FUFISM, SEO and your social media marketing strategy: September 2012

Thursday, September 27, 2012

What is the true purpose of SEO

The true purpose of SEO (search Engine Optimisation) has some how been hidden from plain view, and now seems to be obscured by the technical jargon thrown around by technical SEO experts.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a complex task which involves your entire marketing teams efforts that starts with the Manipulation of "IN-PAGE DATA" to suit your target markets vocabulary and ends with ensuring that search engines understand the complete "Aboutness of your page" so that they are able to match this to the intent of the searcher who is looking for your information which you want your target market to find.

Put bluntly SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is done to ensure that your web pages and related online information get visitors. So we can happily say that the purpose of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is to ensure that search engines send visitors to your pages.

Problem is how ever that website owners (you) don't want large numbers of visitors who will be uninterested and bored with what their web site offers, but want qualified visitors who will be entertained, take some action on their pages call to action statements, and tell their friends about the great experience they had.

Good SEO (Search Engine Optinisation) involves your complete marketing team to ensure

1) that your web sites visitors are entertained and have a great experience at your site. This end user satisfaction is fast becoming a primary concern within many SEA's (Search Engine Algorithms) which was never an issue in the past.

2) your in-page navigation structure is user-friendly and easy for search engines to understand in a way that enhances the SE (Search Engine) ability to link the pages aboutness to a searchers intent. This is also becoming a very contentious issue within the SEI (Search Engine Industry)

3) your web site has a good solid back up within your SME (Social Media Efforts) as social signals are becoming increasingly important within all major search engines metrics that are used within their SEA's (Search Engine Algorithms)

4) the copy writing is linguistically correct for the specified language in the META TAGS within the head section of your page. Good language and the correct syntax is getting a lot more attention within SEA's (search Engine Algorithms) than it did in the past, as this is assisting the search engine to link your pages aboutness to the users intent. Being linguistically correct involves using slang that is indigenous to your target market, so be careful how you interpret this.

5) the META TAGS in the HEAD section of your pages has all the right segments for your page type and page style. Is the page
                   a) a news page
                   b) a technical info page
                   c) a shopping or e-commerce page
   d) an educational page

AS search engines learn about people behavior and thinking patterns within various communities, they integrate this into their algorithms with devious mathematical tricks on the data they have about your pages to link the aboutness of your pages to the intent of the searcher.

It thus follows that SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is no longer just about the technical in page SEO stuff, but must now include many more metrics. Google technical staff within the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) field say that they use more than 200 individual metrics in their SEA (Search Engine Algorithm) and some of the more important ones are listed below.

page title in <HEAD>
page description in <HEAD>
key words tags in <HEAD>
other META TAGs in <HEAD>
language
user friendlyness
navigation structure, internal links and out bound links
inbound links from out side sources not under your control.
Social media signals associated with page, site and communities
in-page HTML use, structure and style (image alt tags, link title tags etc)
copy content and relevance to other pages in sub-domain as well as complete domain relevance

Once again the true purpose of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is to get search engines to send visitors to your pages. I hope that you now understand why SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) must be integrated into your company marketing holistically, and why you need a dedicated SEOM (Search Engine Optimisation Manager.)

Once the marketing manager is up to speed with the true purpose of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) in the new online information age, you should not have any difficulty in ensuring that your company appoints a single dedicated person to manage your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to ensure that SEO related policies and guidelines are in place and functional.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Google web master tools videos to see....

Google web master tools is a great site to help you understand the issues involved in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

Google Webmasters Youtube library has great list of videos that cover almost every aspect of SEO and many related web design issues with tips and tricks on many tools that Google offers.

This video is a good start and should be watched a few times and understood very clearly before continuing to the second link which links to the Google webmasters video library.

Google webmasters Youtube Library

Saturday, September 22, 2012

How much do you spend on SEO and Social media?

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a time consuming and costly affair that needs careful attention from your marketing manager. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) needs to be an integral part of your company's marketing strategy that runs through all your marketing policies with a primary focus on ensuring that your social media marketing teams work closely with your website design team and keep your intended target market in mind and ensure that all your online marketing strategies have a consistent thread that is well optimised for search engines at every stage.

If your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) manager is not on the ball, you will end up duplicating your efforts, and spending an awful lot of resources on target market identification for each platform. Your products and services have a common target market across all platforms as listed below

a) web site
b) face book profile
c) twitter profile
d) pinterest ptofile
e) Google + profile
f) any other social media profile

The purpose of having social media platforms in place is to get attention to your web site and funnel your social media fans through to your web site where you will perform all sales. from this statement you can understand the importance of all your social media efforts being co-ordinated and managed by a single person who also has an input into your web site management issues.

It does not matter where your viewers or end users start out, they will most likely use a search engine to locate your web page or your social media profile. This search engine may be an external search engine like Google, Yahoo and Bing or it may be an internal search engine at a social media site such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn or any other social media platform.

