Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

Last week I started to explore the idea of focusing not only your website, but your whole web presence, check it out if you missed it.

Where do I start?
You should start by evaluating your web presence and then work to grow and strengthen what you have. Can people searching for your products or services using search engines find your web site? Your website must, must, must be optimized for search. What’s the point of having a website if people searching for its content can’t somehow find it?
Here are some things to question regarding search engine optimization:

• Are you using the right keywords? Are they widely searched? Are your keywords geo-targeted?
• How does your website rank for its keywords? Could they improve?
• Are you consistently creating new content on your website that includes those keywords?

Next, assess the content that is related to your website that can be distributed and shared by the people that want it. This includes things like your blog and your email newsletter; you probably have subscribers to both. Blogs, newsletters, and business news can be distributed on your website and and then linked to other websites and social communities. Additionally, blogs are super search engine friendly and great for reinforcing keywords. This means that even someone on another website, a social network, or using a search engine has the opportunity of finding your content.
Here are some content tips to grow your list of subscribers:

• Easily distribute your content for those seeking your information by using an RSS feed for your blog.
• Blog and send your newsletter on a consistent basis.
• Promote your blog and your newsletter online.

Continue expanding your web presence.
Your web presence is never a finished product. What I mean by this is continue doing what’s working and find new spaces online where your target audience may be. You can use resources you already have, like videos, demos, PowerPoints, etc. and re-purpose them on networks like YouTube and Slideshare where people can share with others as well as link to your content. Keep in mind, if you aren’t spreading your content out across the web, other people may be.

Consistent branding across the web.
Lastly, I must mention how important it is to keep your brand consistent on all platforms that exist within your web presence. This includes your company logo, the language, and the tone (tone may alter somewhat depending on the network your content is on). Ensuring your branding is consistent, builds trust and affects your online reputation.

FTW Organizers: Chrystie Corns (speaking),
Jacia Kinsman and Rich Brooks (texting/checking in)

The Hall Web Services marketing team headed over to Social Media FTW this week. A full day conference here in Portland, Maine on all things social media. It was great to mix and mingle with experts, designers, marketers and business owners as we all try to figure out how to leverage social media for our businesses.

During each time slot there were three different presentations being held in different rooms. With 6 of us in attendance, we covered a lot of ground and wanted to share with you the biggest takeaways we had from the event.

Jaica Kinsman’s session: Facebook 201 – Take Your Facebook Marketing to the Next Level

A lot of us attended Jaica’s session and found it one of the best of the day. Alex said his biggest takeaway of the day was when Jaica spoke about optimizing your news feed content. She highlighted that it was best to send out content at different times of the day versus posting three updates at the same time. She also recommended sharing different kinds of content like text updates, video updates and sharing links. Everyone should be more strategic about how, when and what they are updating their Facebook page with.

Jenika also liked Jaica’s piece about optimizing your news feed. She got some great ideas for optimizing landing tabs on Facebook pages – one tab for people who are not yet fans and another for people who are a fan. Great way to tailor your message to the audience.

Jenika also said that the whole conference was a good reminder about getting back to basics and fundamentals of business, just using new tools to do it – you’re still human, you still need to have trust and build relationships.

Kasi ALSO said Jaica’s presentation had the most takeaways for her. She said “SMO (Social Media Optimization) may be the new SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SMO is about driving traffic to websites through engagement on social networks, rather than from search engines. Although I don’t think that SMO will replace SEO, it can certainly have a place in a well-rounded internet marketing strategy”.

Chris Cavallari’s session: Creating, Publishing and Marketing Online Video

Kyle was excited to check out Chris’ presentation and the content did not disappoint. Kyle’s biggest takeaway of the day was that if businesses are looking to make more video content, they should really focus more on valuable content and less on trying to make a video go viral.

Alex Steed’s session: Social Media for Non-Profits

Alayna really enjoyed Alex’s session. Her biggest takeaway of the day was that each non-profit (and business!) is unique and no solution is one size fits all. It is important to be aware of what others are doing, but know that something that works for one non-profit/business will not always work for another. Stay connected to share tips and to help, try new things, but if it is not working let it go.

Derek Rice’s session: Building Online Communities

I really enjoyed Derek Rice’s presentation. He had a lot of information and if you were not paying attention, you may have missed some gems. I liked how he focuses on finding industry specific influencers to partner with. Too many times we focus on celebrities or famous tweeters when really we may get more value from a popular blogger in a specific niche.

