Monday, May 12, 2008

Social Media & Viral PR Generate $1 Million in Sales Leads for New Condo Project

Jennings Public Relations & Advertising (JPRA) recently generated $1 million in online sales leads using social media and viral public relations tactics for the Metropolitan, a new downtown Kansas City condo development.

According to Phillip Gesue, director of acquisitions and development of Time Equities, Inc., an online initiative was a critical component of the Metropolitan's overall marketing strategy. "We wanted to drive online traffic to the Web site and increase search engine rankings to ensure that potential buyers discovered the Metropolitan and all of its amenities," said Gesue.

JPRA, a public relations and social media firm, created a series of three campaigns with compelling human interest stories, featuring current condo residents and illustrated the luxuries of living and working downtown. Valerie Jennings, CEO and president of JPRA, explained that the success of the campaigns was a result of solid content, Web 2.0 technology and search engine optimization. "We researched the market and online community, listened to current and new buyers and created a series of stories. True social media is not about companies, it is about consumers. That is why this content resonated with prospective buyers," said Jennings.

Watch Jennings speak about the future of social media and viral PR: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed2S_8Z4ET0 .
Results from the campaigns were measured via an online sales form, requesting how consumers found the Metropolitan's Web site or online press content. Most of the inquiries were for one and two bedroom condos ranging in price from $81,900 to $145,900. Currently, the campaigns are still generating sales leads for the luxury high-rise building.

Jennings Public Relations & Advertising is a traditional public relations and social media relations firm and is one of the first PR firms in the U.S. to generate B-to-B and B-to-C sales leads utilizing social media and viral PR tactics, via the Internet. By leveraging traditional public relations and dynamic Web 2.0 technology, the firm captures the attention of mainstream, virtual and industry-related press and prospects. For more information

Time Equities, Inc., based in New York City, is a full-service global real estate company. For more information

Social Media Marketing and Link Building

Intensive workshops provide necessary skills, tools needed to take search engine marketing to new level

Two of the many Search Engine Strategies (SES) Training Workshops throughout 2008 will take place Thursday, February 7, at the Hilton San Francisco from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. These workshops give attendees a leg up on the practices, applications, and hands-on exposure needed to become -- and remain -- a top performer in the search engine marketing and search engine optimization fields. Those who sit in on these sessions will walk away with the knowledge and skills needed to be a successful search engine marketer and will be armed with the basics to jump-start a career in search marketing.

The SES Training Workshops will be led by Debra O'Neil-Mastaler, president of Alliance-Link, and Liana "Li" Evans, director of Internet marketing at KeyRelevance. Li Evans, leading "How to Effectively Use Social Media for Search Marketing Campaigns", will help beginners and experienced search marketers alike to understand more about using social media effectively. This session will show the entire realm of social media and how to use it effectively as part of a holistic marketing campaign. While many people think of Digg as the big player that they need to be working with, Digg is just one of many facets of social media. From social communities to photo sharing, blogging and forums, the Internet offers a world of opportunity waiting to be explored.

Debra O'Neil-Mastaler will spearhead "Link Building Tactics, Tools and & Techniques", which will help marketers understand and manage their link building campaigns by providing the knowledge to create a proven, practical and creative link marketing campaign. Attendees in this session will walk away understanding why they need certain links, how to find them, and how to effectively use links to promote brands and increase search engine rankings.

The SES Training Workshops take place in a small class setting, allowing instructors to be readily accessible for informal one-on-one or small group discussions. Consultants, site designers, website owners, and in-house marketing professionals cannot afford to miss this opportunity to experience firsthand the latest developments in search engine strategy.

The cost for a full day pass is $1,345. Seats are limited in order to provide personal training, so interested parties should register soon to ensure that spots are reserved.

