Creating effective Ads on Facebook can be an essential strategy for your social media marketing campaign. You may have used Google AdWords in the past for your online business, and have pulled up the Facebook Ads info-page to find that this type of Ad placement is a whole new ballgame.

One of the biggest differences between Google Adwords and Facebook Ads is that Facebook Ads allow you to tap into the interests and traits of your target market. Facebook has over 730 million users that have created personal profiles with their marital stats, college degrees, gender, age, and interests displayed on their profile. As a marketer, you have the ability to target specific demographics and tailor your message to their likes and interests. Does that sound creepy to you? To some yes, but others figure that if they are going to have to see advertisements anyway, they might as well be relevant to their life in the off-chance that something may beckon their name. Another item to note: You cannot target specific individuals when rolling out your social media marketing campaign; You can only target specific interests.

With that in mind, you may want to do a little research about your demographic before you create your first set of Facebook Ads. There are many free tools that can help

with your search marketing Ad campaign. Alexa.com can help you assess your SEO reach across the global web on a very broad level. QuantCast.com offers a high-level quantitative overview of your demographics of site visitors. Try Yahoo’s Search Clues function to feel pulse of global search trends. You will be able to see what certain demographics are searching the most throughout the web.

Another helpful metric to look at is your “Facebook Insights”. However, if you are a optimizing for a B2B industry or a broad service industry the insights may not tell you much. You can also look at the open profiles of avid fans to get a feel for what they like. You may be surprised to discover trends that can be applied your campaign. Next week, we will stay on the topic of social media marketing with Facebook and go more in depth with how to write effective Ad copy. Stay tuned and see you next week!

Increasing visibility using search marketing practices can be complex. At Get Page One, we emphasize the importance of having strategic vision to achieve favorable search results via the use of organic search engine optimization, paid search advertisements and social media marketing. Yet, rather than falling into the trap of needing to understand complicated jargon such as meta-tags and XML site maps, optimal search marketing results rely on a collaborative top-down approach between a business and its SEO company. Both stakeholders play a part in the success or failure of Internet marketing campaigns.

The components that make search engine marketing work well require an expertise within a multitude of disciplines, many of them technical. Choosing keywords, targeting and optimizing advertisements, deciding on PPC or CPM and setting up analytics are all part of a process that leaves the average marketer puzzled. While complex terminology and knowledge on the technical side of search marketing are a part of your SEO company’s DNA, today’s digital world requires a holistic approach for success.

In other words, best practices in SEM do not always entail your entire workforce having in depth knowledge on the meaning of complicated jargon. However, in addition to the specialized side of the practice, SEM primarily focuses on communication to an audience who is actively seeking out information on the Internet. The saying ‘content is king’ translates into the customer experience. After all, consumers are not simply searching for your site map or what tags you have used. Consumers are seeking relevant information that will provide them some sort of benefit. Simply having a website and Facebook fan page isn’t enough. Great consumer facing content should be a part of the company culture.

Making search engine marketing work for you isn’t simply about nifty software, a website with a few keywords and some inbound links. This is why we emphasize collaboration with our clients so that great content and technical expertise synergize and lead to long-term success in today’s marketplace.

While the practice of searching for local businesses used to stem from flipping through pages found in a several-pound book – now likely stashed away collecting dust somewhere – the consumer is still letting their fingers do the walking. Today, those fingers are both flipping and typing, not on paper, but rather on mobile phones and computers. While business listings in the traditional Yellow Pages and print publications do still exist, the consumer is going digital. For today’s SMB (Small and Medium-sized Business), local search in the online world has taken on even greater importance because shoppers, now more than ever, turn to the search engine and even social networking sites first to discover and buy products and services.

Local search marketing is in essence replacing the traditional Yellow Pages as a method of increasing awareness, while driving both online and foot traffic to the business. Yet, it can be easy to see how an organization may drown in a sea of millions upon millions of search result pages and competing advertisements worldwide. A local search strategy helps optimize these results adding a geographic context to products and services the consumer is actively seeking.

