Is Your Web Site SEO and Social Media Friendly?

Numerous companies are losing vast amounts of revenue due to their web sites doing poorly in the search engines. Web sites that are not easy to find via search miss out on attracting new customers as well as repeat customers that use Google to navigate sites they already know about. Is the same true for web sites that are not social media friendly?

People discover new sites through search, but also through recommendations made via email, word of mouth and through social media content. Making a web site social media friendly will facilitate the saving and sharing of content with others, extending reach and facilitating engagement.

Consumers find new content via social networking sites ranging from links on Twitter to Facebook to their favorite blogs. Content creation and links that occur as an outcome of social media participation can provide positive signals to search engines and affect search visibility. Making a site more social media friendly will expand the opportunity for content to be discovered directly and indirectly.

Search is the most efficient and effective way for consumers to discover content. Companies that want to take advantage now of where trends in information publishing, discovery and marketing would do well to ensure their content strategy factors in the value of search as well as social media.

Core concepts to understand search engine friendly web sites includes:

* Crawlable content
* Site organization
* Internal links
* Keyword usage – content optimization
* Code/HTML optimization
* Inbound links from external web sites

The notion of “search engine friendly” basically means making a web site easy for search engines to find, make a copy of, understand and rank in search results. Search engines are by no means perfect, not even Google. Making web sites more search engine friendly means making up for shortcomings in the search engines’ ability to crawl, index and sort web content.

This is why SEO is an important asset to the performance of natural seasrch results. All major search engines invest in continued improvements in order to achieve a better search experience for users. Some of the things that SEOs have traditionally done for web site publishers are now handled automatically by search engines such as many of the features included in Google’s Webmaster tools.

Improving a web site’s availability to search engines as well as keyword usage and links (internal/external) helps the search engine provide better search results to consumers. It’ also helps companies marketing their products and services to attract more qualified buyers. Not only can web site traffic increase, but the right kind of visitors will self segment themselves by the keywords they use to search.

Many companies have the search issue handled or at least they’re on their way. A recent study by eMarketer shows B2B companies rate Search Marketing as one of their top marketing investments for 2009. A poll run on Online Marketing Blog with well over 500 responses also ranked SEO as a top digital marketing tactic for 2009.

Standard search is evolving but it’s not enough to remain competitive to focus on standard Search Engine Optimization tactics. The social web is the web of the near future and real time search results through services like search.twitter.com or even the new sort by recency option within Google are giving consumers more control over the freshness of the information available to them.

The increasing demand for fresh, live web content as well as the expectation of consumers to interact with what they find in the search results demands that web site owners and content publishers make their web sites both search and social media friendly.

Here are a few ways web sites can make themselves more “Social Media Friendly”:

* Fresh content – To play the search and social media game, a web site must be in the content publishing business. Search engines and participants of the social web respond favorably to the signals created from frequent updates. Participation in off site social channels can be brought into the corporate web site through RSS or widgets providing web site visitors access to additional forms of information and interaction with the company.

* Social content – Not all of a company’s social web participation needs to happen offsite with third party tools. The addition of a blog, reviews, forum or even a social network to the company web site can provide intersted consumers opportunities to interact with other brand fans as well as the company.

* Easy to share – Besides the ability to contribute to conversations happening on a corporate web site, there’s a tremendous opportunity and benefit to making it easy for site visitors to share that content with others. Many sites offer “share this” options that make it easy for readers to submit the page being viewed to popular social bookmarking and social news web sites such as Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon. Sharing options for Facebook, Twitter and email are also popular.Making it easy for web site visitors to share interesting content (web pages, video, images) facilitates the word of mouth recommendations people make in real life, except when done online, they become searchable assets.

The advantages of incorporating social features include improved online word of mouth, stimulating conversations with prospective customers and advocates and expanded market reach. The question is, are web marketing teams incorporating a social media strategy with their overall search marketing and vice versa?

Are you making your web site search engine friendly for the social web?

