Web & Business

What is SEO?

In web design, SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. In general, SEO refers to bringing more people to your site through search engines like Google or Yahoo. You can do everything necessary to get great search engine visibility yourself without paying anybody a dime. And building a web presence in this way (using quality content, social networking resources, and old fashioned electronic gladhanding) gives the best and longest lasting results. Remember, the search engines are (generally) on your side. Search engines are looking for actual humans writing original quality content, and are trying to weed out robots, spammers and plagiarists. Google updates its search algorithms many times a month to do just this. Search engines love:

• Sites that are updated frequently with original content
• Sites that feature often requested words or phrases in the title and first paragraph or two of text
• Sites with lots of incoming links from high-quality sites
• Sites whose code was built with SEO in mind

Search engines neglect:

• Static sites that are rarely updated
• Sites without quality incoming links
• Sites whose structure (like Flash, for instance) obscures the content.
• Sites which behave as if they were automated blog spam (splogs).

What is SMM?

Wikipedia says: Social media marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the participation in various social media networks such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, BOOMj, YouTube, Dailymotion, Hi5, Gather.com, social web applications (webapps) such as reddit, Digg, Stumbleupon, Flickr, iLike, Wikipedia, Squidoo, Last.fm, Twitter, Eventful, ePinions, Shopit and others as well as within 3D virtual worlds such as Second Life, ActiveWorlds, Moove and There.com. I like this definition better: “…the art of leveraging the power of crowds to do your SEO for you.”

Any small business can use Social Media Marketing to raise visibility and establish a community of clients. It is generally free, usually lots of fun, but like any marketing effort it takes a little work. As many people see it, good SMM leads to good SEO and so on in a big virtuous circle.

Here is a simple example: Make a quick video of someone demonstrating or enjoying your product, do a little quick editing with a free or online video editor, a title containing your site’s URL, and upload it to Youtube. Embed the video on a page or in a post on your site. Notify the world with Twitter and your favorite social network (Myspace, Facebook, etc.). Bookmark the video with your social bookmarking account (del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, etc.) Make a pdf of the containing page and upload it to Scribd. Have a friend Digg it, Reddit, and the like. Repeat as necessary.

What Is Social Media?

Social media applications allow users post or reference media (text, pictures, video, audio) and to interact with other users. Users interact by means of commenting, linking, adding additional media, messaging, voting, tagging, bookmarking, engaging in gaming or some combination of these. Here is a basic list of extremely popular social media sites everyone is or should be familiar with:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Del.icio.us
• StumbleUpon
• LinkedIn
• Flickr
• Digg
• Reddit
• Craigslist
• Yelp

And here is a bigger list of social media/networking sites.

Why You Should Use a Simple WordPress CMS to Power Your Site

• WordPress is a free, open-source CMS and constantly updated for features and security.
• Hundreds of looks (via themes) for free.
• Hundreds of extra functions (via plugins) for free.
• No more webmasters– no more maintenance fees.
• Edit, add text and pictures from any one’s computer anywhere and anytime with your web browser– or even your cellphone – No need for web design software (Dreamweaver, et al) or FTP clients.
• Easy to add video clips, audio, pictures, graphics, etc.
• Any user can, with 90 minutes or less of easy instruction, take total control.
• Vastly superior Search Engine Optimization built into the structure (Google loves dynamic blog-architecture sites)– people can find you easily and incidentally.
• Menus, archives, hierarchal page organization and search are all built in.
• Discussion-participation (comments), RSS feeds, blogroll and links are automated – make your site interesting and encourage community-building and frequent visits to your site.
• Huge user-base for community-based support.

If at some later date you decide to graduate to a full fledged CMS like Drupal or Joomla, you will be ready by virtue of your experience with WordPress to take full advantage of those more complex and capable applications’ features.