Nonetheless, local search marketing is more than just a business listing on Google Places, paid search advertising or a high ranking in Yahoo or Bing. This comprehensive strategy takes the Yellow Pages ad or listing to an entirely new level with social media marketing and the ability for consumers to connect and search via mobile. For example, social media sites such as YouTube extend local search reach through video, and Facebook Deals let consumers discover local businesses beyond the search engine. Link building through blogs and photo-sharing sites also help tap into the triggers that your customers are using to discover businesses online.

Local search marketing strategies can be an effective tool to attract consumers to your business. If you are unsure of how to get start implementing local search in with your marketing initiatives, Get Page One can help you find out more about this secret weapon.

It may be easy to think that to achieve favorable search results on Google, Bing or Yahoo, simply putting up a video, blogging or posting to Facebook and Twitter will get the job done. However, to achieve optimal results, the combination of search marketing, organic search engine optimization and social media necessitates a cohesive strategic vision. Moreover, this vision is not an end-game approach, but rather an ongoing and flexible process. The need for flexibility stems from the constantly shifting changes in search algorithms and consumer behavior. We are often asked at Get Page One how each of these components operates in tandem to reach results.

While the answers are not always simple, search engines begin the course of online visibility through a complex combination of factors. More than just heading tags, anchor text, backlinks and advertisements, each component in the search process works together to develop placement on search engines, where the best place is, of course, a top ranking. Ideally, through the progression of increasing views and interaction, organizations convert search results into consumer demand and new sales. In a sense, it is akin to a professional baseball team playing for a World Series title. Each element, from pitching and hitting to defense seemingly operate separately. However, these components do not win championships by operating independently. The manager must know when to bunt and steal bases and when to pull the starting pitcher and rely on the bullpen.

Likewise, search marketing, SEO and social media marketing all seemingly function as separate entities. Yet, each has its own objectives. Choosing the right keywords, effective use of ad elements such as targeting and call-to-action, engagement through social networks and measuring results are just a few pieces of the puzzle.

On the Internet, you want to be in the right place at the right time, when the consumer is looking. Each building block in the practice of search marketing helps to realize this goal. Optimal search results typically occur when each building block combines within a comprehensive strategy. Therefore, like a World Championship baseball organization, achieving top Internet ranking is a team effort.

Many C-Suite executives and marketing managers know both search marketing and social media are important. For some organizations, much of a customer’s initial awareness about products and services is likely to derive from search engines, social media or both. Yet, in terms of their affect on the bottom line, the thought of allocating substantial dollars to these channels may sometimes be a tough decision. The challenge reflects bottom-line thinking; getting the mind around where search and social plug-in to a business can be puzzling. Although, when we uncover the various benefits and connect search and social with business objectives, we begin to see a clearer picture of the overall importance of social and search.

Location, location, location. This cliché is true for real estate and for brick and mortar operations. It is also true for the Internet. If we use our Yellow Pages today, it’s often as a fire starter; otherwise, it just sits collecting dust in a drawer. Today, the search engine has effectively replaced the Yellow Pages for online users. To be found, location in the search rankings is becoming almost as important as physical location and in some cases, more important. Restaurants, for example, are discovering that Internet traffic can very well lead to foot traffic.

Numerous organizations get new business via referral from existing customers. Interestingly, many referrals now are made via social media rather than around the water cooler. Additionally, customer retention has become a significant focus with social media marketing, by augmenting and adding customer touchpoints that are more relevant and more frequent than the once-a-year sales call or monthly newsletter. This “top-of-mind” strategy using social media not only builds product or service awareness, but also creates a more consistent brand message through customer engagement.

Conversations are happening about brands all over the Internet, and reputation management can affect the bottom line for a business in both positive and negative ways. Consumers seeking information via the Internet often get their first impressions of that brand by what they discover via search or social media. Thus, it’s vitally important for a company to participate in online conversations and boost the positive while mitigating the negative.

When businesses consider search and social as important aspects of their marketing that directly touch the consumer, the benefits and justification for adding search and social to the marketing budget are much more clear. In essence, connecting search and social with everyday operations can provide significant value to a company’s bottom line.