About Incisive Interactive Marketing LLC -- A Division of Incisive Media PLC

Incisive Media PLC is a specialist business information provider, based in the UK with offices in North America, Hong Kong, India and Mainland China. The company's activities are currently built around ten core industry sectors - mortgages; marketing services; financial technology; retail investment; capital markets; risk management; insurance; legal services; private equity and photography. Information is provided via a wide range of channels--in print, in person and online. Funds advised by Apax Partners, a leading global private equity group, recently completed the successful de-listing of Incisive Media from the London Stock Exchange alongside the existing management.

Incisive Interactive Marketing LLC is the marketing services division of the company and incorporates leading websites Search Engine Watch, the ClickZ Network and their associated events series including Search Engine Strategies. These properties were acquired in 2005.

SMO is a method to optimize your site

Every other day we come across various changes in technology with latest and updated techniques. Social media optimization is a development process to optimize a website so that it amalgamates with an online community or to a community website easily. Well, it can also be said that it is a method of modifying a website so that the promotion of website gets easily done through social mediums or through online communities. The users or the visitors do help in making the business popular. The web users or visitors visit the website and come to know about its relevance and its use for themselves. In this way the website gets promoted by an easily and effective medium and many people get connected through this social medium. The optimization of website is also done due to the high demand in the market. The web owner modifies in the site to make itself much familiar and useful for the online visitors.

Social media optimization serves as a marketing tool for any business whether it is a new business or an old one. You must design your website keeping in mind the importance and meaning of your business. This will definitely help you to get a fast growth in your business. Today the web has huge response and it can easily reach anyone and anywhere around the world. The success behind social media optimization is that it caters to many users needs. People visit such websites and become member of social media websites to get connected to millions of people globally. And in other way the business promotion also gets executed through social media optimization. Online marketing methods have become so easier that many businesses are tempting towards it.

The icons or the links on a social media site are the perfect example of social media optimization that comes across to the online users. The web visitors click on the link or icons if they feel it will be helpful for them. This concept is sprouting with a fast pace ever since it came into being and many business is getting towards. It has really made many business or firm quite popular. The internet marketers are looking for the many other social media tactics to influence with pioneering ideas and concepts for its clients and businesses. You get so much affected by the social website that you feel something missing if you are not able to visit the social site. Here you find many of your relatives and friends staying in any corner of globe.

This has happened due to globalization which had made everything easily accessible and in everyone’s reach. Use of latest and highly advanced technology has made everything in our reach. So you need to make such strategies that makes your business truly successful. Along with this you have to make your site link available on other reputed websites where you can expect maximum viewing. You can also exchange links with other websites so that you are not left with any option to make your business popular.

Social media websites are quite popular among many users and many other are joining the community everday.Social media optimization serves an effective business tool that can make your business boom with such techniques.

Increasing Online Traffic Through Social Media Marketing

So what do we mean by social media? As the Internet has evolved increasing numbers of people have taken to sharing ideas, opinions and experiences through a combination of text, blogs, audio, video and message boards etc. More recently RSS and podcasts have also captured the imagination of many in their lust to get their message out to a wide audience. Social media has lead to a revolution in the way many people now interact and learn about world events. The repercussions are that the views of media giants are no longer taken for granted. Now almost anyone can put forward their perspective on any issue they wish. Some organisations have been quick to catch on and realise how their products or services can be promoted by this phenomenon, a kind of social marketing mix unlike anything which as gone before.

One of the simplest ways to begin social media marketing is by creating your own MySpace page. MySpace offers anyone the option to build a free web page where you can share your ideas or express your views in a particular topic. By inviting friends who share similar interests it's possible to quickly build a cult like community while covertly linking them to your own website.

The social web revolves around sharing opinions…..be they good or bad. With this in mind, websites that are packed full of content can lever recommendations from readers in the form of bookmarking. Bookmarking has become popular with some web users who'll share their lists with others who have a common interest. Assuming your website has some decent content, bookmarking sites such as Digg, Technorati, Del.icio.us and Reddit provide downloadable code and links etc that'll soon get you stated. A wise alternative is to link up to AddThis.com, which will then save you alienating those with a bookmarking preference by giving access to numerous bookmarking sites in one go.

