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To the budget-conscious marketer, it can still be a challenge to connect social media to real return on investment. “How can tweeting or wall posts translate into sales or revenue?” some wonder, “and is this the most efficient investment of my limited resources?”

Many are unable to find concrete answers to these questions and therefore are hesitant to hop on what some term the “social media bandwagon.” Rather than recognize social media as a lasting, valuable marketing channel, they regard it as an unproven and less-than-predictable distraction that offers few conventional media metrics.

But that’s simply not true.

How to Make Friends and “Sell” Social Media and SEO
Social media can do more than offer uniquely powerful benefits (such as increased visibility, deeper insights and stronger relationships with customers). In fact, social media has also become a critical component of a successful SEO strategy.

Social media and SEO are a package that must be sold together.

The issue, however, is that many marketers present social media campaigns as standalone efforts, rather than a brilliant opportunity for cross-channel integration and optimization, most notably in the case of SEO.

To have the biggest impact, social media and SEO must be presented as an integrated package and executed in unison. Think about it: algorithmic search engine rankings rely in part on the quantity and quality of inbound links to your website; therefore, a successful SEO strategy goes hand-in-hand with link building. And because links are a reward for great content, the key is to create unique, link-worthy content.

A smart social media strategy can then help you disseminate content and build links back to your site. Furthermore, social media allows you to be proactive with your link building efforts by publicizing and energizing your content. Hosting the content on social media networks also enables you to galvanize discussion and engagement around your content, which can then help it spread like wildfire. Social media can also help you win multiple Page 1 search engine listings, allowing you to dominate the SERPs through a combination of brand websites and social media pages.

With that in mind, here are 5 critical elements to a great SEO-Social Media strategy (be sure to include these in your internal or Client presentations!):

1. Align Your SEO and Social Media Objectives. Add Twitter and Facebook to your SEO tool kit (or, if you must, utility belt). Your goal as an SEO is to achieve rankings, and social media is what’s going to help you do it.

2. Define Your Success Metrics. Higher traffic and higher rankings are not end goals unto themselves. Work to obtain rankings for highly relevant keywords that’ll result in qualified traffic that ultimately leads to conversions.

3. Determine Your Segments. Use your marketing chops to identify, segment and target your customers. Different segments may search differently, even when looking for the same content. Define your segment and optimize with the keywords they use and understand; in other words, utilize keyword intelligence and keyword-driven techniques to inform your optimization decisions so that customers will be more likely to find (and respond) to you.

4. Develop a Content Strategy. Produce valuable, targeted content for your customer segments in order to drive qualified traffic and conversions. Once again, in-depth keyword analysis can reveal what customers are looking for and are interested in. Create content around these themes and trends for maximum relevancy.

5. Coordinate Your Social Media Strategy. Social media networks don’t exist in a vacuum. Bridge your social media efforts to engage multiple communities and increase the spread of your content.

Social media and SEO can often be a hard sell, but they are invaluable to any company hoping to run a successful and cohesive web marketing strategy. More than anything, remember that social media and SEO must work in tandem. So, be proactive, and open the door to the increased SEO value and new marketing opportunities this smart integration offers.

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Majestic Social Media offers amazing social media and SEO work so be sure to check out our website at http://www.majesticsocialmedia.com/ or like our fanpage at http://www.facebook.com/UtilizeSocialMedia

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of optimizing your company’s website so that it can be easily discovered through web searches. The more successful your optimization, the wider is your sales net. Considering the vast scope of the Internet, once your website has been successfully optimized, customers you would never have been able to locate through any other means will start approaching you for goods or services.

Although SEO is a great way for any business to attract new customers, I have found that only e-commerce and consumer-targeted companies tend to invest a significant portion of their marketing budget into SEO. Yet, data shows that websites that don’t appear on the first page of a search are largely ignored. Even the difference between where you are on that first page can make a tremendous difference.

From my experience I’ve found that most companies neglect SEO simply because they haven’t heard of it, or they think it is only important when selling directly. I’m here to tell you that if you aren’t thinking about SEO, your competitor probably is, and you need to act now to maintain your competitive edge.

A Majestic SEO Overview

In the same way that you plan collateral for a trade show, the elements on your website need to be tailored to appeal not only to customers but to search engines. Think of it this way: instead of flashy signs and giveaways to get people to talk to you, you have search engines that show results for exactly what your audience is looking for; instead of the booth itself, you have a well-designed website that keeps the attention of the visitor and encourages him or her to follow up with you.

