While social media marketing is definitely a highly effective tool for Internet marketing, it is critical that you do not abandon your SEO marketing campaign. SEO and social media marketing are a powerful combination that must go hand in hand in order to truly benefit your Internet marketing needs. Why is this?

The answer is simple. What happens when you create a social media marketing profile and you start connecting with people? In order to maintain their attention, you must be able to offer some form of valuable information that people can use. Social media marketing is just the beginning, a way to jumpstart your potential prospects. However, you must be able to provide pertinent information, such as blogs, articles, newsletters, etc. through your SEO techniques that will attract and keep the attention of those you meet in the social networking world.

How can they work together to grow your business? SEO can improve your social media campaigns, and vice versa. Keywords are an essential tool for SEO and can be integrated into your social media campaign. Use keywords in your LinkedIn profile, on your tweets, and in the titles of your descriptions on YouTube videos and Flickr photos. Tools like Google Insights can help you track trending topics associated with your website.

Social media can improve your search engine visibility. Have you noticed YouTube videos showing up on the front pages of Google? If you have a blog that shows up in the search results, your LinkedIn profiles, Facebook Fan Page, and tweets can show up on the front page of Google, too! Target keyword phrases on social media publishing platforms, such as: Hubpages, Squidoo, or Wiki. This will not jeopardize your current rankings.

SEO and social media are essential techniques that must be utilized together to ensure success. One does not work well without the other. Combining social media and SEO insights can be done by developing a plan that outlines your goals, your target market, and your SEO and social media marketing plans.

Take advantage of what social media marketing can do for your business, but do not let your guard down on your SEO strategy. These two are a powerful combination that can be the secret to your company’s success.

Failing to Fill out the Bio

People tend to want to dive into Twitter without taking the time to set it up. They are so enthusiastic they leave the bio section blank. This is a big mistake. Filling out a bio takes five minutes and it can help with your brand. Take the time and fill out a descriptive bio so people can find out more about you. They are much more likely to become interested in your company if you have a bio up.

Having a Bland Page

If you do not use an avatar or a background, you will look as though you simply put your profile up without giving it any thought. Take the time to create a real page. Twitter should be seen as a way to express yourself and sell your brand. Use every tool Twitter offers. Look at every tool as a way to brand your company and use them to your advantage.

Avoiding Conversations

Twitter is known for its one way messages, but if that is all you are using, you will not get the following you want. When there is an event or when a certain hashtag is popular, look for conversation and join in. Whenever you log into Twitter, look at the right of your screen and see the hashtags that are the most popular for the day. Join in and gain more followers.

Link Spamming

If you don’t have anything useful to say, it is best left unsaid. If you are promoting your site by spamming links, you will lose your followers on Twitter. You can occasionally put your link up there, but do not blast people with links.

Most people make deadly Twitter mistakes because they do not completely understand how to use the service. Take Twitter seriously and work to avoid mistakes and gain followers. You will then be able to cultivate relationships and sell your brand.

Be Clever

If you are boring, no one will want to follow you. Clever tweets get the followers. Don’t just write something down and hit send. Think about what you are saying. Add a little spice to your tweets and watch your followers grow.

Treat Everyone Equally

You should make friends on Twitter, and you need to treat those friends well. Have you ever noticed your followers dropping off? That is likely because you are not doing any friend maintenance. Make sure to spend time talking to each friend. If a friend is isolated, they wall leave. Use Twitter as a social networking tool and take the time to connect with each and every person on your list. This will improve your relationship with your followers and give you leverage with the Twitter community.

Retweet Valuable Tweets

Nothing is as flattering on Twitter as having a tweet retweeted. Share the love by retweeting posts, but only do it if the tweet has some value. Retweet often, and then notice your followers go up. People appreciate being noticed.

Do not make the mistake of retweeting everything, though. If you retweet everything that is said, your retweets will lose their power.

Show Your Identity

Your identity should shine through on Twitter. You might only get a few characters to speak your mind, but you still need to shine through. Your identity is important in the Twitter universe, and you need to let others know how you are.

