Boost Revenue Via Twitter

The gadget-reviewing fans at TechCrunch recently looked into how Twitter users rate a business and it soon became clear that if a business answers a question that a user posted on Twitter; they would be far more likely to buy from the business. In fact, a massive 64% of users claimed that if a company responds to their question via the social networking site they would be more likely to buy from that company!

How Twitter Can Boost Your Reputation and Sales

This is HUGE news for Twitter fans and the few businesses left in the world that don’t use Twitter and evidently should as it shows just how important it is to connect and interact with potential customers to boost you sales!

What the Survey Revealed…

The survey showed that consumers were more likely to feel that a company was readily available, reliable and willing to put the customer’s needs first if they answered their question quickly and the fact that a company listens to what is being asked; builds up the ground level base of trust.

So, how can you use this useful info to your advantage?

Expand your Followers!

If consumers are more likely to buy from companies who answer questions posted on Twitter, doesn’t it make sense that you should have as many followers on Twitter as possible? Build your list and when you have attracted more followers, attract some more!

A large social media base is great if you want to boost sales and here is the stat that back up the concept:

• 59% said they were more likely to follow a company that answered their questions on Twitter

With more than half of those questioned more likely to follow your business if you answer their questions and even more followers more likely to buy from you if you answer their questions – answering consumer questions via Twitter seems like a simple way to boost sales!

Here is a great example of how the concept works:

Instead of being in Jamaica on holiday I am sat on the tarmac at MIA. The reason for this is a four-hour delay that I endured at JFK and I after making numerous phone calls to both airlines involved; I turned to Twitter for some guidance. After attempting to contact both airlines via Twitter, guess which one I will be using again for future flights? The one that responded to my questions!

A total of 2049 people were questioned in the Twitter survey conducted by the technical gurus at TechCrunch and with 64% of these people agreeing with me that when a company answers your questions when you need them to most – you are more likely to use them either again or for the first time!

Are you listening to this airline no.2? If you had responded to my Tweets for help and advice while I spent part of my holiday sitting on the tarmac instead of sunning myself on a beach; I may consider using your services again!

However obvious these statistics may sound, lots of businesses still fail to engage regularly with their users and as a result, they are losing customers. Not only will people be less likely to buy from you, they may also end up feeling rage at being left stranded at an airport for hours with no support and end up Tweeting about their bad experience.

Or in some cases, writing songs about damaged guitars… Contrary to popular belief – not all press is good press!

What do you think about the way that businesses use Twitter?

Feel free to read more at: http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/29/users-say-theyre-more-likely-to-buy-if-a-business-answers-their-question-on-twitter/

Win the rankings race to get to the top!

Your SERP (search engine results page) is the page of websites that are listed in response to the keywords that are used within a search. You can use a SERP Tracker service to see where your website stands in the rankings war and learning about your SERP Tracker results can be done in a number of different ways. Currently, we use Authority Labs to inform us of our ranking standings.

There are many factors that can affect your SERP standings and here are some of the most obvious:

• Search History: (this is switched on automatically)
• Datacenter: (this can sometimes run different algorithms and can be out of sync)
• Geolocation: (this is based on where the IP address is located)
• Real-Time Search
• Universal Results
• Miscellaneous

Getting hold of results that filter out as many of these variables as possible is ideal so you will be left with a more accurate account of how you are faring in the rankings game. However, it is not always possible to get rid of all of the variables and this means that sometimes rankings are not the same as you will see on your personal computer.

It is important that we point out that we are working hard to find a solution to this issue to ensure that we can offer our customers a more accurate look at their SERP standings.

Here are some of the top solutions that we have come up with so far:

• Give you the capacity to import data related to your SERPs
• Give you the capacity to alter your rank records
• Give you the capacity to select a location – This will mean changing our systems slightly to pass location information found in the query but results are currently still prone to variation

When we have decided what changes we will implement to ensure an improved service for you, we will announce these alterations and keep you fully updated.

Bring out the red carpet for your SEO agency!

Nowadays, all businesses should understand the importance of using SEO services to boost their online presence. An SEO agency provides a wide range of services that will help you to improve the visibility of your company on the internet. Your website will attract more visitors and this will allow you to grow your business and this is why SEO services are so vital today and into the foreseeable future.