A great method of keeping users up to date with your content is to set up a RSS feed. Otherwise known as Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Syndication, RSS provides a notification to users that new content has been added to your site thereby keeping your visitors up to speed with new developments or product launches and so on.

Enabling people to communicate directly through your website is at the core of social media and forums can be a great way of providing just that. The best forums are well managed but not overly censored. Both good and bad comments should be encouraged. While it's easy to assume that bad comments are best filtered out, leaving them in gives the forum greater credibility. A well managed forum provides an excellent, not to mention free, means of gathering customer feedback and carrying out market research etc. To give a forum momentum you may need to regularly stimulate discussion by starting new topics and by spending some regular time weeding out the spam and nonsense.

Showing your expertise through video is a clever way of grabbing an audience. Sometimes the only real way to demonstrate something is in a visual form. If you are dealing with something computerised it could be worth considering using screen capture software where you can easily take people through a lifelike demo. Video can be downloaded from your own website or posted on sites like YouTube for instance. Its always good to stamp your video with you website address so people know where it originated from. If your video impresses people they may want to seek you out. In much the same way still photographs, graphics and audio can be posted to websites; again not forgetting some kind of link back to your own website.

Lastly but by no means least you can get social media savvy by creating a blog. In essence blogs are little more than short articles often centred on current affairs, similar to writing a column for a newspaper. If you set up a blog it requires regular updating. Much like running a forum people expect blogs to evolve preferably on a daily basis. The biggest no no is to be lame on updates as any audience you've gained will soon be lost.

Friday, July 13, 2007

How to SEO Flash

Flash web Design has a bad reputation, undeserved in our opinion, for harming search visibility. Why are SEO consultants concerned about Flash? A few popular WYSIWYG development tools generate invalid, inaccessible HTML code for embedding Flash, and many designers don't know enough about accessibility programming, search engine optimization (SEO) and the benefits of code validation. As a result, most web pages using Flash aren't programmed correctly.



Requirements for Successful Use of Flash Web Design



Flash animation is a great way to present complex content because it allows the designer to put more content in a finite space, without wrecking page design. If you sell technology, Flash is an ideal way to present a slide show or movie that explains your products' benefits. With a bit of hand coded HTML, we can satisfy these objectives:

Clean design using Flash

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Accessibility for people with different abilities

Code validation

Correct functionality with IE

If you have a site built entirely with Flash Web Design, you don't really have a website, because there's no page structure. In that case we recommend building an HTML site, and chopping up your Flash into separate pieces to be installed on each page.



SEO Flash web Design Programming



Our recommended SEO method for optimizing Flash uses a DIV with search engine accessible content, and JavaScript to detect when browsers are capable of viewing Flash. When the browser has Flash capability, the Javascript manipulates the page's document object model (DOM) to replace the alternative content with the Flash movie. Search engine spiders don't run the Javascript, so they see and index the alternative content. The alternative content may contain links, heading, styled text, images - anything you can add to an ordinary HTML page. Simply apply your normal SEO copy editing and coding skills to the alternative content, and Flash web Design becomes a non-issue.

Programming Flash accessibility isn't spamming, as long as the alternative content accurately reflects the visible movie. In fact, alternative content is mandatory if you want to build an accessible site.





Example: Making Flash Menus Spiderable



The sample code below shows a Flash heading and menu from the site that has been made accessible with alternative content. The menu will function properly with the latest ActiveX update for IE. Previously, the interior pages of the site were not indexed because search engines could not follow the links inside the movie. We solved this problem using the HTML 4.01 code below:

Questions to Ask Your Potential Search Engine Optimization Company

Search is a growing industry, and it seems that every day there is a new search engine optimization company in the game. However, the skills of many of these search engine optimization companies are questionable. Staying on top of the knowledge curve can be daunting, and getting up to speed more daunting still. Moreover, there are a huge variety of tactics, "safe" and "unsafe" practices (in terms of the risk of penalization), and other important business considerations that you should think about before deciding on any particular search engine optimization company.
The following is a list of questions to help you to determine if the company you are considering is deserving of your trust. In this article, we'll focus on the tactics that search engine optimization companies might use that could put your website at risk of penalization or removal from the major search engines. Ask your potential search engine optimization company the following:

Do you show search engines anything that a visitor does not see?

