidentiality and conduct agreements you may have signed to ensure you are not violating any terms.

Don't share personal information: can discuss regarding business and the emerging trends of industry, but limit posting information on your personal life coz it can be a subject of major examination by recruiters and hiring managers. So never show your bad hobbies or activities on your public profile.

Don't use inappropriate photos: be very selective in posting your personal photos and use your judgment to ensure that these photos are perfect also make sure you’re not posting any inappropriate language.

Don’t spam: And last but not least, the biggest no-no of them all. It is harmful and might even get you banned or penalized.

Always remember that using social media for an online personality is becoming a basic necessity in the virtual world. Hope these do’s and don’ts will help you develop a well-rounded approach to using social media. How about you the reader?

How to Keep Clients Happy

Few tips which can make your clients happy!

Approach for Details: Build your Customer Questionnaire to get enough details or information from the client regarding the website like their primary keywords, geo target regions, and main competitors etc. This helps you to set your clients project goals to chase!

SEO Process: Update your clients about SEO process and the amount of time it’s gonna take to get listed on major Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). They must know that getting in organic search is a long time process. Help them understand the process and show them the results you have achieved over the period. Your SEO weekly or monthly report will help them understand that you are capable enough to bring site top in SERP. So be detailed in your reports and also it should be the best one :)

Take Initiatives: If it’s a promotional season and it’s an e-commerce website inform the clients to run a campaign having a discount in the website before the competitors do that. Deliver a best result by optimizing banner and landing page. Well in few cases you may not have the access on the website to make changes and you have to depend on the client himself, in such cases inform them the importance of implementing campaign at the earliest.

Deliverables: Make sure you’re delivering all possible project results like Traffic/Hits, Keyword ranking, Goal Conversion etc. Always use the best web analytics software to provide all possible traffic results.

Last thing what I would like to say is help them to understand SEO report, spend some time with them via phone or the best possible way to make them understand. Remember – “Success of the project will depend on client satisfaction”. Having a healthy and happy relationship with the client is all about! So maintain your client relationships and sing along…

Dont say sorry

Short time ago I was thinking about why a person says sorry..? In relationships sooner or later we all say & do dumb things not out of meanness, but because of frustration, stress or any number of other emotions. It depends again on what you were sorry for, and your real intent behind what you said or did.

Socially it can become a real pain in the ass. I play volleyball and I play with someone I don't want to say sorry when mistakenly I smash the ball on net. I say I'm sorry one time to my partners at the beginning of the match and then I never say it again.

Whatever, it seems that just saying sorry isn't always enough. I'm not suggesting this strategy in your relationships, but you might want to develop some similar tactics or rules regarding this issue so you can avoid any negative outcomes.

Well today i just thought like to write something different, its not at all related to SEO. Hope very soon am gonna come up with some new post on online promotion.

Facebook Page Optimization for your business pages

Facebook Pages are increasingly becoming a “second home page” for businesses online. Well definitely there are lots of benefits in having a Facebook business pages. Facebook Pages also have SEO benefits because they show up very high in search results for your brand or product. One is also able to control the landing page when a user first visits your Facebook Page.

SEO is important to all that you post on the internet related to your business brand or product. Growing your social media connections on Facebook is greatly aided by simple SEO tactics. You can do a lot to maximize your brand's exposure to search engines through your Facebook business page.

Using Flash or Facebook’s own markup language, developers like us can create custom entry pages. There are very useful applications for creating a custom page. It allows you to add almost any code to boxes that can be displayed on your Wall or Boxes tab. Even I am also using this to add campaigns of business promo. The images reside on my own server or from other uploading websites and I used html to display the images and text and pull them to the facebook page. Just about anything you can think of can be done with Facebook Pages.

Typically, when you add links in Facebook or other social media websites, the HREF tag includes the attribute “rel=’nofollow’” which tells Google or any other search engine crawler not to give link-back credit to the link. This is done to discourage spammers from using these sites to add links in order to get backlink credit. However, links added to “boxes” or on “wall tab” using Facebook apps that allow hyper text markup language are not included the “nofollow” attribute, if you’re thinking to customize your FB page, although you do need to know at least some html. The only real constraint is the dimensions of the main area and the side column.

