SEO and social media for beginners

I recently posted a ‘using Twitter’ guide for beginners. Here I take a look at using social media as a whole within an SEO campaign.

Search engine optimisation has changed dramatically over the past few years, but it is still based on creating relevant content and building up authority through your website and the links back to it from other websites.

The emphasis used to be on ‘on-page’ optimisation and collecting medium and high PR do follow backlinks.

On-page optimisation is still vital, but the emphasis of that content is now shaped by social media such as blogs, newsletters, forums, and videos and the integration of this media throughout relevant social networks.

And most of the backlinks you now procure to boost your site’s authority are from social media sites, many of which are procured because you have content to share.

A successful link campaign must include bloggers and online communities, where you try to get a vote in the form of a backink.

So what exactly is ‘social media’? For a start, it’s much more than Facebook and Twitter – here are the main areas you need to look at to start to structure a successful campaign.:

Social profiles

Facebook

Creating a Business Fan Page lets you make a page where customers or fans of your business can register as a ‘fan’ — allowing your updates to flow into their pages. You might also want to consider running local ads on Facebook.

Twitter

To make the most of Twitter for your business, you’ll need to use a few more advanced tools. This includes desktop and mobile Twitter clients like TweetDeck, Seesmic, and Tweetie. Desktop clients give you more flexibility and more control over your Twitter strategy than you’ll have on the Twitter website. Among other things, you’ll be able to pre-define searches (so that you can monitor certain keywords, including your business name) and group people you follow so that you can minimise the noise and focus on the real content.

There are many more sites you can use to create a social profile, including My Space, Bebo, LinkedIn, and Tagged– take a look at what’s out there to decide what’s best for you.

Blogs

If you’re confident that you can set up your own blog and integrate it within your website, you should do this. It does require a bit of technical knowledge, but it means that you can customise the blog to your website’s specifications, and add content relevant to selling your business around it, as well as integrating your main menu.

If you don’t feel you have the skills to do this, many hosting providers offer a 1 step easy setup for blogs that will automatically install WordPress for you. You can also setup a blog directly at WordPress.com (it’s easier to do, but you don’t have full control over the look and content of the blog as you would if it were integrated with your website).

Write about a subject you have expertise in and experience of, and that you’re interested in writing about. A blog requires a long term investment of time, and you don’t want to be stuck writing about things that don’t interest you.

Multimedia

Creating relevant and interesting multimedia (video, photos, audio) is a bit more complicated for many small businesses, but it can provide excellent social media marketing opportunities.

If you’re already posting videos to your blog, you can upload them to YouTube to reach a broader audience, and embed the video content in your blog posts. YouTube has also been adding more comprehensive activity updates for its users and has some powerful analytics tools available to help you evaluate the effectiveness of your video content.

Similarly, you could start a Flickr account for your business and post photos of your customers, products, staff etc. Flickr offers a place where people can share photos with others, but also has discussion groups, many focused on local markets, that offer additional opportunities for you to market your business.

Integration

Taking an overall view of what’s available, using it in the most relevant and effective way, and pulling it all together is the best way to take advantage of social media.

Integrating all your activity intensifies the effectiveness of your campaign. For example, if you’re posting a video on YouTube, blog about it on your company’s blog. Then, you can tweet about the blog posts on Twitter (which should be integrated with your Facebook account). This way, you’ve taken one piece of content and found a way to use it across multiple social networks, therefore increasing it’s audience and therefore impact.

You’ll also want to consider ways that you can optimise the distribution to multiple social networks at the same time. There are tools out there to help you do this. For example, Ping.fm lets you update multiple social networks all in one go.

Conclusion

Bear in mind that not all social networks will be the right choice for every business. You will need to do some research and decide which networks are best for your company, and find ways to combine those networks to use social networking to your best advantage within your campaign.

This blog was brought to you by Efdesign Web Design Wakefield

The beginner’s guide to using Twitter

Do you want to start tweeting but don’t know where to begin? Maybe you want to use this new fangled social media to promote your business and are thinking of making a start with Twitter?

As the internet’s quickest growing, hottest social media property right now, it has the potential to be bigger than Facebook and MySpace and even takes on Yahoo and Google for news.

Twitter can be described as being like text messaging, but over the web. You compose messages of 140 characters or less as updates, or Tweets.

But Twitter lets you text everyone on Twitter, all at once, rather than texting to an individual.
Twitter describes its service as follows:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages. People write short updates, often called “tweets” of 140 characters or fewer. These messages are posted to your profile or your blog, sent to your followers, and are searchable on Twitter search.

You probably have friends and in the case of business owners, competitors, who are tweeting right now and you don’t even know it.

Twitter seems to be everywhere at the moment – most of the web marketers are raving about it, Barack Obama famously used it to great effect, and even celebrities like Stephen Fry, Bill Gates, John Cleese, Demi Moore, Arnold Schwarzenegger and many more can be found ‘tweeting’ away to their huge bands of followers.

Tweets can break and unfold national and international news stories, and Twitter is even considered to be faster than Yahoo or Google for breaking news, as it can come from journalists and independent Twitterers at the scene.

So, are you ready to jump on the bandwagon?

1.) The first step is to set up your account – go to http://twitter.com/ and click on ‘give it a try’. Pretty straightforward so far!

