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SEO Made Simple: Here’s a 3 Minute Video Guide

SEO is a term that’s increasingly blasted around social networks and the blogosphere, but how many of us actually have a clear notion of what it’s about?

If you fall among those who know SEO exists and know that it stands for Search Engine Optimisation and know little else about how it works, here’s a beginners guide to SEO that you might find useful.

If you don’t have time to watch the full video, here are some key points to take away:

  1. Words matter: the words on your webpage must coincide with the search terms people are putting into Google.
  2. Titles matter: each page on the web has an official title that’s part of the page’s code. Even though you might not see it, it’s there. Titles summarise a page, so search engines pay them a lot of attention.
  3. Links matter: websites with a lot of other sites linking to it are ranked higher by search engines. Remember, if you’re linked to by a reputable site you’ll be ranked even higher.
  4. Words in links matter. Just having a link on another site isn’t all that useful. The link itself needs to contain a keyword that describes what the link contains. An example: “SEO for bloggers” will mean that my site will rank higher for those keywords than if the link was attached to the words “my blog“.
  5. Having a good SEO strategy for your website is as much about keeping up with the updates to search engines’ algorithms as anything. As we recently saw with Google’s Penguin update, SEOers constantly have to update and modify their strategy. If they don’t they risk doing more harm than good and having their site penalised by the search engines.

I hope this has been useful. If you have any comments or anything to add, be sure to share your thoughts below :)

I am also involved with AdSoc, Oxford University’s advertising and marketing society, so check it out to hear about the latest talks and career opportunities in the industry!

Twitter: 500m Users All Over The World. Time for the hashtag campaign #ViewFromMyWindow

#ViewFromMyWindow

Rather than continuing the explorations of social media that have made up the majority of my blog posts to date, today I thought we could test the potential of one of social media’s biggest platforms, Twitter, to bring people together from all four corners of the globe to share snippets of their daily life. The best way to do this seemed to be by creating a hashtag campaign,  so allow me to present to you the official launch of:

#ViewFromMyWindow

Twitter’s top twenty countries, according to Semiocast, have 383 million user accounts between them, with 107 million accounts in the United States and 33 million in Brazil. Mexico, India, Indonesia, the UK and Japan all have between 10 and 30 million accounts, while countries with over 5 million users include the Philippines, Spain, Canada, Turkey, Venezuela, South Korea, Colombia, Argentina, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Chile and Russia.

Yet, how many of us remain locked into a community of people from the same country, or at the very least, people who speak the same language, without experiencing the world of the millions of other users who live in countries and landscapes vastly different to our own?

This is the problem that the #ViewFromMyWindow campaign aims to tackle. While the view out of your kitchen, sitting room, bedroom, office or car window might not be that exciting to you, wouldn’t you be curious to see the view from someone’s hotel room in Moscow, a coffee shop in Paris, a bar in Mexico, an office in Palo Alto or  kitchen in Manhattan?

And incase you haven’t noticed, I’ve already started the ball rolling with the picture from my window, of sunny Madrid basking in 29ºC heat. The location is Calle de Ríos Rosas and the photo is taken from my bedroom window.

So let’s get going and show the power of social media! Where abouts are you in the world and what’s the view you’re looking out on at the moment?

Let’s prove that the world is only 140 characters big :)

#ViewFromMyWindow


Social Media is all about Communication

Reblogged from CsharpDflat's Corner:

One of the premier things Brands fall for is they use Social Media more of as a marketing channel to reap the huge following in the Social Media world. And most of the strategies fall flat. Unlike TV and Print media, marketing messages are not the way to deal with Social Media. It is more of interaction and communication and less of 'Selling'.

Read more… 638 more words

Really useful post about how social media marketing is about communicating with people, not about selling.

How to use Twitter lists: organize and optimise

how to use twitter listsIf you’ve already been tweeting for some time, or even if you’re new to Twitter you’ve probably worked out that it’s an immensely powerful tool for finding up-to-date information from experts in almost any field, branding yourself or your company and keeping up with all the latest trends in the world of social media.

But while we’re all happy retweeting, mentioning, direct messaging or Follow Fridaying all our followers, we often forget to bother with twitter lists. If you’re anything like me, they have always been something that you know other people use, but something that you’ve never found the time to get to grips with properly. For a long time I thought they were for die hard Twitter fans, who simply wanted to keep all their followers and followees nicely and neatly grouped into different categories, you know, the sort of people who also iron their socks or fold their underwear.

Thankfully, though, after some deliberation and careful research, I’ve found that this is not the case, and that Twitter lists actually can be pretty useful, partly for the sake of neatness, but more importantly in order to position your Twitter profile better in the search engines.

What are Twitter lists?

According to Twitter’s very own dictionary, a Twitter list is:

“a curated group of Twitter users. When you click to view a list, you’ll see a stream of Tweets from only the users included in that group. You don’t need to follow another user to add them to a list; you can follow lists themselves without following the individual users in that list.”

So it’s a list of users grouped together by whatever criteria you choose. As a user we’re only allowed 20 lists, and in any list we’re allowed up to a maximum of 500 people.

How should you use them?

Granted, their use might seem obscure at first. It’s obvious that it benefits the people you add to groups, because you’re making them easy to find by anyone who visits your profile, how do they benefit you?

Well, one benefit of Twitter lists is that they allow you to see at a glance all tweets from people with a common interest. This can be handy if you want to look at tweets about a single topic, away from the hustle and bustle of your timeline. Lists are a way of curating content, so that you can quickly and easily check updates about any given topic. For example, you could have a list for SEO, a list for SEM, a list for travel bloggers, one for a particular event, or one for people who interact a lot…

You can also use them to help you with crisis management, to help you to suss out the haters. After all, lists don’t have to be public; you can create a private one where you put all users who have posted rude complaints about your company, or any other such social media trolls. Nobody likes having nasty things said about their company, so it’s always better to be as prepared as possible.

So how do they help you with SEO?

You most likely know that for your Twitter profile to get a good rank in the search engines you need to have a suitable profile picture, along with all the appropriate keywords in your profile description. But Twitter lists also contribute to the positioning of your site because they break users down into segmented groups, which further helps search engines to pick out the individual groups and interests that you’re targeting.

So this means that to make best use of your twitter lists it’s crucial to name them appropriately, choosing keywords that aren’t too competitive, but that are instead as specific as possible. If you want to make a list of SEO tweeters, for example, check the Google Keyword Tool for some lower competition keyword ideas. You’ll notice some simple alternatives come up, like “SEO Community”, or “SEO Questions”, both of which would be entirely appropriate names, and much more likely to bring you visits to your profile. More importantly, using a long-tail strategy like this, you won’t be competing against big, well-positioned pages for highly competitive keywords.

These techniques have helped me a lot to make use of and understand Twitter lists, which were a mystery to me for a long time. I’m guessing I wasn’t alone in not quite understanding their purpose, so hopefully this short guide will be useful to one or two of you at least :)

If you’ve found any other innovative use for them, let us know; we want to hear your ideas!

Image author: koalazymonkey

10 Signs Your Marketing is Outdated from Inc.com

Reblogged from Ohio Small Business Development Center:

Inc.com's Young Entrepreneur Council recently asked 10 successful young entrepreneurs to share their opinions on which marketing tactics they find to be outdated. Here are their thoughts:

1. Cold Calling. As Inc.com cleverly states, cold calling is just not "hot" anymore. Rather than saying the same pitch to every potential customer, it is best to research each potential customer and tailor your pitch to them.

Read more… 376 more words

Awesome post about old marketing ideas. Let's get these out and usher in the new era of social marketing!