Hmm anyways the more content you have on your facebook page the greater your content density score with Google; however, keep in mind that each tab you create has a separate URL from the search engine perspective. Content is still king so what you post beyond URLs can influence your search ability.

Strategic Internet Marketing Guides

In the history of the Internet, there have been an alerting number of websites that caught people's attention for a while, but then eventually lost their temptingness. So just jumping into the fray just because your business competitors are doing so is not a valid reason. But nowadays website becomes an essential part of every profession and if you are into the business, an owner of small, medium or big company, or just a freelancer you must have your own website.

A professional or a company without a website is like a salesman without his business card. Your website is your shop window and it is open 24/7. Promoting your web site is the next step after having designed and developed one. The best way to do this on the web is by using the search engines.

Search engine optimization is not an exact science. Nobody really knows how the search engines determine where a site will rank in the search engine result pages. You'll have to continually fine-tune your website and analyze your competitor’s website to improve your positioning. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t end there. There are a number of off-page factors that determine how well your website will rank.

Too many people concentrate all their efforts on their home page, but the content on other pages can be far more highly focused — meaning better search engine optimization and more qualified visitors. Remember, the more traffic you get, the more sales you can make — so taking a little time to update your on-page SEO can mean more than just better search engine rankings.

Well, these days in the search engine world, peoples are manipulating webpage to give an artificial boost in the search engine rankings for their website. Search engine optimization spam continues to be a problem for the SEO industry as it tries to move past the perceptions of mainstream advertisers. When under-ethical techniques are used, trust is abused and the efforts of the SEO/SEM industry are called into question.

Blogs and forums are amazing and essential communication technologies, both of which are used heavily in the daily conduct of our business. In some cases, blogs and certain forums also have established high PR values for their documents. These two factors make them targets of unethical SEOs looking for high-PR links back to their websites or those of their clients. An emerging form of SEO spam is found in the misuse of user-input media formats such as Wikipedia. Fortunately, Google’s new algorithm appears to be on the cutting edge of SEO spam detection and prevention.

Hope this article gonna help you to stay up to date while developing strategies for your Internet marketing campaigns, and gives your company a high Return on Investment.

Now list your website on Microsoft Bing

Microsoft Bing is here, with a pretty background. I went ahead this morning and verified my blog, but it was not listed properly on Bing, so here is the step for you to do the same, what i did to get listed on Bing:

A. Now go to the Bing Webmaster Center at: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/. You will have to create a Windows Live account to log in or you can use Your existing Gmail/yahoo e-mail address, which will be your Windows Live ID.

B. After logging in, click the “Add a Site” button with Sitemap Url.

C. After submitting the form you have to add some verification code to your site (either XML or a META tag). This is not as hard as it sounds just need to copy paste on your website header section.

D. Sit back and wait for Bing to “CRAWL" your website.

Backlinks the main building blocks to good SEO

For those of you new to SEO might be wondering what a backlink is and why they are important. you might have come across the term "backlink" at least once while reading anything about Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

Well Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website also knows as Inbound links.
We(SEO) believes that the number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

You might be thinking what is Quality Backlinks, For example, if a webmaster has a website about SEO Services, and received a backlink from another website about SEO Services, then that would be more relevant in a search engine's assessment than say a link from a site about Bangalore Travels. The more relevant the site is that is linking back to your website, the better the quality of the backlink.

Building Quality backlinks is one of the most important factors in Search Engine Optimization.It is not enough just to have a lot of backlinks, it is the Quality of backlinks along with the Quantity that help you rank better in Search Engines.

A backlink could be considered as a Quality Backlink if1. The Theme of the backlinking website is the same as your website.2. It links to your website with the keyword (keyphrase) that you are trying to optimize for.

You can use below given keyphrases to search for websites of the theme you specify that contain keyphrases like "Add link", "Add site", "Add URL", "Add URL", "Submit URL", "Add Article" etc. Most of the results could be quality potential backlinks.

SEO Service, Local Search and SPAM

Why bother with SEO, if Google will provide you with an easy shortcut to the top?