2.) Choose a user name. If it’s taken, then you’ll need to be a bit creative to find something based on your name. If you’re doing this on behalf of your company then it certainly makes sense to claim the brand name if it’s available.

3.) Customise your profile. You could add your one-line bio and a link to your website or blog.

4.) Add a picture. A mugshot, company logo, or a picture of your pet wearing a dress if you’re feeling particularly amusing.

5.) Customise your background. If you’re doing this for your company then maybe aim for something that fits with your brand.

6.) At this point you may be tempted to submit your first tweet. But don’t get carried away yet, as you have no followers!

7.) Go to ‘find people’ and find friends who are already on Twitter via one of the provided tools. Invite friends who aren’t already on to join automatically using the email tool if you have Yahoo, GMail, Hotmail, AOL or MSN

Twitterisms

Tweeting has given rise to a number of new terms previously unknown in our language. These can all be discovered when you enter the Twitterverse! Here’s an explanation of a few.

Some common Twitterisms

The Twitterverse - the community of Twitter users
Tweeter, or Twitterer - a Twitter user

Tweet - a post on Twitter and the updates you, and everyone else, post

Followers - people who have chosen to receive updates for a particular Twitterer

Twitterati - the members of the Twitter A-list that everyone wants to follow.

Twitterstream - the public, or friend, timeline – the posts on Twitter are chronologically listed
Retweet - the action of reposting another user’s post, crediting them for it

Retweeter,- someone who retweets

Twisticuffs - the posts when 2 or more twitterers have a disagreement

Twetiquette - the right way to behave on Twitter
Twitterjacking - pretending to be someone else, usually a celebrity

Twithore - Someone who follows anyone and everyone

Tweetup - A real face to face meeting of people who twitter

Tweetwise - A Twitter Pro

Twinfluence - How influential you are on twitter.

Twiticism - A witty tweet

You can find more comprehensive lists of definitions at Twictionary, Twittonary, and Twitter Fan Wiki

Twitter Shorthand

Shorthand is used a lot when tweeting as each post can only contain 140 characters:

RT - retweet
OH - overheard
DM - direct message
BTW - by the way
JV - joint venture
IRL - in real life, (remember that?!)
LOL - laugh out loud, or lots of laughter
FTF - face to face
IMHO - in my honest opinion
b/c - because
abt - about

You will also need to familiarize yourself with the inner workings of the Twitterverse
Don't panic, it’s easy once you get used to it!

If you attach the @ symbol to a username in your tweet, it will also appear in that person’s Twitter feed

You can send private messages to people who follow you (‘called direct messages’).

You can also ‘retweet’ other people’s tweets and can flag that by using the ‘RT’ abbreviation.

Meanwhile ‘hashtags’ are a way of creating searches, by placing the # symbol before a word, such as #embarrasingtweets

Some extras

Becoming a bit of a Twizz? Then take it to the next level…

Download a Twitter client.

This means downloading a bit of software that allows you to use Twitter more efficiently.

One free example is the TweetDeck, which can manage all your Twitter activity, so you don’t need to visit the website itself. TweetDeck allows you to monitor and reply to tweets, to filter tweets, to form groups and to automate searches.

Set up a Twitpic account. This service that allows Twitter users to upload pictures and attach them to their tweets (as no such functionality exists within Twitter).

Add yourself to directories. There are various directories that allow Tweeters to add their profiles, to help people find them. Take a look at http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10199077-2.html

Integrate Twitter with your website. You can use blog widgets, Tweetback buttons, Twitter feeds, etc.

And there you go – you’re ready to tweet!

This blog was brought to you by Efdesign Web Design Wakefield

Web design for beginners

Here are a few useful tips for beginners who are thinking of entering the world of web design:

The first and most important step is to define your audience and their needs.

Defining the purpose and objectives of your website should be your first step. Focus on what you want your website to achieve. Create a profile of your intended audience and try to understand their needs and tastes, and design the site with them at the forefront of your mind at all times.

In order to make your content easy for your intended audience to navigate, make sure the links to the main sections of your website are easily visible from each web page. You want to invite people to view as many pages of your site as possible, so make it easy for them to find each page.

If there’s a lot of content, split it up into several different pages so your viewer doesn’t have to digest too much information on one page.

Keep text simple and to the point, and make sure grammar is correct – check and check again to avoid looking unprofessional. Text is more difficult to read on screen than in printed media, so it’s crucial get your message across in a succinct and easy to understand way.

Learning the basics of html – even if you are using WYSIWYG software Front Page or Dreamweaver - will help you gain an understanding of how a web page in built, and deal with problems you encounter using the software. A good beginner’s guide to html can be found at: http://htmldog.com/guides/htmlbeginner/

Try and stay away from tables, and create the pages using layers (divs) and cascading style sheets (CSS).

Creating a balanced colour palette from which to choose your website colour scheme will help you to create a professional looking website. Bright clashing colours scream amateur.

If you are creating a website for a company with a logo, start here. Upload the logo to your host server and go to a colour palette website such as (http://www.colorhunter.com) to create a palette, from which you can choose colours for the main banner, buttons and text rollovers etc.

And keep things simple and uncluttered - empty space makes colours stand out and text easier to read.

Use design to highlight functionality. For example; using gradients on button also helps make them seem more ‘button like’, different coloured mouse over text draws attention to links.

Hope you find these tips useful. Hope you find these tips useful. For more information, you can view the full web design tips article here.