Tweet like a Pro


Take a leaf out of the books of big businesses who know how to keep a news story running and running.
The vast majority of the largest companies in the world have a series of press releases that are so good that every so often they like to send them back out again and for some strange reason they pick up lots of distribution for their brand again.

You can do the very same thing on Twitter.

All you need to do is discover which of your tweets got the best response from your Followers (i.e. were marketed as a favourite tweet by them and Retweeted).

This is a very simple process, all you have to do is point your browser to http://favstar.fm/ and where it says ‘Choose User’, just enter your Twitter ID.

The results page will show you the best tweets that you have EVER sent out; all you now need to do is Retweet the best ones, some of them might need a little bit of Spin (rewording a little), and you’ll end up with more twitter users seeing your tweets easily.

Five Tips to Search Engine Success


Tip 1 – You can’t outsmart Google
It’s a fact that if you try to beat Google by trying the latest way to force your pages into the top of the rankings then you will get found out!  Site owners that were spanked by Google's most recent updates (Penguin or Panda), will testify to the fact that you have to bide your time.

A spammy approach to gaining good ranking will hurt you and your business in the long run.  There is no automated way to the top, no quick win – only and effort will get you there.


Tip 2 – Normal business rules apply

If you owned a ‘bricks and motor’ store then I'm guessing that you wouldn't expect to attract customers for free; the internet is exactly the same, it isn't free nor easy to attract visitors to a website.

Invest time and effort and you’ll do well.


Tip 3 – ensure your site has a good infrastructure
It stands to reason that your site won’t survive for long if it had a poor design.  To get ranked well you need a fast loading site filled with pages with great content and pages that link to all the other pages within your site (needed so that search engines spiders know where all your pages are.)

If you're serious about your website, don't use the cheapest web host or designer. Slow poorly designed pages can influence the rankings of your web pages.

Tip 4 – Take Control
Stop searching for gurus or secret tricks that promise to make your site number one in Google (or any other search engine for that matter), they don’t exist.
Work with a search engine marketing professional, ideally someone who understands business and how search engines work.

With their assistance discover what your unique selling proposition is
Identify your audience and make a plan.
Create a great website with valuable content (if visitors like your site word will get out)
Advertise your site (use SEO, paid advertising, even traditional advertising to promote it)


Step 5 -  Act Now
There is always something is your business that’s more important that promoting your website (or so you think), talk to someone today (talk to me) about improving your search engine rankings.

SEO is not necessarily about getting backlinks. It's also not necessarily about getting high rankings on Google. It is about getting sales. It is about improving your business.

The easiest way to get someones attention on Twitter


Twitter is great when you finally get noticed by an influencer or business that you want to get your brand or service in front of; but how do you get their attention?

The easiest way is to tweet about their favourite things or to retweet popular past tweets, but how do you find out that they are?

Favstar will allow you to do just that, by simply entering http://favstar.fm/users/their username into your browser you will find out what they like to tweet about and what are their most popular tweets; this then gives you a chance to engage with them on top topics or simply retweet their best tweet (which could have been from years ago!).

If you want to find out what tweets that your target have marked as a favourite then enter https://twitter.com/ their username/favorites

These are very simple tactic that I have used successfully many times.

Tips for getting more Twitter followers that stick to you!


If you want to get some additional loyal Followers on Twitter then there are a couple of things that you need to do.

Tweet Often – If you want to maximise the benefit of your Twitter activity then you need to be an active contributor to your Followers streams; I’m not just talking about 1-2 tweets a week, but a constant drip of information, news and views throughout the day. To really make a difference you need to aim for at least 10 tweets a day, some of the most popular and influential people can get 30 tweets out easily.

Be of Value – Tweeting what you had for lunch really isn’t going to help get and keep loyal Followers, you need to be tweeting items of interest, and tweets that are based on your real experiences of those of your customers/clients are the most valuable.

Interact – All too often I see people and businesses tweeting a stream of self promotional garbage and they never interact with anyone.  You are on Twitter to build relationships and hopefully turn your Followers into customers or advocates for you, and you can only do this through interaction.  So get engaging, comment on peoples tweets and Retweet often; you will be rewarded for it.

Share – News is great because often it’s something that we all like to comment on, so as soon as you hear something interesting Tweet about it, it’s possible to get a tweet out about a news item before the major news channels manage to get their act together.

Don’t have much time to check your social media?


