We are a little late to be honest, and they do say better late than never.  We’ve been doing social marketing for clients for years and of course we have done SEO for clients for years.  Very few clients wanted both, most wanted SEO, and it was my fault really for not better communicating the value of Social Marketing.  Social marketing as we now know it, sort of crept up as a fad and in rapid time became a significant element of web marketing.  Most of our clients, local in Jupiter or around the world in Canada and Hawaii, should now be on a hybrid plan.

There are still quite a few people we meet with who have no love or interest in Facebook.  Ok, just consider that people spend more time on Facebook than they do on Google.  And google is far and away the top search engine.  Facebook can be an amazing word of mouth and referral source. Always has been and always will be the best way to get new business is to have a friend tell a friend.  And there are many ways friends can tell friends about you.  We recently spoke with a car wash client of ours and suggested they implement the masses strategy. In other words, tell people that a product is popular and they will feel some pressure to follow the masses.

And it’s more than just a strategy, its a valuable service.  Communicating what other customers choose the most could help indecisive people, or people who are unsure of the value of a certain product, or even people who never really noticed that product was available to make a choice that is in their best interest.

We’ve long been an advocate of blogging. Just seems that very few of us have (or make) the time to regularly post useful information on the web.  Huge mistake. Since content is king that means fresh content is emperor. Who wants to read some old static page when there is regularly updated content available, with people’s opinions on it. Now we hook your blog up to your Facebook page and twitter account and you have a sort of minimalist approach to social marketing.   Just consider that an important part of social marketing is being social.  Make time to contribute to conversations going on around you that are interesting and you will find more people contributing to your conversation.

Consider the mainstream social outlets moderns search engines. People search on them for advice on where to go, what to do, and what to spend money on all day every day.  You need to get in their and get some of those dollars.  People have no idea how valuable your product is yet, and they should know.  A great site, some basic seo, social marketing and blogging will get the message out.

At Webmanna, our business is growing your business.

Here is a brief summary of the video:

Go to your profile
Click on Pages -> Create Page
Fan yourself, add a picture, edit info
Add some status updates
Share with your friends
Get 25 fans so you can create a custom URL  (Go to Facebook.com/username)

We’d love to have you as friends and fans!  You can become a fan of WebManna by visiting http://www.facebook.com/webmanna Of course you need to have a Facebook account/profile to become a fan.

First of all, Facebook gets more face time than google.  Facebook is converting haters left and right.  As a marketing tool it is top notch.  Grow your friend base and share cool stuff. So easy a caveman could do it.

At the close of 2009,  Google shared with the world they would list feeds from Facebook in their real-time search results.  Looks like they are making good on their word.   Updates on facebook pages are being included in results.

The Bottom Line:

For now all we see in real-time search results are links,  status updates, pics and videos posted on the Facebook Fan Page.  Only what the owner of the page posts makes it into the results.   Visitor comments are not included.

But don’t just take my word for it, Danny Sullivan speaks! “Google’s move makes having Facebook fan pages even more essential. Without one, you’re missing out on a chance to be found within yet another area, Google’s real time results.”

So either go research and make it happen yourself or find out how WebManna can support your Facebook marketing efforts.

So we start asking around and researching how to get our websites more traffic.  Look it up on the web and you will get an absolute overload of information. If you ask your friends they will often tell you that SEO or PPC are the answers to your traffic needs.  Unfortunately when they attempt to describe SEO it just leads to more questions.  PPC is a bit more straightforward.  Pay some money and get visits to your website.  Let’s see just how simple and complicated these two traffic gaining methods are.

What is SEO and why do I need it?

Search Engine Optimization.  Means optimizing your website or blog to rank well in search engine results.  So if i search Google or Bing for “cat shaped cutting boards” I should find your website in the results.  Optimizing or SEO is as much an art as it is a science. Consider that “cutting board” or “cat” will have millions and millions of search engine results with thousands of businesses spending time and money to get their website on the first page of organic listings (search results). Your site needs to have more quality indicators of value than all the other sites.  The primary indicators are based on the keyword content on your site and the back links or other websites linking to your website.  Some of the many other quality factors include, size, age, load times, traffic, freshness, code bloat, deep links, etc.   So an older site might beat a bigger site but not a newer site with more backlinks?  Exactly. Maybe. Sort of. It depends.

When it comes to SEO there are a lot of strategies.  Great content and anchor text links from other websites to your site are extremely valuable.  Knowing which keyword terms to focus on is important too.  The challenge with SEO is that it takes time.  It can take months for some terms and a year or more for highly competitive terms depending on so many factors including the amount of money you have to throw at it.

So then I should do PPC right?

Absolutely. Maybe. Pay Per Click (PPC) is paying for clicks. Usually Google or Yahoo or smaller providers who take your cash and place your site in sponsored listings sections in search results or page ads and only charge you when the link to your site is clicked on. With PPC you can have nearly immediate traffic to your website for the keywords you want.

The challenges for PPC are similar to SEO. The more popular or competitive the term the more it will cost you.  PPC requires some optimization as well including things like keyword based landing pages, negative keywords, and geographical targeting.  There is also the issue of click fraud.  Pay per click or sponsored listings are really great for testing, selling products, and marketing services.

So PPC or SEO?

Testing tells us that using both in your strategy usually means exponentially more traffic than just one or the other.  There is a trust factor in seeing the same company twice on the page in either or both sponsored and organic listings.  SEO is for longevity and domination. PPC is for immediate results and competition.  Most of the time SEO is a must.  PPC is great to do while you are working on your organic results.  More people look at the organic results and ignore the sponsored listings.  If PPC works great then keep doing it.

At Webmanna we love SEO and PPC.  There are a lot of tricks and strategies for improving your PPC results.  There are a lot of strategies and methods for improving your organic listings.  Let us handle that while you do what you do best.   Give us a call at 877 ASK WEBM.  Or shoot us an email to learn more about SEO and PPC in Palm Beach.

It’s so simple and so important that I will say it again, use but do not abuse your tags people. A lot of good would occur in the world if everyone walked around with tags describing their purpose.

Fresh Meat Means Frequently Updated Content

Look, in my opinion, if you don’t have the decency to put up great content you shouldn’t build a site. If that makes me a web snob than so be it. Now some people do make money with craptent sites, but I want nothing to do with them and sooner or later neither do the search engines. People want to read relevant interesting words and creepily enough so do search engine spiders. (I wish we called them butterflies instead of spiders…)

Keep writing, keep growing, keep adding and amazing things will happen to you and your website. I guarantee it.