Are you looking to promote your business via social media? Do you ponder over the following questions when you think about social media?

Will I be able to find time?
Will it pay off?
Will anyone listen to what I have to say?
Could I be spending my time in better ways?

The truth is that promoting your business via the social web is time consuming. The more time and effort you put in though, the greater the return will be.

With SEO, the intent is already there. A user searches, clicks on the result in the search engine and then visits your site. All you have to do is give them what they want. With social it’s different, as the same intent does not normally exist in the early stages.

Social media provides a wealth of opportunities for you to gain more customers, but It won’t happen over night. If you think about word of mouth and offline marketing, it takes time to befriend people, engage with them, interact and listen to what they have to say. Once this happens, you are building a relationship of trust. Once you have that, you then have what we refer to as “permission marketing”. Users will then be happy to hear what you have to offer.

You wouldn’t walk up to a stranger you have known for five minutes and try to pitch them something would you? You would build a relationship and grow things from there.

Remember. People buy from people, NOT salesmen. People like people, who are like themselves.

So the questions is: “How do I grow my social media circle when I don’t have much time to spare?”

Follow my 6 tips below to help you gain greater social media exposure and get more followers, more customers and who knows, even more friends. All this can be done in around 1 hour per day.

1. Comment on a minimum of 2 facebook pages every day. (Facebook)

Benefits: By commenting and offering something of value, people will look to click on your profile and send a friend request. This way, you will gradually gain more friends who you can build a relationship with.

Time Spent: 10 minutes

2. Make 1 New Friend Request Every Day (Facebook)

Benefits: Obviously by doing this you will get more friends over time. Remember to befriend people who have similar interests to yourself, or if your business targets a specific country or region, make sure they are in that region.

Time Spent: 10 minutes.

3. Comment On 3 Blog Posts Every Day (Blogging)

Benefits: By commenting and offering something of value to the conversation, you slowly but surely build your own authority and expertise on your niche topic. So for example if you are a web designer, comment on web design blogs and offer some good advice and solutions. People will appreciate that and click on your link or profile to find out more. If you give, eventually you will get.

Time Spent: 20 minutes

4. Follow At Least 3 People Every Day (Twitter)

With this one, make sure you follow people that are in your target country or area and/or have tweeted about your product or something you offer. So if you offer weight loss advice, search on Twitter for users who are speaking about losing weight and follow them.

Benefits: Generally, a high percentage of Twitter users will follow you in return. So by consistently following people, you will grow your own follower numbers and will be able to get your own message out to more people.

Time Spent: 5 minutes

5. Re-tweet At Least 3 Tweets Every Day (Twitter)

Benefits: Twitter users like their tweets being re-tweeted as this gives them more exposure. Most people are greatful and will often return the favour to you. If they have a good following then this will only help to get yourself out there in front of more people.

Time Spent: 10 minutes

6. Tweet Your Own Tweets At Least 2 Times Each Day

You can even re-tweet some of your old and better performing tweets and blog posts. It is also worth asking people to re-tweet your message.

Benefits: By tweeting often and consistently you will gain more direct followers.

Time Spent: 5 minutes.

You may find that you need to amend this slightly to fit your own requirements and schedule, but by following this and being CONSISTENT, slowly but surely, you will not only gain more friends and fans, but potentially a bigger tribe of followers and evangelists for your business.

Photo’s courtesy of PurpleMattFish and DanyRolux on Flickr.

Anyone who knows me well will know that I am a bit of a book worm and enjoy reading a wide range of literature including Law of Attraction, self improvement and Zen Buddhism.

Around a year ago I read Timothy Ferriss’ book “The Four Hour Work Week” who mentioned “Pareto’s Law”. (Yep, I’m still working on that four hour work week and have got it down to around 50 hours from 51. So I’m making progress.)

Pareto refers to Italian economist Vilfredo Frederico Damaso Pareto, who in 1906 observed that 80% of our results (output) were derived from 20% of our input (things we do). It is not exact and is merely a rule of thumb although numbers are roughly consistent.

Examples of this can be seen in everyday life. For example

20% of your clients give you 80% of your problems/headaches
20% of pea pods in your garden contain 80% of the peas.
20% of the employees do 80% of the work.

And so on. I am sure you can think of a few more.