You can find 5 ways to make your web site search engine and social media friendly in this companion blog post at Mashable.
Fuente: http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/06/is-your-web-site-seo-and-social-media-friendly/

Future Trends for Marketers in Search & Social Media

The intersection of SEO and social media marketing continues to gain traction amongst online marketers everywhere you look in the industry. As an example, the enthusiastic interest in our recent compendium of blog posts, Essentials of Integrating SEO & Social Media. I think most experienced marketers “get” that SEO and Social Media functions are less effective as distinct channels within a marketing program and work better as a coordinated effort.

Integration of Social and SEO makes sense for a variety of reasons when considering evolving consumer information discovery behaviors. Even so, I think a lot of companies are looking for direction and what’s next. This week Brandon Prebynski and I chatted on his Webtrends.TV show about the mix of search and social media and one area we discussed that I think is worth sharing here is about future direction.

There are two areas of focus (out of many) I think are worth considering with future of search and social media for marketers. First, is the technology that powers the search and social media experience for consumers. The second is the logistics of implementing integrated search and social media campaigns within a company.

On the technology side, you have search becoming increasingly influenced by social signals. For example, Google and Bing are getting feed data from Twitter and Facebook. If you’re logged in to Google, your search results can be annotated by things your friends have shared on Quora or Flickr. Erik Sherma recently covered the award to Facebook of a patent for curated search that combines any type of search engine results with the popularity of each result among members of a user’s social network which shows another direction social sites are taking to make search more social.

True social search is something the engines have been trying at for a long time, but now the momentum Facebook has with 600 million users gives them a lot of data and an audience with which to experiment. From a technology standpoint I think we’ll see an increasing level of influence and integration of social based signals on traditional search activity. The race for true social search is between search engines like Google adding social signals and features vs. social giants like Facebook adding more significant search functionality to their platforms. Who will win is up to consumers.

Logistically within companies we’ll see less silos between search marketing and social media functions. While it’s been up for debate a while, many companies’ social media is managed by Public Relations and SEO is managed by Marketing.

There’s an growing convergence of responsibilities between PR and Marketing. The value of relationships and influence are increasingly appreciated by online marketers. Alternatively, PR and communications professionals are beginning to value search based discovery as they look for ways to communicate more value for their efforts.

PR departments are already creating content, why not make it easy for their target audience (journalists, analysts, bloggers and direct consumers) to find via search? Google sites alone handle 88 billion queries per month – that’s an overwhelming quantity of behavior and too significant to ignore.

As part of the effort to improve the connection between searchers and content, people in the social media content creation business would do well to consider things like a keyword glossary when creating their content marketing strategy and editorial plans.

Search marketers have traditionally used social media as distribution channels for promoting content to drive a flood of traffic. Many of those SEOs are beginning to appreciate the equity in relationships (community) that they can build through social channels so they don’t have to work so hard creating new connections every time they have a new link bait campaign.

Mastering the convergence of SEO and Social Media with Content Marketing starts with an appreciation of how consumers prefer to discover, consume and share information online.

Google’s Panda update is yet another reminder to focus on content that engages. Marketers that make great content easy to find via social channels and links will be rewarded with even more relevant traffic through search engines like Google and Bing.

What can companies do to become more effective search and social media marketers? The simple answer is to develop an approach to online marketing that focuses on customer centric content that’s keyword and social media optimized. Follow how content is consumed and shared – make it easy to do those things while monitoring and engaging to develop networks and relationships. Continue to keep business outcomes in mind and be thoughtful about how success will be measured short and long term.

As many companies deal with figuring out how search and social media will work together, I am curious what your experiences have been?

* How important is the integration of search and social in your company’s current marketing mix?
* Are you incorporating SEO and social media efforts more or less since last year?
* What positive outcomes have you seen as a result of incorporating SEO & Social Media Marketing?
Fuente: http://www.toprankblog.com/2011/03/future-trends-search-social-media-marketing/

Facebook Is Now Becoming Crucial In SEO Compaigns

Facebook is now playing very vital role in the field of SEO and SMO. Earlier it was considered that only the Search Engine are responsible for affecting any organic search result. But things are changing fast, and other things also began to play vital role like the Facebook and Twitter. Facebook's internal searches has began affecting search results. This has let the optimization strategy give a re-think.
A rough guess says that :-

* More than 500 million active users
* 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
* Average user has 130 friends
* People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook

* More than 70 translations available on the site
* About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
* Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application

* Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
* Average user creates 90 pieces of content each month
* More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.

