Social Media for Building Trust

Trust opens more opportunities for business people. When we talk of trust, we are actually discussing the most precious commodity. Social media or social networking sites are the gateways that have opened our doors to our marketing and business prospects and hence, we can make our moves towards fostering and building relationships and trust among our target market. Social networks create engagement. By making the best use of this attribute we need to work towards building trust through our action and through the way we handle our online marketing game.

To build trust we need to:

Create conversation – I need to stress here is that we need to listen to our marketing prospects. Learn about their experiences of using our product or similar products available in the market. Reply to their queries and answer to the comments. The two way communication would mean that you are alive and that you are interested in solving people’s problems that have occurred after the use of the products. 

Replying to negative comments would bring you more into the game. Your reply will make them understand you, your business and your products as well as alert many other eager buyers who will respond with their comments and perception.

Consistency is the key. If you perform the disappearing act and be visible only occasionally, you marketing game will get a different perception. You will not be considered a matured marketer and hence building trust and as well as creating brand recognition will be difficult for your business.  

Share content – Keeping your friends, business page fans interested in your conversation needs you to share with them general things of interest. This means that sharing your marketing messages alone will not make your social marketing game thrive. You will have to attract their attention with jokes, stories, images etc and get them to comment on the content that you are sharing with them. Telling them that you are human like them and can get attracted with other interesting things available online too. 

Create a personality – You have to build or create personality. Do everything with vigor. The type settings, the images, the color that you choose in your conversation and graphics must be appealing and show off class. Do not force or hammer your marketing messages on them. Talk to them in the authoritative, humble tone.

Last but not the least, once people start trusting your words don’t disengage or do not change the color of your conversation. Keep going in the manner you have been striving for the past many days.  Social media is all about people and people interact when they trust others.

SEO Tip - SEO during Website Redesign

It seems that SEO and the website design or redesigns are two separate things. Yes, front fascia tells us that both are entirely different but in essence the professional will tell us that both must be worked on with in combination. Both the elements, that is, the website design and SEO have a perpetual unison and must be applied together when the website is being structured.

If you have taken up the task of redesigning your web pages, be sure that you don’t disturb the search engine ranking. Our purpose with the redesign is to make the website more professionally and make an effective presentation so that our website helps fulfill the visitor’s quest of searching online, but in this effort, I have seen many websites getting dented as far as the SEO elements are concerned. We must remember that it not the color, graphic, images and text alone that make things happen for your web presence online. Search engine optimization elements play a big game for you.

Ramapati Singhania, once again said today, “Are you thinking about a change in design? If you are considering a re-design of your Web site...Don't just think about the new colors and graphics and layout, but also be aware of how the new page structure will impact your search rankings, bookmarks, and inbound links. There are many ways to overcome problems, and the goal is to plan for any problems in advance.”

We have a lot to do. Before even opening up our browsers and web design tools, we must sit down to:

• Decide what is our purpose for redesigning our website
• Keep the visitors need first
• Your need to prove your effective presence, SEO elements tweaking is important
• Keyword research to embed more new keywords to expand our online presence
• Designing elements that need to be embedded with the SEO elements,
• Image optimization
• Internal linking must not be disturbed
• Improving up user navigation.
• Making search engine friendly URLs
• Take care of Meta Title Tags, Meta Description tag and, H1 tags
• Install Google Analytics
• Has the Website Sitemap been made

Keep you website simple when you start redesigning. We must remember that redesigning the website is our business need for (a) to satisfy the visitors need, (b) to satisfy our business promotion and marketing needs, (c) embedding SEO elements will make this happen on the search engines and will effect our web presence and web visibility.

Keyword Stuffing – The death trap for websites

We have come a long way since keyword stuffing become illegal. Yet, many optimizers are in the habit of pushing too hard to the top search engine ranking. The optimizers, the old school of through people, or those who have based their SEO strategies on black hat SEO practices don’t seem to come off, from their illicit practices of stuffing keywords in the web page content, Meta title and Meta description tags and so on. The effort of extracting juice through over optimization does not seem to be working anymore. Not with the Google for sure and also not with other search engines.