If you look at the keywords which are used to find your site via your logs or analytics program, you will see that approximately 80% will be long tail keywords, i.e. keywords/search terms containing 3 or more words (or low search volume keywords. With the remaining 20% made up of broad keywords (common high volume keywords generally 2 or 3 words).

Now let’s talk about you!

Which of the 20% of tasks that YOU do, produce 80% of your results each day?

Or put another way, where are you wasting 80% of your time each day?

If you’re an SEO it’s not yet another tweak of text here and there that will bring you the results, it’s that cool piece of viral content you’ve just created or that high authority link that just gave you a 20% rankings boost or even that social media influencer with 1,000 friends you’ve just connected with.

The thing is this. Give someone 8 hours to complete their work and they will use 8 hours. Encourage them to be creative, productive and more efficient, and they can achieve the same results in a fraction of the time.

So, whether you do SEO for a living or another form of work, take a look at where your being most productive and try and work out which of your 20% is giving you’re the best return on your investment.(Your Time)

Tweet

Blogs are great. They enable you to interact with potential customers and other visitors, promote new offers, content and other important information.

But for every blog owner, allowing comments can be a real chore to say the least. Blog comment spam is rife. It’s not nice taking hours to write a well researched blog post, only to have half the planet descend on your blog in order to place a comment that says something like:

NICE POST!

or

I have been doing some research into this…..will definitely tell all my friends!

or

On a post about real estate for sale you may get something like:

Hey! This is really cool, exactly what I was looking for. The designs here are so fabulous!. Thanks for uploading this stuff.

These are some of the good ones! Others may have pornographic links inserted or may appear to be complete gibberish.

So you see. Total garbage! A real pain in the butt!

Blog commenting, when done badly looks like this. The “people” who do this are basically looking for easy links back to their sites as most blog software platforms allow for comments, although you can turn this off or nofollow the links automatically.

The truth is, if you allow your blog to be comment spammed, you run the risk of losing rankings as well as genuine visitors. Just have a look at Richard Baxters blog post about comment spam penalties and his own experiences.

A lot of blog commenting is done by automated software and  quite often you will notice that the comment is totally irrelevant to your blog post. Poor sods. Can’t even get that right!

As you can see with the examples above, the commenter had no intention of providing a comment of any value whatsoever. After a quick link and then off to some other poor soles blog. Kind of like the get rich quick scheme of link building!

Considering that a vast majority of the links are nofollowed and hence have no SEO value why do they bother?

The answer is because it’s all they know. Many of these blog commenting “services” come from wanna be SEO’s who lack any real knowledge in the field and who generally just don’t GET IT!

So this leads me to the title of today’s blog post.

Does blog commenting work?

The short and sweet answer is YES it does.

Blog commenting servers a number of purposes when done right.

It enables you to add your opinion on a post to show visitors to the blog that you are someone who has knowledge in a certain area and is willing to share this knowledge with other visitors. This means you are GIVING(advice) and not just TAKING!(a link back).

One of my mantra’s is, “You have to give in order to get”. The same applies to blog commenting. Give a good comment with some great knowledge, tips or an insight, and visitors will click your link back to your blog or site to find out what else you have to offer. This is inbound marketing in action.

You can also get a link back to your site which may be followed(have benefits in terms of pagerank passed) but this cannot be guaranteed. Google and the  other engines are very aware of comment spamming, and it’s possible that they may be giving hardly any benefit to these kinds of links due to the association with SERPS and anchor text manipulation.

So when blog commenting, forget about whether the links will give you a rankings boost or not. Focus on the value it will give in establishing yourself as a leader within your field.

The title of my post today is “What is Your UVP?”.

So what is a UVP? Many of you I am sure know that UVP = Unique Value Proposition. And if you didn’t know, you do now!

Promoting your business online has become harder an harder. The web has become a saturated cesspool of billions of pages and websites, lots of which offer the same old thing. This trend, is set to continue for sure.

A few years back, you could do business online with little competition. Today, well, this is just not the case. Want to start an ecommerce site and sell sunglasses. Competition. Want to sell holidays. Competition. Want to sell real estate. Competition. I think you get what I am saying.

Like the picture above depicts. You are shouting and shouting but is anyone really listening? If not, why?