Two SEO Myths and Misconceptions

“We’ll do a big push later.” Often, companies mistakenly assume that a SEO “push” can be done at any time, and that this will instantly increase their search engine visibility. Wrong. Like any marketing or public relations campaign, SEO needs to be included from the beginning in order to be most effective.

Google, which controls the majority of searches (currently 70%), detects sudden changes relating to your website, such as when there is a marked increase in the number of links pointing to your site within a short period of time. Therefore, to suddenly do a SEO “push” is not only bad planning, but can lead to a Google penalty. Nowadays that is the equivalent of casting your company’s online presence into obscurity.

“SEO isn’t necessary for my website.” Many companies mistakenly conclude that they don’t need SEO because they don’t have a product they are selling directly, or perhaps they are not actively reaching out to customers at the current time. But if your company doesn’t have an audience of some kind, you wouldn’t have a website, or a business, for that matter. Understanding your audience and what they search for is vital to the overall success of your business.

Four Quick Tips To Get Started With SEO

Now that we’ve covered the importance of SEO, let’s discuss three simple ways you can optimize your website.

1. Evaluate the SEO Strength of your site

There are many more factors that influence your SEO score, and learning all of them requires precious time which you probably don’t have. You can use our company’s free online SEO evaluation tool to get a pretty good idea what the SEO health of your site is. With This information you get can easily spot common SEO issues like problems with your metatags or sitemap, and fix them yourself.

2. Fill in the Title Bar

Take a peek at your Title Bar (the blue space at the very top left of your screen, or found on the Window menu of Macs). If you see a generic default that says “Home” or “Company Name,” you can be sure that your site is definitely suffering from a lack of SEO. The Title Bar may mean nothing to you, but it is one of the most important pieces of information that search engines use to determine the relevance of your company’s website to the searcher’s query. In other words, it provides search engines with the key terms they use to determine what your site is all about.

3. Keyword Selection

Selecting the right keywords is easier than you think. If you sign up for Google Adwords, you will be able to see at no charge not only what people are searching for, but also exactly how many people do a particular search each month. This allows you to determine the big keywords everyone is looking for such as “green energy,” but also smaller more targeted ones that your direct audience will be looking for. These keywords are known as long-tail, and though often ignored, they can sometimes be the most vital.

4. Meta Descriptions Matter

Often when building their website, companies ignore the “meta description” area, seen only in the HTML but not by visitors to the site. Search engines often insert this text below a website’s name in the search results. By leaving this section blank, you let the search engine’s robot to decide what is important about your site, rather than providing that information yourself.

The Best Long-Term SEO Strategy

There is no substitute for quality content when it comes to website design. Quality content is also the key component in SEO, because search engines privilege sites that provide detailed information about what they have to offer. Sites that offer only meager information such as those that, for example, list only products and prices, fall to the bottom of the search results. Creating pages that are interesting, useful, and even educational to your audience is the best long-term SEO strategy. It will not only score points with the search engines, but it will repeatedly bring customers back to your site, and cause them to want to share it with others via email and social networking platforms.

Below are some very common reasons SMB Web sites fail to attract customers and how to avoid falling prey to them.

1. There’s no conversion path in place.

One criticism of many SMB sites is that they don’t include a clear conversion path for their customers. If you want customers to take a certain action, you need to create a funnel intended to guide them to do that. Simply stringing together a number of content pages won’t necessarily put someone on the path to buy. Your conversion path may be as simple as a solitary landing page paired with a call to action, or as complex as an entire microsite. Either way, you are in charge of designing the flow of your website. Creating a clear conversion path not only helps customers feel more comfortable on your site, it also gives you clear data to track so that you can see where people are abandoning, where they’re engaging, etc. The more data you have to act on, the better you can design your site to attract new customers.

2. There’s no sign of life.

Customers are discriminating. You can bet that when they land on your website they’re going to kick the tires a little to see if they can trust you. They’re going to check your copyright date to see if it lists 2011 or 2006. They’re going to look for old statistics or other signs you haven’t taken the time to update your content. They’re going to check your company blog to see how often it’s updated, if you reply to commenters, if people are talking back, etc. They’re going to look for signs that you’ve created a dynamic website, instead of one lying around in stagnant water. Before your customers get there, take a look around yourself. Would you hang out with you?

3. It’s all about you.

Customers don’t head to your site to hear how awesome you are. They’re there because they have a problem they need you to fix or a question they need you to answer. Your website should be designed to help them quickly achieve whatever it is they came for. Too many references to “I” in lieu of “you,” too much sales talk instead of helpful information, and too much of you not addressing their fears/wants/desires will turn people away from your brand, not on to it. Your customers don’t care about you–they care about how you can help them.