Stay up to Date

If you take a Twitter break, your friends will take a break from you. People want someone who tweets often enough to remain relevant and interesting.

With that in mind, do not make the mistake of over tweeting. If you go crazy on Twitter, people will not want to follow you. They will not want to have to deal with the constant information flowing onto their page.

Twitter is the current social media trend and you can gain a solid following. Become savvy with Twitter and watch your followers grow.

In life, most people experience normal social interactions. They know what is expected of them, and thus they perform accordingly. The majority of people have these interactions without putting a great deal of thought into it, as it is second nature.

It’s a little different when it comes to social networking. They freeze up and they are afraid to take part in this important aspect of search engine marketing. They are not sure what to say, and thus they either say the wrong thing or they don’t say anything at all.

Before you throw in the towel, listen to the best advice you will get when it comes to social networking. It is advice you probably heard from your mother years ago, and it still rings true today. You need to be yourself.

What exactly does that mean? First, you need to talk about what you know about. This is the best way to form real connections in the social networking circuit. Stick with what you know so you can make an impression with the people that are involved in social networking sites.

Also, let people get to know you by using quotes, pictures, and even videos. You want to give people a real look at you. You have to humanize yourself when you are online. That is an essential part of search engine marketing.

You really need to focus on personal interactions to make your campaign go over as well as possible. Even though you are taking part in a game that involves millions of people, one on one contact is still very important. Respond to people and get involved in one on one conversation. You will be better off for it.

Social networking is an important part of search engine marketing. You have to market yourself, and in order to do that, you have to know how to present yourself. It might sound cliché, but you need to be yourself. If you are yourself, you will be able to gain followers and get more customers.

1. Retweet links and posts. This is a great way to get on the good side of other Twitter users, and it will give you more exposure.
2. Post daily. There is no point in having a Twitter account if you are not posting to it.
3. Keep your posts to the point. With Twitter, they have to be, as there is a 140 character limit, but some people create multiple posts so they can keep talking. That is not the point of Twitter.
4. Be sociable. You have to interact with others. This is not the time to be shy. Get out there and start talking. Your search engine marketing campaign will benefit if you get out there and start socializing.
5. Use Mr. Tweet so you can enhance your visibility on Twitter and find others that you would like to follow.
6. Send people a message whenever they follow you. A private message is a great way to introduce yourself and let the person know you appreciate the follow.
7. Get involved in Follow Friday. On Follow Friday, you can suggest people that you think others should follow. It’s a great way to have fun with Twitter and to show others that you appreciate them.
8. Fill out your profile and make sure you include a link to your site. You want to make sure you get the most exposure from Twitter so people will know how to get back to you.
9. Use a picture or an avatar. You want to personalize your site, which means you need to make it look great.
10. Use Twitterhawk to see if your company has been mentioned by other tweeters. If it has, be sure to seek out the people that have mentioned you. Follow them, and they will likely reciprocate.

Twitter is a very powerful tool, and you want to make sure you use it correctly so you can get the most out of your search engine marketing campaign. If you use Twitter correctly, you can get a large following and turn that following into customers.

1. Don’t market too much. Yes, you are on Twitter to help your business, but if you are shoving your business down people’s throats, they will not be receptive. Don’t just set up an account to try to make sales. You have to get a personal connection as well.
2. Don’t follow a bunch of people without getting followed back. Twitter is about reciprocation. If you are following others and they aren’t following you, you need to back off. When people see you have ten followers but you are following thousands, they will assume you are spamming people.
3. Stay away from hot button issues. When you are using search engine optimization techniques, you have to remember to be on your best behavior. Leave politics and religion out of the conversation.
4. Don’t spam. This is one of the most important things to realize. Don’t send a message every few seconds. You want to update daily, but not hourly.
5. Don’t use foul language. You are representing your business, so you need to be professional.
6. Don’t assume followers will just find you. You have to go out and find people. They won’t come to you. You have to go out and find people with like interests, and you have to post.
7. Don’t post anything that people that is not fit to be read at work. If it is not something your boss would like, it does not need to be posted.
8. Don’t think your account is just about you. People want to hear about things that don’t have anything to do with your business. Talk about news stories and fun information. You can also talk about your business, but don’t overdo it.
9. Don’t rush the process. It takes some time to build a following. Don’t rush it, but work on your search engine marketing campaign each day.
10. Don’t ignore anyone. If someone replies to you or retweets something you said, be sure to comment back to them. You want to show others you appreciate it when you are mentioned.

