Social Media Marketing: The Importance of Being Visible to Your Target Audience

Social media has gained a lot of prominence in the recent decade. Facebook, one of the most popular social networking sites in fact now boasts eight hundred million active users. This implies that a vast majority of people are now able to buy what they need from the Internet itself.

Business organisations around the world have started tapping into this form of advertising which is known as Social Media Marketing or in other words SMM. With the help of SMM, companies are now using Social Networking Giants like Facebook or Twitter to be more popular on the global Internet forum. One very important advantage of using Social media is that it is now possible to also measure the kind of hits you get for your company. There are specific websites which actually help develop strategies which would increase your traffic and also generate revenue through SMM.

Here are some of the practices followed by a social media marketing company:

•    They will help you formulate the right kind of strategies by the help of which you can actually guarantee more traffic to your website

•    They will make you know the target customer better. This way you will be able to know better what your valued customer wants

•    They make the website very user-friendly. They will make bookmarking, tagging and sharing the content of your website much easily.

•    They will also help to generate the right kind of content for your website. It is actually through the content and not through marketing that you will be able to get the right and relevant client.

•    They will help you set up RSS feeds, blogs and other content which can be easily shared by the patrons and users as well as other people who were not previously customers.

•    Since it is a forum which is widely used by many people, the visibility of the website is automatically increased in such a case. Users and clients will be able to see more of your website and invariably this will register. Once it registers in your potential client’s mind, you will be selling.

Thus, social media marketing is a unique and cost-effective way of building a brand and promoting it by being in direct contact with the target audience.

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Google AdWords-the Most in-demand Pay Per Click Advertising Network

When you are new to the Internet advertising world, the term pay per click advertising can sound scary and all-too-technical for you. In actuality, pay per click advertising, being one of the several online advertising venues, is quite an easy-to-understand concept.

The most popular and widely effective PPC advertising network is Google AdWords. It is also Google's most lucrative and rewarding source of revenue. Different kinds of businesses, whether an e-commerce site, a brick-and-mortar store with an online storefront or one company that sells services instead of physical products, can benefit in many ways from using Google AdWords.

For one most important thing, AdWords management doesn't require you to work long hours so as to get you on the first page of Google's search results. Your PPC ad, once properly configured, can come up in any search that has your keywords less than half an hour after you approve it for publishing.

 Organic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), of course, has its own major benefits over using AdWords, the latter wins in the convenience department. For another, an AdWords advertisement never succumbs to the changes in Google's search algorithms. Unlike the organic search results that actually seen on top of the competition one day and struggling to break into the top five results in the next day, your advertisement is always guaranteed an above-the-fold placement.

So how does Google AdWords work? When you create its campaign, you are asked to provide keywords that are relevant to your business and a link to your site. Whenever someone searches for your keywords, your advertisement (Google officially calls an ad a Sponsored Link) appears on top or beside the organic search results. When the visitor clicks on your link, he/she goes to your site and you pay for that one click. If, however, nobody clicks on your advertisement, you are not required to pay anything.

Of course, you want a group of individuals to click on your link. One of the best ways to make sure that your AdWords ad is not sitting pretty and useless on top of a search results page is to choose high-quality keywords that used by people who will actually buy your product or services.

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Social Media Marketing - Letting Your Prospects Know About Your Business

As a matter of fact, the ways and methods to do your business have changed and will continue to change. In fact, the dynamics of business and the preferences of the targeted audiences are changing the way businesses have to be carried on, as a result emerged - Social Media Marketing. These days, the pathways through which the businesses and customers reach each-other are not fenced to just the regular market place. Even the much important and valuable consumer insights are not just only obtained through the regular marketing research. Innovative and creative approach to almost everything is demanded today.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is letting people know about your business in a way that is meant for socialization. Individuals, or prospects in the business language, would like to do their various dealings not just with the businesses only. Nowadays, customers require personalization in almost everything, resulting in a basic need to create the business environment perfect for feeding their needs. Banks, for instance, have a highly dedicated personnel looking at the task of personalizing their clients. The same applies to various different businesses these days. Individuals resort to various channels in order to find something new and innovative in what they deal for.

Social Media Marketing is of course one such way that creates a win-win situation for their clientele. In the process, the business houses open up innovative and creative channels for their prospects to reach them. These people, in usual practice, resort to various different social networking web spaces for attaining this task. The usual hot-spots for SMM are:

Social Networking websites: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Orkut. These days, businesses are going for personalized services, and the more widely preferred terms the service personnel are in with prospects, the more beneficial is it for the business.

Multi-media content have played a crucial in triggering the center to attract youth segment of the prospects. Highly dedicated web spaces for contribution towards photography, arts, audio-video sharing, and presentation have made it an exclusive arena to be in and reap various benefits. SMM has really made an excellent platform where companies get an opportunity to share their knowledge and ideas to people from across the world.