We know that search engine optimization and search marketing do the dirty work of creating brand visibility online. Web marketers strive to hit top pages of search engines on Google, Bing and Yahoo. What many marketers and brands sometimes miss happens to be the human influence on the overall search process. This is the blend of both traditional search behavior and the ability for influencers to have an affect on search rankings.

Getting Social

At Get Page One,  your organic SEO, search marketing and paid search-advertising programs are hard at work tapping into consumer behavior, making your brand findable through search engines; however, there is something else hard at work about which you may or may not be aware.

The social media aspect of search is increasingly having an influence on page ranking. And while some of the information on how much influence social lends to search algorithms is vague, Google and Bing both factor social into the mix.

Influencers

The ability for social media to affect search rankings stems from influential users sharing links. This is especially true with Twitter. Shared links via tweets with respect to the overall influence of the user provide authority to the pages being tweeted. The closed system of information from Facebook is more difficult for search engines to calculate the influence of a user; yet, Facebook is still a factor.

Social Media Marketing

Many organizations who learn that social does impact search think that simply having a presence in social media will affect their page rank. Others are concerned about reputation management issues on the social web. As the gap between traditional search and social closes even more, it pays to have more than a simple Twitter account and Facebook page.

Outreach and influence from a brand can breed outreach and influence from authoritative users who can lend a helping hand to your SEO efforts. They, in turn, not only lend a human influence to search, but in essence, can become de facto brand marketers as well.

We offer full social media marketing services as an extension of our SEO work for clients here at Get Page One. But a lot of our SEO customers like to manage their Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Yelp and LinkedIn accounts in-house. They’re doing a great job, and we’re always here to help when questions come up about best practices and whatnot.

It’s common for internal marketing departments to struggle with the prospect of making connections for increased engagement on social networks. Many marketers feel pressured to pump out their own authentic, quality content with limited time and/or resources available. We’d like to share some insight we picked up from a recent post on MediaPost’s Search Insider blog, titled “Why Not Be The CMO Of Everyone?” by Derek Gordon.

It pays to get creative when it comes to generating great social content and boosting those fan and follower counts. Gordon suggested thinking beyond the marketing department when it comes to producing, networking and influencing socially. What is your company’s best asset? The people. And there’s a solid chance that a lot of those people, no matter what department they work in, are using social media personally. Most of your employees are on Facebook and probably LinkedIn, too. Some of them are probably regular tweeters and bloggers. When you begin to think of every person in your organization as a member of the marketing department, you might be surprised at what you find.

Take an audit and determine which of your coworkers are the most socially active and influential online. These individuals are an extension of your brand, even if most of their blogging and tweeting is off-topic (although you’ll often find employees sharing news and insight about your industry or company). Think about how to “activate, focus and curate” content from this arsenal of potential social media marketers. Harness their content-producing savvy and influence by drafting an unofficial panel of experts.

“Very often, employees in large enterprises are actively evangelizing their brands or products and no one in the home office even realizes it,” Gordon wrote. Even if this isn’t the case at your small business, make it happen by inviting active employees to contribute to your social marketing team. Encourage anything and everything from this panel— tweets, blog posts, strategies and ideas for boosting engagement. Ask them to spread the word about your company’s accounts, and you’ll begin to absorb their personal networks of industry peers and friends.

Growing audiences will appreciate your brand’s personable voice and insightful content. Social media is a unique, constantly evolving channel. We’ve found that being overly cautious or traditional in your strategy just won’t work. Get creative and make this essential component of modern branding work for your business. As always, contact us if you have any questions.

Search Optimization Is Easier with Advanced Web Ranking

Search optimization isn’t an easy task and often you may feel overwhelmed by the complexities, the tags, the code, and the rankings. None of us have control of what Google and Yahoo do, and none of us get any search optimization feedback from the search engines when our efforts fail to produce the results we’d hoped for.

One of the biggest challenges in search optimization is getting good search rankings for your top keyphrases and tracking the changes in those rankings over time. Not only is it time-consuming to look up all those rankings, even with the assistance of special software, but the sheer volume of data starts to overwhelm when you’re talking about multiple keywords and/or multiple search-optimized websites.