4. People can’t find you.

If you’re finding that customers aren’t interacting with your website at all, there are a few questions you need to ask yourself.

1. Is it accessible? With more and more users searching via mobile devices and on the go – is your website mobile accessible? If it’s not, users trying to find you may hit a dead end. There’s nothing worse than trying to find your accountant’s website while on the road and finding out his site only renders in Flash and won’t load on your phone. Not that I’m talking from experience.
2. Is it properly SEO’d? Have you made it easy for users and search engines to find your content? That means using the right keywords, linking properly, making your site super crawlable for spiders, and staying away from common SMB SEO mistakes

Sometimes before you can see more traffic, you have to break through the obstacles preventing you from seeing any.

5. There’s no POD.

If you want to attract people, you have to give them more of you. You have to stand out from the crowd and show them something that they’ll want to align themselves with. Take a look at your own site – what are you showing potential customers? I don’t mean the graphics or the videos you choose to incorporate (don’t forget to SEO those, too!), I mean the experience that you’re creating. Are you using your site to set yourself apart, or do you come off like everyone else? Are you talking to customers in their own language or filling your pages up with buzzwords and jargon? The more powerful a POD (point of differentiation) you can create, the better you’ll attract the right customers to your brand.

If you’re finding it difficult to attract leads via your website, it may be time to ask yourself some hard questions. Before you can fix the problem, you first have to identify it. What are some struggles you’ve had attracting new leads? How have you fixed the problems?

But SEO is changing rapidly, and one of the biggest forces driving those changes is the increasingly social nature of the web. (social media)

Search Engine Motivations

One fascinating thing about SEO is the constant change. Most of us experience this through the changes made by the search engines to their results, such as the recent advent of Google Boost. What interests me more is what motivates these changes?

We could provide the simplistic answer of “increasing profits,” which would be correct, but it isn’t sufficient. It may sound trite, but the answer for both search engines is increased user satisfaction.

In Google’s case, this is measured by click-through rates, low bounce rates, and a variety of other metrics. These types of metrics are seen by the search engines as social signals.

Google’s sources for this data include: Google Analytics, the Google Toolbar, Custom Search Engines, and user behavior within the search engine itself. Data available to everyone includes user engagement with social media sites. Google has more access to data on user behavior than any other entity on the planet.

Some of you may think I’m missing the fact that large companies are inherently evil and Google is no exception. Let’s not debate that point. The profit motive of Google (and Bing as well) is well served by high levels of customer satisfaction.

Google’s huge market share is the key source of its profits, and they have a huge disincentive to drive down that market share. If you were Google, would you make changes that increase your profits today by 5 percent if you knew that you would lose 10 percent in market share over the next year, probably to an extremely dangerous competitor, such as Bing or Facebook? No.

That market share is the golden goose that drives profits. Google wants to maintain or increase that market share by using the enormous amounts of data it has to constantly test new ideas and increase user satisfaction.

With Bing and Facebook pushing new and innovative ideas, the pressure is enormous. Users aren’t compelled to use Google, and all these services are free, so switching costs are low. Don’t piss me off Google, or I’ll take my searches elsewhere!

Social Sites

Another aspect is the interactions on social media sites. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter are the obvious examples, but there are also user reviews, comments in various forums, spam complaints, blog postings, news articles, and more. These all provide signals to the search engines.

Volume of activity is one signal. Lots of references to your site is certainly an interesting data point, but sentiment analysis also allows search engines to get a signal as to whether people like what you’re doing. Sentiment analysis may not be in active use by the search engines at this time, but it’s hard to believe that it won’t be in the future.

Thinking about a spammy link campaign? Think again, because someone might decide to spill the beans on you and start a raging discussion on a blog, or set of blogs, about your site, or do it on a forum somewhere. That would provide negative sentiment signals.

Plan to do some guest posting and provide people with crappy articles because all you care about is the link? Bad idea.

Starting to build thousands of crappy web pages to capture the long tail of search? Could well backfire on you.

In our highly social online environment, the true spam police is us. Our behavior on a web site can impact the way the search engines perceive it.

What we write as comments on a blog post is crawled, interpreted, and read. Is there a risk of manipulating this collection of signals? Not easily.

Social communities guard the sanctity of their environments more thoroughly than any search engine ever could. Spammers still can run a bot that jams thousands of comments into inactive forums and blogs, but the search engines aren’t going to put much weight on that. A discussion involving a popular Twitter user, or on a popular blog like TechCrunch will get a lot more weight.