Your SEO team and Social Media teams will need to co-ordinate their efforts and ensure that they use the same key word base, image store and copy writing style. then take into account what Jordan Kastler had to say here

Jordan Kasteler is the Online Marketing Strategist for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) as well as a speaker, author of A to Z: Social Media Marketing, and entrepreneur. You can follow him on @JordanKasteler. See more articles by Jordan Kasteler

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

How do you measure the impact of your social media efforts?

Measuring the impacts of your social media efforts is a difficult task at best, but how do you connect this to your bottom line?

In my opinion all social media efforts are in place to funnel online activity to your call to action pages that are manged out side of the social media arena. Others will have different opinions and explain why they think the way they do.

Social media is a very powerful marketing tool, but there are difficulties in measuring its success. having a large number of Facebook followers does not necessarily translate into a large number of people buying your product or using your service, and the correlation between face book likes and feet in to physical stores is quite difficult as followers may live in foreign countries / out of state .

That is why target market selection is critical in your social media efforts. FB adds can be very effective if you use the Geo-targeting tools made available, but still extremely difficult to measure. Other social media operators also allow for Geo-marketing but none offer any tools on how to measure the effectiveness of your social media efforts.

how do you tie your social media efforts to your bottom line? read here and then decide which way you want to go, and what actions you can take to convince your boss to spend more on social media marketing.

I firmly believe that your social media efforts need to be seen as promoting your existing online sales and marketing efforts which need to be managed as a collective entity keeping your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) policies and principles in place and ensuring complete integration of all your marketing / online sales channels.

If you do this you will have the tools to measure the success of your marketing efforts and keep tabs on the separate parts with out loosing the fact that they are part of an integrated system. read this and think about what I have said here today

Monday, September 17, 2012

Understanding search experince from an SEO viewpoint

The experience of an end user of your information at a search engine is determined by many factors This article helps us to put some of them into the picture more clearly.

What an end user is expecting when he / she uses a search engine is often forgotten by the web master and those involved in designing a web page, as is clearly pointed out in the article. So what is your responsibility as an SEO specialist when you discuss the make up and contents of a web page?

Which words an end user will type into the search engine is difficult to determine, but what your end users perceive your website to be about is very helpful, and your marketing team should fill you in on this as they are the ones who determine your target market, and give you a brief on the aims, objectives and purpose of a page.

The term "aboutness" is used in the article discussed and this is very often neglected by the design team. How to ensure that this is taken seriously by the marketing people in your design team is often a problem, as they are concerned about the marketing issues and loose sight of the fact that the rest of the team must be following their instructions, as all online materials which are not directly sales pages are about marketing different aspects of your company / organisation in some shape manner or form.

The aboutness of your pages is often a subject that is attributed to the web site as a whole and not a single page. This is an important aspect of the search experience as the words that the end user (Searcher) uses to find your information is defined by his ideas of the aboutness of your information. It thus follows that each page needs some attention of its own aboutness as a stand alone page.

As a seasoned internet user you know and take many things for granted which most end users are totally ignorant about. This often leads to the aboutness of a page being lost or misplaced and thus not included from an SEO point of view in the page makeup instructions in a manner that the copy writer clearly understands. When your work force is small and there are less than 5 people working on your pages these things become more critical as there are less eyes to pick up these small errors that lead to the aboutness of your page being misinterpreted by search engines.

Now we all hear about KEY word META TAGS being irrelevant for SERP's (Search Engine Results Positions) and how they are a waste of time and effort, but what do they do for the ABOUTNESS of your page? Did you ever think of the aboutness of your page from a key word meta tag perspective?

To ensure that the aboutness of you page is interpreted better by both search engines and end users ensure you page has the following.

1) a page description (meta tags in head)
2) a page title (meta tags in head)
3) a key words list (meta tags in head)
4) good well worded content
5) out bound links to related material (internal)
6) inbound links (internal links) from other relevant pages within your web site
7) out bound links to related material (external)
8) Inbound links from
a) your social media platforms
b) external sources (other webs sites)
If you have all eight of these essential parts of your SEO in place the end user will find your site closer to the top of the SERP's and thus have a better search experience when searching for your info..

Search experience is determined by the search engine, and you (SEO / SEM staff) play a small but very significant role by ensuring that your pages are search engine friendly. read this article for more on understanding search experience

Saturday, September 15, 2012

SEO resouces by iblogzone.com

I found this wonderful resource site where there is just simply loads of good well researched stuff with many links to relevant information and a great easy to use navigation structure that allows you to find the stuff you want in a jiffy. check their SEO or Search engine Optimisation section here

check their home page here

Go to their pages and surf around, use their in site search tools to find all the info you need about SEO read their articles and be surprised at what you can learn from these guys.

Just remember what SEO - Search Engine Optinisation is.... the art of ensuring that your online target audience finds your pages in search engines....