If you want to be a pro at Twitter, take the time to learn the best and worst practices for Twitter. That way, you will be more equipped to have a solid search engine marketing campaign.

The nofollow directive in links has always been a safety net of sorts. You could use it to link to contact outside your pages that might come from an unknown source, and it was the accepted standard to linking to your own content so that the search engines didn’t believe you were link stuffing. Search engines pretty much adhered to nofollow directives and all was well.

Today, we face a much different environment. It all started with Wikipedia in some ways. By default, Wikipedia nofollows all outbound links on its site – in other words, the site isolates itself from the rest of the Internet. Plenty of people are linking in, but from the search engines point of view they aren’t linking out. Yet SEO professionals noticed something rather interesting about this arrangement. Wikipedia consistently ranks near the top for a lot of search queries. Was this “black hole” actually being rewarded by the search engines? Or could it be that the search engines were ignoring the nofollow tags altogether?

Before an answer was found for that question another wave of links without the nofollow directive hit through the micro-blogging sites. Since almost all of the micro-blogging sites require users to “host” their micro-blogs on their sites the #1 rule of blogging was broken – host your content on your own domain. Because of this the links to that content started pouring in. People were linking up to Twitter feeds and Tumblr posts left and right, and almost nobody was using the nofollow directive. It didn’t matter to the average user if they trusted the person or not, they were just interested in linking to the content for their own purposes.

A third scenario popped up as well, led by the Wikipedia example above – people started to nofollow all links from their sites to replicate the success Wikipedia had. So now we had three situations where nofollow was coming into play:

• To isolate sites entirely from outbound links.
• Ignoring it completely because of the popularity of sites like Twitter and Tumblr.
• Search engines choosing to ignore nofollow and following anyway.

Have you kept up? It’s a nightmare for anyone engaged in SEO to try and figure some of this out!

To throw another twist into the mix, recent tests have shown that sites that have nothing but nofollow links pointing to them are actually ranking. This gives credibility to the theory that search engines are choosing to ignore the directives.

So how can you use all these findings to make your sites better and to increase your rank? Simply put, it’s something where right now there is no clear answer. You should continue to use the nofollow directive as you have in the past for paid links and such, but when it comes to social networking sites you may want to drop it altogether. You may want to try several different versions of pages to see which ones ranks better trying a combination of nofollow directives. Questions like this make the perfect scenario for A/B testing.

If you want to get more information about Search Engine Optimization, we invite you to visit our SEO FAQ and subscribe our feed in our SEO Blog.

Recently Google Japan launched a new home page where it was promoting a list with the most searched terms typed on its search engine. It´s a kind of “HotWords” also found on Twitter:

Accordantly with TechCrunch, that new service has been already available to include in the iGoogle page of any user. The big trouble arose when Google Japan decided hire an online marketing company, Cyberbuzz, to promote that new tool, already available as a widget to webmasters, through pay-per-posts.

Well, some good integrations arose from that process as reported by TechCrunch, but this number was really low if you get note by the research in Google BlogSearch.

Google Japan swam against the flow of good online advertising practices supported by its headquarter in the USA, when it dicided to use pay-per-posts campaigns. All of us know how Google USA fights Pay-per-Post practices.

So far so good for Google Japan. But just for now.

Yesterday, Fabio Ricotta an SEO blogger from Brazil noticed a twitter message written by Matt Cutts leader of the Google Anti Spam team where he announced a punishment to Google Japan. He made a question to him about the issue and Matt gave a positive answer confirming the punishment.