If you’re facing this problem, you’re in luck. Brian just signed off on letting me share some information on one of our search optimization secret weapons, a software package called Advanced Web Ranking (AWR).

Serious Search Ranking Management Requires Serious Data Management Software

We’re running AWR on a Mac mini with a dedicated internet connection (AWR runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux). With this software, we track our clients’ rankings in all the major search engines for all of their keyphrases. This alone is a monumental task. Some of our search optimization clients have hundreds of keyphrases. In fact, some of our clients have hundreds of locations, and as a result we have keyphrase variations for each of those cities. You can see how this quickly becomes a data management problem of the first order if you don’t have a dedicated software solution.

AWR transparently mimics the behavior of a user googling for keyphrases, sending queries to the search engines and parsing the results for listings from your webpages. The end result is a report that shows your website’s ranking for all the keyphrases you care about, in PDF, XLS, XML, HTML, text, or CSV formats. Reports come in a variety of styles: listed by search engine, by keyword, by rank compared to your competition, et cetera. Reports can be customized, branded, and even automatically emailed after completion. In fact, you can set up AWR’s sophisticated scheduler and give AWR your FTP login and in return, it’ll automatically upload the reports in HTML format to your website whenever you like. That, my friends, is what you call search optimization service.

Does that sound like a search optimization secret weapon to you yet? How about if AWR stored website rankings for each keyphrase in a database, and allowed you to create custom reports almost instantly? Yes, indeed, all that data is stored and accessible. Client wants to compare this month’s search optimization rankings with December 2007? No problem. How about December 2007 versus January 2008, but only for the UK version of Google? Easy. Just go into the Reports menu, make a custom report, and choose your desired dates and report formats from drop-down menus.

Is AWR Better Than Analytics for Search Optimization Monitoring?

If I were doing search optimization “on the cheap,” I’d probably try to scrape by using Google Analytics instead of AWR for awhile. This strategy, however, is generally penny-wise-pound-foolish because the two tools are not competitors. Instead, they’re complimentary search optimization analysis instruments. Analytics shows you who’s visited your site, and AWR shows you where your site is ranking. Analytics is your exit poll, and AWR shows you where you have room to grow — your polling numbers for key issues, if you want to extend the political analogy. Analytics is reactive, and AWR is proactive.

AWR, which sits somewhere on the charts between “feature-rich” and “bewilderingly featurized,” offers many tools to help you figure out what keyphrases would best fit your site. You can also import keyphrase lists from text files, a website, Google Suggest, or Wordtracker. The software also caters to search optimization firms with some heavy-duty features like multiple proxy handling, seamless querying of over 1000 different search engines (yes, there are that many), rank evolution charts, user profiles, event-driven notifications (“triggers”), filters, backups, Local search tracking, a full keyword research tool, multiple API keys, and (with the Enterprise version) Google Page Rank tracking.

Responsive Search Optimization Software

Not only is the software extremely flexible and powerful, but the staff is gratifyingly responsive. Several times, we’ve had feature suggestions or bugs to bring to the attention of the search specialists at Caphyon, the publisher of AWR. We’ve visited the popular forums at their website, posted those questions, and received prompt assistance every time. They even created a specific search engine module just because of our feedback; thanks to their automated updates, that new module was disseminated within days to all AWR users, possibly helping hundreds or thousands of people to improve their search optimization tracking.

If a search optimization software company is committed from the beginning to a public forum for product commentary and feedback, you know they are serious about serving the SEO community. Search optimization specialists are not shy about sharing their opinions in a public forum. If they get angry about a product, they’ll make sure that you see negative feedback about it all over the web.

If you’re interested in taking a peek at this useful search optimization tool, check out a trial version. You can download a free 30-day trial without obligation.

For Search Optimized Link Coordination: Advanced Link Manager

It’s hard to treat any of Caphyon’s search optimization offerings as an afterthought, but this blog wouldn’t be complete without mentioning their Advanced Link Manager tool, a link popularity and coordination package. If your search strategy centers on incoming links, you should take a peek at ALM’s features and reporting. ALM incorporates many of AWR’s strengths (like database management and all-in-one comprehensiveness). Some of our favorite ALM features include the reciprocal link tracking, the personalized and flexible reporting, and the “find link partners” tool that helps you quickly find potential link partners based on metrics that best fit your search optimization priorities. ALM even has a convenient email composer that lets you fire off emails to those optimal link partners’ webmasters without having to leave the application.

