Internet marketing means we have more communication tools than ever before. And, what’s more, the speed at which they are being introduced – and at which the public are lapping them up – doesn’t seem to be slowing down.

Here is a 5 step framework for your Social Media Marketing strategy to help you to review which digital marketing techniques work for you, and create a plan which is right for your organisation, your budget and your audiences.

What are your objectives for using Digital Media?

Are you looking to:

• acquire more visitors to your website?
• convert visitors into customers?
• engage more fully with your clients?
• improve the retention and loyalty of your customers?

Step 1: Planning

I have to confess, I like to do the planning bit after the next steps, but all the text books say planning has to come first…

• Who will be responsible?
• Who needs to be kept informed?
• How is social media being used in your sector?
• What are you competitors doing with social media marketing?
• What are your SMART objectives?
• How will you report against these objectives?

Step 2: Listening

• What terms will help you to identify relevant conversations in the social media marketing space.
• Try monitoring your digital footprint
• Who are the leaders of the pack, setting the agenda?
• At what points in a customer journey do people connect?
• How are you able to monitor these conversations?

Step 3:  Conversing

• Who are you speaking to?  Journalists? Customers? Intermediaries?
• Which social media platforms do they use?
• Who is the “real” person who will be the voice of your SM?
• Create a content / editorial schedule
• What good stuff (“link bait”) will you have your site?

Step 4: Responding

• How will you handle responding?
• Public vs private responding
• Do you have a Social Media policy?

Step 5: Measuring Your Success

• Money is a key measure:  Sales
• Reverb: Fans, Followers, Friends
• Engagement: Videos viewed, programmes downloaded
• Quality vs Quantity
• Return on Investment
• Google Analytics Social Media Filter & Goals

Link building is the magic fairy dust of search engine optimisation. How hard can it be? Actually, it’s pretty darn hard and link building tips are always welcome.

Last week I attended Ian Lockwood’s  “Top Link Building Strategies” breakfast briefing and he’s agreed to write up a recap of his top 5 recommendations.

1.  Get listed in Local Business Directories

These listings will improve your visibility in the Google Local search results, and provide valuable signals as to the location of your businesss.  They also help with general link building.  We’re only looking for high quality directories, with links that are indexed by Google.  As a word of warning, many of these will result in telephone sales calls (just say No).

http://www.accessplace.com/
http://www.zibb.com/
http://www.bizwiki.co.uk/
http://www.hotfroguk.co.uk/
http://www.shoplocally.co.uk
http://www.freeindex.co.uk/
http://www.uk-local-search.co.uk/
http://www.bview.co.uk/
http://www.applegate.co.uk

2.  Get Testimonials.

So easy, this one. Think of all the suppliers you use who have a website, who you would recommend to others. Offer them a testimonial and ask that they link to your website, so that their visitors will know it’s a genuine testimonial.

3.  Run a Competition

Why not run a competition to link to your site? Offer a reasonable prize and a time limit on entries, then promote it to relevant websites, forums and blogs. It’s a good idea to post about the competition on your blog too, so people can leave comments with links to their pages when they’ve entered. Remember to state who the winner is when it’s over, otherwise you’ll get lots of emails!

4.  Offer Your Product or Service for Review.

This requires a bit of research first, as you will need to find websites who will review the type of product or service you offer. Assuming you can find some, why not ask them to review it in return for a free product/service? They will link to your site as part of the review.

5.  Get Links from Other Regional Businesses.

Whilst reciprocal links are, in the main, pretty useless for SEO, reciprocal links from other businesses just like yours will still carry weight. Why? Because they’re about exactly the same subject! Google expects sites about the same topics to be linked together, so these links still count. If you only operate within a particular geographic area (locally, nationally or internationally), why not search out companies doing the same thing in non-competing areas and ask to swap links? It’s a win-win, you just have to explain the importance of links to SEO, if they don’t already know.

Ian also talked about a number of other tips, including asking for links on your website (best done if you incentivise people through a free gift or money off coupon), writing guest posts or articles for other peoples’ websites and creating useful resources related to your business, which you can then promote and get links to.

If you are looking for other link building ideas, why not take a look at my blog archive of link building ideas.

And finally, I do offer a link building service so get in touch and we can discuss your requirements

If you search for “Michelle Obama” on Google’s Image Search, you’ll find an offensive picture as the very first result.

