Three Steps to Social Media Marketing Success
Today, an effective online marketing strategy depends, at least in part, on the success of its social media plan.
Promoting your website’s content is only part of an overall plan to succeed. Effective marketing means becoming part of the network and trying to reach the forefront to gain recognition. Following are three important steps to help you and your business succeed in the world of social media marketing.
Add contacts regularly
Finding social networks that allow you to add contacts is a great way to build up your media strategy. Social sites like Myspace, Facebook and LinkedIn are large avenues to tap for new contacts. If you add just two contacts each week, you gain more than 100 contacts each year. The best part is that you can do this in just a few minutes each week. With a very small time investment, you reap benefits that can be priceless.
Consolidate your blog reader
Many people have dozens of RSS feeds and blog readers that they don’t need. Instead of spending your time reading all of these blogs, concentrate on a few that relate directly to your industry. Stay updated on the latest information and comment on the blogs you read regularly. Contact the blog’s author after a few weeks of commenting. This way, the author will be more likely to do some link-building with you because you will have formed at least some contact already. This might seem time-consuming, but it’s probably less time than you used to spend reading those dozens of blogs each day.
Participate in forums
Find a forum that relates to your industry and become an active member. Create a profile and add comments in the main part of the forum. You can also take it a step further and use the private message capabilities to introduce yourself to the more influential members of the forum in a polite yet personal manner. After building a relationship, you can slowly integrate your services or products with other forum members.
Look for more tips that lead to social media success in the next posting.
Yahoo and Google the Odd Couple of Search
Optimizing your site for one search engine doesn’t necessarily mean it’s also optimized for others. But in the world of online marketing, optimizing is vital for getting your auto dealership recognized. Unfortunately, your site could be ranked high with Google but much lower with Yahoo. That’s because each search engine is different, typically looking for different things when ranking sites. Following are some differences and similarities to consider to ensure that both major search engines rank your website as high as possible.
Inbound Linking
With Google, inbound links are the bread and butter of your website. The more websites that link to your website, the higher your website ranks. But there’s more to it than that. The Google spiders look at each website’s Page Rank, too. If you have many inbound links from high-ranking pages, your rank also increases.
Keyword URL
Yahoo places greater emphasis on your website’s URL than Google does. To achieve a higher Yahoo ranking, make sure your keyword phrase appears in your URL. If it doesn’t, make a new page or add a keyword-relevant URL as a new page from your website’s front page. Google also looks for this, but only when other websites link to your page by using strictly the website’s address.
Keyword Density
In addition to using your keyword in the website’s URL, it’s also important to have keywords scattered strategically through a site. The ideal amount of keywords is between 6 and 8 percent. Anything over 8 percent could adversely affect your website’s rank.
Link Building
This is similar to the idea of inbound links that Google focuses on, but it goes a step further by encouraging website owners to build linking relationships with other sites. Ask others to link to your site if you link to theirs. Or you can even offer something free to those who link to your site, such as a complimentary web tool or download. Google spiders like to see this, and it radically improves your chances of getting ranked higher.
Site Maps
Site maps used on your site make the spiders’ jobs much easier, allowing them to quickly search your page. Be sure to keep the maps updated so they continue to offer the latest information to searchers.
It’s extremely difficult to know exactly how the Google and Yahoo ranking systems work, as the algorithms and other procedures are confusing and ever-changing. Following the tips above, however, has increased many website rankings, and these are still the most basic ways to get your website noticed.
