Search Engine Optimization has become the newest and best way to market products or services. Gone are the days where print advertisements can net millions of dollars as readership rates plummet across almost every market. The Internet has become the new frontier of marketing and at its forefront is SEO. SEO Basics can bring any company into the forefront of public visibility.

The easiest way to approach why search engine optimization is so important is to think about how users browse the Internet. If someone wants to purchase a product, they will typically go to Google or their favorite search provider and look for a review of the product, or even the best place to purchase it. They will then click on whichever of the first links looks to be the most relevant.

Search Engines are trying to find their users the most relevant content. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is essentially trying to get a search engine to think that a website is the most relevant for any given keyword. If a web owner is selling dog leashes on their website, when someone searches for "the best place to buy dog leases", that web owner wants to be the first result that shows up to get the sales. Hiring an internet marketing company can help you target search engine users for the product or service you offer, but if your budget is small, you might have to do some of your SEO work yourself.

Keywords are the basis for most of the popular search engines for today. A search engine looks at how many people are linking to a website to determine its value. Take the previous example for instance. If 200 other websites have a link to that website that says "great place to buy dog leases", the search engine "thinks" that that content is more relevant to their website.

The best way to begin Search Engine Optimization on a website is to figure out what keywords need to be targeted. Identify a product that needs to be sold and then the specific keywords that users would search for. From there it is just a matter of using those keywords and creating content offsite that will link users back to the original site.

A while back I entered a blogging contest that I never planned on winning,  I figured I was just not ‘social’ enough to win, but I decided to give it a try and entered my post.  Somehow, you all rallied behind me and helped me win not just one of the 20 prizes, but THIRD place!!   My entry was titled ‘Don’t Be ‘That Guy’ when Commenting‘,  and it got over 200 tweets and 270 comments!   So thank you to everyone that commented or tweeted, I am amazed I placed as high as I did!  I learned a lot about social media, about online support, and about commenting in general through all of the other entries (which you can find in the blog commenting folder here.)

I will definitely enter another if one come up,  it was fun testing my own limits when it came to writing and promotion, and winning $200 didn’t hurt either! Perfect timing too, my daughters birthday is this weekend so every bit of cash helps with that!  Thanks again for all of your support!

Unbelievably, your online habits give others a perception about you.  Whether you are a business or a person – the same is true.  So what I am I referring to?

Let’s discuss some examples . . .

Let’s say you have a mega corporation within the Fortune 500 and are progressive about having a Twitter account, I would say kudos to you.  However, there are some rules of the road for Twitter.

Twitter

First – Twitter is about having a conversation.  When you are using Twitter, it’s about engagement and building long-term relationships – not hard selling or spamming.  Social media authority, Dean Holmes, recommends that a business follow back everyone except for MLMs and spammers.  Simply following people back makes your consumers feel heard.  When you do not follow back or answer replies, you appear to be either too high and mighty or extremely disorganized.  Why would I buy a product or service from a disorganized company?  In addition, the use of @ replies indicates engagement.  If every single tweet that is sent out contains a self-serving link – you are seen as a spammer.

My second point about Twitter is to spend some time designing a nice custom background indicating your company’s or your own personal brand.  Using the standard templates and not having a decent sized account (over 1,000 followers) makes you look amateur.  Consumers do not want to buy from an amateur – they want to buy from the best.  So be the best!

Blog

Another example I can use to illustrate my point is having or not having a blog presence.  Let’s look at health care giant, Kaiser Permanente.  Kaiser is a $34 Billion dollar plus company and does not have their own blog!  One would think that one person of out 167,300 employees could dedicate some time to educating the public, current and potential members by simply engaging and sharing health tips and trends.  By sharing content, they can build up their reputation as the leader with their Thrive campaign.

Kaiser offers so many free classes to its members about health care tips.  Why not blog about it?  I Google “Kaiser Permanente Blog” and find a site called Kaiser Permanente Thrive Exposed showing their lawsuits and medical errors.

Conclusion

Social media is here to stay.  The choice is yours to get with the program.

Posted by Deepak Gupta.  Deepak runs Marketing By Deepak and you can read more about him and his experience here.

What do successful business or business owners have in common?

They are ridiculously organized and use many methods.

With an organized business, you can handle and negotiate powerful business deals, manage and launch client campaigns, and oversee the productive employees who are at the core of every great business. Doing these things can allow the business to thrive because of the time the business takes to develop structural and organizational skills. Productivity can also be at an all time high when you’re organized and know, step by step, what you need to be working on. It makes your daily tasks less ominous.

Small business organizing is more than simply penciling in a client meeting or delegating duties and responsibilities. Organizing the business to enjoy a profit relies on systems that are more dependent on background systems or on things which occur unnoticed or without event. The following online and offline systems can help you organize your small business from the core. continue

It has been a very busy month year here, lots of work and lots of new sites, I am going to go through and list them in another post as well as get them all added to the portfolio, but wanted to highlight one in particular here, before I was hired for the design and development I had never heard of such a service- for people like me with no time to market on twitter it sounds great to have someone handle all of that for me!

The newly launched site is TweetsByUs, as of last week it is live. With a custom design and logo we had a great time coming up with elements and content to help drive the site. I was able to try out some new techniques and learned a lot while working on this one!

Home page design for Tweets By Us

Be sure to stop by and check them out! I will try to get on here and post more often from now on, work has just been so busy that I haven’t had time to breathe!

The FamousBloggers ComLuv contest I entered last month is still open and won’t be over until sometime in August I think. Every Re-Tweet counts as a vote, as well as the comments.  As of last night I was in the lead for comments, but not for tr-tweets- so be sure to help me out by re-tweeting the entry for me (see some tweets you can use below). Although Topsy has me at 96 tweets, and the twitter button on the site only shows 86, so there is some lag I think.

Anyway, my entry was meant to be fun, and has become a great topic of conversation- the comments have been great and the support I have gotten has been amazing- I couldn’t be more proud! So head on over to my entry and RT and comment, even if you have already commented you can add to the discussion by replying to other comments or my reply to you. Everything counts as long as it is meaningful!

Help Eve win by commenting/tweeting her entry at the @FamousBloggers Writing Contest : Don’t Be “That Guy” http://bt.io/FVEG

check out the conversation happening @ http://bt.io/FVEG for the #FBCLcontest loads of support and information! @evelester

One of the sponsors is a Social Media Virtual Assistant, this seems like an awesome plan, I would love to have someone to help me get all this done- especially the business tasks part- although I wouldn’t know where to start or what to actually outsource at this point! But I could use a ‘virtual me’!

One great way to improve the look of your site is to use custom fonts, before we were limited to only a few web-safe fonts. If you wanted to use a fancy font you had to use an image, and the only way search engines would see that text, no matter how important, was if you specified an alt tag. Thankfully,options to replace any text on our site with a custom font we specify.   There are many methods to accomplish this but in this post we are discussing Cufón; which uses javascript to replace the text with whatever font you choose. You can implement this manually or use a plugin.  The plugin I am using on this site is called WP-Cufón and this tutorial is about that plugin.  Another plugin to use Cufon is the All-in-One Cufon.   I have also written a tutorial on using TTF Titles, that method is no longer very efficient or SEO friendly.

This guide is meant for both beginners and advanced users, and many of the steps after the plugin is installed and set up will work with any Cufon installation, as the code to product the effect is the same regardless of how you get the code to your site.  If you are already using cufon and just want to see some fun styles to try then jump to the Advanced Tips section now. continue