Social Media, Digital Marketing: Just what you need

Social Media, Digital Marketing: Just what you need So, you not sure what all these boggling terms mean but everyone around you is constantly talking about how Digital Marketing and Social Media helped take their businesses to better places. In our world things are constantly changing and it’s hard to keep up with what’s going on, so let’s catch up!

Twitter is the most recent buzz; it’s used by everyone, including celebs, companies and regular people. Twitter allows you to follow people and get followed, thus allowing you to “Tweet” about your company news, sales and basic information. Tweets are 160 characters long, so you don’t have to type out anything long.


One of the greatest things about Twitter is that it allows you to reach a larger audience and this helps with brand popularity amongst other things. Brand popularity means a greater Return of Investment for your company as more people know that you are out there. The best thing about Twitter and other Social Media sites is that it’s FREE.

A great idea, is to have competitions and give away goodies, people love anything that’s free. Digital competitions are very successful and play a great part in promoting who you are and what our products are about. I absolutely love Social Media sites becomes you can connect to anyone, anywhere at any time. It’s advertising at a click of a mouse. People can also get in touch with you if they have any queries about what you do; this right here creates moral and customer relations.

A key of any business is having a good relationship with your customers. Once your customers are happy your business is a step closer to being successful. To conclude this, Social Media and Digital Marketing are the newest form of marketing. It is very successful and really could help almost any company improve.

A special guest post from Razina Patel @ Trafficfundi.

Ineffective Practices in Creating Title and Description Tags

Utilizing proper title and description tags is one of SEO’s best practices. This will help websites obtain enough traffic and online presence at the same time.

If your page title failed to attract online users, you will not be able to disseminate what you have in your site, may it be services or products. This will, primarily, leads to a lower web traffic.

As we all know web traffic is very important. It is the amount of data sent and received by visitors that helps sites rank in search engines. This is determined by the number of visitors and the number of pages they visit. So therefore we should not lose even a single online user because this will add up to the search volume that we are targeting.

One of the main problems that cause sites’ ranking to fail is the ineffectiveness of site pages’ titles and descriptions. Here is a list of problems that we commonly encounter when we create title and description tags.

Title and description do not hit the right keywords

·         Remember, title tags and the meta descriptions should include keywords relevant to the content of the web page.

Title and description are not unique and do not compliment the site itself

·         Each page should have a unique title and description that will attract clicks.

·         The description should have a high quality set of sentences that will best describe the page. As I mentioned, these should include the assigned keywords to make it more relevant with the site.

The titles and descriptions are too long, exceeding the maximum ideal number of characters

·         Ideally, search engines allow you to use 60 characters for the title tags while 160 characters for the descriptions.

The words do not catch the searcher’s attention

·         Make title tags appealing to the searcher!

·         Good keywords alone may not be sufficient, you want to get the reader’s attention so they will click on your site using a call-to-action.

The title tag and description tag are so general that they do not specify anymore what the page is all about

·         Make sure that your title and description sentences are related to the page’s content.

·         Make sure what you’re trying to tell to the searchers are the information that they are looking for.

Using these guidelines will surely help boost your site’s ranking. Remember, unique and high quality title tags and description tags can be very effective. It helps a page to get more traffic and higher visibility opportunity to search engines. Keep in mind that traffic and search engine visibility could lead to more sales and profit which is very complimentary with your business goals.

So let’s not take for granted these small parts of our websites. These two might be less of a problem but if these are done correctly, you can be assured of your site’s success. Good luck folks!

 A special thanks to Marc Garcia from Trafficfundi Philippines for this article.

Writing Killer Copy to Attract Attention

It is no secret that we all would love everyone to be drawn to a particular website like bees to a honey pot – but there is a lot more to writing interesting and different copy than meets the eye.

First and foremost – you need an eye-popping headline where visitors to your site would not be able to tear their faces away from the intrigue and fascination not only from the staggering headline, but also from the actual copy.

Don’t waffle, don’t be boring and yes – don’t say stuff you know nothing about – so the real and true key is to do your research thoroughly. There is enough on the web and enough in magazines and enough in newspapers to find stuff to write about – and if you are REALLY stuck – go to the library which is a font of information.

When you read books (this helps in general even if you don’t ever write copy – just makes one more interesting and a whole lot more intelligent) then keep a little book with a pen and if something witty or interesting or really well-written pops up – jot it down in your little (could be black) book.

