Social networks are getting a lot of attention these days including Wikipedia, del.icio.us and MySpace. Along with the buzz, these sites are also generating a lot of traffic! How can you integrate links for these types of social network sites into your search engine marketing program? While there are an increasing number of social networks, this article will stick to the above as they are kings of their domains so to speak. I recently had the opportunity to attend Search Engine Strategies in New York City this past February, 2006. While attending a session in regards to community marketing tactics using both Wikipedia and tagging, the panel asked the audience, “Who here knows what Wikipedia and tagging are?” - less than half the room raised their hands.Let me give you an overview of these concepts.

Posts

When a user saves an item on del.icio.us, it is posted to the front page as well as the tag page for each chosen tag. A sample is below explaining the various information pieces:

Here is a del.icio.us example listing under the tag “web 2.0″:

O’Reilly — What Is Web 2.0 save this

by Scottcard to web2.0 oreilly article reference … saved by 2938 other people .

The good and the bad of tagging is that you will receive good quality backlinks to your site and increase visibility. The bad is that the majority of the time your tags will be removed from community members because the members are technically savvy and intolerant of any type of commercial push. Choose your keywords wisely and make sure your tag is in the right place and contributes to the community. Other tagging sites to consider are: Technorati and Digg. There are many others, but these are the ones that matter.

I see tagging or social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us gaining in popularity within the next three years as blogs did two years ago. Yahoo has already taken notice by purchasing del.icio.us and flickr. Digg.com and furl.com are also making headway. Other sources to consider are the social network sites for developing a web2.0 SEM strategy.

MySpace is the current king of social networks, as it is literally a social-space network with 2.5 times more daily users than Google (psst, this is a huge untapped market). The domain dates back to 1999 where it was originally an online hard-drive of sorts. The current rendition took hold in 2003 making MySpace barely three years old. The main demographic is made up of teens to 20-somethings. The music industry is currently using MySpace as a marketing tool, not the labels themselves, but the bands. For example, Pearl Jam is announcing their upcoming release for May with sample songs and concert date announcements. One of their sample songs from their upcoming albums is one of the most played songs across the entire MySpace network. Independent film makers have also taken notice. In February 2006, amateur filmmaker David Lehre released a short film called MySpace: The Movie. This short film has quickly become a hit, registering over six million views following its release.

Benefiting from MySpace traffic is pretty straight forward. You will want to create a user profile and post links to your company or websites such as blogs, feeds, etc. Profile note, you can post html code in any field regarding your profile. Next, create your social pipeline of users and keep the demographic inline with any product or link you wish to shamelessly promote in the future. You don’t want to get spammy here either. The downside would be getting your user profile terminated from MySpace or members posting negative comments within your profile. Again, tread lightly by thinking neutral and keep the benefit of the community in mind.

The opportunity costs associated with community based SEM are very high. However, tagging in particular may be time prohibitive for most organizations as it requires a lot of trial and error. Tagging can seem like a waste of time as most tagging submissions will be removed by community members who find your submission “spammy”. Time spent on tagging isn’t a problem for most sole proprietors, but can be costly to your employer who is left with little equitable return to show for your time spent.

Utilizing Web2.0 sites such as Wikipedia, del.icio.us and MySpace, will prove effective for your business if done properly. Remember to tread lightly, don’t use “spammy” techniques and stay neutral keeping the benefit of the community at heart in your content development. Doing so will help your business to avoid a negative backlash toward your brand from the community you are developing content for.

By Warren Pattison

According to the 1998 Georgia Tech GVU User Survey, 85 percent of respondents found Web pages from search engines. Since then, other studies have reported 50 to 80 percent of Web site traffic comes from search engines. Searching is second only to email as the most popular online activity. Unfortunately, there are many marketers who simply do not put enough effort into preparing their web site for the search engines.

The following guidelines will help you to start seeing results in the search engines. Your first step is simply choosing the right keywords.

Choosing the Right Keywords

Often times, people make the mistake of optimizing for very general keywords like used cars or online marketing. Although these terms get lots of traffic, it is very unlikely that you will be able to rank highly for them. Then, even if you do, this type of traffic produces very low conversion rates because they are not targeted prospects.

