SEOMatrix LLC Blog: Your Daily Ethical Search Engine Marketing Treats

Back in March of 2008 I discovered LinkedIn and have been an avid user since. Apparently, I was a little late to the party – as this phenomenal social networking site’s inception dates back to May 2003. I use LinkedIn for an assortment of task that is unparalleled by any other social networking site. It’s an excellent medium for staying in touch with colleagues, business partners, and even family. However, LinkedIn’s best use is not merely for staying in touch – it is answers; via connections and groups. LinkedIn follows a similar trend that other social networking sites do. LinkedIn allows users to establish connections, which operate similar to friends on Facebook or Myspace.

On any social networking site it is always preferable to have a lot of “friends,” or connections. However, in LinkedIn’s case, the more connections you have, the more it benefits you in reality – not just online. It’s great to stay in touch with people you once knew, but LinkedIn is different – it is professionally based. It grants users the ability to stay connected with business partners, and establish new business partners in your field (or even other fields, depending on your needs). The site is incredibly flexible; it caters to professionals, meaning (in general) it isn’t filled with 10 year olds looking for free music, or spam. The population of LinkedIn (again, in general) is comprised of fairly intelligent and articulate individuals that are generally there to help and receive help.

LinkedIn’s “about us” page breaks its purpose down into three general purposes; “Re-connect, Power Your Career, and Get answers.” Staying in touch with anyone is simple – merely lookup the name, workplace, school, or residence of your friend, classmate, family member or business partner and LinkedIn provides you with a results page with accuracy reminiscent of the mighty Google. Powering Your Career is also fairly simple. This area of the site is where you need to be creative. By establishing good connections, joining good groups, and having a well setup profile anyone can boost their career to the next level. Getting answers is probably my personal favorite part of the site. When you join a group, or have a solid amount of connections, you can pose a question. LinkedIn allows you to post this question in a variety of methods – in group boards, or your “wall” (they don’t have an actual name, so I’m using Facebook’s example). Posing the question in a group is generally the most effective. Groups are filled with intelligent and articulate people; I nearly always get excellent answers, even to questions that are incredibly specific. When asking a general question, only people you are connected to can see the question (and answer it). So unless your connections are avid LinkedIn checkers, it’s generally best to pose a question in a specific board.

LinkedIn is not just a great social networking site. It is also incredibly useful for SEO purposes. You can create personal profiles, and corporate profiles. Corporate profiles are wonderful because they provide people with your company’s philosophy and synopsis of practices as well as contact information. Personal profiles (if done correctly) can majorly influence your online identity. When doing a Google search for your name (if you have a LinkedIn profile) it will nearly always come up on the first page, unless your name is exceedingly common – like Mike Smith for example. LinkedIn will also generate inbound links to your website and indirectly affect your overall web visibility.

Everyone loves YouTube. The website has literally revolutionized the internet. I remember way back in 2000 I was sifting through the barely categorized, non-descriptive and difficult to navigate Yahoo! videos - on a quest for music videos. I virtually never found what I was looking for, and when I did; I had to download some foreign application for the video to play. Then one day back in February 2005 I stumbled upon YouTube - the greatest thing to hit the internet since…well…it was just the greatest thing I ever saw online. 

Think about, you can search literally tens of millions of videos that load instantaneously. You can upload your personal videos of any nature for free, any time. Everything is available on YouTube - from Sarah Palin’s wildly outrageous interview with Katie Couric to music videos. Better yet, YouTube maintained the tradition of the internet by shattering the barriers of entry for video. Everyday-people have become famous from their videos on YouTube. Ever hear of Chocolate Rain - thanks YouTube! How about the ever popular Kimbo Slice - the latest craze in the world of MMA - YouTube allowed him to get his name out there for beating people up in his backyard. 

When I do a search for anything at all - chances are one of the first results is a video on YouTube. Whether it is some sort of educational/instructional video or a news clip from a political speech I missed - YouTube is always there for me, giving me exactly what I need all while proving highly relevant search results. This being said, YouTube is an excellent supplement for SEO. Social Media Marketing can be defined as “[online] activities that integrate technology, telecommunications and social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio.”  Personally, I believe SMM is only going to increase in popularity. 

Regardless of your business, by putting valuable information onto YouTube you are guaranteed exposure of some caliber. People are always searching for new videos on YouTube - unless the quality of the video is so poor you can’t stand to watch it - people will without a doubt view your video for some reason.

Better yet, if your video does well and people find it informative - they can “embed” the video onto their website or blog. Embedding is a great feature of YouTube - it allows anyone to paste a piece of code on their website to display any video on YouTube (assuming the author of the video has enabled embedding).

In summation, YouTube is just one of the many mediums of SMM that you can utilize to promote your business online - for free. 

The web is getting more and more advanced and complicated everyday. Back in 1999 it was considered high-tech to have dynamic pages, Flash content and animated gifs but in 2008 it’s an everyday occurrence. The web is transitioning to an incredibly accessible social market. With the introduction of Web 2.0 technologies, anyone can find anyone, anywhere. Social Media sites like Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn are becoming prominent figures on the internet.

As the web evolves, so must the web-marketer. By utilizing these incredibly effective tools that encompass Web 2.0 technologies for your internet marketing needs you are staying up to date with the latest innovations. When your potential prospects see that your business is adapting to “the way of the future” they are not only more likely to contact you (because you’ve made it infinitely easier for them to do so by listing yourself in Social Media venues) you are also setting the prospect’s mind at ease by ensuring them you’re keeping yourself up to date; especially if you’re in a web-related industry.