Many of us don’t all have lots of hours free to sit in front of a device and check our social media as and when things happen, find new people to engage with and track down those influential people that can make or break your business, so if you can only spare 20 minutes a day what should you do?

There are lots of things you can be getting on with:

Check that Inbox - Ensure that if anyone had contacted you directly through any social media channel ensure that you get back to them within 24 hours at the very least.

Follow relevant people – the sums are easy, the more people you follow the more likely you are to get followers yourself; the more followers you have the bigger the audience is for your message.  Take a look at Klout and Kred as both of these will show you who is influential in your chosen topics and these are the people you should be following.

Do a few directory searches based on your niche and hit the follow button..

Tweet – and tweet often!  Use HootSuite and set your tweets to schedule automatically; HootSuite will then send your tweets out at the best time.  As and when you think of a tweet to send simple compose it and AutoSchedule it, HootSuite will send it out at the right time for you.  You’ll find that you won’t need too many Tweets to fill each day!

Reply – someone has copied you into a tweet or message for a reason, over time you will learn to quickly understand the value in the connections that you have built up and then quickly be able to understand whether entering into a discussion with them is both productive and useful; but like Inbox messages, don’t ignore them!

Following these small tips should take you no longer than 20 minutes a day BUT will provide you with huge benefits.

The 5 myths of Search Engine Optimisation

SEO and SEM is a extremely competitive industry - and there are lots of people out there and many more agencies who promise you the earth when it comes to web site placement in search engines and deliver nothing if you're not careful. We have seen it, we see what they say and we don't like it, it makes us all look bad!

Here's a list of five most common myths and false promises that might not deliver the results promised.

1. Overnight Results

No-one, and we mean absolutely no-one, can guarantee good organic search results within 24 hours for agreed keywords. It's the staple sales message of so many poor SEO agencies out there.

The reality is that Google is pretty slow when it comes to understanding and showing results for new sites - a new site will struggle to rank properly for weeks. In most cases, to achieve anywhere close to a site's full potential will take months of work building good quality links and/or an extremely loyal customer base.

Most of the time, these guys just pick a random (but related) phrase that isn't currently indexed well on Google and get you indexed on that. To show you how simple it is, check out Google for "fuzzyalarmzip"! 

Yay, look at me, not only are we number 1 on Google, but I do not have any other competition either - OK it's true that no-one will ever search for me by using that term, but a poor SEO agency will claim that they have done what they said they would do and demand to be paid!

If they don't use these techniques then they might send your URL to link farms (even Google's own guidelines suggest you do not do this), or they might just SPAM blogs and other social media sites. These two approaches might get you a spike of visitors, but it will not bring you customers; also the Yahoo! and Google algorithms are so advanced that they can spot this activity and are likely to get you banned or delited quickly.

In short, if you want to get traffic to your site (and who deosn't!) - don't look for the quick and dirty fix, there is no instant gratification. Work with an agency that will play the long game instead; take your time and reap the rewards. 

2. Placement Can Be Guaranteed

The same guys that guarantee you overnight listing can also guarantee particular placements - regardless of the competition out there or indeed the quality of your web site. Oh yes they guarantee that you too can take your place on the front page of results.

Again, this is ridicuous, as I hope we now know, it takes time to improve search engine rankings, there is never any guarantee of placement on the first page. It is what we all strive for, and often we do get first page results for many of our clients, but even we can't guarantee it!

You have already seen with our "fuzzyalarmzip" example, easy number 1 positions in Google can be easy for keywords that aren't competitive, but if they don't bring in traffic, what's the point!

Good organic traffic starts slowly and grows with the site.


3. Meta Tags

Even now, nearly a decade after the likes of Altavista, Lycos etc were all the search engines we needed, some SEO consultants still cling to the myth that <meta> tags to boost site rankings.

It has been demonstrated often that the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN etc) will largely ignore the content placed there, and instead rely on the actual content of the page, and the quality of the sites that link to yours.

Whilst they are still of use for search engines, and it is usually worthwhile adding them to your pages, laboring over them as though your site's existence depended upon it is really misguided.

Keyword Stuffing (stuffing lots of keywords into your <meta> tags) will hurt your rankings badly, our advice is to simply list a few of your main keywords and write a short and well-written description, and use those on the <meta> tags.