To find the best SEO agency you will need to make sure that you use a professional company with an established background in the industry.

Here are a few of the most obvious things to look out for when looking for an SEO agency:

• White hat SEO procedures
• Proven track record
• A regular update on how SEO is improving your business
• Where is the SEO agencies own site ranking? If they aren’t ranking for top competitive keywords, then move on.

SEO professionals will bring a variety of skills to the table. They will understand how to attract more traffic to your website, how to ensure that the search engines rank your site highly, have a talent for analyzing users psychology and an understanding of how to research primary and longtail keywords.

SEO Tips

Search engine optimization is a complicated industry and this is why it is essential that you use an SEO agency to help you to optimize your website rather than attempt to do it yourself! SEO agencies will do keyword research to establish which keywords need to be implemented into the website content and there are various expert methods and techniques that will be used in order to achieve this.

SEO specialists will often use press releases, forums, and articles to optimize content and these all play a vital role in generating more site traffic. Content for a website will also need to be optimized and SEO agencies will be able to offer all of these services to businesses of all sizes.

SEO Services

White hat SEO is always important and you should never use an SEO agency that provides black hat techniques. SEO services will not only boost your site traffic and search engine rankings but they will save you the time and effort of having to achieve these goals. This allows you to focus on whatever you need to be doing while the experts optimize your website for you.

If you are worried that SEO services are only for those with a big budget then think again! Professional SEO services can be found for a really affordable price and even if you think you will save yourself money by doing it yourself – you really won’t! The rules and regulations about what works and what doesn’t in the optimizing industry change all the time, and the only way to keep up with all the tricks of the trade is to be a professional.

Hence the reason why SEO services provided by a professional agency are vital if you want to grow your business….

What services do you always look out for from your SEO agency?

Ensure the search engines can rank your video content with Video Sitemap

Google Video Sitemaps should be used whenever you post video content on a website. It works by providing Google with metadata about the video and therefore allows the search engine to rank your site through an additional method.

So, now we have established what a Video Sitemap is, let’s look into how it works…

Video Sitemaps allow you to provide Google with information needed for the search engines to rank your website by looking at the following:

• category
• title
• running time
• video description
• intended audience

All of this info helps Google to determine how relevant and rich the video content on your site is, which will help you to improve your listing on the video search results. The aim of Google is to offer its users the most relevant search results for their search terms and this rule applies to video content as well. Billions of people use Google every day and out of these billions, many are searching for video content. Google Sitemaps is free.

Now that we have identified what Sitemap is and how it works, we can now look at how we can set it up!

Step 1: Set up a Sitemap account at: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80472

Step 2: Add your website URL to your Sitemap account

Step 3: Navigate to the Dashboard page

Step 4: Add and verify your Sitemap

Step 5: The Dashboard page will then show a number 1 under the Sitemap column

What is Video Content?

First of all, you can establish whether or not you need to set up a Video Sitemap by looking at your website content. Video content refers to the pages that embed the video, to the URLs used to play the video and the URLs of the actual video content.

Every URL that you submit must include the following:

• Title
• Description
• Play page URL
• Thumbnail URL
• The player URL or the video file location

For every Sitemap file that you submit, there can be no more than 50,000 entries. If your website has more than 50,000 videos, you will have to use more than one Sitemap.

What Files Are Accepted?

Google is able to crawl and index all of the following types of files:

• .mpeg
• .mp4
• .mpg
• .m4v
• .mov
• .wmv
• .swf
• .flv
• .asf
• .avi
• .ra
• .ram
• .rm

However, every file MUST be accessible with HTTP. It is vital that your robots.txt file is not blocking the thumbnail URL, the play page URL or the video URL included in each of your Sitemap entries. Google will check that your live site matches your <video:title> and <video:description> and Flash and JavaScript must be disabled.

When you provide the video information to Sitemap, you have to include the link to the landing page of each video along with the other information needed in order for Google to be able to index.

Submitting Your Sitemap

Once your Sitemap is ready, you can submit it to Google by using Webmaster Tools. Both the website on which the Sitemap is located and the site that the URL point to must be added and verified in your account with Webmaster Tools.