The picture above kind of reminds me of 99% of Twitter users. I follow 5,000 and am followed in turn by 5,000. You follow me, I follow you syndrome. How many of those 5,000 are reading your tweets? Very few! How many of them are just dying to blast you with their own promotional crap? Almost all of them!

I can promote your website, rank you well and drive traffic to your site but this is only half of the problem. It’s how you get your visitors to take action and keep them coming back which is also just as important.

It’s never been more important to differentiate yourself from the crowd. It’s no use just putting up a website and hoping everyone will come to see it. It just WON’T happen!

So how DO you differentiate yourself from the crowd?

There is an old saying. “You have to give in order to get”. So what do you offer your visitors that they can’t get anywhere else? Please don’t say “We offer a great service”! Oh well, whoopee do. So does the rest of the web.

Well how about things like:

Free downloads
Infographics
Free software
Informative well researched content
Videos
E-Books
White Papers
Interviews
[Add dozens more here]

If you are “real expert” and not some fly by night blagger, creating such material should not be that hard. Should it?

Once you can really offer something of value to your visitors, marketing your site is a lot easier. Hell, if you offer something really useful, others will market it for you free of charge via social media. That’s the ultimate aim right? To get greater brand exposure, using minimal effort?

Trying to promote a website which has nothing to offer is like trying to flog a dead horse!

So I will ask again. What IS your UVP?

Came across a fantastic infographic on “How Google Works”. Great piece of viral and link bait content. Click on the image if your eyesight is as bad as mine!

Infographic by PPC Blog

I was recently reading one of the latest SeoMoz blog posts on 30 SEO problems and tools to solve them and point #6 concerned link atrophy and one of the tools that you can use to diagnose link atrophy issues.

For me, the post was quite interesting and got me thinking about something that many people are either not aware of, or just don’t pay too much attention too.

But first lets define what “atrophy” is. From the dictionary we have

If a muscle or other part of the body atrophies, it decreases in size or strength, often as a result of an illness.

or

If something atrophies, its size, degree, or effectiveness decreases because it is not used or protected.

So how does this apply to our links or our overall link profile?

Lets use an example.  Site A has 500 links pointing to it. Over a period of time approximately 30% of these links are churned, i.e are lost and replaced with new links.

So what does this mean to a search engine? What signal does this send to a search engine in respect to a sites trust?

For me and I am sure to a search engine also, this indicates that a site is possibly renting links or buying links/subscriptions for short periods of time. The owner buys some links, the links expire, are removed and are then replaced by similar paid links on other sites, which also are removed after a short space of time.  It also indicates a lack of quality.

Site B on the other hand also has 200 links (far fewer) but the link atrophy rate is at just say 2%. This means that the churn rate for new and old links is far less, signaling more trust and stability and long term link profile strength.

Google for example say they use over 200 ranking signals in order to rank a site organically.  You can bet your bottom dollar that this is used as one of the stronger ranking signals.

Think of it this way. If you engage in aggressive link building and acquire many poor quality links over a short period of time, the fact that they are of a poor quality will also mean that these links in a lot of cases get removed after a short amount of time. So having a high atrophy level is a strong signal of spammy link building practices.

Lessons To Be learned

1. Try not to buy or rent short term links. If you do “buy links” say from directories, try to make sure they are lifetime style links with a one off payment.

2. If you do reciprocal linking, keep an eye on whether your link partners are linking back to you still. We all know there are some shady characters out there who just love to link exchange only to remove you link hoping you will not notice.

3. Make sure that if you do undertake some reciprocal linking that you try as much as possible to link exchange with trusted sites or business partners.

4. It really is still about quality over quantity when it comes to link building.

5. Use the link atrophy tool from Virante in order to check your link atrophy rate on a regular basis.

Until next time.

Please feel free to follow me on twitter or become a fan on Facebook.

I’ve not posted for a while as I am just so busy promoting my clients sites, but I want to start posting more often and will endeavor to do just that from now on.

Quite frankly, I could make this post very very long as there is just so much I can cover, but I am aware that too long a post can not only confuse, but also prevent users from reading it in the first place. So, I will try and keep things as brief as possible and try to touch on the key points.

So, this weeks installment is all about hyperlinks. What makes a good SEO link?

