Social Media Marketing in support ofComprehensive Website Development

             As a company that offers website development services, as well as internet marketing services, Web Dot Com is a firm believer in the effectiveness and necessity of social media marketing.
             Social media marketing simply means strategic participation in existing social media networks as part of an overall marketing plan. Participation could mean social interaction or submission of quality content such as blog posts, articles, videos, images or audio files.

          Some of the most popular social media networks are Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Flickr, Digg, Reddit and Technorati. These are, therefore, the best networks to include in your social media marketing campaign. If your target audience is young, be sure to include Friendster and MySpace, as well.

                    Through social media marketing, you reach an unbelievably large audience. Your message gains more weight and credibility by riding on the love earned by the social media network from its followers. You could get a lot of direct traffic from the exposure. You could also be linked to by other websites or blogs. These not only bring in more secondary traffic, but the links themselves – being natural and permanent – provide very valuable search engine ranking. As we all know, top ranking in search engines is the goal for every website since it guarantees continued influx of traffic. In turn, traffic for your site helps you build a base of returning visitors who could be converted to clients.

                Social media marketing also provides a very inexpensive way of building your brand. Your online reputation is something that will provide more long-term benefits. Of course, all these are contingent on the quality of your participation in the social media networks you have chosen. The reputation of your brand will be developed according to how you connect with others and based on the value of the content you contribute. More often, content that is highly relevant and helpful to others earns the greatest social revenue. Also popular are humorous and entertaining content. Really juicy content usually gets spread virally to unexpected proportions. Make sure that means juicy in a positive light, though, to ensure it does not backfire on you.
Establishing sincere relationships with others through social media networks will slowly create a loyal following for your site. Return the favor sincerely by actively interacting with their sites, as well. Join communities and be useful in each one. These relationships could become mutual advocacies that further strengthen your brand.

                     Undoubtedly, social media marketing takes considerable effort. Many companies, and even individuals who leverage their websites for profit, opt to outsource this undertaking. Make sure you assign it to experts who know how to maximize returns for you, though.

               Social media marketing, along with search engine marketing, is part of the internet marketing strategies applied by Web Dot Com. The ten year old Philippine-based company offers this in conjunction with basic and advanced website development, web design, advanced portal development and other custom programming, web based database programming, content management systems, e-commerce solutions such as online store applications for online shopping and online payment, search engine optimization, and website maintenance and support.
Who can better implement your social media marketing campaign than the same website development team that set up your website and will be maintaining it for you? This ensures focus and synergism while streamlining costs.

Seo Spiders – What they are Hungry for ?

             In the previous article ‘Get Traffic With SEO Thinking’ we discussed how search engines work in general and how you can apply SEO to your site or article. You should understand, or at least be aware, of where to put your keywords and how keyword prominence and keyword density works. If you haven’t read it maybe it is a good idea to go do that quickly before we continue.
If you remember correctly a search engine has workers and thinkers, spiders and indexers. When we discussed keyword densities and the like we were focusing more on the indexing part of the search engine algorithm. Let’s have a look at websites from the spider’s point of view, what do they like?

Spiders like:
• Text more then they like code. For the most part it’s quite easy to have more lines of text then code. Be aware that some programs, like the MS Office Suite, add a lot of extra code to a file. This is to enable you to open any MS file in almost any application.
• Keyword densities in the range of 3-7%. Anything less is off subject and something ridicules like say 20% is frowned upon and possible flagged.
• Backlinks from other sites, it’s said that authority sites have an average of 300 backlinks pointing to them.
• Original content. If you didn’t write it, it’s probably not original. Although you might pay someone to do it, but then you own the only copy.
• Sites that download quickly. One of the biggest culprits in slowing download down is dynamic URLs, like pictures, from other sites.
• Site maps. They take seconds to build, so do it and update it at least once a month.
• ALT Tabs for images, because spiders cannot see pictures.
• Links to websites that are contextually relevant. If your site is about making online millions you should link to something like investing millions, contextually relevant but not competitive.
• Fresh content every time the spider crawls your site. Spiders are like girls, they love new stuff.
Spiders do not like:
• More lines of code than text.
• Nested tables. It adds code and the spiders take longer to digest the tables, making you less likely to be crawled.
• Mega-high keyword densities, also called keyword stuffing. It’s unnatural, and the search engines have caught on. You should remember that using a keyword stuffed portal as a doorway page is doing exactly the same thing. Bad programmer!
• Too many backlinks to your own home or landing page from within your own domain.
• Duplicate content, it doesn’t matter from where or how. Even if someone copies from YOUR site you have duplicate content.
• A slow loading site. Watch those dynamic URLs.
• Automated link swapping that could be because of repeating exactly the same words in your linking text, spiders are allowed to do this, we, ironically are not.
• Stale content, it smells like old people to spiders. So, go ahead, update your site, its fun.

Does Your Website Really Need SEO

What exactly is SEO? SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search engine via natural search results. The earlier your site appears on natural search results, the more visitors you will receive from search engines. Traffic from search engines is targeted. When your web pages rank high for keywords that are related to what you are offering, you get more traffic and business.

To make your web pages rank high on natural search results, you must optimize your website. So if you are still wondering whether your website needs SEO, it is no doubt - YES. If you run a small business, SEO gives you the opportunity to compete with the big boys. When your website appears on the first page of the natural search results, you can take traffic and business away from your competitors.

Many websites do not implement SEO and they are losing a lot of quality traffic. SEO is the bed rock of internet marketing and every website should implement it.

So now you have understood that SEO is an important business process, what’s next? It is possible for you to do SEO on your own but it is a tedious and continuous process. It is not something that you can do it once and forget about it. So if you are not well-verse in SEO or do not have the time to do it consistently, you should allocate a budget to engage a professional SEO firm to do it for you. Professional SEO companies have the resources to optimize your website consistently and they know what they are doing. If you go online and do a search, you can find tons of companies offering this service. So how do you choose the right company to optimize your website?

You should shortlist a few companies and meet up with them. Listen to what they can offer and remember to ask them what exactly they will be doing for you. If any company guarantees rankings for certain keywords, you should beware. This is because with it comes to SEO, no one can ever guarantee keyword rankings. Moreover, SEO is more than guaranteed rankings for certain keywords or key phrases. It is about improving the volume and quality of search engine traffic to your site.

Before you decide to engage a company to optimize your website, be sure to check out the price. Professional SEO service may be costly but it is definitely worth every single cent in the long run.

Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of OOm, an online marketing agency providing SEO Singapore service.