Search Secrets

That’s our big search optimization secret disclosure for this holiday season. Our little gift to you, our faithful search readers. Hope you enjoyed this little optimization tip. If you have some feedback on search tracking tools or SEO in general, please send it our way! Stay warm and have a restful, peaceful winter break.

Blogging Best Practices from an SEO perspective

It’s important to remember that we blog for many reasons, not just for SEO. The following best practices are only regarding the Search Engine Optimization reasons for blogging. You may need to weigh these against other reasons you may have for blogging such as user interaction, conversion, etc.

Choose One Keyphrase

Each blog post should be targeting one main keyphrase. Use tools such as the Google keyword tool or Wordtracker’s free keyword service to determine the target keyphrase.

Use the Keyphrase as the Title

Title your blog post with the keyphrase and only the keyphrase. If you need additional information, use a sub-head. The title will be read by Google, and will also become the article’s url, two important factors in determining relevance.

Create and Use Relevant Categories

Your blog should be set up to include the category of a post in the url. Creating and using a relevant category will boost the relevancy of a post. Categories should be fairly broad, as you want many posts under each category. Example of a relevant categories would be “Auto Loans”, “Auto Finance”, etc. Each post should only exist under one category.

Pay Attention to Keyphrase Placement

1. Begin the article with the keyphrase if possible. If not, then make sure to include the keyphrase in the first sentence
2. Use sub-heads that use the keyphrase or a subset of the keyphrase
3. Use keyphrase or subset of the keyphrase once per paragraph as a general rule
4. Bold the first instance of the keyphrase
5. Link one instance of the keyphrase to a relevant page on your website
6. Read over article to make sure keyphrase placement isn’t so high as to sound “spammy”

Create and Follow a Linking Strategy

Your should determine the top 5-10 keyphrases that your site addresses and naturally work those links into your blog posts. Each of these phrases should have a consistent landing page. Go easy, these need to look natural and should be relevant to the blog topic. Remember, you are linking naturally, so you’re not saying “for great auto loans click here”. An example would be “I remember when my mom was looking for an (link to home page)auto loan(end link) with a low interest rate.”

Create Unique Meta Information

Each post should have unique meta description and meta keywords tags. We suggest a 50/50 rule: 50% of meta information should be pre-existing material related to the website in general, 50% should be specific to the post. Be sure to begin with specific information and work down to pre-existing information.

Create Unique Tags

As with the meta information, the first half of tags should be unique to the post, second half should be general tags developed for the site.

Submit Blog Posts to Digg

Submit each blog post to Digg. As with the blog post, the title of the Digg should be the keyphase. If more words are necessary to prevent looking like spam, then begin the Digg with the keyphrase. Include the keyphrase in the description of the Digg.

Submit Digg to Google

Submit each Digg to Google’s Add Url page (go ahead and also submit the blog post while you’re there). Again, use the keyphrase as the title of the submission.

Create Companion Press Release

If publishing a companion press release, target a keyphrase that is addressed in the blog as well as on the website, link to both the blog and the web page from the press release with relevant text.

Good luck with your SEO blog post!

The Video Marketing Expo (VMX) is going on today in Austin at the Hilton Downtown. Jam-packed with helpful and interesting sessions about all things online video — including innovative methods for producing online videos for blogging, marketing, lead generation and social media — VMX makes it so attendees will walk away with useful tips and tools given by industry leaders.

And among those industry leaders speaking at VMX is Get Page One’s very own Brian Rutledge. He’ll be giving a presentation about search engine optimization and video metrics, and how new media and video are seen by search engines. This is a great time to learn about the best tools for tracking video viewership and abandonment as well as how to make sure your videos are seen correctly by the emerging networks of online video syndicators.

Can’t make it to VMX? Feel free to download Brian’s presentation: SEO + Video + Metrics.