Before I answer that, we need to establish a number of things.

1. What are hyperlinks?

2. What are hyperlinks used for?

3. How to “obtain” links to your site.

4. Do’s and don’ts of linking.

5. How many do I need to rank well?

Once we have covered the above. I will then speak more about what makes one link great and another link pretty much worthless, not to mention a possible waste of time and money.

So here we go.

1. What are hyperlinks?

A hyperlink is a piece of HTML code that allows a piece of text or an image on a page to take you to another web page when clicked. For example This is the SEO Spain homepage.

So “SEO Spain” above is linked to the SEO Services Spain homepage at http://www.seoservicesspain.com

I could have linked it to any page on my own site or to another site on the web but as I believe this is the most relevant page on my site for this term, this is fine. So if I wanted to link Web Design Spain, to the web design page at http://www.seoservicesspain.com/web-design.php which I have done. See the clickable text? Good.

The same can be applied to an image. I won’t show you here for the sake of brevity but the principle is the same.

The code looks like this

<a href=”http://www.seoservicesspain.com/web-design.php” title=”Web Design In Spain”>Web Design Spain</a>

The part <a></a>  is the anchor HTML tag, and the part in between is the anchor text or link text.

Quite simple. For those who have done any web design this is very simple stuff.

2. What are hyperlinks used for?

A hyperlink is used to take you from one web page to another. If we did not use hyperlinks within our pages, every address would need to be typed in your browser whenever you wanted to view a page on a site.

For search engines, links are ultra important. Links enable a search engine to traverse the web, making notes about URL’s and sites and gaining a greater picture of how websites on the internet are connected.

Links are also used to determine the relevance of a page. For example, by linking the words “web design spain” back to the page as I have done previously in this post, I am indicating that the page I am linking to, is relevant for those keywords.

When using an image to link to another page, you do not have anchor/link text so you would need to use the ALT tag. The alt tag may look something like this

<a href=”http://www.seoservicesspain.com/web-design.php”><img src=”/images/webdesignimage.png” alt=”Web Design Spain”></a>

Easy peasy, lemon squeasy. So the alt text is used to tell the engines and users who have turned images off, just what the image is all about and what it links too.

3. How to “obtain” links to your site.

This question alone could take up 100 blog posts but basically links are obtained from a number of sources including directories, blog posts, static pages, articles, press releases, RSS feeds, social media sites and other sources.

A link is generally obtained by either paying the site owner, reciprocal linking, offering something of value(article or press release) or by someone naturally linking to your page due to something of value you have created. The last form of link is generally considered the best.

Like I say. Links can be obtained from many sources and I don’t want to go into too much detail. Just know that links come from many different sources.

4. Do’s and don’ts of linking.

When others link to your pages there is little you can do. Google and the other engines love this kind of link as they have not been paid for by the owner. The link text has also not been manipulated, so is natural and can give the engines a good idea of the relevance of the page and it’s content.

If you acquire links manually(most people need to do this to promote their sites) make sure you follow some of the following do’s and don’ts.

Do make sure that when you link from a page back to your site that the page you are linking from is as relevant as possible to your business. Don’t link from a page on chocolate cakes to a page on motorcycles.

Do make sure that you vary the anchor text as much as possible. So if you sell property in Marbella, make sure you use different anchor text such as “marbella property”, “property for sale marbella”, “marbella estate agents” etc. This way your link building will not look “spammy” to the search engines and you will not be penalised.

Do make sure you link to the correct landing page. So if you sell property but also have long term rentals and holiday rentals, make sure the anchor text you use is relevant to that page.

Do make sure the link that the link you are placing will not be “no-followed”. This means that the nofollow attribute has or will be added to the code. Having nofollow on a link renders that link worthless as it tells the search engines not to give any value to the link and in effect ignore it.

Do Not use the same anchor text for all of your links. This is dangerous and could get you penalised or have some kind of filter tripped on Google or one of the other engines.

Do Not link from pages that are not relevant. Obvious. Another spammy indicator you will be sending to the search engines.

Do Not acquire many links at the same time. For example, pay $5 for 5,000 directory submissions. Directories are not bad, but the way you approach using them could well be. Make sure you use some common sense and say to yourself “How will this appear to a search engine?” or “Would I do this if search engines did not exist?”.

