If your not Tweeting or updating your Facebook status to communicate with people these days, then you pretty much don’t exist (at least it feels that way).  Thanks to Myspace and Facebook, our generation has witnessed one of the fastest growing digital trends in communication via social networking sites.  I mean, we can’t make it through the day without hearing about a celebrity “Tweet,” chatting about a new Facebook post, or hearing about some other virtual announcement.  With that, I think its safe to say that we are living in a new age of communication – one which seems vital for keeping up with the rest of the world (whether its for business or for pleasure).  

         I don’t even think I knew what Facebook was until something like my second or third year in college (way back in 2004).  Seeing how quickly social networking websites have evolved, from your basic college student’s way of posting some pictures from their latest kegger or keeping in touch with old high school buddies, to this vast network of possibilities for information exchange, certainly necessitates some attention.

          I’m sure that many of us have recently experienced that, “Oh my god, my mom’s on Facebook moment!”  I know I have.   Aside from this being quite a hilarious or perhaps a nerve-wracking experience (depending on whether or not your the one upside down doing things like keg stands in your Facebook portfolio), the fact that older generations have joined their kids on the world wide web, is a prime example of how social networking has become universal.      

         So, where do Twitter and Facebook fit in with the world of web marketing?  The answer to that question is, EVERYWHERE.  Whether your a small business or a Fortune 500 Company, its time to make a name for yourself  with the help of these social networking websites.  While it might seem obvious to some, the following are just a few of the reasons why its super important to be Tweeting or Facebooking your way to success.  

1. Social media lets people know who you are, what you do and what your doing up-to-the minute. 
2. You can network your business by becoming Facebook friends with people in your industry, potential customers, or current clients, etc. 
3. You can create buzz and visibility with a Facebook announcement, event invitation, or newsfeed.  
4. You’ll be able to show and tell the world about what you can do for them by Tweeting everything you’ve been up to (do I hear virtual resume much?). 
5. You can also provide easy access to your website from your Facebook or Twitter page and vice-versa. 
6. And lets not forget that social media will help increase your SEO and rankings in Google by creating more traffic for your website with links to and from Twitter and Facebook.  

While I could go on for another five blog posts about the benefits of social media as a means of advertising yourself and your business, I won’t because its much more beneficial for you to start to get out there and experience the phenomena for yourself.  Before we go, there is one other tiny aspect of using social media to advertise that I have not mentioned …. dun dun daa … ITS FREE.  So, do your business a favor by logging in to the world of social media by making a Facebook or Twitter account today!

And after you’ve done that, come check out Black Rhino Marketing Solutions on Twitter or Facebook while your there! 
 

          It’s not an easy task to determine which keywords to use while doing your SEO (also known as Search Engine Optimization) for your website. Unless you are highly familiar with the concept and dynamics of SEO, choosing a few simple words, well . . . it isn’t that simple.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with SEO in general – I’ll make it easy for you.  Go to Google.  Type in something you want to find or learn about in their search engine.  The first entries that come up and the reason as to why they came up in the order they did, is all due in part to SEO.  

         In recent articles, I’ve gone over what to use, how to increase your ranking, etc. But I never really went over how to choose your key words which is the most important part! When choosing my key words for SEO – first and foremost, I do a test run.  I will run a sample search in google and see what results I get for a specific phrase – I specifically look to see how many sites or pages come up with that EXACT keyword. For instance, “web design Westchester ny” has those key words in every link until about the 20th or 21st page. That means that it’s a pretty popular SEO key word search. From this, I can conclude that it will be a little more difficult to get on the first page since my search resulted in quite a few pages that I’d have to beat out. IMPORTANT: This does NOT mean that this is a popular keyword that people are searching with, instead it is what companies or websites are using as their keywords for people to find. 

