Top 20 Social Media Resources

Social Media is scattered around the whole diversified World Wide Web. Every business has a tendency to dig into it and leverage the true power of this emerging trend. There are many social media sites out there, few general and broad in scope covering almost every aspect of social cloud. Others focused on a specific niche area. This is your little task as to find out the one's which suits your business and social needs well. So these top 20 social media resources contain both type of sites and it is recommended that you visit each of them, leverage your business and harness the potential of becoming social with your customers base. The data has been collected from various platforms, tools and utilities and the factors to rate were like page views, rankings and average growth of a website over a specific period of time etc. Remember always that the days have gone past when only performing few SEO activities were sufficient enough to rank a site higher in search engines, it is now becoming more important to realize that social media optimization is going to play a major role in 2010, as it did to some extent in 2009.

Note: Indexed pages and backlinks are mentioned just for information purpose.

5 Essential Things to Know About SEO

From the very start of the Internet era, the first and foremost challenge which we all are facing is how to attract qualified visitors to a site. The days has gone past when only populating and stuffing keywords in META tags and Title tags were enough to rank high on the search engines. Massive funding and buying links is not going to work now as well, these all seems old stories now as search engines has grown much mature now. These all practices also sound unethical in true nature of business.

As an SEO lover, with ambitions of experimenting with all possible things and knowing the results has let me to share you with something very beneficial. If you can give more time than money, believe me, you can beat much of the competition in the market and you will stand distinguishable from the others in your area. The outcome of these trial and error techniques sets the foundation of our SEO efforts and the basis for the constant growth of traffic to website.

What is Google Analytics Bounce Rate for a Website?

One of the most important factors to consider while performing SEO activities is to check for the bounce rate of website. I personally consider that this is a very important criterion that can give you the true insight of your visitors. Google Analytics can provide in depth statistics regarding Bounce Rate.

In simple, bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who closes your website without browsing any other webpage. So this can give you the clue of what exactly you need to do or incorporate into your website to decrease this rate. There are many entrance paths to your website. One of the most visited and important path is the home or index page of a website. Many visitors come through this path and if they are unable to find information they are looking for, they might simply close your website without browsing any other page and so your bounce rate will start to increase.

In fact, each and every webpage should be optimized in such a manner that when a visitor land on it should find the information that he was looking for. For example, if a visitor come to your site through Google organic search with the keyword of “tic tac toe flash game download” then your landing page should have this download available with other relevant games in the categories if possible. This would definitely increase visitor loyalty to browse more pages of your website and hence will result in the decrease of bounce rate and increase of achievement of your primary goals. Content rich websites should not have bounce rate of more than 60%. There can be varying level of thresholds for different websites out there but it is always good to have this ratio as low as possible.

How to check Bounce Rate in Google Analytics

Follow the steps below:

• Login to your Google Analytics account
• On the main Dashboard screen, you will see Bounce Rate in the right panel, showing you the overall bounce rate for your website.
• You can check the detail stats by clicking on this link. See the screen shot below:

Google AdWords Overview and Campaigns Management

Google AdWords is a powerful online marketing tool. Google can generate high volume of targeted traffic to your website within your specified budget. There are following two major areas where you can advertise your site.

1. Search Network
2. Content Network

Search Network

Google Search Network shows Ads on top and right side of Google Search Pages. Your Ads will be seen with targeted keywords on Google Search pages. The Ads placement from top to bottom at right panel of google.com may vary depending on the CPC set for the campaign and with respect to competition on that keyword.

Content Network

Google Content Network includes hundreds of websites on which your Ads will be seen. Google Content Network is very sensitive and only shows Ads relevant to the subject. So your Ads will be shown only on content networks that will match our keywords criteria.

What are Google Adwords Campaigns?

Campaigns are used to advertise the Product or Service through dedicated Ads. One campaign may consist of Multiple Ad Groups. For example, if you have a website on books and authors, you may have separate Campaigns for your Author and Book Stores. In Author Store you can have several Ad Groups for different authors that are most popular. One Ad unit in an Ad Group can be served with different Ad Variations from design point of view. It may include image and text ads with different sizes and styles.

Conducting a Keyword Research

First of all you should conduct a Keyword research, because you will be advertising on the basis of keywords and your Campaign will target those keywords. It is a good practice to brainstorm the Keywords that are relevant to your product or service that you are going to offer to increase traffic and convert that traffic into your desired goals, such as Purchases or Signups. For keyword research, you can use the Google AdWords tool:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
This tool can also suggest keywords based on your website. You can provide your website address to this tool and it can extract a huge list all relevant keywords that you can consider for your Campaign. You can get more accurate estimates of hourly search volume for the particular Keyword from the tool below:
http://www.wordtracker.com
You can also use VRE toolbar along with Fire fox browser to analyze monthly search volumes, CPC (Cost per Click), and maximum and minimum biding for the keyword.

Location and Language for Ads

Geographical targeting is very important for Campaign management. Ads can be targeted based on locations and languages. For example you can make a campaign that you want to launch only in specific places and states of USA.

Controlling Budget

Each Campaign has a specific Budget/day, which can be changed at any time. The Ads are run and displayed by Google at Search network and Content networks with prescribed budget set by Administrator. As far as the Ad units are concerned, you can set budget for them individually, but this budget will fall under the total budget that you have set for the whole Campaign. The Budget can also be set for Content networks and Search networks separately.