Webopedia defines keyword stuffing as, “A SEO technique used by Web designers to overload keywords onto a Web page so that search engines will read the page as being relevant in a Web search. Because search engines scan Web pages for the words that are entered into the search criteria by the user, the more times a keyword appears on the Web page the more relevancy the search engine will assign to the page in the search results (this is only one way that search engines determine relevancy, however.) Search engines often penalize a site if the engine discovers keyword stuffing, as this practice is considered poor netiquette, and some search engines will even ban the offending Web pages from their search results.”

About.com defines keyword stuffing as, “Keyword stuffing is a deceptive technique to try and elevate a website's search engine result ranking by including targeted keywords more often than they naturally would appear in a quality document. The intent is to make it so that it's it is unlikely to be seen by a visitor but will be visible to search engines.”

In every well defined line of keyword stuffing we can conclude that keyword stuffing can get your website dumped by the search engines and make you loose your authority on the web. The website or the web business suffers due to:

• The text become meaningless for the website visitors due to the over use or repeated use of the relevant keywords. As the text seems more robotic it chases the humans away and less conversions happen, in spite of the fact the site had attained top search engine ranking
• The Website gets penalized. It is delisted or banned from the search engine in due course of time; hence the short lived life brings no laurels to website owners.

Forum postings – Two pronged SEO benefits

Sometimes things come as surprise and sometimes the same things are plated in a platter for you as a gift. Forum participation, forum posting and commenting gives free web traffic and helps in building back links, two pronged benefits, plated in the platter and served to you for free. We have to take bold internet marketing steps after we learn how to handle our SEO. Learning along the way and take the benefits of load of information available on the net, deciphered by the experts who detail out their experiences.

Google updates and the current SEO strategies point out towards building links, one way back links, which, as the master SEO’s say is the natural way of building links. If these links coming from the authority websites from the same market niche or from the relevant websites, these link carry more weight and helps in strengthening the hold on the SERPs.

Forum Participation

As explained by many experts, forum participation helps in building:

a) Two way conversation
b) Helps you to promote your brand
c) Helps you to establish your say in the market niche
d) Helps you to know your customers needs and market preferences
e) Helps you to understand your competition’s business tactics
f) Helps you to create a buzz word for your products and services
g) Helps you to get free web traffic
h) Helps you to get authority back links

Out of so many benefits detailed above, the search engine optimizers focus on two, which are deemed to be most important as far as SEO is concerned.

1. Free Web Traffic
2. Back links

Why are forums so important in the web market place?

Forums are highly visited sites. Especially high page rank forms are Google’s hot favorite. With many people visiting these forums every hour, the search engine spiders’ visit these forums frequently hence index every conversation taking place. The links left by the participants in the signatures are usually clicked through by the participants and hence, the more web traffic flows and the links left by you help in getting back links from these forums.

3 Steps to Off Page SEO

Search Engine Optimization is a huge topic to discuss. No loose ends make things worse and make your SEO effort go down the drain. We need specialists to work on our SEO projects or else we will get entangled in the hit and run situation where we would keep fighting our wits and arguing with ourselves as to why doesn’t our SEO effort get us to the top. We will end up saying, like so many other people do, that “Search engines hate SEO”. The fact is they love it. This is the element that helps them to be in business. Search engine do encourage SEO and to keep the ethical competition the search engines loves to keep the search engine optimizers on their toes.

We have time and again read about on-page SEO or the on-site SEO, that is the tweaking the on page elements of the web page to make it search engine ready. The page than propels the Google BOT and other search engine spiders to index the page and keep it handy to return the page in the SERPs when a query is made.

Off Page SEO hold some special propositions. It is, as we know, performed while staying away from the website. This is not to say that it has nothing to do with the web pages we are optimized, but it works in conjunction with the on page elements. Off Page SEO gets us back links and free web traffic.

Out of many off page optimization methods the following 3 steps help us getting the back links and also help in propelling many web visitors to click on our website links that they come across.