5. How many do I need to rank well?

To be honest there is no exact amount. It depends on many things including the competitiveness of your industry, the amount of domain authority you have. One thing I will say is that its good to have a good mix of links from different domains. So much better to have 100 links from 100 domains than to have 100 links from 2 domains. More individual votes means more trust.

So focus not so much on the number of links you have, but the number of linking domains. There is a crucial difference. Do you see?

So now on to the most important part of this post.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD SEO LINK?

A good link serves a number of purposes. If you can hit all of these with one link then great. If not, try and make sure it obtains at least one of the below.

A good link will come from a page that is cached/indexed by Google or another search engine. If not, the link will not have any value in terms of rankings or organic SEO.

A good link will come from a relevant page that is associated in some way to your business.

A good link will have focused anchor text in order to help you rank better for your chosen keywords.

A good link will have the possibility of attracting click throughs to your site. So for example a link from within an article that is read by many people may produce a number of clicks through to your site as well as give you an organic rankings boost.

A good link is a link that comes from a domain that has AUTHORITY.

A good link is a link that comes from a PAGE that has AUTHORITY.

A good link is a link that gives you great brand awareness.

A great link is a link that is shared with others via social media networking such as Twitter or Facebook or via social media bookmarking.

A good link is one that has good “call to action”. For example “Click here to receive a 25% discount on all of my services”.

A good link will ideally NOT have the nofollow attribute attached to it.

Well, that’s it really. Simple!

I hope you have found this post interesting and that it helps you to become a better link builder or to just understand the SEO process a little better.

As ever, please feel free to follow me on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook. I am always happy to answer any questions you may have or just to socialise and talk about the weather!

Ever wondered how the social media graph may affect the search algorithms in the future?

I personally have, and its my view that Google is showing many signs that it is using the “social graph” more and more to influence its ranking algorithm.

Google recently introduced its new product, Google Buzz, which is incorporated into Gmail. Google Buzz is like twitter in that you can share what you are doing, share videos, images and links etc and generally provide your followers with status updates.

I have had a brief play, and I think it will be a big hit.

It’s my personal view that eventually users will move away from search engines. “What?” you say. “You must be mad mate!”. Well a little yes but let me explain.

The world has changed big time in recent years, not only how people interact online but also in terms of trust. Word-of-mouth has always been a great source of leads and information and I personally think this is the way the web is going. People will not be looking on Google or Bing or any other search engine for information. They will be asking their hundreds or thousands of connected followers that they have within the social sphere in order to find what they are looking for, or answers to questions they may have!

What do you think? I would love to hear your point of view. Feel free to send me a tweet, connect on facebook, mail me or leave a comment below.

Below is the latest blog posts from the guys at SeoMoz. Rand speaks about how they think search is changing. Enjoy.

After sitting through yet another SEO webinar and reading more and more posts on the web in recent days, it has become very clear to me that there are a huge amount of new and experienced SEO’s out there who seem to be fixated on trying to reverse engineer the Google ranking algorithm.

Many of them spend hours writing about what they “believe” to be the case but have no substantial evidence to back up their claims. Just visit any SEO forum and you will find hundreds of threads created by people claiming that this is the best approach or this is the best method in building links. What is clear is that a lot of these people spend an awful lot of time hanging out in forums. What is it they say? “advice is the cheapest commodity around”. Everyone has some to share!

Strategies built on speculation and taken from those who either claim to have the knowledge, or listen to the other lemmings, are doomed to failure. So people. Stop trying to read Google’s minds and reverse engineer the algorithm, as you just can’t do it. Even if you can work out that H1 tags are no longer of any value, or that links from a certain site appears to pass link juice, the algorithm is constantly being evolved with Google changing their 200+ signals on a regular basis.

One thing you can take to the bank though is that Google are ALWAYS looking for the signals that reflect trust, authority, relevance and value. Let me say that again “TRUST”, “AUTHORITY”,”RELEVANCE” and “VALUE”!