I was doing analysis for my blog and got shocked with the google local search listing results. More than one local business vertical with 6 to 7 bogus listings all with the same phone number even. This is just wrong. Some companies create fake listings and fake addresses because they can only appear in the city their address is in.

Local search spam is similar in that hijacked local listings may be tricking your customers in much the same way. Combat map spam with awareness. If you are a member of a national organization, include this information on your site and if there are any alerts or important information about these kinds of issues in your industry or local area, link to them so your customers can be aware.


It may be a good idea to make your customers aware of any scams that they may encounter by alerting them to the existence of the issue.

I'm a local search expert, so I'm really looking forward to hearing your opinion.

Effective way to make killer Landing Pages

Let' talk about lead capture page or the landing page, can say its one of the best SEO practice to drive your traffic and getting leads.

Here are few tips in creating a productive landing page that converts visitors on a very huge percentage.

First: Offer something that is free like a freebie in exchange for your visitor's email address. You can offer a special report it could be anything related to your business or a sample of your paid product to your visitor in exchange for their details such as name and email address. I very much endorse this method of building your mailing list.

Second: The landing page must be written in a professional manner. When writing your landing page content, treat it as if you are writing a sales letter. While you are not necessarily making someone to buy your product upfront, being able to entice your visitors to give their details to you is just as important as selling.

Third: Landing page shouldn't have any other links to any other page. The best practice is to include your opt-in form and perhaps important disclaimers and terms. Always keep the links and navigation to a minimum.

Fourth: Rub in the benefits of the freebie you are offering more than a mere subscription to your newsletter. You should focus most of the attention of the letter on encouraging your prospective visitor to download your free offer. Later, you gently remind your prospect that he or she has nothing to pay but just merely subscribe to your newsletter in exchange for the freebie.

Fifth: If you are a smaller company, another method for increasing your landing page effectiveness is to learn from others in your space. Establish an online competitive set that you would be interested in. Benchmark their various strengths and weaknesses via quantitative measures and reverse engineer what works best.

Sixth: Great e-mail marketing strategies, doesn't involve e-mail alone. It also covers the Web pages people land on when they click through from the message to follow the call to action. You can get a great open rate and a very impressive CTR, but if the landing page doesn't carry the reader through to the goal, it's pointless.

Here are some e-mail marketing tips for creating more effective landing pages.

• We've all seen landing pages that tell you exactly what the e-mail told you - no more, no less. Why a reader likes to land there? Why don’t you make them click through to the next step? Send them to the next step directly from the e-mail.
  
• Don't just send your people to home page, this will make people search for what you've told them is there. Take them straight to the landing page.
• Your Call to Action button should match with your Landing Page. You're engaging readers by telling them about something, then setting an expectation for what they'll find when they click through. If it's "order now," they expect to land on a page to begin the order process. If you’re promoting a new product with a link to "learn more," readers expect to land on a page with more information. If it's "read the full article," they expect to land on a page with the full article. Be sure you deliver on the call -to -action's promise.
• Define a Clear Path and be sure you have a route in mind. If you aren’t clear on what readers should do, how can they be?
• Look and Feel of landing page should be consistent with the E-mail. Repeat your benefit-oriented headline also having the same image on the landing page and in the e-mail quickly lets readers know they're in the right place.

As a final reminder and conclusion, in order to build trust, you can include your hand-written signature or a photo of yourself explaining where you are coming from and how you can help your visitor through your free report on offer.

It's easy to read these tips and agree; it's much harder to implement them. But it's worth the effort.

How to track high end mobile visits on your website

Now a days people talks lots about Google Failure, I don't think that Google can be called a failure just because of some server problem or because of other problems. Well the fact is that Google search is really reliable and up to date and as a search engine I prefer Google and I hope we all :)

Okay today I thought to write some interest thing so I came up with Google Analytics most powerful feature, the Advanced Segments – Beta. Segments which let you group certain types of visits together. Those who are into SEO they gotta good feature to generate reports, a new tab above my Google Analytics Dashboard - Advanced Segments, new Beta feature.
What exact is this feature ? Well it filters which makes easier to see what your visitors are doing on your site, the default ones including

• All Visits
• New Visitors
• Returning Visitors
• Paid Traffic
• Non-paid Traffic
• Search Traffic
• Direct Traffic
• Referral Traffic
• Visits with Conversions
• Visits from iPhones
• Non-bounce Visits

The interesting part is the Custom Segments..Yeah now you can track your iphone, ipod, Android & PalmOS visitors.