Google Adwords and its impact on SEO

It is noted that Google Adwords traffic has a positive impact on SEO. Google Adwords can generate huge volumes of traffic, and this is one sign of website popularity. It flags a green signal to search engines that this website got too many visitors per day and its reliability is high. Even Google may give you little favor in your search rankings for this.

How SMART and SEO works together

Make your SEO efforts SMART [Simple, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timely]

Simple

SEO works great if you have simple goal(s) to start with. By simplicity, I mean that your SEO goal(s) should be very straight forward and specified in couple of plain sentences. Anyone reading it should be able to understand that what you are going to achieve in the future. For example, I am going to launch a brand new site for Cars (Sell and Purchase). My Goal statement can be as follows:

“To make a Car (sell and purchase) website for UK region specifically and achieving 3000 registered website users in next 6 months, and a regular traffic of 500+ visitors/day from search engines at that time.”

This statement is very simple and general in nature. I will definitely plan and devise methods to achieve those goals but technical details should not be the part of Goal statement. I will make my plan revolving around this particular goal that I have made. At this stage, I will list all possible activities that I would need to perform to obtain those figures specified in Goal statement. This is somehow called a Work breakdown structure of activities. I can make two level plans approach here. First level plan will describe only the major activities and the second specifying further details under each major activity.
My first level plan may include the following major activities just to give you an idea:

• Professional website Design
• Slicing and Publishing of Website
• Building quality Content
• Website and Search Engine Sitemaps
• Discussion Forum
• Social Media Marketing
• Directory Submissions

Measurable

This is rather a very important criterion for your Goals to be evaluated fairly. In real world, we compare things by features, aesthetics, comfort, design, reliability, durability etc. In SMART methodology, firstly you should have a set of characteristics against which to measure. Once you are clear about those parameters, measure them one by one and in-depth. You can also measure your success by building benchmarking criteria’s. You can measure your position with respect to your competitors. SEO is an activity which starts right with the creation of website. So you cannot delay your measuring process until the deadline, instead you should start measuring your results continuously and make adjustments in the plan if something is going wrong or anything unforeseen happens.
You should always take help from the tools. For example, Google Analytics is one of the tools that you can use to measure your results constantly. There are lot more in the market, but you should use one which best fulfill your needs.

Achievable

The Goal(s) you specify for your SEO campaign should be achievable. You can set the challenging goals but yet they should be achievable on ground realities. Making goals out of bound will make your plans always slip with respect to time, budget and scope. Carefully plan your resources and expenses well ahead of kick start of the SEO project. For instance, If you are an entrepreneur; evaluate your skills, abilities and knowledge from your past history and prior achievements and then estimate your efforts required for the SEO activities. After this, you will be in good position to check whether this project is achievable for you in the given timeframe. Always make adjustments to the plan as you go along with the various stages of your SEO project and put things on track.

Relevant

You should not throw the arrow in the air and then draw your target. Always keep laser focus on the Goal(s) you want to accomplish. Always make sure, all of your SEO activities are revolving around those goals. For instance, let’s consider our above example which we specified in “Simple” for Cars website, suppose we need to build inbound links to our Auto’s website. My first priority should be to get the links from existing Autos websites in the UK region. It would be difficult but it is highly relevant to my niche area and region. My priority afterwards then would be to acquire links from article submission websites with high PR and getting links with my desired relevant words in the anchor tag.

Now see this from another angle. I want to promote my website by running Ad campaign. Now there are many ways to do so. I can use Google Adwords, Linkedin, Facebook, and AdBrite etc. But choosing Adwords would be more relevant and appropriate for my Auto’s website promotion. Linkedin is a website for professionals, so it can give me best results if lets say I have a jobs website. So linkedin network for my Auto’s business will be an irrelevant selection for Ad campaign.

Timely

The “timely” factor is the most critical from SEO perspective. Once you have an online presence, you need to remain in-touch with your visitors or customers; you would never want that relationship to break. Because once your site is up, and you started receiving traffic, then you should be very efficient and effective in delivering fresh and relevant content to your visitor, which will convert them to returning visitors and then finally to customers. Even when you are performing SEO activities, you should keep in mind that search engines love fresh and updated content with uniqueness and relevancy. So if you respect time, it can give you long lasting results.

Important SEO Steps for Optimization of a Website

Below I am going to list some important and essential steps from basic to advance level for making your website optimized. I have divided them in four phases. Phase I through Phase III cannot be ignored if you are serious in your SEO efforts. Phase IV is optional but it will give you boost ahead of your competitors and it is recommended that you perform activities listed in phase IV to further take your site high in search engines.

SEO Steps – Phase I

• Include your main keywords in domain name of website
• Make a professional website design
• Think about your navigation strategy and make it simple for users
• Use keyword suggestion tools for getting keyword ideas

SEO Steps – Phase II

• Write unique and quality content
• Use CSS instead of HTML tags to format your pages
• Include your keywords in Title tags
• Never repeat same keywords in Title tags
• Optimize headlines (H1 through H6)
• Include Alt tags for images
• Optimize your Meta tags, include only relevant keywords
• Create a sitemap of your website

SEO Steps – Phase III

• Embed your main keywords in body area at the top
• Include your main keywords in anchor tags
• Include links within the site of your pages (interlinking)
• Submit your website to high PR directories

SEO Steps – Phase IV

• Make Blog or Forum for active participation
• Social bookmarkings and social media participation
• Newsletter subscriptions
• Inbound links building