There is a common tactic that certain search engine optimization companies use called "cloaking." In simple terms, these companies use technology that enables your website to recognize when a visitor to your site is a spider and to then feed that spider specialized content designed to rank highly in search engines. This tactic violates the Terms of Service (TOS) of every major search engine. Sites that are caught cloaking are routinely removed from engines. Therefore, depending on your tolerance for risk, you may want to find a search engine optimization company that does not employ this tactic.

Do you create pages, either on my server or somewhere else, that are not built into the navigation of my site?

Another common technique that some search engine optimization companies employ is the creation of "doorway pages." Since the term "doorway page" now has such a negative connotation in the industry, many search engine optimization companies have their own names for such pages: "gateway pages," "bridge pages," "targeted entry pages," "specialized content pages," and so on. Whatever they are called, such pages are rarely effective and also put websites at risk of penalization, as this is another tactic that violates the TOS of every major engine. If your potential search engine optimization company does not give you a definitive "no" to the above question, you may want to look elsewhere.

What is your link building methodology?
Is it automated, and do you target reciprocal links?

Quality search engine optimization companies are concerned about garnering quality inbound links to your website because "link popularity" plays a big factor in rankings. If the major players at any potential search engine optimization company tell you that they do not build links, it's time to laugh in their faces, call them lazy, and move on.
Because finding quality links from quality sites is very time consuming, many search engine optimization companies have tried to automate the process. One undesirable approach to link building is automated reciprocal linking schemes, often responding to the ubiquitous emails that are sent to anyone with a website, looking for link exchanges to boost a site's link popularity. The danger here is that an outbound link from your site is counted as a "vote" for the site to which it links. If that site gets penalized, your site may get penalized in turn. (Google refers to this type of linking relationship as a "bad neighborhood.") A good search engine optimization company will concentrate instead on garnering quality inbound only links to your website and adding the type of content that makes it worthy of non-reciprocal links from a variety of sites.

Do you use hidden text or hidden links?

Search engines, as a rule, do not like it when a website shows them content that is not designed for a visitor to see. However, there are search engine optimization companies that will employ hidden text (text that is the same color as the background color of a page or text that is hidden behind a graphic, for example) to try to boost that page's relevance, and thus the page's ranking. Other search engine optimization companies will use hidden links, typically sized down to one pixel, that lead to dozens, or even hundreds of pages that are not designed for visitors to see, known as doorway pages. This is another tactic that, if discovered, can get a website removed from search engines. If you are averse to this type of risk, make certain the search engine optimization company that you are considering gives you a definitive "no" in answer to the question.

Have you ever gotten a client's site penalized?
If so, when was the last time?

Many quality search engine optimization companies have, at one time or another, gotten a client site penalized, either due to a change in the TOS of an engine or an oversight of some sort. If the search engine optimization company with which you are speaking tells you that it has gotten a site penalized, but that it was many years ago, this may not be such a big deal. But if the company tells you that it caused a site to be penalized last week, you should quickly procure a cross and some garlic and run screaming in the opposite direction.
While these questions do not cover all potentially dangerous methodologies, it has been my experience that shady search engine optimization companies rarely use only one illegal trick, and one of the tricks in their arsenal is almost certainly listed above. If a search engine optimization company gives you a lot of evasive answers to these questions, it may give you an idea of the type of firm that you are dealing with. Unless you are comfortable with the risks associated with the above tactics used by some search engine optimization companies, I suggest you find another vendor.