For example, if you are selling hiking backpacks, it would be much more beneficial for you to target the phrase ‘hiking backpacks’ rather than the extremely competitive keyword ‘backpacks’. It would be even better to target the phrase ‘camelbak commander’. This is a specific type of backpack and therefore will attract more buyers than searchers.

In fact, according to Jupiter Media Metrix, 28 percent of searchers will type a product name into a search engine. Nine percent type in a brand name and 5 percent type in company names.

The more targeted your keyword phrase, the more likely they are to buy. A person who types in ‘backpacks’ may be looking for school backpacks or snowboard backpacks. This lends to useless, un-targeted traffic.

However, a person that searches for a specific brand of backpacks knows exactly what they want and they are much further along in the buying process.

Once you have determined the best possible keyword phrases to target, you must now optimize your page for those specific keywords.

Optimize Your Page for Targeted Keywords

There are many factors that will determine how your web pages rank. However, one of the most important ones is that of a good title. The title tag appears at the very top of the head section. The words in the title tag will appear in the clickable link on the search engine results page (SERP).

Your title tag should contain targeted keyword phrases that reflect the copy on the page. The most important keywords should appear near the beginning of the title tag, You must also keep in mind that this should be a compelling title that would attract searchers to want to know more.

Your title tag should focus on your primary keyword, but it should also deliver a message. Use your title to mention benefits, make an attention-grabbing statement, ask a compelling question, or anything else that would set you apart from all of the other pages competing against you. Your title should include the main keyword you are targeting on that page as well as entice visitors to click on your link.

Following the title tag are your Meta description and Meta keyword tags.

You have probably heard that meta tags are dead and for the most part that is true. However, you should still include them in your web site because they allow you to control the description of your listing in some of the search engines.

Your meta description can make the difference in someone clicking on your link or choosing your competitor.

The meta description tag should be used for marketing purposes, enticing people to click on your link as opposed to one of the other 9 search results.

Meta keywords tags are a different story. Google pays absolutely no attention to this tag: a result of spammers. As for the rest of the search engines, meta keywords may be taken into account, but they are still of very little importance.

I would advise that you use this tag for misspellings, technical acronyms and synonyms. Using this technique, you may be able to bring in some additional traffic for people looking for related, but less popular keywords.

Creating Quality Content

Next, you will want to focus on the visible content of your page. Many people online today are creating content that is written specifically for the search engines. However, I would advise you to optimize your content for your readers. Your readers are the most important.

You’ll especially want to have your targeted keyword phrase in the very first paragraph of your text.

Some other places you will want to include your keywords are in the image alt attributes and within your heading tags. Place all of your subtitles into header tags with your targeted keyword phrases.

Internal Linking

Creating quality content for your visitors is crucial. However, proper navigation and site structure can be just as important.

The search engines cannot fully index your site if it is not properly linked together.

Every single page on your web site should be no more than 2 clicks away from the homepage.

Before you create your site, decide on which internal pages are the most important in terms of ranking. Once you have gathered 15-20 of your most important pages, you will need to place them at the side and bottom navigation of each one of your web pages. This will ensure that the most possible pagerank is transferred to those pages.

Each of these links should contain descriptive anchor text, preferably targeted keyword phrases that you are wanting to rank highly for. You should never make your web site visitors guess what’s on the other end with a link that says, ‘click here’. Be as descriptive as possible and your visitors will thank-you.

One of the best ways to structure your site is through the use of hub pages. This is very similar to hubs on a spoke. At the center is your homepage. On the homepage, you have a link to each of the hub pages. The hub pages are basically small site maps that are built into the navigation. Each hub includes a set of information on a particular keyword or phrase. This is often referred to as content layering. You can layer your site through the use of sub-folders.

Inbound Links

Once you have finished optimizing all of the on-page factors, you must focus on some crucial off-page factors.

To have a truly successful search engine optimization campaign, you have to go beyond on-page factors. Your overall link popularity is a crucial ranking factor.

Some of the best techniques for getting quality in-bound links are syndicating articles, exchanging RSS feeds, submitting your web site to directories, syndicating your podcast, sending out press releases, and simply having a link-worthy site.

When you have a site that is full of wonderful, useful information, other sites will start naturally linking to you. You have probably heard that content is king on the internet. However, this is simply not true. QUALITY content is the true king.