Once this is done, complete the following:

• Upload your Sitemap to your website
• Select the site you want through Webmaster Tools
• Click on Sitemaps found in the Site Configuration option
• Use the text box to complete the path that leads to your Sitemap
• Click Submit Sitemap

For more information on Video Sitemap as well as complete details on how to add and verify your Sitemap, check out this link:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=10079

A favicon is a small image that shows next to your url on the top menu bar of browsers. It inspires brand recognition amongst your visitors when they land on your site, inspires trust and makes your website stand out when the visitor has many tabs open:

A favicon can also help your SEO efforts since the search engines consider your website more “valuable” when you have one.

How to create your favicon:

A favicon is simply a small image that you have to convert to .ico format. It is easy to do this through the many free online tools out there. One of our favorites that lets you crop, resize and save with the correct extension is http://www.genfavicon.com/

How to upload your favicon:

Once you have created your favicon, all you have to do is upload it to the root directory of your site (Browsers know to look for it there) and also to be on the safe side, add this code to the header of your html pages:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”/favicon.ico” />

Adding a favicon is an easy project that will add immediate value to your website in just 5 minutes!

Marchex has recently revealed that search results for websites of companies that are highly susceptible to receiving consumer reviews often point searchers in the direction of customer review websites or social media pages rather than the company website itself.

And the Survey Says…

With a massive 80% of results failing to bring up the actual websites many companies will be concerned to see such high numbers being directed to review sites and social media networks.

Among the various businesses that were involved in the survey, restaurants, bars, legal, plumbing, beauty, automobile and travel websites were all looked into. All of these types of businesses are commonly reviewed by consumers and it is vital that if you are involved with a company that specializes in such a sector that you’re aware of this common problem.

The Director of Small Business Product Development at Marchex, Ryan Fritzky, spoke out about the findings in a recent interview and had the following to say: “We thought that it was important that we highlight quite how serious a problem that this is, especially for small businesses.”

Domino Effect…

Reviewing businesses is a popular trend at the moment and it seems that everyone wants to have their say about how they are treated, by whom and where. Often the ratings that companies receive from such reviews are unjust and this negative feedback then gets picked up by searchers who are looking for an individual website rather than a review website.

As well as keeping your eye on what these websites are posting about your business, unfair or legitimate, you must also have resources to hand to offer counteractive-feedback. The easiest way to do this is to offer your consumers an experience that they will post about and you can sometimes make complaints to the host site if you feel that a hate campaign is being unjustly fought against your good name.

Top 12 Review Sites

While there are some really obvious places to find reviews such as Bing, Twitter, Facebook and City Search, there are some not so obvious choices so check out the following list for some ideas on how you can find out who is saying what about your company:

MerchantCircle.com: This site allows businesses to create their own coupon booklets and MerchantCircle promotes businesses through a pseudo-paid marketing system.

InsiderPages.com: This website focuses on healthcare related businesses but there are a handful of restaurant, home and garden and beauty business reviews as well.

TripAdvisor.com: The aptly named TripAdvisor website helps travelers to read about other people’s travel experiences from hotels through to local landmarks and tours.

BBB.org: Better known as the Better Business Bureau, the BBB website may be new to the scene but it has a trusted reputation that a variety of business reviews appear on.

JudysBook.com: Businesses can use JudysBook to improve their SEO as they can have their own accounts and guides such as “The Top 5 Plumbers” are often available.

Wize.com: This website concentrates on offering reviews of products featuring the best and worst in the electronics sector.

AngiesList.com: This websites requires you to pay to use it and the reviews are unbiased with many trusted members offering their thoughts on a range of local businesses.

SiteJabber.com: This site is one of only a few the offers you the chance to put a review up about a company website.

OpenTable.com: Users on this website can make immediate reservations in restaurants and the site boasts good and honest reviews on the whole.

PowerReviews.com: This site offers users the chance to see reviews about particular products by using SEO, social media and mobile.

Buzzillions.com: All types of product reviews are featured on this website from sports equipment and clothes through to electronics and computers.

Epinions.com: This website features opinions on every product that can be bought through the internet from cars through to beauty products.

Do you use any other consumer review websites?