The key steps to any online marketing strategy are:-

1. Build a site that DOESN’T have all the bells and whistles but serves a purpose, provides great unique, interesting and ground breaking content in the form of blog posts, articles, videos, downloads and other great content.
2. Add a blog to your site with RSS feed, sharing widgets and email subscription.
3. Setup accounts on social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Youtube.
4. Promote your content on these channels by building a community around your brand, products and services. Your site becomes a hub.
5. Bookmark your new posts and content on sites such as digg, reddit and delicious.
6. Contact industry leading bloggers in order to help promote your content further.
7. Make sure you post consistently with well researched content.
   Interact online via social media in order to build trust, transparency, brand awareness and mind share.
8. Monitor and track your progress using your key performance indicators and ascertain and put more effort into best performing channels.

This is what users want! So give it to them and they will love you for it and tell the world just how great you are.

Who knows, you may even get a sale or two.

As ever, please feel free to subscribe to my blog via RSS or via email, comment below, follow me on twitter or become a fan on facebook.

When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of your online marketing campaigns, there are many different KPI’s that can be used, with some providing better insights than others. Some people measure the number of inbound links and indexed pages with others using Google toolbar page rank and keyword rankings.

But before using any metric, it’s important to know WHY you are using it and what each metric actually signifies. For example, you may say, “wow, my site has 10,000 links”, but when those 10,000 links come from 10 domains this doesn’t really measure popularity or reach does it? Besides, Google will probably have de-valued 9,990 of them anyway.

In my last post 7 Must-Do Inbound Marketing Practices For 2010 (and beyond) I spoke about some of the best inbound marketing methods you can use in 2010 and beyond in order to attract more visitors to your website. In this post, I will discuss some of the KPI’s you can use in order to measure the success of those practices and why each is so effective in finding out whether you are truly connecting with your customers.

1. Number Of Organic Keywords Found With
If you have ever looked at your traffic and keyword stats you will notice that approximately 80% of keywords used to find your site are keywords that you most probably didn’t optimise for. This is more commonly referred to as the long tail and is why it is so important that you create a site that has lots of textual content that can be indexed by the search engines.

So, the more content you have, the more keywords and search phrases you will be found with. Another great benefit of being found with these long tail searches is that they are normally very highly targeted and convert much better compared to broad keywords.

So, if the number of individual keywords you are being found with (and you can find this using any analytics program) is rising consistently, this is a good sign that you are creating a content rich site.

2. Number Of Linking Domains
Another great KPI is the number of linking domains. Many people focus on purely the number of links coming into your site from other websites, but this is wrong. It’s very easy to get a link from a site that’s placed in the footer which means that you may have a link on 10,000 pages. Do you think Google will count all of these? Dream on!

This is why a more important KPI is the number of unique domains linking to you, as this is a greater indicator to Google and the other engines that you have great link popularity. 500 unique domains linking to you are far more valuable than 20,000 links from 20 domains. Unless of course the 20 sites are extremely powerful.

3 . Number Of Pages Indexed
Another great KPI which is important to keep track of is the number of pages on your site that are indexed in the major search engines. The more content you have indexed, the more likely it is that you will attract lots of highly targeted long tail traffic.

4. Number Of Branded Searches
A strong indicator that you are starting to gain greater brand awareness are instances of branded searches within your logs and analytics. So, any search that includes your company name in it can be considered a branded search. Make sure you monitor these on a regular basis.

5. Number Of Blog Subscribers
If you have a blog and are using it in order to display your writing talents then you want to keep track of how many people are subscribed to it via RSS. This can be done by using Feedburner and can provide you with regular stats on how many people you have hanging on your every word!

6. Number Of Twitter Followers
Twitter has become a great channel for drawing visitors into your site. It’s a great way to build a community of followers for your business and also a great way of establishing a connection with your clients and becoming more “transparent”. The number of followers you have can be a good indicator of the kind of reach and “mind share” you are starting to build.

7. Number Of Facebook Fans
Like Twitter, Facebook is extremely popular, with hundreds of millions of users logging in every day. By creating a fan/business page on Facebook, you give your existing and potential customers the opportunity to not only get updates on your company, but also give them the opportunity to converse with you directly. Tracking and increasing the number of Facebook fans you have is another signal that you are gaining more influence and mind share within your market.

So remember. If you are tracking any KPI, make sure you know exactly why you are tracking it and what it signifies.

Related Post: 7 Must-Do Inbound Marketing Practices For 2010 (and beyond)