Summary of above Questions to ask a SEO Company

Above, I went over questions that you should ask your potential search engine optimization company regarding its tactics. That set of questions is critical, as before moving forward with any of the myriad of search engine optimization companies out there, you should always determine whether or not they will put your site at risk of penalization in the major search engines (leaving your website worse off than when your campaign started).
However, many people researching search engine optimization companies are unaware that potential penalization is even an issue, they are primarily interested in the results that the search engine optimization company can achieve. The below questions are designed to determine the competence of any search engine optimization company that you are considering. To find out whether any particular company is worthy of your trust in terms of results, consider asking the following:

Do you require that I make changes to my website content?

Any search engine optimization companies that answer "no" to this question are either using shady tactics or are only scratching the surface of true search engine optimization. Certainly, there are some elements that can be changed on a website that are largely transparent to the user, including title tags, meta tags, and alt tags. While making changes to these elements can create a boost in rankings, it will not give you the search engine dominance over your competitors that you desire. Remember, search engines are interested in matching content (what appears on your web pages) with search queries (the phrases that people are typing into search engines).
The problem with a search engine optimization company only manipulating the largely unseen elements is that search engines recognize that these elements are determined by the owner of the website and may not actually reflect the real content that appears on the pages. In order to perform well across the most popular engines, you must make certain that your search engine optimization company accurately addresses popular search queries within your pages. And this almost always requires changes to your content.

Will you be adding additional pages to my website?

If a search engine optimization company answers "no" to this question but answers "yes" to the question above, it likely means that it will be employing what I call the "shoehorn" approach to optimization. This means that the firm will try to shoehorn key phrases into existing pages on your website, rather than expanding your website to include new content.
The trouble with this approach is that your existing pages are unlikely to directly address the search query. When search engine optimization companies shoehorn in key phrases, they may achieve high rankings for you, but you probably won't have many long term visitors. For example, assume that your company makes widgets and you have an "about us" page on your site that gives a brief history of your company, as well as contact information and driving directions. If your search engine optimization company optimizes this page for "custom widget pricing," and you subsequently achieve high rankings for the phrase, it does not necessarily mean that you will see much benefit. One can deduce from the query that people are looking for actual pricing information, not information on where your company is located or when it was founded. Another web page that directly addresses their search query is just a click of the back button away.
Adding new, informational pages to your website is a standard approach for the inclusion of quality search engine optimization phrases. Think of it this way, your search engine optimization company should not be thinking, "Where can we shoehorn this phrase in?" Search engine optimization companies should instead always be thinking, "How can we best address this query with a new page?" The difference in results can be dramatic.

What will you be doing besides working on my site directly?
If a prospective search engine optimization company tells you that it will only be making changes to your site itself, this means that it will not be spending any time working on your site's link popularity. Link popularity plays a tremendous role in determining rankings in every major search engine. Simply put, sites that have a good number of quality and relevant incoming links are held in a higher regard than sites that do not. This is because a link from another site is considered a "vote" for your site, but all votes are not equal.
Quality search engine optimization companies will spend a great deal of time looking for industry specific directories and portals where a link to your site can be added. They will also review all of your existing incoming links and make certain that the website owner has configured them in such a way as to give your site the highest chance for high search engine rankings.

Will you be adding additional pages and targeting additional key phrases over time?
This is a very important question. Even search engine optimization companies that have a reputation for providing quality initial results can fall short on this, but it is one of the most important aspects involved in improving your optimization results over time.
When your campaign is kicked off, your search engine optimization company will target an initial list of phrases. Although good search engine optimization companies will rely on readily available software to determine which phrases are being searched on most often, and common sense to determine which of those phrases will bring buyers and not "tire-kickers," it is in all honesty an educated guess.
Forward looking search engine optimization companies treat the initial key phrases as the "testing" phase of the campaign. They track these individual phrases and find which ones are working (bringing in the people that actually buy something or take the point of action on your site that leads to a sale). Armed with this knowledge, such search engine optimization companies will regularly expand your campaign to include phrases similar to the ones that are working the best. Without such expansions based on real data, you are merely relying on the best educated guesses from the initial campaign, and not the hard data that comes from true metrics as the campaign progresses.