Click "Like' to Optimize Your Facebook

After Facebook introduced the world to its now famous ‘Like’ button and began allowing users to leave comments, the ‘like’ button’s visibility has been boosted dramatically, which is a benefit to marketers, brands and sales people.

So, why does the success of the ‘Like’ button mean so much to so many businesses?

The volume of traffic, the quality of traffic, revenue and conversions are all important points for any business. The ‘Like’ button is addictive to press but it is also interesting to see how many people look to see who else has Liked you, thus increasing your visibility. The more people who choose to ‘like’ your business or status update; the more attention you will receive as your friend’s activity will appear in their News Feed page for their friends to see and so on.

Check out these handy tips on how you can optimize your Facebook pages:

• If you let your users leave comments on your business page, you will increase the number of ‘Likes’

• Figures released from Facebook claim that you are five times more likely to get ‘Liked’ when the button displays a thumbnail image of friends

• You should place ‘Like’ buttons at the top and at the foot of your posts

• Post video clips with titles

• Always post links to similar content on your website

• Keep your content up to date by talking about current events that are relevant to your business and some that are not. For example, if you sell American Football merchandise then it would be wise to start up a poll to see who will win the next Super Bowl a week or so before it starts but even if you sell dog food; you can still benefit from starting conversations up about popular current events

• Use your wall to offer discounts and coupons, with all posts displaying the ‘Like’ button

• Send out the occasional message to your fans to ask them what they would like to see more and less of in your group

• Include a ‘Like’ button on your video clips, images and infographics as well as your status’s

• People love to play games so offer your fans trivia questions, present them with polls and relevant games – all of which should of course include the ‘Like’ button…

Noteworthy facts:

When Pretzel Crisps offered Facebook fans an exclusive coupon, the company enjoyed a 53% growth spurt of fans in 24 hours! Like…

ShoeDazzle began allowing their fans to go directly to their website from their Facebook page and as a result, these shoppers are 50% more likely to make repeat purchases! Like…

Tea Collection says that they welcomed a revenue increase of 10 times the amount that they were previously enjoying after they added the ‘Like’ feature. Like…

Metacafe’s daily referral traffic from Facebook doubled from 60,000 to 120,000 after placing the ‘Like’ button above as well as below its video clips.

Do you love the ‘Like’ button and the other social plugins provided by Facebook for commercial purposes?

Did you “Like” this post? Don’t be shy, go ahead and click the Like button, you know you want to

SEO Tips on Optimizing for Speed

Online marketers have spent the last 24 months analyzing the analytics of web marketing techniques. You need to do this in order to learn more about what works and what doesn’t as well as learning about user behaviour and trends in order to improve your website.

Website optimization is often used as a term that refers to the content that a user will be greeted with such as the homepage text, graphics, layout etc and the analysis of how well these features are performing will then ensue. The idea behind this type of research is to create a more user-friendly site that generates more traffic with its engaging and relevant content.

Now, while it is vital that we continue to do these studies, it is also important not to forget the need for speed!

In 2011, everyone is in a hurry! Whether you are in a rush to get to work while stuck in rush hour traffic, you need to pick your kids up from school but you can’t find where you left your keys or you are rushing around the supermarket grabbing your fruit and veg like a crazy person! Everyone wants to be somewhere five minutes ago so when you optimize a website – make sure it loads up and runs fast.

Behavior Controlled by Speed?

User behavior is largely determined by site speed and everyone from Bing and Yahoo! to Google and Amazon has backed up this theory with figures that show the faster a website runs; the more popular it is. The users experience is heightened, the conversion rates are therefore higher and the engagement levels are increased – Interestingly, these are often the top three aims of marketers looking to improve an online company’s bottom line…

So, now we know that speed has a direct link to how well your users perceive your website – how do you optimize your site for speed?

Firstly, you have to know how fast your site is running and you can do this by using the free tools provided on webpagetest.org as well as the Yahoo! YSlow add on feature provided by Firefox. This will show you how fast your site is currently running with a grade of A-F, provided to you with info on why your site is so slow and then they will make recommendations on how to improve your speed.

All you have to do is take the action they recommend to you!

You can add to the list of site-slowing problems by checking out your analytics and A/B testing. This will show you how users are responding to the changes, which is always important.