Is Any of This Social Media Stuff Working

I had the pleasure of being a part of the day’s lineup and did a presentation on Social Media ROI and measuring your efforts. In my session we talked about creating a plan, strategy, choosing the right social media sites and how you can measure if your efforts are moving your bottom line, and not just moving your social media stats. The slides are below.

We had a nice turnout and got some really great questions during and after the presentation. It seemed that a lot of people were looking for services that could help them keep their social media efforts organized; I just saw this blog post today and wanted to share it with you: 22 Social Media Marketing Management Tools.

Thanks again to Rich, Jaica and Chrystie for organizing this event. For more information about Social Media FTW please visit their website.

Yes, your website matters, it matters a whole lot. Your primary focus should be on ensuring that your site is designed to effectively drive and convert traffic as well as remain consistent with your brand. However, it’s time you also start thinking about your overall web presence.

What’s Web Presence?
Your web presence describes what you’re doing online with your business. Building a website is the first step in creating an online identity, but your web presence involves using the “interwebs” as an online marketing platform and finding different outlets to promote your business on the internet.

Gauge your web presence.
To get an idea of your overall presence on the web ask yourself these questions:

• Are people searching for your products and services finding your business? How?
• How are you connecting with prospects online? Better yet, how are they connecting with you?
• Are your online efforts effective? Are people contacting you through forms on your site, commenting/messaging you on Facebook, replying/direct messaging you on Twitter, etc.?

Broaden your focus – look at the big picture.
Your web presence includes your website, acting as the hub for all your online marketing activities. But your presence is all those spaces where your business can be found and interacts with people online:

• Social media networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter
• Expert-based websites and online forums
• Press and news websites

Of course it takes extra time to devote to promoting your content online, but the pay off can be well worth it. Ultimately, you’re spreading content you’ve already created in relevant spaces online where people are naturally looking for it.

Stay tuned for Part 2 next week, when I’ll go into more detail about how to build your web presence.

Google’s PageRank can play a role in how your website ranks for keywords in Google, so it makes sense to want to know what your site’s PageRank is.  However, if the word “PageRank” is a little fuzzy to you, let’s try to clear that up a bit.

PageRank Doesn’t Mean Keyword Rankings

Even though it has the word “rank” in it, the term “PageRank” does not mean where your keywords come up in the organic search rankings.  A web page’s PageRank is an assigned value from 0-10 that is determined mostly by the number of websites that link back to yours, and the quality of these sites.  According to Google,

“PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.  PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.”

PageRank is its own algorithm that’s a component of Google’s overall algorithm (which determines the web pages are most relevant for a search query).  If you want to make your head hurt, you can check out the mathematical formula behind PR.  This formula is Google’s trademark and has been patented.

So…What’s My PageRank?

There are a couple of ways you can check your site’s PageRank. Most SEO browser plugins that you can download for Firefox and Chrome will indicate PageRank.  One I like to use is SeoQuake for FireFox.  It gives you a lot of information about the web page you’re on, including the date that the domain of the website was registered, how many links there are to your website (this is a figure from Yahoo’s Site Explorer), and the last time Google cached the page.  But you don’t even have to download a plugin if you just want to do a quick check.  There are a few websites where you can enter your domain and it will give you the PageRank value. (These are third-party tools that are not affiliated with Hall Web Services.)

It’s important to note that Google publicly updates PageRank extremely infrequently; every few months or so is the typical trend.  The PageRank value you see may be subject to change over the next few months.

How Important is PageRank?

For me, I use PageRank merey as a reference regarding the quality of backlinks that a website has.  A website may only have a few hundred backlinks, but if those links are from sites that have a high PageRank, the website they are linking back to may also have a high PageRank.  A lower PageRank may indicate few backlinks, or many backlinks from less “quality” sites.  Websites that are brand new typically start out with a PageRank of 0.

Still, even if a site has a PageRank of 0, it can still rank at the top for their desired keywords.  A lower PageRank does not always equate to low rankings.  In fact, Google doesn’t want people to be obsessed with PageRank.  Webmasters used to be able to see their sites’ PageRank in Google’s Webmaster Tools accounts but they removed it in October of 2009.  Google Employee Susan Mowska stated, “We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true.”

I agree with Google that PageRank shouldn’t be a metric that you live and die by.  Still, Google does offer some information on how they suggest you get backlinks to your site, which could ultimately increase your PageRank and even help your site get better rankings for more competitive keywords.