Investing in Pay Per Click Marketing or Search Engine Optimization

As click costs rise, many companies who are already investing in active pay per click marketing campaigns are looking toward hiring a search engine optimization company to supplement their marketing portfolio in order to increase their exposure and reduce their advertising spend. In some cases, frustrated by click fraud and increasing click costs, marketers are using search engine optimization to completely replace pay per click marketing. However, these companies will often try to evaluate search engine optimization using the same methodology that they had used for pay per click - by figuring out the cost per click.
In almost every case, a campaign created by a reputable search engine optimization company will eventually garner lower per click costs than pay per click marketing for any industry. Yet using cost per click to compare the effectiveness of these two separate disciplines is comparing apples to, well, anything other than apples. The crucial difference between these two approaches is that pay per click marketing is more of an advertising investment, while search engine optimization is more appropriately likened to an investment in infrastructure. While both have their merits in terms of increasing a company's online exposure, it is important to understand the differences in the respective investments and to determine why cost per click is not a fair indicator of the performance of a search engine optimization company.

Pay Per Click Marketing

Advertising investments of all kinds, from billboards to print ads to television spots to pay per click marketing, all share a common trait. They exist in the public eye for as long as a company is willing to pay for them. Stop paying, and they disappear. True, a print ad may continue to exist for a while after it runs (until the newspaper or magazine gets recycled, at least), and a television spot may get attention if it wins any awards (or winds up on YouTube). But a pay per click marketing campaign will simply vanish as soon as the budget is cut. This means that when a company reduces its advertising spend in this arena, it loses all of its exposure immediately.
What does this really mean? Well, for one, it means that figuring out the average per click costs of a pay per click marketing campaign makes sense because everything happens in real time. A pay per click campaign will begin nearly instantly after a company signs up and pays, and it will vanish just as quickly when the company ceases payment. In other words, there is a clear delineation of when a campaign begins and when it ends.
This delineation is important, because it excludes many other potential factors that muddy the waters when you try to apply this same ROI analysis to a campaign created by a search engine optimization company.

Search Engine Optimization

As said previously, utilizing a search engine optimization company can be likened to making an investment in the infrastructure of a business rather than an investment in advertising. This is because with search engine optimization, there is no clear delineation of where the benefit from the campaign ends. If a business stops paying its search engine optimization company at any point after the campaign has been launched (presuming they have hired a decent search engine optimization company), there will continue to be results from that campaign for an extended period of time, usually many months or even years.
Of course, it is not recommended that any business actually quit an ongoing SEO campaign because a good search engine optimization company will always be expanding and honing that campaign over time to make it more successful over the long term. However, budgets get revisited and revised. Decision makers can change. And if the budget for SEO does get cut, a business will continue to see results for long after. How, then, can you determine value on a per-click basis? The simple answer is that you can't.
It should be noted that while maintaining ongoing results after payments have ceased is a big upside to search engine optimization, the inverse downside is that an effective campaign put in place by a search engine optimization company can take some time to implement, and the results may not appear for weeks or months. A search engine optimization campaign takes patience, effort, and, most of all, time. If a business needs its marketing campaign to be up and running immediately, pay per click marketing is going to be a better short term choice.

Conclusion

It is important to recognize the innate differences in pay per click campaigns and search engine optimization when trying to quantify results. A pay per click marketing campaign can have a definitive beginning and end, which makes cost per click a good way of determining ROI. Yet the results gained from hiring a search engine optimization company, although an SEO campaign can take much longer to implement, will outlast the results from a pay per click campaign if a business ever needs to cut spending. And this is where the notion of analyzing the effectiveness of a search engine optimization campaign on a cost per click basis breaks down.