Are Social Media and SEO Linked?

Taking a first look at the most essential SEO component of social media: social media builds links. In fact , if you can create viral content and are lucky to strike it rich with a successful viral campaign, it replicates an SEO link building campaign. The large number of backlinks create authority and legitimacy, proving your expertise.

If a website is getting it’s content shared thousands of timea across social media, it sends some positive signals and information about your internet site to search engines:

1. Your website contains current information

2. Your website is current, not an old site floating around the internet

3. Your website understands the needs and wants of your audience.

Search engines are interested in one thing: helping users find the best content that covers what they are looking for. Large amounts of social shares indicate that a large amount of people not only found what they were attempting to find on your website, but were also so impressed by the information on your site that they chose to share it with others.

Viral Content = Valuable Content that people consider useful and good enough to share with those they know.

By gaining a big amount of social shares, you’re not just boosting your SEO signals—you’re also creating content with worth for your base of clients. Viral content is a win-win for both your brand and your search engine rankings. Like everything else in life , however , price requires time and talent to create.

Viral content is quality content. It’s important to ensure that it’s well-crafted, it’s information, useful, or it’s funny. If you need the thousands of shares, you are going to have to put thought, skill, and effort into creating something with real value for your clients, customers and audience.

If you’re looking for a Port Macquarie SEO Consultant or for that matter if you’re based anywhere in Australia we’d love to talk with you about adding you to the Bright Biz family of customers.

While most other websites talk about travelling with children internationally, Little Aussie Travellers celebrates the amazing regions around Australia, and helps you research how best to explore the Australian country as a family. Offering great tips on how to travel with children, camping recipes for families, family travel on a budget, how to choose the right travel gear for families, how to choose the best 4wd for Australian travel, and a whole range of travel resources.

Not only that, there’s some great blogging and other stories too.

So if you’ve ever wondered if it’s possible to just pack up your life, sell all your “stuff” and live on the road to really “smell the roses” then follow this great website and watch as stories of past travel are shared, and stories of research and planning for around australia travel unfold.

TOOL 1 – Google Analytics.

For most website owners they don’t ever really understand the value of their site, or how effective it is at attracting and retaining viewers. Do you know how many people visit your website? How they got there? How long they were on your site and how many pages they viewed? How much direct traffic vs search engine traffic you are getting? Don’t worry if you said know, there is a free tool to help you find out all this valuable information and more.

Install Google Analytics on your website by signing up and following the instructions.

TOOL 2 – Keyword Research Tool.

Once you have analytics installed, you really need to focus on what keywords you’ll be optimising your website for. The easiest way to do this is a quick brainstorming session. If you were a customer, what keywords would you type into google to find your business? Write these down. Once you have some starter keywords, head over to Google Keyword Research Tool and follow the instructions. You’ll need to type in keyword/s and google will help you come up with possible variations that will be suitable for your website. The best part is that it even provides estimated search volumes so you know how popular a keyword is. Another great piece of information here is the competitive rating that is applied to tell you how competitive certain keywords are. Just remember the traffic stats are “estimates” so take them into account but don’t always trust everything you read.

TOOL 3 – SEO For Firefox Extension.

If you’re a Firefox user (and you should be) then a great tool to install and use is the SEO Book SEO for Firefox Extension. It’s a wonderful tool which allows you to view market research information quickly and easily while you’re browsing the internet. If you’re interested in what your competitors are doing and how difficult it might be to beat them, then stop wondering and start discovering. With all these stats at your fingertips, decisions on what areas you need to compete hardest in to reach your SEO targets are much easier than they once were

While it’s not likely anybody but Google Search Engineers will ever truly know exactly why and how Google search engines choose one website over another to offer in search results, it is clear that they do provide guidelines that serve as a general rule for best practice amongst website owners.

The real achievement of a great SEO plan is the ensure that Google sees your website as the most relevant.

If you have managed to do some initial reading, then you may have come across the descriptions of “Black Hat” and “White Hat” SEO. For the average website owner, the only tactics you are likely to undertake yourself, are likely to be considered “white hat” and this is the way it should be. “Black Hat” SEO methods are developed to try to trick Google into thinking a website is more important, than it actually is. The problem with Black Hat methods is that they generally only work in the short term but Google are constantly refining and tweaking their ranking methods and will quickly penalise and ban websites who appear to gainrankings using these unsavoury techniques.

The Main Points to Consider for Great White Hat SEO Practices.

How Important Does Your Website Appear?

Google understands that people prefer to visit accurate and popular websites.  If other websites talk about your website and recommend it by linking to your website, Google sees those links as “Votes” for your website. The greater the number of links, the greater Importance your website holds. Not all links are created equal though. It’s important to keep in mind that links from spam pages can actually be negative, so only seek links from great quality webpages.

TIP: Approach suppliers or businesses you work or partner with to link to your website.

Is Your Website Trustworthy?

As previously mentioned, links from poor quality websites can actually hurt your SEO Rankings. Google will only believe your website is trustworthy if the websites who are linking to you also appear to be trustworthy.

Do not use techniques such as hiding text within your website, sneakily redirecting your page to others, buying links from link farms or any other of the blackhat techniques floating around the web. They will only ensure that the search engines actually see your site as low grade.

What Are Your Customers Searching For?