         One of my favorite ways to combat my competitors is to use google adwords. Yes I know this is meant to advertise your website on google, however, they actually have a pretty awesome tool called keyword tool. This tool allows you to search a particular keyword and then tell you keywords that are similar and what their monthly search volume is, what last months search volume was, and what level of competition you have. It’s a pretty awesome tool I think! This is where I basically get my key words. You always want to find a keyword (using google adwords keyword tool or whatever tool satisfies you) that has a good search volume and a low level competition scale. A keyword may have a high search volume, but if you can’t get on the first page then it is useless. I would rather have a keyword with a search volume of 100 a month where I am the first link, than be on the 5th page of a keyword with a search volume of 1000.  That could be 100 new potential customers that will visit my site, versus MAYBE 1000 new customers that may never even get to your site. Think of this question… when you search on google how often do you go to page 5?      

        In your keywords you should always try to specify a location, because local SEO is much easier then just doing a keyword of ‘dog walker’. That will be almost impossible to get on the first page unless you are posting articles every ten minutes for years. The more specific your keywords are the easier it will be to get on the first page of a search engine. Don’t think which keyword has the most volume, think of which keyword will get you the potential customers and the sales you need. Another issue I have with SEO is all the websites that ask you to pay them hundreds of dollars to keep track of all your SEO. Google allows you to do this for free with a few of their applications, so don’t fall into the trap of paying $200 dollars a month for a company to just tell you what your stats are. It’s completely different if they are actually doing the leg work to get you on the first pages of google, but not if you are doing the majority of the work and just want to know what your rank is and what your opponents ranks are.

The big SEO that is the talk of the web marketers agenda. Indeed Search Engine Optimization has become the most important thing for web marketing and getting visitors to your site. There are so many things out there that are “important” for web optimization its hard to keep track. Some important things:

1. The most important thing is to find good key words. You don’t want to use keywords that aren’t even being searched. There are several sites that are good for this. One of them is Keyword Discovery
2. Title – A good title with your main keywords is important. For instance Westchester Web Design is an important keyword I link to. So I have that in my title as the first thing. I also include my companies name in the title as well.
3. Header Tags – It’s important to have header tags with key words in them as well. Google wants to give users who are searching the best possible site that is relevant to what they’re looking for. *hint* Make sure you only have ONE h1 tag!
4. Description Meta Tag- Even though these are becoming less and less important it’s still important to have a good description. Make sure you again include your key words and make the description relevant to what the page is about. Key word meta tag – One mistake users make is that they pile up the keywords in their key word tag. Sometimes google will look at this as spam and will automatically disregard your site. Watch out for that! Content – It’s important to have your keywords within your content. Again to not overwhelm the paragraphs with keywords, but make sure you have a decent amount.
5. Use title and alt tags for your images. It is important not to have to many images on a page because google cannot read the image. Alt & Title’s are another way for google to see what the image is.
6. Inbound Links – Inbound links are links from other websites that link to your website. Google looks at this as a ranking system. The more links you have the more important your site must be. However, there is a trick because it actually does matter which sites are linking to you. If you are linking from a website that as a google rank of 0 and you have about 20 of these, it won’t do you as good as if you had 1 link from a website with a google rank of 5 or higher.
7. Pages Index – The number of pages indexed by google, along with the amount of inbound links & your traffic rank determine what your overall google rank is. Pages indexed is very important, so the more pages ou have index the more important information google thinks you have. That is why blogs are a very big plus because google will spider each and every one of your pages within your blog and trust me they add up.
8. Create a sitemap for the users- It’s important that you have easy navigation so people can follow, and sitemap is where you have every page on your website listed. This will allow all web crawlers to quickly find the content that is needed for users.
9. Include a robot.txt file – All you have to do is open up text edit on your computer such as notepad and type in: User-agent: * and then save the file and name it robots.txt and place it in the root of your website (where your index file is). This will tell all robots to index every page of your website. If you want to make sure the spider doesn’t index certain files and folders (particularly ones that have nothing to do with the context) you will want to place underneath the user-agent* -> Disallow: /folder or file name/
10. Include a sitemap.xml for search engines. This is a file that will allow search engines to view all your pages. Here is an example of what the sitemap should look like:
11. <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?> <urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″> <url> <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc><lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>       <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> <priority>0.8</priority> </url> </urlset>