Understand that bottom line is important for any businesses out there, but in SEO, one must see it as a long term marketing instead of a hit and run (short term marketing). Normally, a reputable SEO consultant or company will want to know what type of industry you are in and the your online marketing goal. Please don’t tell them to make a profit online. That is so broad that you might end up having zero result.

Instead tell them that, you might want certain keywords or your brand to be in top 10. Or better still, if you know exactly what you want, tell them. The more you tell them about your online goals, the better SEO consultant will tailor your marketing campaign for you.

The reason why is because the marketing campaign varies from industry to industry. The way they approach is different also. The next thing you have to look out for is keyword. As a rule of thumb, the more keyword you want to target to get into top 10, the more you have to pay. My advice is to start small like 5 keywords and work from there.

This is better than you start at 20 (which is possible) but can’t see any result from it.

SEO and Social Media Marketing is the way to go in the future and is here to stay. Think about how you search other people services online and you will have a rough idea on why SEO is essential in your business.

Though Social Media can be used to build brand awareness, list building, relationship building and seo, but not many know the true advantage of Social Media. So, I decided to post the real advantages of social media right here in my blog post. But don’t believe every single word that is stated below, you may have to use your own judgment to see whether does it really fit into your own marketing campaign.

The number one advantage of using Social Media is you can use it to do a group survey before pushing out your own products. You may have heard about a survey group. This group is a group of people where they come together pull from the general public and answer a few survey question pertaining to the products or services that you want to launch. This type of survey group, combining with Social Media is easily achievable using Facebook apps or a Facebook Group. And not to mention, these will allow your followers to generate buzz and you may have the survey done free of charge or at least at a very low fees.

The second advantage of using Social Media is you can hold contest easily. If you are a small business owners or a home-based business owners, using Social Media to launch your contest, will create buzz around you or your products and services. This is a low cost marketing campaign and if wanted, can scale up to a big campaign where your follow will either RT or create buzz about this contest. Ive seen some home-based business using Twitter to full effect to tied in their online contest with their facebook page.

The third advantage of using Social Media is to boost your SEO or organic listing advantage. You see, search engine are starting to index those pages in social media sites like twitter, facebook and you tube. At time of writing this post, Facebook is using Bing to show search result on their site, while Google is using Social Search by displaying twitter on their search engine.

As you can see, the above are some of the many advantages of using Social Media. You may consider using anyone of the above in conjunction with your marketing campaign.

1) On-Site SEO
2) Off-Site SEO

So today, we should touch on On-Site SEO.

The three things that you must do or ask your web designer/developer to include,

1) Your keyword in Title
The title is usually appear on top of your browser. This will also appear in search engine title. Search Engines will bold them out to give your user attention.

2) Your keyword in your Description
The description is the short snippet just below the title itself. The search engine will also bold out the keywords in your description.

3) Your keyword in your web copy
This is important but don’t do keyword-stuffing. You must have keyword in your copy to make sure that search engines understand what your web page is all about.

So before you start creating a website or a web page, consider the above criteria. They will help search engine to better know your web page and also for reader that the web copy is relevant to what they are searching for.

Well, the answer is YES!

Here why,

Your prospective customer will search online for product that solve their solutions. And therefore, they will type in keywords in Google to find their solution. This hardly can be done in Social media marketing. Although some major search engine are able to index some information from social media platform, but still your customer will start from search engine.

So, SEO marketing is still a must for businesses. And, most searcher will not search beyond the first page, so this make more sense to engage a SEO marketing expert to do SEO marketing for your website.

Top 10 Twitter Tips:

1)    Make objectives about what you want to achieve by using Twitter, and stick to them. You need to know what you want to achieve with Twitter. If there are too many things, create more than one account – each one should have its own agenda and credibility. Think about your user name. If you want to build up awareness for your own name brand, use your name, but if you want to build up your company name, you could try a mix of your name and the company name or just the company – depending on the length of your company name. E.G Leila_Interleado. You don’t want to use a name like superstar69 because it gives absolutely nothing away about you or your company and it doesn’t inspire any kind of credibility.

2)    When you add your avatar try not to add a picture of you wearing a giant silly hat, or you sitting in a boardroom. You want to be a human as well as professional. You also want to inspire confidence in your business capabilities and not look like a joker. Keep it simply you -and enforce your brand (whether it’s a personal brand, company brand, or your voice in the company brand).

3)    Add your URL and a small bio to your profile. People will have an online reference to learn about what you are offering them or what else there is to learn about you. Your profile reflects your brand.

4)    Twitter is like micro blogging. Your messages have a limit of 140 characters. Make them count.

