Call 727-894-5266 or email us to get a free quote or consultation from Seven North Graphics Web Design, St Petersburg, Tampa Bay, Florida.

Though it is probable that any small business could profit from the use of social media, certain kinds of small business operations absolutely need it, and need to establish a consistent social media identity that outshines the competition.

Think of social media as a conversation. If you talk to your customers when they call you or come into your store, you may want to find ways to continue that conversation online.
Anytime you find yourself printing out a sign to put up in your business about a sale, an event, or about your hours, you can easily convey that content online, more effectively and more quickly. The key is to keep your posts personal, yet relevant to your business. Let your personality show the same way you do face to face.

Read the whole story here.
Via: Search Engine Watch
By: Gadi Shamia

St Pete’s Seven North Web Design & Graphics Social Media-Hub Website: Leveraging WordPress for Easy SEO and Lower Cost.

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Call 727-894-5266 or email us to get a free quote or consultation from Seven North Graphics Web Design, St Petersburg, Tampa Bay, Florida.

Ready to roll up your sleeves and get a little technical? This piece will answer your questions about which links are most valuable if you are willing to give it a little attention and thought.

Speaking of correlation data, no single, simple metric is better correlated with rankings in Google’s results than the number of unique domains containing an external link to a given page. This strongly suggests that a diversity component is at play in the ranking systems and that it’s better to have 50 links from 50 different domains than to have 500 more links from a site that already links to you. Curiously again, the original PageRank algorithm makes no provision for this, which could be one reason sitewide links from domains with many high-PageRank pages worked so well in those early years after Google’s launch.

Read the whole article here.

St Pete’s Seven North Web Design & Graphics Social Media-Hub Website: Leveraging WordPress for Easy SEO and Lower Cost.

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Call 727-894-5266 or email us to get a free quote or consultation from Seven North Graphics Web Design, St Petersburg, Tampa Bay, Florida.
Here is another quick way to get your head around basic SEO concepts. This series of articles stresses the strategic over the tactical and is rich in concepts rather than specifics. Which is the way it should be, because the specifics change weekly, but the concepts very slowly.

Ironically if you take a step back and generally market yourself well some of the more difficult parts of SEO will take care of themselves. That’s not to say you should ignore SEO, but most of us don’t need to obsess over every little detail. There are many, many factors that determine where a page will rank in search results. Obsessing over one of those factors doesn’t make sense. Try to see the forest instead of staring intently at a single tree.

Read the whole article here.

St Pete’s Seven North Web Design & Graphics Social Media-Hub Website: Leveraging WordPress for Easy SEO and Lower Cost.

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What a useful summation! It leads off with a little history:

In the early days (late ‘90’s) online advertisers focused on reaching the largest possible audience. The thinking was if they threw enough mud against the wall some of it would stick. Headline making deals were done for banner ads and sponsorships on the major portals, but the little guy didn’t get a look in.
Then in 2003 Google introduced Adwords. This was a genuine revolution.
Ads were only served to pages with relevant content and advertisers only paid if their ads were clicked on. The shotgun had been swapped for a rifle; relevant ads aimed at a relevant audience. Suddenly small businesses were able to get out of the car park and onto the ball park.
But the more people that used Adwords, the higher the price and the less cost-effective it became (today Adwords remains popular but once again it’s the big advertisers who have muscled in).
This led to many of the early adopters to look elsewhere.
They re-focused their attention to optimizing their websites for the search engines to generate free traffic. Free search engine listings tended to generate better quality traffic, but this too had its limitations and risks. Google could play God; one day you are on page one of the search results, then next day … poof… like Houdini in a mirrored box, you’ve disappeared. And there is nothing you can do about it, except plead and beg to be re-listed.
Entrepreneurs and marketers needed to find a cost effective way of getting relevant traffic without over-dependence on Google.
The answer was to build up a good reputation on the Internet amongst the people who were most interested in your subject. These people would then become your followers, evangelists and ultimately bring new customers to your door.
And so Social Media Marketing was born (although the title came along long after it was established).

Read Part 1 and Part 2 at SubHub.com

Virtuous cycle or stairway to heaven? Either way, Mashable reiterates the SMM basics:

From a marketing standpoint, you can look at the benefits of SEO and social media two different ways.

First, implementing a social media marketing program without optimizing content is leaving money on the table. Useful social content (blog, video, images, audio) that cannot be discovered via search is a lost opportunity to reach an audience that is looking.

For example, The Student LoanDown, the popular blog about student loans and college financing from Wells Fargo, identifies 29 keywords in its Keyword Meta Tag and doesn’t rank in Google’s first page for 26 of them. Those that do rank are variations of the blog’s name.

While there is a generous amount of cross linking within posts, a basic blog template optimization effort leveraging keywords and other minor adjustments could improve search traffic for this site substantially, without any compromise in content quality or user experience.

Social interactions and media sharing amongst social network participants create the kind of content that can improve a brand’s visibility within search results through profiles, videos, blog posts, or other media. A good example is Stormhoek wines’ first page Google (Google reviews) rankings including blogs, Facebook (Facebook reviews) and Twitter (Twitter reviews).

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Read the whole article on Mashable.