One place where care should be taken is the <title> tag - this is used very extensively by all the major search engines, and it will prove critical to SEO success. Increasingly, though, the <meta> tags are being left behind, and will most likely lose all meaning in the near future.

In summary, if a real visitor can't see it, then as a general rule of thumb, search engines aren't interested in it!


4. Submitting to Search Engines

'We will submit your site to over 8,000+ search engines'. Does this type of pitch sound familiar to you? Of course it does - site submissions to search engines and directories is bread and butter for your average SEO.

The trouble is, that the search engine market is very much focused on one principal player - Google - and a few subsidiary search markets (MSN, Yahoo are the foremost). These big 3 will probably account for about 99% of all searches to your site - the other 7,997 will barely get a mention in your referrer logs.

I have tried their services, keen to see if they work. It was £100 wasted, and our server logs showed us that all the traffic just came from Google anyway! The other sites never sent us any other visitors!

A good SEO agency will take the time to understand your web site and the behaviours of your potential customers, and then recommend the very best search engines and directories, and then hand submit them - taking time, effort and care in ensuring that the job is done properly.


5. More Links > Good Links

When I first started in SEO, many moon ago, I knew all I need to do was get lots of links from lots of different web sites and I would rank well!

How things have changed. Major players in the maket (like Google) really understand (as we do) that it's not just about getting links, it's about the quality of those links. We know that the importance of ranking well if to provide the web site visitor with a good journey.

Someone looking to buy a car, wouldn't expect to find a link on a care sales web site for computer memory! Neither would we, and neither would the top search engines, so they pretty much ignore these type of links.

The term 'relevancy' in linking is thrown around often and it is sometimes misunderstood, but it essentially means that it is quality links in the relevant sector that contribute far more to search engine rankings than broad quantities of unrelated links. Having bad links will negatively effect your ranking.


Conclusion

SEO is very rarely quick fix, sometimes it is possible to do exactly the right thing in the right way and it's rewarded with a good listing very early, but most of the time it can take months to see really tangible results.

5 Top Tips for improved search engine ranking

Having a website that gets found in Google, Yahoo! or MSN, etc. isn't hard to do, but it can be difficult to know where to begin. Here are our latest tips to help get you started.

Optimise for your Visitors!

It sounds like common sense, but very few businesses actually do it. Many businesses optimise their site for search engines, putting in keywords and phrases that are commonly used in search engines rather than actually researching what customers actually search on.

Search engines are looking for pages that best fit the keyword phrase someone types into their search box. If this person searching the internet is typing in search words that relate to what your site actually offers, then they are most likely members of your target audience.

You need to optimise your site to meet their needs. If you don't know who your target audience is, then you need to find out one way or another. Look for studies online that might provide the relative information, and visit other sites, communities, or forums where your target audience might hang out and listen to what they discuss. This information will be crucial to your resulting website design, keyword research, and copywriting.

Research keywords

Research your keyword phrases extensively, and never give up, the smallest of tweaks in the right direction can make a huge difference to your ranking.

The phrases you think your target market might be searching for may very well be incorrect.
To find the very best phrases to optimise your site for, use research tools such as Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker or any Google or Yahoo Search Marketing data you can lay your hands on.

Compile lists of the most relevant phrases for your site, and choose a few different ones for every page.
Never shoot for general keywords such as "parties" or "cars" as they are rarely indicative of what your site is really about.

You are aiming for a list of just ten good keywords or phrases, then start your optimisation.

Labels

It’s great coding too, but remember to label your internal text links and clickable image alt attributes (alt tags) as clearly and descriptively as possible.

Your site visitors and the search engines look at the clickable portion of your links (i.e. the anchor text) to help them understand what they're going to find once they click-through.

Don't make them guess what's at the other end with links that say "click here" or other nondescriptive words. Be as descriptive as possible with every text and graphical link on your site.

The cool thing about writing your anchor text and alt attributes is that you can be as descriptive (and relevant) as you want to be, and try to include some of those keywords too.

Copywriting

Great web site copy is one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal to get you ranked well on the major search engines.

Write compelling copy for the key pages of your site based on your chosen keyword phrases and your target market's needs, and make sure it's copy that the search engines can "see".

This is a crucial component to having a successful web site. The search engines (i.e. Google and Yahoo!) need to read keyword rich copy on your pages so they can understand how to classify your site.

This copy shouldn't be buried in graphics or hidden in Flash or as coding comments. Write your copy based on your most relevant keyword phrases while also making an emotional connection with your site visitor.