In review, keep in mind that the most important places to use your researched keyword phrases are in your title tags, the visible body of your text, and in onsite and offsite links.

Successful SEO takes time. If you continually put all of these strategies into action, you will begin to see the benefits in due time.

By Kim Roach

This change is permanent: Marketing your website without taking advantage of RSS feeds will be the biggest mistake you can make in 2006 and beyond. Microsoft is unleashing a new OS (Vista) that will plug into the web via RSS in a very profound way. If you haven’t been keeping up on Vista (formerly Longhorn) developments because you thought it was of no consequence to you as a marketer, think twice.

Vista will revolutionize the way everyone syndicates their content and markets their websites forever.

RSS is fast becoming the backbone of the web. Sites are organically syndicating content around the web through RSS search engines like this one: http://rssfeeds.contentdesk.com.

Feeds in RSS directories then get picked up by publishers looking for good headline content for their sites.

The major search engines also pick up those feed listings and often discover new sites and spider them faster than any other form of content syndication including articles and press releases!

How To Create A Feed For Your Site

First off, if you are not blogging, you need to. Every type of site imaginable can produce a relevant blog with topics related to your main content.

It doesn’t matter if you simply sell furniture on your site - you need a blog!

Imagination is all that is required to create a blog featuring the almighty promotion power of an RSS feed. In the furniture example you can blog about interior design and any number of topics.

Notice that the big sites (that were formerly simple shopping cart sites with little content) are now putting up articles and blogging about the topics surrounding their products.

They are not stupid. They know that creating content and feeding it around the web is a major traffic source and they’ve been switching to richer content models for well over a year en masse.

Most any major shopping site you land on nowadays has rich content somewhere on the site. And they have a feed their visitors can subscribe to and that they can market with.

For the smaller mom and pop shop, a Wordpress blog is all you need to plug into the RSS world and fill your site with rich content (not just product descriptions and sales letters) that the engines are looking for, as well as the major part of your market who want more information before making purchases.

A review site is a very popular model. Lots of surfers want to read about 3rd party experiences with products before deciding on purchases.

Again, this model is not new and it is not an afterthought marketing ploy. It is major business to the sites who have mastered the art of filling direct sales sites and shopping cart-run sites with deep content.

With Microsoft Vista, all PC users are going to be able to detect feeds on every site they visit and subscribe to those feeds.

Very soon the days of “Give me your email address and other private information” will be a thing of the past.

Smart marketers are going to adopt the RSS information delivery model because surfers will quickly begin to ignore email subscription forms while looking for the simple and completely anonymous RSS subscription model.

So if you haven’t started planning a marketing campaign utilizing RSS delivery of newsletters and updates over email, you had better get started understanding RSS and its eventual replacement of the traditional email list.

Critical mass tolerance of spam and giving out email addresses has been reached in all markets. Only in very tight niches in special circumstances where there is instant trust and credibility conveyed by a site will you find decent optin rates.

Everywhere else the optin rate for any kind of email notification list is at rock bottom. Add to that a dismal delivery ratio of emails due to overzealous, catch-all spam filters from the ISP to the user level, and the writing is on the wall: email is on its way out as a viable tool for a successful marketing campaign.

The change is happening now and it will be permanent. RSS will eclipse email lists and it will be the new defacto method of content syndication around the web by the end of 2006.

Tracking what your RSS subscribers click on and do through your RSS feeds is the problem many geeks are working on now. We will soon have more accurate and more in-depth tracking available through RSS subscription and syndication than we currently have with email marketing.

Once marketers feel comfortable that they haven’t lost any tracking ability that we currently enjoy with email, the game will quickly accelerate into a whole new type of competition for eyeballs. Watch also for a whole slew of new marketing courses and materials that teach how to dominate a niche with RSS marketing rather than email marketing.

“Growing Your List” and “Syndicating Your Content” is going to be done by RSS more and more by regular website owners as this year progresses. That includes your competition! Vista will be a massive feed detector/reader available to all PC users very soon.

This means that you can have a feed on your site for visitors to subscribe to, or you can see for yourself how many of your visitors choose to ignore your email subscription form and your content because you are not Web 2.0 enough for them.

So, are you set to take advantage of RSS as the impending dominant tool in your marketing campaign?

By Jack Humphrey