We don´t know if that was an isolated action, took by the Anti Spam team, because the Google Japan was punished after 46 paid posts (Noticed at the Google BlogSearch research). It´s a little suspected think that an algorithm detected the issue, but we cannot discard this hypotheses.

Well, the most important thing to learn from the whole history is: even the Google branches in other countries can’t walk away with something concerning the Google Anti Spam Polices, and if you intend or actually do pay-per-posts then you must open your eyes, maybe you are the next to lose Page Rank from one day to another.

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Many SEO companies are a “one solution” company. They offer the client one solution to a problem, and don’t even mention the fact that there are several others that may produce better results. If you are lucky, in 6 to 12 months you’d have a chance to revisit the recommendations – but let’s be honest, how many times do we actually do that? Once we make a recommendation most of us stick with it and never look back.

To be fair, it wasn’t until recently that we had tools to help us make better decisions and to test our changes. The introduction of detailed web analytics (such as Google Analytics) has made the idea of SEO testing achievable. Search engines and crawlers also now index more frequently, and thanks to features such as XML sitemaps we can even control how often most of our content gets checked and crawled. We no longer have to wait 3 months until Google crawls us again, we can (almost) control it ourselves. All of this comes together to let us see what changes worked, and which ones didn’t, faster than ever.

So now that we know we have the tools available for testing, what type of testing should we do? What questions do we have to ask ourselves to make effective use of SEO? Some of the better questions I’ve come up with are these:

• Does alt-text on images matter? Should I stuff keywords in there?
• Are footer links effective? Should I have one, two, two hundred?
• How many links should I have from the homepage? Should I just link to main topics or products or should I try to link to a wide assortment of pages?
• Long or short title tags? Brand before or after the keywords?

These are just a few questions (and there are probably hundreds of other questions), but the answers to these questions are going to vary from site to site and demonstrate how testing can help point you to the correct answer.

There are also questions which won’t be as easy to determine, but still need to be addressed: Should I buy links? Should I cloak content based on user agent? Questions like these are difficult to test, but you should still be asking and trying to answer these questions as well.

Once you get your testing methodology down for SEO you now need to start monitoring the results. One of the best ways of doing this is through split testing. This is where you use different techniques on different parts of the site and see which one brings about the best results. For some sites you may also wish to look into A/B testing where you design the same page two (or more) different ways and then send a percentage of people who visit a particular page to the different versions. This works best when you are selling something as the results are more obvious through the sales figures.

Testing should be an integral part of any SEO process. If you aren’t doing it now you should start investigating how to do it and start rolling it into your projects. You will find that by investing the time up front to setup testing methodologies your final deliverables to your clients will deliver the results that keep them coming back year after year for your services.

Not all social networks or social media sites will be beneficial to you. For starters, you have to have a good idea of who your target audience is, and what social media services they might use. These are the places in which you should focus your efforts.

Another thing to remember is that on many social networks, users are hyper aware of spam. Therefore, you’re going to have to get creative about where and now you submit links, because you don’t want to come off as a blatant marketer. When using social bookmark sites, such as Digg or Del.ici.ous, don’t make overt attempts to have your content voted to the top, either by encouraging others or creating false accounts and voting for your own content. This is considered black hat SEO in many circles, and your content can be removed if this is discovered.

One thing that’s important to remember is to provide specific tags for your links. Specific keywords and tags can help you stand out in a crowd. Rather than competing for a popular keyword such as “used cars”, try being more specific, using something like “used car parts” and try to tackle a niche. This will result in more attention in that niche and much better results.

When you link, link to content within your site that will be useful to users. Providing them with something specific is much better than linking them directly to your homepage. Remember, providing specific, useful content to a niche interest group will ultimately be much more effective than trying to reach everyone through general, boring content. A great idea is to link to an article within your blog, and then use the blog to relate back to your main site. Make yourself look like a specific expert, and your SEO and social media marketing will be most successful.