What do you need to succeed in social media? As Patrick Stewart, when playing Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Captain Picard, so often said: ‘Engage’.

If you look on the popular social networks, you’ll see that the most successful users are the ones that spend time there. Even with celebrity users, the ones that build the biggest number of followers use the network almost constantly. More importantly, they reply to comments and generally try to get along with people. In the social media, as in the real world, the truly popular people are the engaging ones.

Could it be that simple? When it comes to social media optimization, it certainly can. The social media is all about connections made on a human level. Business users who only drop by to promote their SEO blog tend to miss out.

‘Engaging’ with your social media followers isn’t that hard. It can even help you to begin with your campaign. Simply begin by reading the updates, blogs and tweets of people that catch your interest. Follow this up with comments whenever something occurs to you. This activity doesn’t have to take up more than ten minutes of your day. By doing this regularly, you can’t help but catch the attention of other users, and this attention can later be used to further your online marketing purposes.

Spending time on your social profiles does great things for your social media management. Talk to your SEO company, or us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk, about scheduling social time into your search engine optimisation plan.

Quality, research and innovation. These are the three things you’ll need if you want your SMO campaign to work. While at least two of these concepts may seem a little abstract, all three must be applied with a practical skill for social media audiences to pay you attention.

*Quality – it comes as no surprise to anyone connected with professional SEO services that quality is one of the cornerstones of a successful social media campaign. What this means in practical terms is much the same as what you need to achieve for your SEO campaign. Ensure that any content is written to a professional standard, widgets don’t fall over, and your target audience is kept informed and entertained.

*Research – before you can start building those quality offerings, however, you need to know what you’re doing and who you’re doing it for. Research is one of the watchwords for SEO and marketing, and you can discuss this with us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk. For social media, you need to know not just the bare facts about your audience, but also their thoughts and attitudes. Get your SEO company on board in uncovering who your target audience is, where they like to be seen, and what they like.

*Innovation – this last quality is possibly the most important for success in the social media. Many social media hits have been low-quality, last-minute compositions, but the quality all success stories have is innovation. If you want to be a hit in social media, get your thinking cap on.

Not many site owners approach SEO thinking that they’ll have to become a media influence. Unfortunately, if you want your site to get attention, that’s exactly what you have to do. As your SEO company will tell you, top rankings these days depend as much on off-site interaction as they do on on-site technical work. If you’re having trouble finding an angle that will work for your website optimization plan, don’t worry – there’s an easy way in.

They say that everyone’s a critic, and there’s certainly plenty of them on the net. For gaining easy attention, though, offering criticism is ideal. It attracts attention from all corners, including your target market and your peers.

Criticism can come in many forms. It might be a series of reviews of products, services or ideas. It could be a regular opinion piece that you publish on your SEO blog. Whatever form it takes, critical content comes with bonuses:
*Direct attention – your target market is more likely to come to you if you’re a resource on your industry as a whole.
*Links – sites, bloggers and businesses that receive a positive review generally jump at the chance to link to that review. Covering more than one influential person, business or site in a review is a great way to build a powerful link profile.

Reviews and opinion columns are a great way to open the door if you’re social media marketing or just trying to attract attention for your site. Talk to your SEO company about adding criticism to your content plan.

‘Navigation’ is one of those words that gets thrown around a lot in SEO circles. There is one permutation of the term that isn’t often talked about, and that’s ‘navigational search’. This type of search, which uses the search engines as a navigation point to get to a specific site, is often overlooked by site owners when they are planning out their SEO campaign. This can mean the loss of a very easy chunk of traffic, and much more.

If you don’t optimise your pages for your business name and related keywords, you’re losing out on a fair few opportunities:

*Determined or repeat customers. Internet users don’t react favourably if a business doesn’t appear first in a brand-name search. If all they get is a list of directories, they’re likely to feel that your brand isn’t a strong one.
*Search engine reputation management. If you don’t appear at the top in a search for your brand name, you risk having negative responses turn up instead. Controlling your brand name is a first step for online reputation management.
*Authority building. In a purely technical SEO sense, making your brand a strong presence in the search engines helps to build your rankings generally. It also helps to link your business more closely with your keywords.

Navigational searches are performed by people looking for you. Don’t miss out on their business by concentrating solely on the searchers who don’t know your name. Talk to us at www.SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk for more information about navigational search.

It’s been suspected for a few years, but Google’s position on ads has finally been confirmed. In a recent conference appearance, Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed that the search engine is now treating excessive ad space as an indicator of spam. Sites that feature too much advertising above the fold could find themselves facing a penalty.

Many sites rely on ad revenue for their survival, but many of these forget the impact that ads have on a page. Theories abound as to the best spot for placement for both SEO and marketing. The unacknowledged thought behind every theory is that internet users generally prefer sites with no ads at all, and Google seems to be backing this idea up.

Cutts stated that advertising that obscures content above the fold is being treated as a spam factor, in line with Google’s tougher stand on content this year. Site owners who give into the temptation to flood their pages with advertising have likely already felt the sting of changes to Google’s Panda Update, but any sites featuring advertising would be well advised to take it into consideration when accessing search engine optimization services.

Cutts has flagged potential problems with algorithm changes, requesting that sites who feel that they’ve been wrongly tagged as spam get in touch with his team.

If you suspect that your site has suffered a spam penalty, it’s important to fix the problem and get in touch with Google. You can discuss the resubmission process with our experts at www.SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk.

If you’re looking into affordable SEO services, but you’re worried about where to focus your attention, you’re really looking for smart SEO. Of course, the best search engine optimization is always smart, but when you’re trying to make your marketing budget stretch a little bit further it becomes even more important to implement your plan strategically.