So now we know that Google needs to know that your website is important and trustworthy, but important and trustworthy for what subjects? You will need to decide what “search terms” it is that you want your website to rank for. What would your customers type into Google Search to find you? My customers might type in something such as SEO Consultant. Your customers might type in something such as Sydney Plumber if you were a plumber located in that region.

TIP: Write a list of all the likely search terms your customers will use to find your business online. It’s those keywords you will be wanting to use across your website.

Of course  having a trustworth and important website is only a basic explanation of how SEO works, but if you keep this in mind with all decisions you make relating to your website, it will be a step in the right direction.

Did you know?

90% of search engine users will click on a result in the first 3   pages of search engine rankings. What page is your business on?

Chances are, your portfolio website is based on flash and when you search for photographers in your location, your website is nowhere to be seen! If it is on the first page, then it’s not up high where most people click.

There are some simple changes you can make to your online marketing strategy to help ensure your website has a chance at ranking higher. To get started if you’re doing this yourself, the best strategy for photographers with flash based websites is to have a blog on the same domain. In many instances it is actually easier to focus Search Engine Optimising toward your blog, rather than your flash site. This may seem back to front or not ideal, but when potential customers are seeing your work that’s what matters right?

Before doing anything though, it’s important that you know and understand your keywords and your market. If your target customers were searching for you in google what would they type? Often this will be things like “your town” photographer and variations of that. The good news is that it is generally relatively easy to achieve rankings for location based keywords once you know what you’re doing.

If your website is html or just blog based, then you have a definite advantage, and achieiving high seo rankings for photographers is easier with blog and html sites, but for those with flash sites it is also achievable but just a little tougher.

Stay tuned for our guide to SEO for Photographers. We’ve got some amazing resources launching soon that could not only help you grow your business online, but save you money wasting mistakes at the same time! If that’s something of interest to you then SEO For Photographers will be essential.

As a self confessed small business in the search engine optimisation arena we love what we do. Being regional allows us to focus on small and regional businesses that might otherwise find it too overwhelming or expensive to use services such as Search Engine Optimisation or Social Media Marketing to grow their business and compete in the online playing field.

We continue to offer previous services such as writing services to write or edit websites, newsletters, articles and any other online copywriting requirements.

We also now proudly offer Online Reputation Management. ORM works to help businesses or individuals monitor what is being said about them online, or to clean up negativity that may have surfaced online. Such a fulfilling service to offer and sadly becoming more and more necessary in the harsh online environment.

Getting a website up and running can seem like such a huge expense, that having website copy professionally written is just not even a consideration for many small business owners. Worse still is when the web designer  charges  big bucks to have someone write the text and there is trust implied to providing a great final website, so the copy writing is never questioned.

The truth is, that unless a web designer, or copy writer is used to optimising their designs and writing for the online environment, the resulting website could indeed be more harm than good.

I was horrified to speak to another business owner who used a copywriter who had been “published a few times in local papers”. WOW! The following discussion made it very clear to me that not only did the writer seem to have very little idea about how to optimise their writings to benefit the website owners OR the readers,but also that people were paying good money for this writing and being led to believe that print publication was of benefit and reason to pay very well for this service.

The risk to many business owners is that they pay for a website, are supplied sub par copy writing or try to write copy themselves and when their website launches they wonder why they aren’t being found in search engines and the people who do visit their website don’t stick around to read what they have to offer.

Here is a quick checklist for how to ensure you have the best wording on your website pages. Don’t be convinced by your web designer that they can offer writing services until you are sure the services are what you really need. Small Business SEO Copywriters such as Bright Biz or one of the many businesses available can ensure your website copy writing is just what you need.

EASY ONLINE COPYWRITING CHECKLIST

• The Copywriter asks what your overall goal for the page or pages is.
• They ask you to provide, or help you to decide on effective keywords that help your website in search engine results.
• They include these keywords in the website copy (but not overuse the keywords as this can result in penalties from search engines)
• The writing they produce is short, engaging and written well for both search engines and readers.
• They provide you or offer a service to provide meta tags and descriptions for each page, based on what they have written.

Just because a writer can write well, doesn’t mean they can write the most beneficial way for your business online.

One question I often hear as an SEO Consultant who often recommends that small businesses start a twitter account is “but why do we need one?” I was going to write about why, and I’ve stumbled across this great blog post, the information is based on law firms, but applies to any industry so check it out:

Twitter

Thanks to the power of social networking, NattyJane Designs was one business website I had the delight of assisting to revamp.

Nat is a lovely lady who offers graphic design services at wonderful prices. She specialises in products such as

Photo Storyboards

Birth Announcements

Party Invitations

Business Packages and Logo Design and more….

Thankyou Nat for allowing me to work with you on your website, I’m glad you love the results so much. I highly recommend anyone looking for custom designed photographic products to head over the NattyJane Designs.

It’s for that very reason that I teamed up with Amanda Powell of Support a Work at Home Parent & Minkabelle Designs to help launch her new websites.

Amanda needed 2 websites, one for Support a WAHP and one for her own business Minkabelle Designs, and I was extremely honoured to help her find a solution.

Together, we created flexible and attractive solutions to her needs that allow  her to communicate easily and effectively,  update and change the site with absolute ease when she needs to, and it all looks great as well!

Not only that, I was very happy to give Amanda some inside tips about search engine optimisation and some ideas that will help her businesses in the short term and long term.

Thanks Amanda, it was fun working with you.