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.

Technological innovation between search engines and social media seems to have taken somewhat divergent paths in recent years. While search engines and social media have seen some integration, recent changes by Google adding a Google social search feature could make the blend between search and social even more relevant.

At Get Page One, we’ve monitored the evolution of search and social, and we are excited about the future prospects in technology and relevance to business. Because many organizations bring in new customers through a combination of online visibility via search marketing, SEO and word-of-mouth (or word-of-web), the latest innovation from Google can possibly be a boon to business.

Google Social Search, as reported by Mashable, feeds information from your social graph into search results. The information shown to the user stems from shared connections and shared information linked to Flickr, Quora and Twitter, social feeds with which Google integrates. In other words, if one of your Twitter friends shared a link to Get Page One, the share would show annotated below the search result.

Marketers and businesses realize the importance of how consumers share information via the social graph, including the trust they have in the recommendations of their Internet friends. Google Social Search adds an element of both visibility and word-of-web.

With the advantages come potential disadvantages. If your organization happens to be experiencing a public relations crisis, the negative publicity might not only feed the search engines, it may also feed more negativity into the social graph, snowballing when picked up in a Google search. At Get Page One, we can help you prepare for and react to an online public relations crisis via our reputation management services.

Despite any disadvantages, advancements between search and social media provide a unique opportunity for companies to extend their reach and influence.

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.

If you’re not using social media to promote your business, you’re missing out.

A recent study by Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group, called the ENGAGEMENTdb study, ranks the “world’s most valuable brands based on how they leverage social media to interact with customers.” Able to measure and monitor brand engagement, ENGAGEMENTdb is the first of its kind. Essentially, Wetpaint and Altimeter Group are measuring social media’s financial value. For example, how does a Twitter account actually pay off — or does it even pay off at all?

So the study took the world’s 100 most valuable brands (as measured by BusinessWeek/Interbrand “Best Global Brands 2008″ rankings) and looked at their social media use — how well the brands are engaging their consumers and how that affects their revenue and profit. What the study found was that those 100 brands are “experiencing a direct correlation between top financial performance and deep social media engagement.”

What exactly does that mean? Simply put, companies engaging in social media are more financially successful.

At Get Page One, we’re firm believers in the power of social media marketing. But you can’t just sign up for accounts on Twitter, Facebook, etc. and hope for it to pay off. You have to work hard at it and be consistent in the way you use it — you can’t just sign up and leave. Successful social media marketing involves signing up for social media accounts and actually being social — interacting with other users, regularly updating and participating.

Engage in social media, be consistent and see it literally pay off.

Heard of Bing? It’s a new search engine by Microsoft that’s been getting a ton of attention since its recent launch, likely thanks to a huge marketing budget.

Author Seth Godin is skeptical. He pointed out that Bing is trying to be the next Google, and the problem is that the next Google is Google. “Google is not seen as broken by many people, and a hundred million dollars trying to persuade us that it is, is money poorly spent,” writes Godin in a recent blog post. “In times of change, the rule is this: Don’t try to be the ‘next’. Instead, try to be the other, the changer, the new.”

Satirical newspaper The Onion even commented on Bing — they did an American Voices feature about it, where three (fake) people were asked what they thought about Bing. “Search engines are for lazy computer users who don’t have the fortitude to type random URLs until they find what they’re looking for,” was one answer. Another was, “Bing? Interesting. I’ll have to Google that when I get home.” Great stuff.

It’s a huge risk to challenge Google, a search engine so big and powerful and a part of our everyday lives that we’ve adopted it as a synonym for “search.” I need to find a dry cleaner near my house. I’ll just Google it. So why try to compete with Google? Well, why not? Competition is a good thing. Plus, Google didn’t achieve overnight success.

Rob Pegoraro of The Washington Post wrote about the good and bad aspects of Bing in an article titled “With Bing, Microsoft Finds Some Good Web Search Ideas“:

Bing suffers from some handicaps, starting with one whose initials happen to spell out: “But It’s Not Google.” Yet it works fairly well as a general-purpose search engine, outperforms competitors in a couple of areas and makes a major contribution to mobile Web searching. There’s something to see here, and it’s not just the hype that $100 million or so of marketing can buy.

Pegoraro also reported that when searching for generic terms, Bing can seem “confused.” But when searching for a well-known topic, “Bing can present more relevant details than Google,” he says, using the example of a search for “Washington Nationals” that turned up the team schedule for the week, links to ballpark info and tickets, and the team’s record and standings. Google results, on the other hand, “offered little more than the score of the Nats’ last game.”

Today reports came out that after just a week, Bing has become the number-two most used search, beating out Yahoo. Google holds a 71% market share, and Bing now holds a 16% share. BNET warns that this could be due to the hype and marketing around the site launch, so we could see the traffic go down pretty soon if users go back to the search engine they were previously using. If traffic holds, though, that means Google potentially has a serious competitor.

Some experts say that whatever new, cool feature Bing implements, Google will come right back with something better. If that’s true, we could possibly have two search engines that are constantly one-upping each other and improving. Even if Bing winds up failing at “beating” Google, it’s a win for everyone if we’ll be getting better results for what we’re looking for.

Regardless, it’ll be interesting to watch what happens in the next few weeks.

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.

We came across a great article at MediaPost titled “SEO Investments Expected To Grow More Than 20%.” A report from eMarketer concluded that search engine optimization growth will jump from 17.7% in 2009 to 20.3% in 2013, as paid search growth will actually decline from 15.9% to 11.3%. Basically, with marketers beginning to see how SEO fits into campaigns, investments in SEO will grow at a higher rate every year.

David Hallerman, senior analyst for eMarketer, said that search is the best tool for customer acquisition. The article goes on to say that people “generally find organic listings more relevant than paid search ads,” which means they’re likely to click on search engine results more than they’d click on PPC ads. However, Hallerman noted that marketing campaigns should combine search engine optimization and PPC.

When this is done successfully, it could result in higher rankings. Both have benefits, says the article: While the effects of PPC campaigns are immediate, marketers must spend money consistently. On the other end, SEO takes time and requires maintenance to keep high rankings once they’re achieved. Hallerman explained that the amount of time it takes to deliver a ROI (return on investments) all depends on conversions.

So how do SEO and PPC fit into your marketing campaign? Contact us — we’ll be happy to discuss it with you.