I often recommend that anyone seeking new business through the internet enlist in social media websites. Websites like Facebook and Myspace are predominately geared towards the younger generation (Myspace in particular). But there is a plethora of venues at your disposal, places like LinkedIn and Jigsaw are excellent ways for you identify yourself to your prosepcts. These venues are also excellent methods of increasing your web visiblity on both a business and personal level. Adding your company’s videos to YouTube will certainly get you more exposure. With millions of visitors a day, your video is likely to be seen on YouTube. The best part of all of these Web 2.0 mediums is that they’re complely free and easy to use.

I assume Scarlett Johannson has an e-mail address. I assume she also may be internet savvy. I assume she just might have a gmail account. So, I e-mailed her - scarlettJohannson@gmail.com and scarlett.Johannson@gmail.com as well as missjohannson@gmail.com (a long shot, i know). So far, nada, zilch, zippo, no response — no “hiya” no “hehe” no avatar smiley face — nothing. What’s going on:

1) Those may not be her actual e-mail addresses
2) She may not like receiving e-mails from me
3) She may have tried to e-mail me back (went right to the spam folder of course)
4) She is on location and doesn’t have WiFi or access to an internet cafe
5) Ryan Reynolds promptly deleted the correspondence

The difficulty in deciphering her lack of engagement is similar to my A/B website testing. For those marketing newbies who aren’t familiar with Robert McNamara’s system of analysis, A/B testing is breaking down a system into individual elements to test which variables are really a decisive factor within the system (remember the grade-school correlation vs. causation logical reasoning, as well). A/B testing or split testing changes one element at a time, so as to isolate single factors or variables.

I mainly use A/B testing for two purposes:

I test web site landing pages to determine which elements are critical in marshaling a website action or conversion. I also test web site pages to discover which on-site or off-site elements may be changed to affect search engine rankings. Either way, breaking the system down, element by element, is the critical theme of my message here. If multiple variables are changed at the same time, the true measure of what caused the change is difficult to discern.

Testing for website conversions is a relative no-brainer — as long as I have a sufficient amount of data or visitor actions to analyze in a somewhat controlled environment. Testing Google’s ranking system is a bit more difficult, because the formula for ranking websites changes often (Mr. Brin doesn’t like to remain status quo for too long). Anyway, A/B testing for dynamic systems (like Google’s algorithm) can give you some information; but a significant amount of guesswork still enters the arena. I can empirically change factors one at a time and record my results… but, in the back of my mind, I will still be wondering: Was it my change that resulted in the ranking change, or was it Google’s algorithm change? The more control I have over the experiment, the more reliable and predictable (and profitable) my results become.

Google may agree with my first application of A/B testing as they created their own website optimizer www.google.com/websiteoptimizer chock full of A/B testing features. They haven’t gotten around to creating a Google organic ranking optimizer just yet, only general guidelines.
In a similar vein, Scarlett hasn’t gotten around to e-mailing me back as yet; but, before I consider any other factors involved in her lack of communication, I will check my spam folder now… and will keep everyone updated.

In the beginning, there was nothing. And then there was everything. Out of this everything came thousands, millions of pages, all promising to contain the information you were looking for. Naturally, this meant that it became difficult to actually find what you wanted. There were places one could go in the attempt to sort the wheat from the chaff, but more often than not this proved to be a fruitless exercise.

And then along came Google. It was September 1998 - President Clinton was in office, Iraq was just a place a long way away (admittedly, one that didn’t want the U.N. to look at its weapons) and Brett Favre - remember him? - was the reigning Superbowl-winning QB. Two guys from Stanford secured funding for a new and innovative kind of search engine, one that ranked pages partly on the number of links those pages received from other, similar, pages.

In the decade between then and now, the Internet has become arguably the premier source for every kind of information, and searching for that information has become so entrenched in everyday culture that ‘Google’ has been turned into a verb. The challenge for businesses now is to ensure that they appear in the search engine results, in a high enough position that potential customers can be enticed to visit a website.

Given that you have found this blog, I have to assume that you have at least a passing interest in search engine optimization (SEO). However, there are so many conflicting articles and blogs around it can be fairly easy to get confused. In the early days of the Internet, SEO consisted mainly of making sure you had keywords and descriptions on your page, getting a shedload of links, and that was pretty much it. With the rise of Google, though, the algorithms that are responsible for indexing pages have gotten more and more sophisticated, so these approaches will no longer work. In fact, it’s likely that your site could even get ‘blacklisted’ if you persist with these methods. Research has shown that more than half of all clicks in a search engine go to those sites ranked either 1 or 2.

Percentage of Total Clickthroughs and Position in SERPs

So, what should you do?
The answer is straightforward;
find a SEO | SEM company  with an expert team of extremely competent, intelligent and business-savvy professionals who will take the time to learn your business, your market, and your competition. Now, you’ll be well on the way to increasing your online visibility.

But that isn’t all - turning that visibility into real sales or phone calls - “conversions” is vital; it’s no use finding new potential clients if the chain stops there. That’s why a search engine optimization company should be aware of your requirements and expectations of a bottom-line increase. A website that makes no money is worthless, whether there are 10 visitors or 10,000 a week.

If you would like to arrange a free consultation with one of SEOMatrix’s web strategists, please call 203-777-3407.