There are more than 200 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
So with such big and massive presence Facebook is bound to draw the limelight in the SEO Arena. Little-to-none of Facebook’s is activity is indexed by Google and other mainstream engines. It’s easy to see why Facebook’s members-only organic search results deserve attention!
In addition to wall posts, think SEO in tendering status updates, links and notes. You never know who will find it, searching for whatever. Wall-post external content like blog posts and news should be optimized for important keywords, especially the content’s title tag. If possible post content where the call to action and/or contact information is actually in the title tag. This gets your pitch to the search results as opposed to requiring a second click through to a profile page.
Remember that it’s not only wider (non-friends) Facebook search that matters. Your friends, friends of friends, networks and networks of friends are likely to trust you a bit more since you’re “local.” It’s fascinating to extrapolate the implications of a “trusted local personal search network.” As a user or searcher, be aware of how Facebook search privacy settings function. Seek advice from other tools Facebook gives us regarding users common social graphs. Lexicon, which is about to get deeper, and the Facebook paid search platform offer cool insight regarding what’s hot. Contribute continually. A good portion of the physical search results are comprised of social graph points generated within the last 30 days.

So what I can figure out by now about facebook is that it is the next big thing in the Search Arena. It has huge potential in itself. Facebok is not only connecting with friends and keeping yourself updated about them. It is also about what new and whats hot in every fields. It can tell you about new business opportunity. It has everything you will need about gaining traffic and visitors.
Keep updated on Facebok Guys. Pass more and time on facebook and stay ahead of your competitors.

Top 5 mistakes most hotel social media accounts contain

Social media together with the hospitality industry can make a great pair. Too bad very few hotels actually know how to make that happen. Instead, the hotels’ social media strategies are full of mistakes, which results in countless number of missed opportunities.

No proper signage at the property: Many hotels that have social media presence either hide it in an offline   world on purpose or do so unintentionally. The hotel may have a Twitter and Facebook account, yet when you are staying at the hotel, you would never know. Does it make any sense? No, but it often is the case. Having signs at the front desk, on the flyers, newsletters, feedback cards, receipts etc. would go a long way when it comes to encouraging the existing customers to join the hotels’ social media world. Without the signs, the hotels make the customers dig deep, which is something very few will do.
Doubtful or non-existing widgets on the hotel’s website: Many hotels with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc. accounts don’t link them properly to their website. The widgets (small icons) are either not there or hard to notice. Even worse, some hotels don’t even link their social media accounts to the website at all. Talking about hindering your social media strategy.
Let’s copy all other marketing materials: When you look at Four Seasons (twitter.com/fourseasons) for example, all you see are the stiff updates made out of everything you can learn from the website or printed marketing materials. Whoever runs this account doesn’t realize what my Twitter friend, @iconic88, once tweeted: “The power of Twitter is in your sharing, not your selling.” The social media channels are unlike any other marketing channels and have their distinctive advantages, like first-hand contact with existing & potential customers, so copying other marketing messages should be a secondary factor.
Get the full story at OnlineFantastic’s Blog

Tip #4 SEO de sitio web en Turismo: links visibles a los buscadores?

Los links de su sitio web con visibles a los robots de los buscadores?
Mucho del contenido y los links que se muestran en su página web podrían correr el riesgo de no ser visibles a los buscadores; debido a que pueden ser links que están en animaciones Flash, contenido generado por Javascript, contenido generado como una imagen, etc..

La siguiente herramienta, hace una simulación de cómo el robot del buscador va a ver su página. Así que obtenga sus propio análisis.

Simulador del robot de un Buscador