How Does Social Behavior Affect SEO?

The main impact is on the amount of time you must focus on providing a positive user experience on your web site.

Website conversion optimization is now an important part of SEO. So is a deep understanding of usability and web design. As Kim Krause Berg would argue, a holistic approach to usability and SEO is required.

Traditional SEO thinking would tell us that videos and graphics should be used sparingly, and that text is king. However, the web is a place where instant impressions matter most, and few people want to engage in paragraphs of text.

Put another way, people want visual experiences. If you don’t take the time to do that, what are you? To many, that is the mark of a spammer.

People don’t hang out for long periods of time on sites that they believe are spam. This may not be entirely fair, but the judge and jury is the user.

This doesn’t mean that text is dead. It still plays a big role in driving the long tail, and providing the search engines with context that they can’t get from other signals. So you should have text as a part of your pages, but if you implement large gobs of text on the page you may drive users away and hurt your SEO results to boot.

Balance is key. In addition, there are some types of pages where large quantities of text are highly desirable. Someone who just found out they have cancer will want to read everything they can get on the topic.

From a link building perspective, it’s important to provide value wherever you go. Give them something valuable to link to. Or, if you’re giving them an article, give them good stuff to post.

Is that guest post something that someone might tweet? If you spew a hundred articles out in guest posts and no one ever tweets any of them, you’ve just provided a signal of low quality user experiences that reflects poorly on your site.

Embrace the Social Web

Instead of focusing on the negative, focus on the positive. Embrace the social web, feed it good stuff, and it will embrace you back.

This isn’t meant as a “build and they will come” statement. You need to actively promote your stuff. You need to tell the world about it.

But, if you’re truly a contributor, no one will mind. In fact, they will jump right in and do some promoting for you. Now that’s a positive signal!

SEO insiders have wondered whether this new search innovation would affect placement strategies. And the simple answer is: yes. Yes, there will be changes to the way SEO professionals run their clients’ campaigns. Yes, this will affect the industry as a whole. And yes, we believe SEO professionals will have to adapt to meet ever-evolving needs.

Changing the Method, Not the Mission

But to think that this development is rocking the SEO world is to misunderstand the realities of the industry. In its roughly 15 years of existence, SEO has grown from being a small wildcat operation run by webmasters and content services to being one of the most dynamic, fast-growing sectors of the tech market. The reason for this rapid growth is because — not in spite –- of the constantly evolving nature of search engines.

Of course, as with any complex question about a dynamically evolving industry, there is a caveat. While the Bing-Facebook agreement and the recent updates to Google will change elements of how we do our business, the fundamentals will remain the same. As much as innovation shapes the day-to-day processes of optimization, the core foundations of the industry remain unchanged. The goal was — and still is — putting clients at the top of results pages, whether this is through organic search, paid search or social media.

Social media is nothing new in the world of online marketing. Facebook alone has 500 million users. We have already seen certain Twitter feeds included in Google search results. Before long, results may integrate other social networking sites, like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and myriad other sites that haven’t even been developed yet. For SEO professionals, this change highlights the need to integrate social networking if they haven’t already.

The Bing-Facebook agreement is indicative of the many changes that have taken SEO from a small-time game to a major, innovative industry. SEO is not about counter-punching, and it’s not about simply reacting to the changing search-engine landscape. Instead, it is about growing alongside search engines. It is about evolving with them to ensure that searchers get the results they need.

SEO Firms Must Become Digital Media Agencies

For years now, successful SEO firms have not been focusing their efforts strictly on organic search results. They’ve been steadily evolving along with changes in search engines: new Google algorithms, the emergence of Bing, the development of Google Local, instant searches, paid search, and searchable Twitter feeds. At my company, we believe that to be successful, SEO firms need to become something more advanced: Digital Media Agencies.

A modern DMA resembles an SEO firm from 2002 in the way that a Ferrari resembles a Model T. The basic elements remain the same, but sophistication and complexity have resulted in a better product. DMAs are about handling the many online representation needs of their clients. While top search engine placement remains the major goal, it is just one aspect of what they seek to do. A DMA also seeks to manage a client’s online reputation, create and maintain their social presence, and handle the many other aspects of a client’s online brand.

Will SEO professionals have to change their strategy in reaction to a new social media paradigm? The answer is yes. Their evolution into full-fledged Digital Media Agencies is imperative. And as the social and search industries continue to change, so too will DMAs need to innovate.

For more information on social media marketing or SEO Services feel free to visit us at www.majesticsocialmedia.com

we would also like to thank Joe Devine for the hard work on this blog.