Smart SEO involves ignoring the wisdom of the past and looking to the future. Specifically, smart website optimization involves:

*Anticipating human behaviour, rather than search engine behaviour. The search engines have been increasingly tailoring their approaches to suit internet users. It’s better to focus on the search engine’s targets than on the search engines themselves.

*Not being distracted by the technicalities, and focusing on goals. Those new to SEO often get drawn into watching clicks and traffic rates. These don’t automatically transfer to profits for your business. Talk to us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk about translating SEO into business gains.

*Treating your online presence as a valued sales operative. Internet plans have to have personality to work. One of the smartest things you can do to bring your SEO campaign together is decide on your attitude to socialising. Once you have an approach decided upon, you can build your business personality across the net.

By working smarter, you can avoid getting too involved with catching up with the current trend, something that can really hold small-scale SEO plans back. Instead, you can focus the energies of your search engine optimization agency on building something to bring your site forward.

Not everyone can make a major investment in search engine optimization services. When you’re trying to make the efforts of your SEO company stretch further, or you’re trying to manage your optimization work on your own, here are three things that can make your life a little easier.

1. Draw up a spreadsheet for link sorting. Having link building services on board is a boon when you’re trying to boost your link profile. However, if you’re trying to build some links on your own, there are things you can do to make your life easier. The most important is building a links spreadsheet. When you gather the data from your competitors’ link profiles, download it into a spreadsheet and set out columns for PageRank by site, rankings per page, contact details, and so on.

2. Get your social profiles sorted. Social media profiles are free, and many rank well, helping you to control your reputation. Talk to us about this at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk. Register wherever you can, and decide on a couple of sites to regularly participate on. This will help with #3, below. Another spreadsheet can be handy as a reference resource to keep track of passwords and those other tricky details.

3. Work on your reputation around the net. A good SEO plan can be a huge help in getting your pages into the SERPs, but you can help by building your reputation in other areas of the net. Set aside half an hour each day to post guest articles, reply to questions and participate in social media.

A significant number of SEO advantages can be had if you’ve got the right site structure. The problem, of course, is figuring out which is the right structure for your site. Regardless of the size or purpose of your site, you’re going to have to make some choices. Among those choices is whether to split off into multiple domains or structure in some sub-domains.

Multiple domains

If you have a lot going on online, having multiple domains is an attractive option. It’s the easiest way to keep things clear. On your many domains, you can create micro sites for each of your business ventures, ensuring that customers don’t get confused about your products. Using a number of domains can be handy if you have operations in multiple countries as it allows you to target local search more effectively. Talk to us at Searchengineoptimization.co.uk for more information about this and any other related topics.

Sub-domains

Sub-domains can also be handy SEO tools. As with using multiple domains, sub-domains give you an SEO advantage in that you can grab more listings in the search pages. Sub-domains have the added bonus of economy, as they allow you to branch off from your existing site, and there’s less chance of confusion with the search engines in terms of suspiciously connected sites.

Neither

If you want the simplest option in website optimization terms, you should opt for neither sub-domains or multiple domains. In doing so, however, you may lose the link and SERP visibility advantages, not forgetting the increased effectiveness of streamlined marketing. If you’re running a complex campaign, splitting off is worth consideration.

One of the link building strategies your search engine optimization agency might talk about is guesting on someone else’s blog. Guest posting, or guest blogging, is a popular form of organic link building. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s appropriate for your campaign.

As with any SEO strategy, there are pros and cons to link building. These need to be weighed up before you invest.

Cons:
*Investment – guest posting requires a significant investment because the content provided needs to be high quality.
*Uncertain reward – there’s no guarantee that the blog’s audience will react well to your post in terms of traffic and notoriety.
*Blog quality variation – not all blogs are going to provide valuable links and the best blogs can be hard to get a guest spot on.

Pros:
*Relationship building – guest blogging consolidates relationships within your industry and with your target market.
*Direct traffic – a good post should bring traffic back to your landing page.
*Inbound links – if targeted properly, guest posts can provide some high quality links in an organic way.

As you can see, there are some solid benefits to guest blogging. If you’re keen to do it, there’s nothing really holding you back. If you’re looking into guest posting as a part of your search engine optimization services, however, you need to balance out the commitment with the reward. For some sites, it may not be worth it. Talk to your SEO company for more advice, or approach us at searchengineoptimization.co.uk.

It has been a while since site owners could expect their target audiences to come to them. Even when readers did turn up to sites in search of a good read, some effort had to be made to make that first contact. These days, first contact is not enough. Contact has to be made constantly, persistently, and with an eye to becoming part of the reader’s world. The best way to do this is to tweet like crazy.

Tweeting content updates has become a common practice. Everyone from the biggest news organisation to the smallest blog is doing it, and with good reason. Posting an update on Twitter is much like opening your window and yelling, ‘hey, we’ve got some fresh stuff!’ Failing to tweet is almost exactly like sitting in your office with the door closed. Which method do you think will get more attention?

There’s another reason to start tweeting about updates, however, and it’s related to the broader field of competition. With so many people using tweets and wall posts to advertise content, it’s become an audience expectation. For more information on using social media sites as search engine optimization tools, talk to us at searchengineoptimization.co.uk.

Although we mention Twitter here, your social exposure doesn’t have to be limited to tweeting. Not every audience is on Twitter, for a start. It’s worth considering using your Facebook wall, and even things like StumbleUpon to promote content during organic search engine optimization. Advertising updates across several social platforms only means more exposure. Talk to your SEO company about your options.