Forum Participation – Niche forum help. Business and industry related forum participation gears up interest in our web pages. We talk to the industry related people, we communicate with the target market, leave the links of our web pages and hence, create a buzz. In this effort, every conversation that we leave must be optimized, embedded with the search terms to trigger the interest of the search engines in our conversation.

Blogging – Another way of creating special buzz word for our business, products and services. Blog though seem to be one way conversation tool, but the element of blog commenting makes it a two way conversation medium, where people can post their comments on the blog as well as discuss on the particular topic.

Social networks – Social networks are the busiest marketing mediums on the internet. Breaking into conversation and leading the masses by leaving links to your website from where members can reach out to your website.

SEO tip of the day

We strive for high search engine ranking. True, we have gone through Big Daddy, Panda and Penguin. The jolts were enough for the search engine optimizers to give them hardcore learning, yet, sadly we are still in the learning phase. Certain things are written on the wall, large as life, for us to see, but we miss out and cry for help. Some SEO strategies too are written on the wall and have been explained time and again to help out the people in their SEO efforts, yet we miss out.

Today I received an email from a friend offering the SEO tip of the day. Ramapati Singhania said in the email, “Did you know that it is possible to rank visibly higher in the search engines with a PR of 5 than it is with a PR of 8? It's true! Don't be obsessed over Page Rank. Focus on building true relevancy.”

We need to understand the depth of the message when we start building our SEO strategy. 

Defining the word relevance, the web dictionaries state “Pertinence to the matter at hand”. The definition gives us the clear cut road. Walking on this path chalks out the clear cut strategy that we have to build out web pages, our content, our graphics, our HTML elements close to our matter at hand, i.e. our business. If we are selling products, services or giving out information, we need to:

• Research keywords, research the most relevant words or search terms to our products and services or the information that we are disseminating. 
• Use these keywords in the Meta Tags
• Use these keywords when we are building website content
• Create relevance of images and graphics to our subject matter
• Strive to get links from the relevant sites

Relevance is the most important factor in our SEO strategy. It ensures that the site would be indexed by the search engine and kept in the proper category while the relevant links help in the creating a strong footing on the search engines. If the links are coming from the a relevant and authority site, does not matter if the belongs for page rank 5 i/o page rank 8, your website would definitely climb the ladder and get the deserved visibility on the SERPs.

SEO – Master the game or fade away

Not many of us have still mastered the game. We think or we perceive that we know it all, but the geniuses out there, the search engine makers, have always succeeded us beating the search engine optimizers at the game of SEO. Search engine are made for the web visitors, for them to find things, search and learn and interact with the businesses to buy the products, services or get the required information. This gives the online marketers as open field to create an effective presence through ethical means, not the way many of our friends did, used black hat techniques and exploited the opportunities available to us.

How in the world we have thought that we could use these engines to make big money overnight. The opportunity exists for everyone to showcase the products, take ethical steps to promote but by using unfair means, mastering the black hat techniques, the optimizers had shortened their web visibility through the search engines and found themselves out of scene, fading away from the glory of top search engine ranking.

• On-Site SEO – The basics of SEO where we can tweak the HTML tags, build keyword laden, but not keyword stuffed web content, Optimize images and graphics and make the web presentation of our company search engine friendly. This is the task that is rather easy to master and most of our friends play their SEO game around the on page SEO, shying away from the real ball game.
• Off Page SEO – Here we must understand that in SEO there are no short cuts. This is the place where the real juice is. To help our search engine friendly website to hold ground, we must plug in some of the back links. These come naturally, with all the off page optimization efforts whether we are blogging, article and submitting articles, issuing or publishing press releases, or when we are indulging in social media marketing or participating in forums, we are trying to build links the natural way.

We need to master the ethical SEO game that could lead our websites and web presence through to the top of the organic search engine results. The white hat way. Here the air is clean, no threats of being dumped by the search engine exists. We need patience and hard work. We need to wait for longer time that we would have waited through other means; hence, without taking sort cuts we can secure ourselves and our existence on the web.