Google has taken the rather extrordinary step of taking out an AdWords ad to explain the situation.  The advertisement clicks through to their explanation of why the image appears, and includes an explanation:

Search engines are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the Internet. A site’s ranking in Google’s search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query.

Michelle Obama Google Image Spam

How did this offensive image get to be at the top of the results?

I have written previously about how to optimise images for search engines, and the first step would be to check for a Googlebomb, or a campaign of inbound linking to inappropriately force a web page to the top of the search results for a particular page.

I’m perpelexed to see the page containing the image  doesn’t appear to have any inbound links?

Michelle Obama No Links from Yahoo

Yahoo Site Explorer reports 5 inbound links to the actual image

Michelle Obama Image Inbound Links

I’m sure there will be lots written about this, so I’ll update the post when more analysis uncovers why this image ranks as well as it does.

Matt Cutts of Google recently announced that the “new version” of Google, dubbed Google Caffeine, will be fully rolled out after Christmas.

How will this change the search results and, perhaps more importantly, how will it affect your site rankings in Google’s search results?

Looking around the web, you will find various folks writing about their experiences with Caffeine while Google had their testing version open (nb: the testing version is no longer available).

There is no doubt that searching using Caffeine is a lot faster, which is one of the key elements of the upgrade for Google. It also seems to have a much bigger index (database) of pages, so you’re more likely to find what you want. Whether it’s more accurate is difficult to say, as that’s a subjective thing, but there don’t appear to be huge differences in pages listed for any given search result.

The other big move by Google is to get into real time search – indexing content from things like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. As people are turning to social media to find what they want, the search engines have to react and it’s no surprise that all the major engines have signed deals with Twitter to index their content. Expect Google Caffeine to include more (and more recent) social media content. That’s a message to us all – social media isn’t going away and your social media footprint is going to start encroaching more and more into search engine results, so spending time on social media will have the added benefit of additional exposure in search results.

So what about us, the website owners? What can we do to prepare for Caffeine’s roll out?

Well, there is some evidence that domain authority gets even greater weight in Caffeine – that makes life more difficult for smaller websites targeting specific (long tail) keywords.

It also means “more, more, more” when it comes to getting links to your website. I guess most of us knew that already though…

As recently stated by Google, they are likely to introduce website speed as a ranking factor, which is probably part of the Caffeine roll out – so make sure your site is on a decent server and loads nice and quickly!

One other thing that some people noticed is that Caffeine seems to give greater weight to keyword-rich Title Tags and body copy, so despite its predilection for links, Google isn’t abandoning good old on-page optimisation any time soon. Make sure your pages are optimised for your target keywords, as relying on links may see you slip slightly.

So, as Matt Cutts has said more than once, this is an “under the hood” serious infrastructure upgrade, not a huge ranking algorithm change. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it, but there are bound to be some changes to your ranking for various keywords. If you’re following good SEO practice though, you should be fine. If you want some more help on what SEO best practice is, have a look at my forthcoming training events page.

8 December:  Google Analytics Training

15 December: Search Engine Optimisation

Welcome to Gill Marriott, who has joined Hallam.biz as our new Events Manager.  She will be managing and coordinating our Internet marketing training programmes, and brings with her a wealth of training management experience.  I’ve worked with Gill for many years, and am absolutely delighted that she has decided to join the team.

She’ll be letting you know about our new courses:

The currrent training course schedule can always be found in the Events Listings.

A few things I found interesting that I didn’t have time to write a full blog post about: here is a roundup of my October tweets:

1. Dreaded “Locksmith” Google Local Spam infests UK results (Edinburgh Locksmiths) http://bit.ly/226BJq12:27 AM Oct 22nd
2. Yahoo loving delicious tags for rankings? New in Site Explorer http://bit.ly/4eA9BR RT @rustybrick:10:17 AM Oct 19th
3. Google Local Business now asking users if business details are accurate: http://bit.ly/22zUoW5:47 AM Oct 19th
4. Dave Chaffey’s excellent overview of Web Marketing Dashboards. http://bit.ly/1YHS382:08 AM Oct 19th
5. Are BT Customerstreet verbally promising their spammy microsites will have top 3 listings in Google…? See http://bit.ly/PZzXI @mattcutts1:04 PM Oct 17th
6. Google Page Rank is Not Important, and is now gone from WebMaster Tools. http://bit.ly/3cQvCM6:44 AM Oct 16th
7. Ofcom reports rapid growth in 65+ online and social networking-though more using private profiles http://icio.us/n4jxlj RT @susioneill4:31 AM Oct 15th
8. Guaranteed broadband for every citizen in Finland as a legal right. Well done you Finns. http://bit.ly/mvTGR1:23 AM Oct 15th
9. How can somebody have 8,637 followers if they have zero tweets?6:55 AM Oct 14th
10. Solicitors can’t stop the Social Media tidal wave against toxic waste scandal. #Trafigura #Carter-Ruck http://bit.ly/qZCcU9:23 AM Oct 13th
11. Free eBusiness Conference: Nottingham UK. 3 December 2009. See you there! http://bit.ly/Du8kk9:16 AM Oct 13th
12. 5 Ways to dig even deeper into the Google Search Results: sidebars, addons, plugins http://bit.ly/QjkqP5:19 AM Oct 12th
13. Free Press Release Services: I don’t think they work, but I always get asked where they are. http://bit.ly/hdXDM2:16 AM Oct 12th
14. 10 Tips to Optimise Your Linkedin Profile http://bit.ly/36XM311:56 AM Oct 12th
15. Is your Web Browser the most important piece of software on your computer? Google wants us to think so. http://bit.ly/HDUCA10:26 AM Oct 10th
16. University of Nottingham produces national map of Swine Flu cases. There’s great Mashup potential in that data… http://bit.ly/wjJ0e7:25 AM Oct 9th
17. New stats in Google Local Business Centre – see how many impressions & clicks your listing has had. RT @helga73:5:38 AM Oct 9th
18. Mobile Marketing in the UK: Research Overview (Oct 2009) http://bit.ly/utw035:36 AM Oct 9th
19. Buying or selling SEO links? Look at the trouble you are causing http://bit.ly/147vX7 RT @Econsultancy:1:47 AM Oct 7th
20. 4Q Review: a free tool for measuring web visitors’ satisfaction with your websitel http://bit.ly/xKRpM

I was given a review license of a new keyword research tool, Keyword Examiner, last week and thought I’d give it a spin. It claims to save hours on keyword research by automating the process of competition analysis.

Rather than just evaluating how many people search for a particular phrase, it also helps you to understand how many other websites are competing for that phrase.  Finding phrases with a high number of searches combined with relatively little competition is your keyword research goal.

Keyword Examiner runs an analysis of some typical search engine optimisation signals that is evidence of levels of competition for your phrases:

• The text of a page, known as phrase match (searching with “inverted commas”).
• The Title Tag of a page (using the intitle: command when searching).
• Anchor text linking to a page (using the inanchor: command when searching).

Clearly these are all important factors used by Google to determine where a web page appears in the search results. The idea of Keyword Examiner is that you can see how many people are searching for a collection of keywords (it uses the AdWords Keyword Tool for this), then run searches on Google for those keywords to see how much competition there is. The big sell is that if you did this manually, it would take hours putting together a spreadsheet of the results.

Hopefully, what you will get from the data are a few choice keywords with sufficient volume (the number of times a phrase is used each month) but not too much competition, making them good targets for SEO.

So, I tried it out with the topic of “cooking utensils”. You simply enter your topic as you would with the AdWords Keyword Tool, and the list of keywords with search volumes comes back. I then chose the ones I was interested in from the list and made my choices on competition – I went for the full house of all three types of competition (phrase, in title & in anchor), searching “pages from the web” on Google UK (I could have chosen any country in the world or “only pages from the UK” if I’d wanted).

A few minutes passed while Keyword Examiner ran the searches, as it pauses between each one to emulate human activity (Google looks out for automated searching to prevent overloading its servers). Here’s a screenshot of what I ended up with:

As you can see, there are quite a few choice looking targets in that list. Take “Indian cooking utensils” for example – a search volume of 390 per month in the UK, but only 184 pages with that phrase in the title tag and only 8 pages with that phrase in anchor text linking to them. That’s pretty low in terms of competition and, were I in that market, a good phrase to target. “Cooking utensils UK” looks quite tasty, too.

I can export that list to a spreadsheet to save it for future reference or add extra data that I might want, such as the relevant page on my website for a keyword. If you want even more data, you can also import WordTracker keywords if you’re a subscriber.

Overall, although Keyword Examiner is relatively simple compared to some SEO software, it does its job very well and keeps things simple. £19.98 per month is not a huge price to pay for the time (and tedium!) it saves and there’s no tie-in period, so you could just use it for one month if you needed to.