Take time and discuss this with your managers and ensure that you, or a person who you can work with is part of the marketing team. Make sure that the marketing staff understand what the purpose of SEO is and that this is a common thread in all marketing efforts.

SEO for startups in under 10 minutes Plus other reading material.

The links below will add some value to this video covering basic SEO - Search Engine Optimisation, and should be read only after you have viewed the video, as the video will still be fresh in your mind, and you will be able to tie the pieces together with a deeper understanding of the many complexities of SEO or Search Engine Optimisation.

This short video discusses the very elementary basics of SEO (search Engine Optimisation) and gives some very good tips to beginners in the SEO business.

What is not discussed is the fact that SEO or Search engine Optimisation starts with defining your target market, and choosing your web site content and the COPY with great care to ensure that your target market group forms the core base of all visitors to your site.

After all your hard work you dont want a bunch of visitors to your pages who are not interested in what you are discussing, and feel that they were some how tricked into clicking on your link. So think this through clearly and remember that SEO or Search Engine Optimisation should form an integral part of your complete marketing strategy.

Reading previous posts in this blog http://4uband.blogspot.com will also help in understanding how to integrate SEO into your marketing strategy at the top level and why it is essential to ensure that your SEO manager has a good working relationship with your whole workforce.

what is SEO and who cares

SEO -as described by Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Webmaster academy - tools and tips

Bing Webmaster Tools Revamped, Better?

BING web master tools

SEO - best practices

Mobile SEO – Just How Different Is It?

Friday, September 14, 2012

Is SEO dead?

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is not dead, and will never die, as SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the collective work done to ensure that your online information is found by your intended target market . So as long as you have online information of any sort you need to do SEO

The very technical stuff that used to be done by technical SEO experts is taking a bit of strain, and under serious pressure, from Social Media experts, and this may be what some experts are referring to as the death of SEO.

Once again SEO or Search Engine optimisation is a collective effort that needs to be integrated into your entire online marketing strategy. The "Link building" and Social "signals" that are generated when others quote your work are one of the most essential parts of any SEO effort, as this offers the search engines an insight as to just how useful your audience has found your online offerings.

This article - What is SEO and who cares is a very interesting read

This article Mobile SEO – Just How Different Is It is also a bit of a surprise, but not entirely new or alien to SEO

Managers need to understand that SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is a very big issue and it needs to be integrated into the company marketing policy and managed from the top in a co-ordinated and integrated fashion. SEO is no longer the stand alone department that it used to be, but should now be an integral part of any online marketing strategy.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Who is in charge of your SEO and why?

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a very diverse and mystical art form that is totally misunderstood by most managers. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) often has its own manager and its own budget in big companies. In small companies SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is treated as a marketing project with its own stand alone staff that fall within the IT (Information Technology) or marketing departments.

In small to micro businesses SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is left in the hands of the web master and does not receive the attention that it deserves. in micro companies and organizations with less than 50 employees SEO ( Search Engine Optimisation) is generally not discussed unless the company focuses on IT (Information Technology services).

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a marketing strategy within the online marketing of any business / organisation and needs to be fully integrated into the whole marketing strategy of the company / organisation from the beginning. For this to happen managers need to understand what Search Engine Optimisation is, and the mystique associated with the art of ensuring that a companies information is found online needs to be removed.

First one needs to understand what is the purpose of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). The answer to this question is very simple and once clearly understood will make many other decisions an awful lot easier.

The purpose of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is to ensure that your online information is found by your target market.

So who should be in charge of this? simple answer your marketing manager, or a person delegated by your marketing manager.

How much power should your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) manager have ? Quite a bit, as this person needs to ensure that your marketing is integrated at all levels. This means that your online marketing needs to be integrated with
1) your print media marketing
2) your radio marketing
3) your TV marketing
4) your Social Media marketing
5) your web site and all related online publications
6) your telephone-marketing
7) any other marketing avenue that your company may use.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is not a quick fix to get visitors to an individual page, but a marketing strategy to ensure your information is found online by your target audience, and not the wrong crowd that have no interest in your product, service or information.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is not about big numbers of visitors to your online pages, but about ensuring quality visitors to your online portfolio who make use of your products, services or information in a manner that generates a return on your investment.

Your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) manager needs to be a very strong minded person who is capable of leading as this person will be in a very demanding position that requires a deep understanding of team efforts and influencing several different teams in a manner that ensures the complete integration of information relating to the total management of your online information. There is no place for favoritism, and each team member needs to understand where their part of the puzzle belongs and what it does so that copy writing and choice of words used are constant and reflected equally at all levels.

Back to our original question Who is in charge of your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and why. read this article on Search Engine Land and think about the answer to this question. This needs careful evaluation and considerable thought. The person in charge of this section of your company will influence your entire marketing strategy and needs a very deep understanding of your company aims, objectives and purpose.

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