5)    Twitter is no longer there just to tell people that your dog had 5 adorable puppies and you have decided to name them all Bob and Trudy. Now is the time to use Twitter to tell people about your business goals, your professional interests, to spread knowledge and offer customer support. Use your own ideas to spread the messages – be unique!

6)    That said, by no means is it deemed acceptable to spam your followers with “Tweets”* only concerning your company and how great it is. This is a sure fire way to either lose follower or not gain any. Add a human touch by passing on the link to an article you found funny or interesting. Tweet about issues you have online, things you found on your way to work, ask questions and reply to what other “Twits (or Tweeps)”** say. Offer customer support for example. Be useful but keep a balance.

7)    Add followers who you think you can learn from.  Hopefully they will think the same of you and follow you in return. It’s about building up a network here, the more useful all the connections are the better for you and everyone who networks with you. This means not automatically following people who follow you too. Depending on what you want to achieve, it seems logical that you would only follow people who have things to say that you find useful or interesting in any way. This is a chance to gain new blog readers, newsletter subscribers or software users. Again, this depends on what you want to achieve with Twitter.

8)    If you like what one of your followers  contributed, say so! By “Retweeting”*** what one of your followers or someone you are following says, you let them know that you found what they said interesting and that you are willing to share it with others . You could also reply to them or send a direct message and let them know. To retweet something, users typically type in “Retweeting” and the user name with an @ in front of it to show who posted it originally e.g. “Retweeting @LeilaPan” then paste the Tweet here. To reply to someone you type in the user name with an @ before it e.g. “@LeilaPan nice article!”. Users can be notified when they get these replies so they will know you replied to them or retweeted their message and may be more inclined to return the favour. Try to keep  a balance though, people can see when you are Tweeting your own messages or when you are replying or Retweeting – make sure you have your own voice.

9)    Use Twitter regularly. The more you use it, the more interaction people see. The more use people see in following you and the more followers you will receive!

10)    Twitter can give you insight you may not have had before. It can form part of your online reputation management. Track what people say about you or your company, or both! See if people are Tweeting your articles. By responding to what people say about your brand you build up your network and credibility.

Of course there are many Twitter tools and resources out there to help you use the application as best you can. It’s all about using it and finding out what works for you. You might also want to brush up on your Twitter lingo (you could even make up your own Twords! Twitter words…that one’s all mine.) Twittering can be fun, and keeps the communication lines with your target audience wide open.

The most important thing to remember is that this takes time, but it is becoming more and more widely accepted as a way to interact with existing and potential customers or even your niche heroes.

If you would like to follow some Interleado employees, you can follow me or Interleado’s CEO, Peter Cullen.

*Twitter posts

**Twitter users

***Reposting a Tweet

Using social networking sites, you can promote articles or web pages that you feel will benefit the internet community. Your goal is to create a buzz and have people comment, bookmark or share things that they find interesting or useful.

So How do You Get Started?  Creating content on your web site that is interesting or useful to a site visitor is the first step, without this your site will not be ‘sticky’ and will not be deemed as popular by users of social networking sites. Writing ‘How to’ articles is a good example of useful content, i.e. ‘How to shortlist candidates for web design in Bournemouth’.

Why Use Social Media Marketing?  Although it won’t make you a direct profit, social marketing will drive traffic to your site that is targeted towards your theme or ‘niche’. Having a clean and well thought out design on your web site will let visitors navigate through other pages and find other areas of the site that are profitable to you. You can also embed hyperlinks within your article content that can link to products or other pages.

Increasing Initial Traffic to your site:  The main goal of social network marketing is to drive targeted traffic to your site, this can come directly from a social media site, or a site that has linked to yours after finding it through a social bookmark or tag. When you post on a social media site, you can get immediate targeted traffic if your post title and article description draws people in, try to think of teasers that get people interested and want to read more.

Gaining Longer Term Traffic:  The more links you have pointing to your web site the more popular your site becomes in the eyes of Google and other search engines, this can make a massive impact on your search engine positioning results over time and will drive even more targeted traffic through search engine results.

Every time you post on a social media networking site, you increase your site’s exposure which means that people will be more likely to link directly to your site. This can be a very powerful way of building natural back links to your web site which is looked on favourably by search engines.

Cost compared to traditional marketing:  One of the best things about social media marketing is that it costs nothing! When you compare this to more traditional marketing methods such as Pay Per Click you can really start to see the benefits. Effectively you are creating a steady flow of free organic traffic.

Increase Awareness of Your Web Site:  Through this method of marketing you will increase the brand awareness of your site and you can create a buzz about something that relates to your products or services. With the increased popularity of social media, you can not afford to miss out on the trend!