There are no magic number of words per page or number of times to use your phrases in your copy, just do not use too many or too few! Try aiming for between 5 percent and 15 percent keyword density and you should be OK.

The important thing is to use your keyword phrases only when and where it makes sense to do so for the real people reading your pages. Simply sticking keyword phrases at the top of the page for no apparent reason isn't going to cut it, and it just looks silly.

Linking

Make sure your site is "link-worthy."

Other sites linking to yours is a critical component of a successful search engine optimisation campaign, as all of the major search engines place a good deal of emphasis on your site's overall link popularity.

You can go out and request hundreds or thousands of links, but if your site is poor, why would anyone want to link to it?

On the other hand, if your site is full of wonderful, useful information, other sites will naturally link to it without you even asking.

The jury is out on where it is fine or not to simply trade links, the approach of black and white marketing is to get as many one way links for our clients as possible because we know that this is the very best linking approach to take; but it does take time.

When you link to lousy sites, keep in mind what this says to your site visitors as well as to the search engines.

Conclusion

There are some things that you can do to your web site to help you get a better search engine ranking, but it takes time (a long time), it's hard work, and lots of people think its boring, I actually enjoy doing it!

Improving website conversion

Most websites fail to convert visitors into buyers most of the time; this is particularly true of B2B sites where the sale might be more complex and include a higher price tag!

Getting plenty of visitors to the site of the first step to success; but more important than that is getting your traffic to make that all important buying decision whilst they are on your site.

Remember that lots more traffic doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll massively increase the rate of conversion; to do that you need to remove a number of barriers to purchase, they are:

1. Make Your Website Easy to Use
It stands to reason that when someone visits your site it needs to present itself correctly and be easy to use.

a) Evaluate the accessibility of your website (does it work with different browsers at different resolutions for example)
b) Is navigation clear and concise
c) Ensure the call-to-action button on your website is clearly visible

Each of these tweaks on their own seems simple enough but you need to ensure that you are making the right changes for your target market.

2. Focus on Getting Quality Traffic
Some sites that I have seen and had the pleasure to work on do not attract the right type of traffic; the sort of visitors that are really keen to buy whatever it is you sell.

The fact is a simple one …. in order to increase the number of online sales, you need to promote your products or services to the right people.

Find out who your target audience is and locate the sources where you can connect with them. In fact this is probably the most important strategy!

3. Enhance the Quality of Landing Pages
Landing page should be clean and simple in order to convert the most amount of visitors; do not think that this means very little content on the page, you need to put enough words on the page so that your proposition and benefits of your product/service is crystal clear.

Remember you can always test a couple of version of your landing pages to see which has the best impact.

3. Talk About Visitor Benefits
NEVER highlight the features of your offerings, already focus on the benefits and how you can help your visitors. What pain do they have and how can you solve it?

Visitors tend not to be too interested in your company, they have been attracted to your site, all you need to do is to convince them to buy, and talking about benefits will do just that.

I remember when I first qualified as a marketer, we were taught ‘Features and Benefits’ (FaB), this is no longer true!

4. Create an Urgent Demand
Anyone trained in copywriting will have been taught to ensure that that to compel your readers to take action and take action quickly you should try to create urgency.

Mentioning a time limit or a stock limit can quickly infuse urgency into visitors, but also getting across the point that the benefit of your offering is that they can ease their pain quicker!

5. Demonstrate Credibility
No matter what you sell you must earn trust, this is the same when selling stuff on line and it is in person; if you are not trustworthy then you will not sell anything!

This is a huge challenge for many businesses as they fail to show credibility. Some of the most useful ways of establishing credibility includes sharing customer success stories, media mentions and security verification, add contact details (including telephone number, email address and postal address) for added credibility.

6. Build Your Brand
Conversion rates will improve as your brand grows. (yet another useful fact).

The more people know about your brand, the more sales you will make. So, make sure your day-to-day activities include an element of brand building, it’s also true that better known brands find it easy to sell things and so become more profitable!

If you’re not using social media then try it today to help your brand; Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are all great for getting yourself known.

7. Keep Your Word
All wrapped up with your brand and building a great brand image is ensuring that you deliver what you promise; in fact I believe that delivering on a promise is exactly what a brand is.

Always ensure your customers get what they were promised in the first place.

If you need help on any of this then just get in touch with me (andrew@andrewscaife.com)