Sep 25

Last night, I was a panelist at Social Media Club RDU where we discussed how social media impacts organizations and which department within the company is responsible for managing social media activities.

While we didn’t come up with a consensus decision on who actually owns social media we did have a very thorough exploration of the topic.

We also discussed some of the best ways to leverage social media and mobile marketing in your promotional efforts including some innovative ways to effectively use twitter, facebook, ning, linkedin and other social networks.

Watch the video and let me know your thoughts…

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Jun 18

Many new Web 2.0 sites like del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Digg and many more allow users to add and categorize links to their favorite websites. This allows you to store your favorite sites on the Internet instead of just in your web browser so you can access them from anywhere. It also allows you to share your favorite sites with the entire world so others can benefit from the great sites you’ve found.

Most of these Web 2.0 sites allow you to “tag” a website page with various words that describe it. This eliminates the need to have a defined category structure like a typical website directory would have and allows you to categorize a website with whatever words make the most sense to you. (Hint: YOUR KEYWORDS!)

What makes social bookmarking sites so powerful is that the search engine spiders absolutely love them!

A search spider’s job is to scour the Internet in order to find and index all of the web page links it discovers. So it makes sense that these spiders will put a lot of emphasis on sites that contain lots of links about web pages that users feel are important. The more users that have the same site listed in their bookmarks, the higher the ranking the search engines will assign to it.

The tags are the real key though. Search engines determine what a particular URL is about based on the words that people use to link to it. This is why if you do a search on Google for the phrase “click here” the top 3 results are usually for Adobe Acrobat, Apple Quicktime, and Sun’s Java. Many sites distribute their content in one of these formats so they often have a sentence that says something like: “To open this file you will need to have Acrobat Reader installed. Click Here to download it.” The hundreds of thousands of links to Acrobat with the words “click here” give it a #1 ranking for that phrase even though those words don’t have anything to do with the product and they don’t appear anywhere on the web page.

So what this all means to you is:

1)      The quickest and easiest way to get your website pages to rank on page 1 of the search engines for specific terms is to bookmark them on ALL of the social bookmarking sites.

2)      Use the keywords you want to rank for as the tags for the bookmark. 

3)      The more sites you bookmark it on the better. Vary your keywords and descriptions slightly on the various sites so it appears natural.

4)      Don’t just bookmark your site. Add other related sites as well so it looks natural.

Social Bookmarking is a very tedious process though and takes a lot of time. As a business owner it’s probably not the best use of your time and it’s best to outsource it to someone who knows how to do it and doesn’t mind doing it for a lot less money than the value of your time. If you need help finding a reputable company to do this for you, just let us know and we’ll gladly help you out.

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