You can filter particular visits and for enabling this new visitors segment is easy: click on the drop down menu at the top right of any report next to the text “Advanced Segments”, or left side under Settings Advanced Segments Beta and select “Create a new advanced segment”. This will lead you to a page where you can Drag and drop dimensions and metrics into the boxes to create a visit segment. Advanced segments allow you to choose what types of visits you want to be considered when generating the data for a report.

What is Metrics and Dimensions ?

• Dimensions are Visitors, Content, E-Commerce, Traffic sources and Systems.
• Metrics: Site usage, Content, E-Commerce and Goals.

How to Apply the iPhone filter to the default reports ?

From the Advanced Segments drop-down, click on “Create a new advanced segment”, and create a segment with 2 criteria. Drag “Operating System” under the “Systems” dimension into the target area with the dotted-line border,
and type “iPhone” into the “Value” field. Click “Add ‘or’ statement” to get a second target area, and do the same for iPod or for Android. Then, you can name your segment “High-end mobile or Anything” and see that traffic in Analytics.

These all feature shows that Google is gearing into mobile analytics market and its very tough competition for other mobile analytic service provider. Even though its a challenge for other web analytics marketeers.

Improve your business with customer feedback

There are many companies that claim's they "satisfy" nearly every customer they have. Well in my opinion the larger the customer, the more difficult it becomes. Still, developing companies are announcing customer satisfaction ratings that would lead the public to believe they've never mixed up an order or missed a deadline. We all knows business customers and consumers alike are aware of what's real and what's not :)

When customers make the decision - and the effort - to give honest, unbiased feedback, they take it seriously. Don't squander the chance to find out what they really think.

One of the many fears of companies is often negative feedback, to know what customers are thinking, businesses have to ask. But failing to recognize and fix negative customer experiences can harm a company, its reputation and its future sales. If a business is not proactively soliciting feedback from customers - its reputation may be at risk.

See it's impossible to track everything that's being said about your business or product online. Even you can see businesses without a web presence like the local candy shop or pizza shop, they are still being talked about on review sites like Yelp or Yahoo, without even knowing it. Don’t be afraid of negative feedback. Businesses should proactively solicit feedback from customers at every opportunity and be timely about it - while the experience is still fresh. While it may come as a surprise to many businesses, the majority of feedback that is proactively solicited is positive. You know what? 60 percent of online shoppers provide feedback about a shopping experience, and are more likely to give feedback about a positive experience than a negative one.

Share customer feedback throughout the organization. Responsibility for customer feedback extends beyond the marketing department. When everyone in a company - from owner, to customer service, to sales knows what customers are thinking - business decisions will be better informed. In many businesses, the employee receiving the feedback will not move critical feedback up the management chain due to the possible repercussions. Establishing top-down responsibility will encourage employees to share feedback that could be crucial to improving your business. Another key is to keep customers in the loop about how their feedback was used and thank them for it, whether it was positive or negative. While good employee-customer relationships are critical, take a dim view of company policies that value those relationships at all costs. Employee incentives shouldn't be offered based on customer loyalty - it's too tempting to bury negative customer feedback.

Do something with the feedback you get. It's easy to talk about negative and positive reviews, and there is a lot of data about the effects of reviews on sales and consumer confidence, but the real key is figuring out what this feedback means to you as a business.

Offering a suggestion box isn't enough to improve customer satisfaction and service. A suggestion box or a survey doesn't provide a mechanism for dialogue between a customer and a retailer, nor does it fix a problem that may have just happened. Customer feedback and the power of reviews can be extended beyond just online business.

Remember, customers know nobody's perfect, the effective and best SEO Service can deliver good result - what you really want for your business online.