Always remember that copy when written has to be sincere, honest and straight from the heart. If you are in a crummy mood and squeezing out copy, then the public will soon cotton on that you are faking it – oh yes! NEVER underestimate your audience, as they are a lot smarter than you realize. You know what it is like – when you are speaking to someone on the phone and they are reading something on the other side and not really paying attention, you know for sure that they are listening with half an ear. Copy is the same – if you are writing with half a heart and half a soul – everyone is going to know – trust me.

Naturally all copy is not going to grab you. There are those sites that you have to squeeze out ideas and fabulous stuff – I mean how excited can one get over mechanical stuff – not the motor kind but the factory kind, so it is your duty to MAKE it interesting – make it so interesting that customers will be queuing up to buy that product. Perhaps you are not all that excited about it but the other guy might be dying to add it to his collection of gee-gaws.

Never presume you know what it is that tickles the buyer or customer pink! It is always your duty as copy writer to write with a sincere heart and bright smile.

What Google can learn from Buddhism

Buddhist Love

Having been brought up in a very Catholic / Roman Catholic surrounding being Italian and all I initially found it very difficult to understand how other cultures / religions could fit into society. In fact I never understood how people (non Italians) could do things other than:

• Watch the Pope give sermons at the Vatican
• Support Ferrari
• Eat Pasta

As an Italian catholic boy that's what I was lead to believe was the essence of living.

As i started growing up I started becoming interested in more and more of life's GREAT cultures and religions and started realising that there was more to life then being Italian... This brings me to my story for the day, "What Google can learn from Buddhism". To be more specific what Google and their linking algorithm's can learn from the Buddhist way of life...

The Yin and Yang of Love

The Way of Love and Affection

(This is an extract from Humanistic Buddhism, a Blueprint for Life)

 "In terms of marriage, the marriage of man and woman is the elevation, perfection, and unity of love. However, love is not a one-way street; love means that people should try to understand one another and to take the love they feel for a person and broaden it to include all sentient beings..." furthermore it states, "Love is reciprocal. True love means helping and blessing the beloved. Love is not owning, but rather offering. Small love means loving that which is related to oneself; great love means loving that which is related to others. Love others as thyself; lead thyself by following others".

What can Buddhism teach Google?

Well, for those who are newcomers to SEO, companies/websites that would like to rank well in search engines rely heavily on something called a link building. For those who want to read more on this, check out SEOmoz - http://www.seomoz.org/article/the-professional-guide-to-link-building-2011.

Back when SEO was still all about on page optimisation and sharing links with other people, Google relied heavily on something called "Reciprocal link building". Things changed, and over time Google realised that people were using this method of linking to boost their rankings. Quite easily. The method people used was to build a relationship with another website owner. Tell them they loved their site added a link to their website and asked the website owner if they would return the favour.

This is a mutual agreement and something I would refer to as link love. I love your site, you love my site, let's link up.

Google thought better of this and decided that this was way too easy for people to cheat the system and then told everyone that reciprocal links no longer worked. They were crap and that everyone had to now go an get one way links if they wanted to rank well.

The problem with one way links

With this great update that Google brought upon the SEO world along with it came SPAM. Web spam of a form that not even Google predicted would happen.

• Massive link networks started popping up
• Social media sites were spammed into oblivion to the point that some of the BIG social media, bookmarking sites are only used for link spam these days
• PR sites were spammed beyond belief, some of the PR sites i worked with were recieving on average 2000 PR articles an hour (for links)
• Big corporates started realising that their business models could change and began selling links on their sites for REDICULOUS amounts (Ask news24.com what is costs for a banner on the home page). In fact better yet, ask Forbes.com what it costs for a link in the footer of their site.
• Small SEO companies offering link building services popped up quicker than Jamie Oliver could could a plate a pasta.
• Every company on the WEB started hiring link building companies to buy 1 way links

This lead to such a massive increase in web SPAM, rubbish sites ranking for irrelevant terms, and worst of all a REALLY REALLY bad user experience on Google.

Ultimately this lead to the Google PANDA & PENGUIN updates! This I believe all could have been prevented with SOME RECIPROCAL LOVE!

Conclusion

Google, read this, read the passage that the Buddhists so brilliant put forward. Love is reciprocal, love is not a one way street. As a webmaster of many many sites, we ALL know that irrelevant links to irrelevant sites is bad not only for SEO but for user experience. Myself as a webmaster would never link to someones sites if it wasn't relevant to my readers and my viewers.

If someone links to me and I link back to him, that's reciprocal love and a mutual agreement that says, "Your site is great man, thank you for linking to me". That is good for EVERYONE.

Yes, filter out the SPAM. Yes filter out the irrelevant content. Yes drop all the crappy sites out there.
BUT, bring back reciprocal link love with a more advanced algorithm, you have all those engineers, maybe you should look at hiring some monks...