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A Brief Introduction to the History of Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation, also known as SEO, is the effort in promoting a website on major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, etc. In reality, this exercise is primarily focused on optimising a site for certain keywords/key phrases so that when these are entered on a search engine window, the site appears at the top of an ensuing Search Engine Results Page (SERP). In my opinion, a site appearing at least on the first page following a query is a great result.

For many websites, success is measured in terms of targeted traffic they attract and entice. The greater the number of visitors you attract to your site, the greater the interaction there will be between your visitors and your site. Thus, if you are trying to sell something on your website, there is more likelihood of numerous these targeted visitors doing just that.

There are majorly two ways to attract traffic to your site. Either by paying for it, for instance if you participate in the Google AdWords program or not paying for it which is where Search Engine Optimisation comes into action. As a matter of fact, the effort to raise the rankings of a site by SEO means is also known as organic search engine promotion.

In the early days of Google, it was really easy to get a website indexed and then quickly ranked high. For one thing many Webmasters realized what made Google tick and went about cheating the system to get their sites ranked high and quickly. In general, they employed what is now referred to as Black-Hat SEO services. Amongst various other things, this form of optimisation involved obtaining plenty of backlinks to the site from external sites which were not necessarily relevant to the incoming website.

It also involved stuffing the site with keywords and plenty of them. Sometimes this exercise made the article quite difficult to read as it did not flow naturally. The keywords density target had to be met and so these keywords had to be placed somewhere in the article which in turn distorted its context and the narrative.

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Proactive Implementation of the Sitelink Policy by Google

Sitelinks extensions are a useful feature in Google AdWords that allows pay per click advertising specialists to include additional links to their standard text ad. This is a great way to promote different web pages of a site through a single ad.

According to the existing sitelink policy, each sitelink within the ad must lead to a unique landing page on the site. However, Google has reported an increase in the number of sitelinks leading to the same landing page. It’s a violation of the policy and this is why Google will soon begin proactive enforcement of the policy. So, in the coming months, the sitelinks that do not meet the policy standards will be restricted from showing in the results.

Using different sitelinks that lead to single landing page is a malpractice meant to promote the most important web page. This practice has benefited the pay per click advertising efforts of many advertisers but it violates the policy standards and leads to a decline in the quality of results shown on the search engine.

Advertisers who want to improve their PPC performance need to adhere to the policy and add 6-10 unique sitelinks to their campaigns. If you include lesser sitelinks, the possibility of your ad showing above your competitors would diminish. Inadequate number of sitelinks would also adversely affect your ad’s visibility level and click through rate (CTR).

As of now, Google will not take any action against the campaigns that use different sitelinks leading to same landing page because making the changes would need time, but advertisers should take this as a warning and start working on their sitelink strategy. The policy would be enforced on new sitelinks and the ones that are edited and need a review from Google.

To get best results out of your sitelinks extensions, writing great sitelink copy is crucial so that they inspire the users to click it and take a favourable action.

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5 Latest Tips on Writing Meta Description Tags to Increase Traffic

Quality has never been so emphasised up on in the website optimisation industry before as it is being done now. Whether it is about the content, the backlinks, H1 tags or the Meta descriptions, it is crucial to make them all useful and relevant for the human users, not just the search bots.

Earlier, Meta descriptions were written only from the point of search engine optimisation. All the targeted keywords were stuffed in to positively affect the rankings. However, since the time Google started taking measures on improving the quality of the search results, writing meaningful content, even in the Meta tags, has become important.

Presented below are 5 tips on writing effective Meta description tags to meet Google’s quality parameters –

1. It should make sense – More often than not, website optimisers stuff together all the targeted keywords without actually creating meaningful sentences. The purpose was to just fill the space with the targeted keywords. However, Google now gives greater preference to web pages that have meaningful Meta descriptions.

2. Keep it concise – The Meta descriptions show up in your Google search results as snippets. If you write long-stretched descriptions, it will appear to be incomplete in the results. Ideally, a Meta description should be restricted to 150-160 characters.

3. Include a call to action message – For users, who are looking for your business on Google, the Meta description is the first thing they see about your company/service. If you include an impactful call to action message, there are higher chances of click through rates.

4. Maintain uniqueness – Many Website optimisation use the same description for each web page. This practice leads to content duplicity and may cause a ranking penalty by Google. So, you must ensure that each web page has a unique Meta description that talks about what that particular page is all about.

5. Don’t stuff keywords – Again, the practice of keyword stuffing no longer helps your website optimisation efforts. It is great to utilise important keywords in the description in a natural manner, not just to fit them all for SEO benefit.

The next time you are updating the Meta descriptions and titles for your web pages, it would help if you integrate the above discussed measures in to your approach.

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