* Website Speed Tip! *

A great tip for speeding up a website is to condense and combine multiple CSS or JavaScript files into one. However, always ensure that you then test how well this is welcomed by your users as speeding up a site is pointless if your users don’t like what you have done to it!

How do you ensure that your website runs as fast as possible?

How to use video for SEO

Creating video to use for SEO purposes is not only easy but it is genius! Some SEO techniques take years of practice and an expert eye to perform adequately but even a child can post a video! There are endless places to publish a video and although YouTube is the number one video sharing website in the world; other sites such as Metacafe, Viddler and Vimeo are also available. Social networking sites also allow you to post video clips and with so many video hosting platforms available; it’s easy to see why video sharing is so popular.

The Need For Speed – You don’t need to host your own video player as you can leave all the tiresome bandwidth issues to the hosting sites rather than putting the unnecessary pressure onto your own server.

Interesting Factoid: According to a spokesperson for YouTube, more than 20 hours of videos are placed on the site every 60 seconds and every year, more than 120 decades of clips are uploaded!

Video SEO is unlike all other forms of SEO and if you look online, there are only a few blogs that offer advice on the top dos and don’ts as there isn’t that much that you have to do!

Here are some of the best ways to have a high-ranking video on YouTube:

• Keep the title clear and simple
• Make sure the title is descriptive of the content
• Include as many tags as possible
• Think about what words viewers of your video would search for
• Be generic if you think it’s more appealing
• Submit a video sitemap to search engines

Here are a few useful examples:

If your video clip features funny home videos then you can use words that always appeal to people such as “funny video”.

If your video shows someone how to knit, your title should include words that are directly associated with learning to knit such as “How to knit”.

Simple yet effective…

If you want to use video in an SEO campaign then you will have to make sure that your titles are keyword rich. Getting other websites to link to your video is ideal but they must also link to your website or you run the risk of the third party site getting the link juice.

Forget Quality!

Search engine robots are only able to read text so this means that instead of judging how good the video is; they will only be able to judge the quality of the text that accompanies and surrounds it as well as the links.

So, how can you use a video for SEO if the robots can’t rank it?

YouTube as well as some other video hosting sites allow you to place a caption on your video. The video transcript can be indexed as it is text and this allows the content of the video to count towards a ranking. YouTube also off you the chance to add a caption automatically but you should always check that the text is correct as computers sometimes make mistakes!

Another common SEO practice is to put the transcript of the video in the description and a New York-based company recently took this to a whole new level…

How Does it Work?

SpeakerText allows you to use the tried, tested and approved transcript and video marriage in the caption section but they have allowed companies to embed it on their website with the same transcript attached. Visitors must highlight a part of the transcript and then copy and paste it into their website and this will be used to link to the part f the video where the transcript quote appears. This link then gets sent to the publisher’s site and not the host site and while this technique currently only works for YouTube; SpeakerText has insisted that it is developing the technique further so that it can be applied to other hosting sites making video SEO even easier.

Video Increases Visibility

People are far more likely to read your monthly newsletter if instead of always writing it out you use a video clip instead. The open rate for newsletters in the form of a video is far higher and this additional attention is a great way to boost brand awareness. You can even personalize each video so that they address the individual customer and this offers an increased level of personalization and it also promotes customer loyalty.

Benefits of Video SEO

There are numerous benefits to using video SEO and they include the following:

• It offers personalization
• It is cost-effective marketing
• It attracts traffic
• It is easy to implement
• It is attractive to all age ranges, cultures, sexes and nationalities

Videos should be scaled so that they reach long-tail keywords in order to make sure that they are more accessible to searchers and they can be used to promote everything from new products through to sale items. With video being so cheap to make, it makes it an accessible way to market to businesses of all sizes.

Some figures even suggest that a video that boast searchable keywords in its description is 50 times more likely to appear on the elusive first page of Google. If this is in fact true; video SEO is about to get a whole lot more popular with your rivals so you better get in there first!

The Future of Video SEO…

Some experts predict that new mobile platforms such as the iPad will change how we view and post videos shifting from eth open web to being able to view certain videos only from specific platforms. The change of social trends with the introduction of social networking sites such as Twitter will also make a difference to SEO in the near future as the social trends in search algorithms are being incorporated into SEO.

How do you use video for SEO purposes?